Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television: Chronotopes of Anxiety, Depression, Expulsion/Extinction 3030632601, 9783030632601

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Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television Chronotopes of Anxiety, Depression, Expulsion/Extinction

Francesco Sticchi

Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television

Francesco Sticchi

Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television Chronotopes of Anxiety, Depression, Expulsion/Extinction

Francesco Sticchi Film Studies Oxford Brookes University Oxford, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-63260-1    ISBN 978-3-030-63261-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63261-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Andrew Merry, Getty Images Cover design: eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

The notion of factory working class found its perfect embodiment in The Working Class Goes to Heaven (La Classe Operaia Va in Paradiso, Petri, 1971). Lulu (Gian Maria Volontè), in a famous monologue, describes working in the factory as becoming the piece of a gear, trapped in a constant confinement (living an existence without light). In this dimension of disciplinary segmentation, working means repeating equal mechanical acts leading to the alienation of every intellectual and affective, or even erotic, activity. Lulu, indeed, associates every piece produced in the assembly line to an image of a woman’s bottom in order to perfectly function in the eight-hour work-shift, thus revealing the total loss of autonomous impulses separated from the context of production. Such images, as for the famous Charlie Chaplin’s assembly line ‘devouring’ the workers in Modern Times (1936), among many others (the unforgettable horrific iconography from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis [1927], for instance), have become the concrete expressions of a humanity at work, forming and transforming the collective imaginary. These fictional figures have played a strong role in the organisation of political struggle, creating associations through which many could express and share ideas about their condition. Many of these films, we could argue, were also characterised by the epic purpose of describing a universal subject (the proletariat) subsuming all the political and ideal conflicts of their socio-historical context. Similarly, nowadays, we often hear terms like precariat or precarious workers and gig-economy, but we do not really have a strongly codified image of this condition. The purpose of this book, therefore, is exactly the attempt to draw maps of precarity in contemporary cinema and television, v

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using case studies as active instruments for the experimentation and discovery of precarious subjectivities. It is not my aim, however, to present a universal precarious subject in substitution of the old proletarian one, which, it is necessary to highlight, was more than often coded as male, white, and family man. The intention of this book is, indeed, to avoid any kind of universalism and essentialism, and to observe precarity as a complex and multiple fundamental dynamic of contemporary life, embodied and enworlded in recent films and TV series. In this text, the expression working class will be used to address a diverse workforce defined in intersectional terms with varying degrees and layers of marginality and exploitation, thus avoiding reductive and simplifying categories (cf. Coin and Crenshaw 2020). Mapping these audiovisual lives means also experiencing and interacting with them; therefore, the theoretical starting point of this book is to consider cinematic experience as a pragmatic and affective phenomenon, a transformative event that allows viewers to vividly discover the world anew. Oxford, UK

Francesco Sticchi

References Chaplin, Charles. 1936. Modern Times. Produced by Charles Chaplin. US: Charles Chaplin Productions. DVD, 87 mins. Coin, Francesca and Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 2020. Kimberlé Crenshaw: Liberty. Equality. Intersectionality. An Antidote Against Fascism. LeftEast. http:// www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/interview-­w-­kimberle-­crenshaw-­liberty-­equality-­ intersectionality-­an-­antidote-­against-­fascism/. Lang, Fritz. 1927. Metropolis. Produced by Erich Pommer. Germany: UFA. DVD, 128 mins. Petri, Elio. 1971. La Classe Operaia Va in Paradiso. Produced by Ugo Tucci. Italy: Euro International Film (EIA). DVD, 125 mins.

Acknowledgements

Writing this book has been a daunting challenge at times and it would not have been possible to finish it without the help and support of many colleagues, friends, and relatives. First of all, I would like to thank my partners in crime at the Department of Film and Digital Media, The School of Arts, Oxford Brookes University, for their help along these years. In particular I wish to thank Daniela Treveri Gennari, Lindsay Steenberg, Maya Nedyalkova, Dalila Missero, Silvia Dibeltulo, Warren Buckland (always a mentor!), Paolo Russo, Govind Chandran, Pete Boss, and Pete Turner. A special mention is reserved to Suke Wolton, Mel Nowicki, Tina Managhan, Lucy Ford, Tamsin Barber, and Jason Danely for our engaging conversations on precarity. Likewise, the meetings with Nikolaj Lübecker, Emilija Talijan, and McNeil Taylor have been invaluable moments for sharing ideas and for the implementation of various sections of the book. Another acknowledgement goes to Silvia Angeli, Chiara Quaranta, David Fleming (with special thanks for his kind words), and William Brown for their generous feedback and encouragement, and in this sense, I dedicate a particular thank to Claudio Celis Bueno for his inspiration, support, and precious comments that have accompanied the most difficult moments of the drafting of this book. I would like to express my gratitude to Palgrave for supporting this project: to Emily Woods, Asma Azeezullah, Lina Aboujieb, Petra Treiber, Ragunath Munirathinam, and all those involved in the revision and editing of the book.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I salute my family (Virginia, Marianna, Nicola, and Gianluca) and friends (Raffaele, Nicola, Vincenzo) for being always present and supportive. This book is dedicated to my partner Eleonora and to my nieces Alice, Cloe, and the newborn Carlotta with the wish that they may live through interesting but less precarious times.

Contents

Part I Anxiety   1 1 Introduction: A Film-Philosophy for the Age of Precarity  3 2 Sorry to Bother You: Visualising the (Embodied) Soul at Work 35 3 From  Welfare to Workfare: I, Daniel Blake and The Measure of a Man 49 4 Fish Tank: Cinematic Performances of Femininity 63 5 Himizu: The Precarisation of Education and Social Relations 77 6 Black Mirror and Nosedive: Becoming Algorithm 91

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Part II Depression 105 7 Kelly  Reichardt: Film Chronotopes of the Precarious Northwest107 8 Italian Peripheral Cinema: Boys Cry and Don’t Be Bad121 9 Gig  Workers and Emotional Labour: Sorry We Missed You, Araby, Two Days, One Night135 10 Social  Reproduction and Cinematic Care-­Work: The Cases of Roma and The Chambermaid149 11 China Is Purest Capitalism: The Cinema of Jia Zhangke163 Part III Expulsion/Extinction 177 12 Parasite, or The Economy of Massacre179 13 Border  as Method and Precarious Cinematic Citizenships: Mediterranea, Wind River, and Junction 48193 14 Extraction  and Confinement in Show Me a Hero and Orange Is the New Black207 15 Expulsed Childhoods: A Ciambra and The Florida Project221 16 Cinematic  Memories of an Infected Planet: Beasts of the Southern Wild235 17 Conclusions249 Index255

PART I

Anxiety

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: A Film-Philosophy for the Age of Precarity

Current film studies are focusing more and more on the possibility of cinema, television, and visual arts to stage and generate entire ethical and philosophical systems constantly violating and overcoming the distinction between viewers’ intellectual and conceptual interaction with films and their sensorial and affective participation (cf. Sinnerbrink 2016, 2091–2106). This paradigmatic and methodological shift can lead to the complete rejection of the Nature-Culture split in film analysis, which, to some extent, still separates the study of the perceptual and cognitive aspects of audiovisual experience from the social and political examination of its ‘symbolic and abstract’ meaning (cf. Sticchi 2019, 162). Nonetheless, the development in the study of the embodied mind and the definition of cognition as integrated multimodal phenomenon, combined with philosophical approaches that highlight the physicality and concreteness of ideas and concepts, have opened a new path in the study of cinema (see Brown 2013, 3–6). This new field of film analysis is detectable in many recent studies and publications, which, although informed by different philosophical perspectives, all share a major attention to the body of the viewer; the body, however, is not observed as a simple machine producing emotional and intellectual reactions; it is a complex experiential site, a transformable ecological structure carrying cognitive qualities and habits that can be used, reinforced, and challenged through its relational connections. Another fundamental premise to make is that a Film-Philosophy or Film-Ethics is possible only if audiovisual media are considered © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Sticchi, Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63261-8_1

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independent forms of thought, capable by themselves of unleashing immanent conceptual and affective experiments without needing any other discipline or method to legitimise them (cf. Deleuze 1997, 280). Consequently, a film-philosophical approach privileges the experiential dynamics a particular film enacts and addresses it as an ecological system. Likewise, in this book, I will follow the directions traced by scholars and philosophers examining ‘the human’ in its dialogical and relational aspects. In this sense, Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope (and his work in general) will be paramount in my analysis, which aims to combine philosophical and sociological observations with the study of the embodied dynamics of film experience. Bakhtin formulated the idea of chronotope (literally time-space) to demonstrate that literary experience does not work by means of abstract structures, subjective interpretations, or symbolic decoding (1981, 243). Narratives are, instead, experiential constructions; they set concrete spatial and temporal dynamics to interact with and, in turn, lead to the production of complex concepts. For instance, the shift from myth to novel in literature coincided with an anthropological mutation, which transformed the perception of time and space, and, consequently, to an aesthetic revolution of expressive codes. The absolute closed past and the hero with a fixed personality, mostly defined by unique qualities, tend to leave the scene in favour of open/linear spaces and of literary figures characterised by an inner self to be developed and transformed. However, we should not think that chronotopes are strictly defined structures (epic chronotopes also are characterised by an intrinsic multiplicity, see 1981, 154), recurring with precise regularities, and thus defining genres and expressive forms in accordance with fixed taxonomies. It is exactly because of the exigency to analyse the singular and unique potentialities of a work of art that Bakhtin distanced himself from Saussurean and formalist linguistic theories, accusing these analytical accounts of being obsessed with the necessity to tightly categorise aesthetic and linguistic interaction (1981, 262–264, 1986, xxi, 169). What the idea of chronotope reveals is the enactive and operational nature of artistic experience, the creation of an ecological dimension in which the storyworld in its entirety allows the production and the construction of an embodied and interactive meaning (Bakhtin 1981, 100). For this same reason, Bakhtin’s literary theory is grounded on other two fundamental notions: dialogism and heteroglossia. Art cannot be discussed as a monological univocal expressive phenomenon because it is intrinsically manifold and unresolved, composed of different discourses and

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aesthetic utterances that interrelate in unpredictable ways producing an endless dialogue—a relational multiplicity in which the reader/viewer/ user of the aesthetic experience participates by adding her/his own voice and emotional/intellectual involvement. The dialogical structure of our interaction is always superior to any categorisation and static definition, and the ontological polyphony of the artistic act allows for a participation that endlessly exceeds and renews fixed structures (cf. Bakhtin 1993, 32). Dialogism, however, is not to be related only to the modes of interaction between fictional characters (their speeches), to specific linguistic utterances, and to the various forms of our participation in them. According to Bakhtin, every element of a particular experience contributes in generating its overall effect, in unleashing an ‘event’ of possibilities for our engagement with a storyworld (cf. Bakhtin 1981, 274, 1986, 92). This dialogical materialism (see Jordan-Haladyn 2014, 21–25) generates ironic and even subversive overturning of preconfigured conditions and situations (Bakhtin 1981, 263, 400). The same chronotopic construction of a specific cinematic experience is composed by a multiplicity of dialoguing chronotopes with spatial and affective features dialogically related to one another (Bakhtin 1981, 252). From these points we get a notion of aesthetic expression as a creative interactive process, where meaning is not bounded to pre-existing semiotic codes and emerges as the continuous dynamic codification of experiential and relational systems. As noticed by Deleuze and Guattari, Bakthin’s linguistics is centred around a pragmatic tension, the desire to investigate an order-word beyond constant laws, and the constantly differing dynamics of a free indirect discourse that allows a word to become an enunciation (cf. 2005, 82, 523n5, 524n10). Furthermore, Guattari pointed out how in Bakhtinian terms the ‘spectator’ is never detached from the experience; she/he operates as a co-creator reinventing her/his own polyphonic subjectivity while exploring an artistic ecology (1995, 13–17). We could say that cinematic experience, in this sense, appears more akin to a process of negotiation, to the operational affective/intellectual exploration of a specific storyworld, which places viewers in a state of problematic contiguity and enables them to generate affects and concepts beyond a mere reproduction of stimuli. This, of course, does not mean that our experience of films and literature relies on nothing but subjective interpretations, all sharing a relatively equal value and importance. The semantic negotiation viewers enact with films involves that the experiential dynamics generated by a work of art are to be understood as combinatorial possibilities, as virtualities of the real to be

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continuously explored and re-elaborated. In this sense, Deleuze’s notion of impersonality, of ‘a life’ that exists beyond personal pronouns and clear definitions of closed subjects (2002, 13, 28), is useful to understand the idea of cinema and television that I would like to put forward in this book, one that addresses audiovisual media as practical ethical paths to explore. I believe that the intellectual and analytical tools elaborated by Bakhtin are, therefore, extremely valuable to this purpose, as they allow for a conceptual and thematic analysis of film, which is, nonetheless, grounded in the ecological system produced by each experience (cf. Jordan-Haladyn 2014, 4–8, 12–14). Furthermore, the notions of chronotope and dialogism are strongly connected with the idea of ‘event’. According to Bakhtin, art captures the world as it is, an event, or, we could say, as an autopoietic system of relations and connections (1986, 106–107). The event, however, is never realised; it is a process, a dynamic unity in transformation that always exceeds its closed configurations. With his words, There can be neither a first nor a last meaning. It always exists among other meanings as a link in the chain of meaning, which in its totality is the only thing that can be real. In historical life this chain continues infinitely, and therefore each individual link in it is renewed again and again, as though it were being reborn. (1986, 146)

The philosophy of the ‘artistic’ act, according to Bakhtin, is therefore closely connected with a creative effort to experiment the potentiality of a specific interaction, to the investigation of the production of utterances deriving from an experiential involvement (1993, 15–17). In this sense, I would argue that Bakhtin’s theory, because of his conception of art and human interaction as creative relational endeavours, is, to some extent, comparable to a Spinozian methodology for film analysis, one that conceives audiovisual experience as an embodied and experimental practice of ecological thought (see Sticchi 2019, 104–106). The information arising from an artistic experience is, as bio-semioticians would argue, an in-­ forming process, a pragmatic potential to be mapped in its virtual implications and correlations (Wheeler 2016, 7–8). The practicality and effectiveness of Bakhtin’s notions of chronotope and dialogism for the study of audiovisual experience has been also largely addressed by Pepita Hesselberth and Miriam Jordan-Haladyn in recent volumes. Both scholars use these instruments to demonstrate how cinema communicates by creating thickened time-space configurations, plastically

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modifying the position of the viewer, by making her/him experiment completely new modes of inhabiting the world (Hesselberth 2014, 85; see also Jordan-Haladyn 2014, 106–108, 113–116). In this sense, each cinematic chronotope can be considered an emotional and topographical map, through which viewers travel within the filmic world in a state of in-­ betweenness, of becoming and interactive transformation: the event of going outside preconfigured cognitive and affective paths. These arguments highlight also the possibility to connect the notion of chronotope with an Embodied Cognitive Theory of films and audiovisual experience, particularly one interested in the enactive components of viewers’ engagement (see also Brown 2013, 7–9). Indeed, it is possible to establish a similarity between the functioning of cinematic chronotopes and Steffen Hven’s work on complex narratives, according to which audiovisual storytelling appears as an embodied fabula, as an affective process continuously re-elaborated by the viewer (cf. 2017, 122–123). In both cases, viewers’ participation in narratives is to be considered as an experiential mapping, as the embodied and operational ‘tying and untying of narrative knots’ (cf. Bakhtin 1981, 250; Hven 2017, 12, 20) not necessarily connected with a segmented and atomised understanding of the story events. Cinematic chronotopes and embodied fabulas, in their articulate composition, are experiential and exploratory models, and define trajectories for actions and dispositions of characters, together with interactive possibilities for viewers participating in them, whom are enacted by these sensori-motor and aesthetic patterns to actively ‘dialogue’ with a film. A similar description of film experience is to be recognised in Giuliana Bruno’s work on audiovisual media and arts in general, as described in texts such as Atlas of Emotions (2002) and Surfaces (2014). According to Bruno, films constitute environments, material surfaces to be explored and discovered, and meaning or conceptualisation emerges as part of the interactive contiguity existing between the screens and their viewers/ users. The power of film experience does not rely on a distanced positioning of the viewer (Bruno 2002, 28); on the contrary, our cognitive and affective participation is completely grounded in the haptic and ecological nature of the medium, which, with its multiple material fabrics, allows for universes of meaning to be revealed and traced (2014, 5). Film has, therefore, its proper skin—a material conceptuality composed by its situatedness, forms of exposition, and all its aesthetic and stylistic properties—which touches and surrounds the viewer, thus transforming her/him and allowing for the experiential configurations of new worlds (2014, 15).

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Architectures, colour tones, camerawork, clothes, cutting rate, and so on, all participate in generating a filmic cartography, an emotional map to investigate a storyworld in its practical and emotional effects. These ‘fabrics’, therefore, are not simple sensorial features to be contemplated; they are practical textures, habitus, and modes of inhabiting the space (2002, 384–385). In this sense every dualistic opposition between an inside and an outside of the audiovisual experience dissolves in favour of a dynamic, recursive, and transformative contiguity with the film (2014, 51). The filmgoer (in the literal sense of the word) is a nomad whose body is continuously recomposed and transformed through its encounters with the screen and its emotional topography. Of course, viewers’ travelling within a filmic world and chronotope is enriched by the connection with the characters inhabiting it, who establish modes of acting in a specific environment and constitute dynamic maps of subjectivities that express a connective and semantic power for viewers to embody and interact with. Empathising with filmic characters and spaces means, therefore, going out of preconfigured construction of subjectivities, not as juxtaposition of the self on film events and figures; audiovisual experiences stage problematic encounters, the material engagement of new lives, and intimate geographies within an ecological continuum (cf. 2014, 194). The affective and emotional modes of viewers’ participation are closely connected with the philosophical and ethical coordinates of particular audiovisual experience, as they form a dynamic unity in producing a storyworld or a media environment with its own rules, morality, and hierarchy to be recognised, addressed, and also creatively subverted. This implies, therefore, as pointed out by Patricia Pisters, the possibility through the film image to generate new ‘brain circuits’, new intellectual, and conceptual patterns philosophically renovating viewers’ becoming in the world (2012, 18). Part of the experimental and exploratory interaction with film worlds is, what is more, the challenge to empathise with ‘damaged’ subjectivities and to engage disturbing and anti-cathartic affective and experiential dynamics, which, by challenging viewers’ moral stances, can enact productive ethical and conceptual transformations (Del Río 2016, 17–21; Fleming 2017, 16–17; Lübecker 2015, 172–174; Sinnerbrink 2016, 637–643; Sticchi 2019, 144). In accordance with a Spinozian principle of Amor Dei (‘Intellectual love of God’), our capacity to act and to become creative participants in the world, and in film experience as well, depends on our ability to adequately and affirmatively address every challenge that is presented to us

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and to transform it into a source for intellectual and affective power (Spinoza 2002, 377–379; Sticchi 2019, 39). Cinematic chronotopes, we have argued, are maps; they define territories, but they also enact experimental investigations of spaces of life, of anthropological and ethical dynamics, and of the subjectivities travelling through them. Bakhtin considered the chronotopes fundamentally interconnected with their historical and social situatedness, since they capture and re-elaborate practices, habits, and experiential systems, thus condensing the weltanschauung of a defined anthropological context (cf. 1981, 85, 137, 219, 426). Particular expressive modes can emerge only in mutual correlation with specific socio-historical ecologies, with which they confront and construct variable dialogical relations. Therefore, part of the dialogical power of a work of art resides also in the way it addresses the world around it, or in the subversive power it can unleash through this confrontation and exploration. Elsaesser’s definition of films as thought experiments is significant in this context, as it reveals how they can stage ‘what if situations’, describe unprecedented modes of acting and perceiving that directly address moral and political crises, and thus have the power to unleash a renewed ethical agency (2018, 3). What I aim to discuss in this book are, in fact, chronotopes of precarity, namely the maps of current social dynamics expressed in contemporary cinema and television, ecologies that, in very different ways, allow viewers to explore several aspects of our economic and political context and, maybe, also to produce a subversive confrontation with them. At this point, a clarification is necessary: I am not arguing for a particular form of socio-historical determinism, maintaining that we are only capable of relating to those aesthetic experiences that are closely connected with our precise anthropological situatedness. On the contrary, I am describing a notion of film and television experience as interactive and experimental, one that allows for a creative production of utterances in terms of our affective and intellectual participation and that, for this same reason, strongly relates to an extended ecology and to the possibility to reframe our ethical power to act within it. Therefore, addressing audiovisual experiences as ‘ecologies’ relates to Gregory Bateson’s understanding of the concept, describing relational contexts as dynamic sites of meaning construction with their own affective geography and temporality in contiguous connection with a multiple and transformative ontology (1979, 14–16). This is why, to borrow Felix Guattari’s taxonomy, I will address characters, chronotopes, and the dialogical dimensions they enact as

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interlinked mental, social, and environmental ecologies expressing pragmatic fields of ethico/aesthetic experimentation (cf. 1995, 90–92; Holtmeier 2016). Furthermore, I reject a closed and crystallised notion of relativism. If we exist as ecological beings, always involved in dynamic relational systems, this implies also that our subjectivity is constantly endlessly reframed and recomposed in accordance with new experiential conditions. In this sense, no ‘relativist’ notion of pure cultural and social belonging is possible. What it is to be analysed, again with Bakhtin (cf. 1986, 7, 117), is the dialogue, the confrontation, and negotiation that we, as specific social agents, can operate within particular relational contexts, and the unexplored and undisclosed possibilities for transformation embedded in them.

The Economy of Precarity To discuss the dynamics of contemporary capitalism and its interconnection with particular form of subjectivities, I will follow the trajectory drew by a heterogeneous corpus of analyses bringing together the so-called Workerist/Post-Workerist tradition with various instances of radical critical thought. The first premise to put forth is that since the 1970s we have witnessed the emergence of a new social paradigm that we can indicate as neoliberalism or bio-cognitive capitalism. The economist Andrea Fumagalli (2019a) indicates the origin of this model of governance in the decision to untie the value of dollar from the price of gold, which ended the Bretton Woods consensus (2019a, 63) and transformed currencies into explicit indicators of debts/credits and salaries into adjustment variables determined by financial markets (a turn reinforced by the Federal Reserve embracing of monetarist policies in 1979, see Marazzi 2008, 36–38). The political transformation of money and finance engendered a new phase of capitalism, not determined by the production of commodities, but rather by the expansion and re-modulation of financial fluxes, so that, we could say, money became the main object of the productive process. Of course, this gigantic global transformation cannot be described as the consequence of a specific political reform or of a linear succession of historical events; it is the outcome of a general reorganisation of capitalism. As a first consequence of this mutation, we can notice the progressive rejection of the Keynesian-Fordist model of welfare state, which combined the existence of mostly life-stable jobs—configuring a specific division of labour— with a variable system of social protection. The departure from this system

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(which we could connect with Foucault’s notion of disciplinary society cf. Deleuze 1995, 177) and the progressive financialisation of the economy have also introduced new modes of exploitation based on autonomous/ independent forms of employment, or extended forms part-time, temporary, and contracts/projects-related jobs. Public services and welfare are also reduced and turned into new productive sectors,1 to be managed according to the logic of business enterprise and to be provided through private loans, debts, and insurances (Giuliani and Vercellone 2019, 13, 23). At the same time, it is necessary to specify that we do not witness the disappearance of factory-work; on the contrary, there has probably never been a higher percentage of factory-workers across the globe in history. Neither work is disappearing or being replaced; what we experience is the extension and assault operated by extractive and productive processes on the entire social and relational sphere (cf. Hardt and Negri 2017, 28). Reformulating the entire production and sociality in terms of mechanisms of credit and indebtedness has demolished the notion of working class as it was imagined and used in political struggles during the last two centuries and deconstructed a recognisable stratified composition of the social body (Ciccarelli 2018, 14–15; Coin 2018, 31–32; Hardt and Negri 2017, 43; Standing 2011, 6–13). At the same time, this reconfiguration of the workforce has pushed to extreme consequences the notion of the ‘individual’ as the closed minimal social unit of capitalism, giving birth to the idea of the human capital. The subject of neoliberalism is an organic enterprise, which does not access to an income and to a job as mainstay of social stability; she/he has to motivate the obtainment of a salary through her/his activity and perceives it as a reward for a proper investment (Ciccarelli 2018, 51). Labour, therefore, does not take place exclusively on the workplace and during fixed timetables; it captures a twenty-four seven activity the subject operates on her/himself by accepting this continuous process of selection, judgement, and evaluation, which involves a perpetual training and self-improvement (a continuous work on the self, see Lazzarato 2012, 33; Fisher 2018, 464–465). Furthermore, work has become a performative activity with a related terminology: expressions like gig-economy capture a mode of perceiving and organising labour not as a series of constant operations but rather as an event to be isolated and evaluated in order to be continued and 1  We are seeing the terrifying impact of such transformations on health-care systems in the days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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reproduced. As a consequence of this, risk is another key term in this economic model as it indicates the capacity of the subject in evaluating the impact of her/his performance, where to direct it and what quantity of her/his labour to invest. The worker is a private contractor as an occasional musician, a mercenary, a sell-sword (the same term freelance originally indicated private military contractors, cf. Steyerl 2012, 125–126), and, as Roberto Ciccarelli maintains, an auctoratus: a non-slave gladiator, who risks her/his own life for the possibility of a future social improvement (2018, 134–135). Taking on debts is quintessential for the precarious subject as these financial instruments allow for her/his labour to continue and, simultaneously, perpetrate the desire for social mobility and economic affirmation. Indeed, applying for loans is encouraged and praised as the independent and courageous choice of the individual manager, who does not need social care and dares to attempt autonomously to the promise of improving her/his status. It is not accidental, then, that the major economic crisis of capitalism post-1929 was based on the failure of financial assets that assembled mortgages, loans, and private debts aiming to the ‘expansion’ of the collectively privatised economy (instead of the Keynesian policies of public investment and full employment, cf. Fumagalli and Lucarelli 2019, 105–106) and to the construction of the worker as autonomous, atomised enterprise. More precisely, as argued by Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, the transformation of capitalism we are discussing coincides with the emergence of a new ‘rationality’, of a new anthropology affecting and modifying our notions of individual identities, communities, and governments altogether (2017, 4–5). The creation of an economy of precarious individualism and the consequent expansion of labour beyond the walls of the factory and the office have also involved the transformation of most of our everyday life activities in productive operations (Ciccarelli 2018, 56–58; Fumagalli 2019b, 79–82). Watching television, using internet and social media, writing reviews of our experiences at restaurants and events, drafting and redrafting cover letters, and registering on recruitment websites are only few examples of the constant production of data we operate in everyday life. All these activities define the work necessary for the generation of value extracted and accumulated, for instance, by web, media and information companies, and the mainstay of their survival, even though we fail to recognise these operations as proper work. Expressions such as ‘attention economy’ and ‘bio-cognitive capitalism’ are meant to describe exactly these new forms of exploitation, the dataisation and algorithmic

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elaboration of our existence as cognitive subjects, with data and information becoming the quintessential commodity of our age. Furthermore, these notions indicate also the awareness that every aspect of our life and the outcome of our interaction as collective agents can be subsumed by capital in its endless search for surplus value (Celis Bueno 2017, 17; Fumagalli 2019a, 68–71). In the famous and often quoted ‘Fragment on Machines’ of the Grundrisse, Marx elaborated a notion of labour power connected with the idea of a General Intellect, highlighting that the subsumption of labour power to capital does not involve the simple reiteration of mechanical operations; it configures the exploitation and involvement of the workers in their entirety as organic and thinking subjects, ecologically connected with one another in the form of a cooperative multitude capable of inventing and socially reproducing themselves at every turn (Celis Bueno 2017, 63–65; Marx 1993, 690–712). This is why ‘the machine’, as argued by Matteo Pasquinelli, is not a ‘thing’, but defines social relations, modes and compositions of the working collectivity (2019). However, the becoming-data of the human does not refer only to our labour as prosumers of the information economy or as agents in the social media environment. This concept demonstrates that every aspect of human (and non-human) life can be tracked, categorised, and, afterwards, monetised and evaluated for economic and social investments to be implemented (Fumagalli 2019a, 64–69). Our identity (on the line of gender, race, class, and ability/disability), the neighbourhood we live in, the type of resources we access, the schools we attend all constitute elements of valorisation and mutually affect the environment and the ecology surrounding us. The notorious mechanism of gentrification identifies exactly this dynamic: the transformation of a living area in accordance to possible economic investments, which radically mutate the social composition and diversity of that same environment (Fumagalli 2019b, 80–81; Sassen 2014, 28–29), generating also the idea that no urban policy is imaginable beyond the mere logic capital mobility and reproduction. We can find a new form of rentier capitalism in the accumulation of properties in urban areas,2 favoured and propelled by digital economy (the Airbnb model, for instance), which uses real estate as instrument for financial accumulation (the ‘classical’ becoming rent of profit cf. Ciccarelli 2018, 171; Fumagalli 2019a, 64) and as leverage to determine the type of 2  Or in other parasitic forms of accumulation such as buyback operations (cf. Mazzucato 2018, 108).

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development imagined for a specific context. These extremely pervasive forms of value extraction from collective activities demonstrate also that we live in an ‘abundant’ economy, where terrifying inequalities are associated with an always more precarious ecology and the exhaustion of psychological and affective life. Life/bios and the planet itself are instruments for the reproduction and re-modulation of financial fluxes. Soil, water, air, together with seeds, genes, and so on, are not perceived as public/collective common wealth or goods, impossible to be alienated or accumulated (cf. Braidotti 2013, 61; Haraway 2016, 37–38; Hardt and Negri 2017, 102); they need as well to be quantified, patented, used, and managed in accordance with the possibility for economic expansion. In relation to these dynamics, Rosi Braidotti’s notion of the posthuman, on one side, identifies this tendency in contemporary capitalism; on the other hand, it also outlines a critical ecology and reconfiguration of the human aimed at evaluating how we can become active participants in these mutations directing them in a radical/ emancipatory way (see 2013, 66, 2018). Furthermore, this notion leads us to reject any essentialist difference between the human and the technological ecology surrounding it by thinking about the precarious subject as a machinic (enslaved) composite (cf. Braidotti 2013, 50; Lazzarato 2014, 12–13). However, the machinic subject in turn should not be misinterpreted as a technocentric essentialist concept, since it indicates, instead, both the process of subjective individuation for exploitation in which we are involved and, concurrently, our being collective parts of a processual and dynamic ontology/ecology (Braidotti 2013, 145). Therefore, we assist to an incorporation of technological assemblages by the human and, vice versa, to the technological redefinition of anthropological dimensions, an existential continuum that shutters every dualistic distinction between subjects and objects of production, and defines subjectivities as parts of multiple machinic compositions (Hardt and Negri 2017, 109; Lazzarato 2014, 26). It is because of these mutations in the entire anthropology supporting the modern subject that we could define the dynamic governing the social body in the neoliberal age as a process of expulsion, a ‘necropolitical’ practice of selection, extraction, and consumption of life in all its existing forms (cf. Mbembe 2019, 38; Sassen 2014, 150). Expressions like Anthropocene and Capitalocene, indicating new geological eras, are meant to specifically evaluate the modes in which capitalism is triggering, by expropriating a cheap/commodified nature, a crisis in the mechanisms of

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its own social and ecological reproduction (Braidotti 2018; Moore 2015, 77; Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 197; Sassen 2014, 149). Moreover, citizenship outlines an explicit mechanism of selection, by drawing lines of access to rights and to active political life for ‘non-citizens’, and by determining the forms of exploitation to which they are destined (Sassen 2014, 63–64). Poor migrants and refugees are the direct aims of these cruel policies, which define these subjects, together with many other types of minorities, as differential centres and actors of a general machinic enslavement. These same processes affect and transform gendered labour (in particular the unwaged work of social and affective reproduction) by combining the already existing sexualised divisions of the workforce with the extractive and parasitic logic of the neoliberal economy (as recognised also in a recent Oxfam report cf. Coffey et al. 2020). In general, we could say that capitalism operates through forms of differential inclusion; it prospers by defining differential spaces and territories. It produces various degrees of marginalisation and exploitation functional to the continuation of the productive process and to the (in) stability of the social order (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 2005, 178; Lazzarato 2014, 142; Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 66). One of the most emblematic expressions of this operative strategy is the redefinition of penitentiary institutions into productive contexts, where prisoners become a cheap or free workforce (Sassen 2014, 68–70). These considerations help also in recognising how the re-emergence or radicalisation of identitarian, sexist, and racist policies should be connected to the expulsive forces and perpetual total war capitalism distributes on the social body, and not to a ‘return’ to a more traditional form of nation-state sovereignty (cf. Ciccarelli 2018, 50–52; Alliez and Lazzarato 2016, 110, 146). This turn of governmentality also couples always stricter and more coercive policies of control on work performances and on the moral reliability of the workforce, and the reproduction and renovation of mechanisms of racialised division of labour (cf. Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 41–42, 81). The construction of walls, borders (in every sphere of relational and social existence), and the ‘fascist’ reorganisation of the state machine shows also the attempt to resort to idealised and centralised egos (the State, the Nation, the Race, the Culture, the Father, the Individual, and the Reliable Worker/Citizen) as reference points in a moment in which the ‘progressive fates’ of neoliberal morality have definitively faded away. These political constructions, far from presenting a return to an imagined traditional order, emphasise, instead, the same tendency of neoliberal governance to build singularised

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and atomised subjectivities, in continuous competition with other discrete individuals with whom no connection and composition is possible. The final elements that I would like to add in this section are more connected to theoretical clarifications. In accordance with the analyses mentioned above, bio-cognitive/neoliberal capitalism is a set of evolving social relations characterising the globe, not specific national or continental contexts. As Deleuze and Gauttari revealed, when we talk about the contemporary economic and political system we refer to an Integrated World Capitalism (IWC), we indicate a force affecting the globe itself, always trying to deterritorialise and reterritorialise itself; notwithstanding the planetary nature of capitalism, this destructive force is expressed in differentiated politically and socially contextualised forms (cf. 2005, 492; Guattari 2000, 27), involving a multiplicity of heterogeneous and even conflicting actors and practices/operations (Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 85–87). This is why, the multinational corporation has already been assumed as one of the political subjects and institutions better entitled (together with many other social agents, see Hardt and Negri 2019) to govern and manage globalised capitalism in combination with nation-­ states. These latter, on one side, facilitate and assure the flowing of capitals and monopolistic accumulation, providing tax havens, indefinite bailouts for great economic agents in connection with cyclical market crises, and offer localised reterritorialisation and stabilisation of financial fluxes, all necessary for the effective materialisation of private ownership. On the other hand, national and continental state institutions are still central as market creators, and in the management and enclosure of population (including wars), providing borders, and territorially specified prisons describing the different humanities moving around the globe. Likewise, every distinction between financial/abstract and industrial/concrete economy3 is to be avoided, as this categorisation prevents from understanding the transformations of labour, and how production is based on the governance of collective bodies in their multiple relationalities. Capitalism is not exclusively an economic system, to be opposed and identified in dualistic combination with political institutions and state power. It describes a whole dynamic anthropological and social model, the simultaneity and coexistence of all those power relations that determine the identification, generation, and management of subjectivities. As Dardot and Laval have 3  Although the financial side of the economy operates the most evident parasitic and extractive role in the process.

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pointed out, paraphrasing Margaret Thatcher, the aim of neoliberal economy was not to simply put in place a new mode of production, but to change the ‘soul’, and to build a new working subject, individualised and atomised in her/his obsession for competitive excellence (2017, 12). It is, therefore, also erroneous to think of it as a Moloch, as an abstract monster devouring lives and controlling them from above, since it operates as a diffuse machine, an ecology (or mixture of ecologies, see Guattari 2000, 32–34, 41); it combines and entangles moral rules, institutions, grotesquely proliferating  bureaucratic structures and technological apparatuses, thus appearing as a pervasive force that endlessly strives to reproduce itself exploiting every space, form of life, and line of flight for its survival. Deleuze’s definition of control society similarly puts forth an idea of power that works by coding and recoding fluxes of data and information, a serpent producing axiomatic modifications, whose undulating network of coils manage to filter through the entire social body, transforming individuals (and their complex relational life) into dividuals, statistics, and algorithms (1995, 180). This is why capitalism does not aim to produce commodities or goods; it attempts to generate subjectivities, machinic enslaved agents through which it re-modulates and endures (cf. Lazzarato 2014, 8). This also explains the crucial role of platforms, acting as material and digital spaces for the management and re-modulation of fluxes of commodities and information on a global scale (Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 81–83). However, as Lazzarato and Alliez highlighted (2016, 12, 286), the modulating and transformative and even deterritorialising force of capital always needs to be reterritorialised in the form of property, enslavement, war, and expulsion; thus, it combines an enormous transformative power with continuous primitive accumulations and brutal forms of governance. Although contemporary capitalism continuously re-­ modulates and modifies subjectivities to allow the flow of data and money to continue, the construction of a closed and atomised exploitable and guilty ‘ego’ is always required as apparatus of subordination and exploitation. Following the problematic considerations anticipated here, the next section will be dedicated to the presentation of precarious lives, to the forms of life and spaces of existence determining and characterising our reality, and the cinematic universe within it.

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Anxious, Depressed, and Disposable/Extinct Lives on Screen We have seen that contemporary capitalism extracts surplus value from intellectual and affective activity and, in many ways, from life itself, by operating as a pervasive machine of economic valorisation and re-­ modulation of financial and information fluxes. This productive apparatus exploits our agency as social actors and extends command and control, and its subsumption schemes on society as a whole, drawing its strength exactly from the creative forms in which our interaction, sociality, language reproduce and innovate themselves. The next step, therefore, is to reflect on the nature of the subjects inhabiting this productive and political reality. Of course, the forms of subjectivities living the precarious era are manifold, impossible to reduce to fixed taxonomies and to an abstract categorisation. What I aim to accomplish in this book is exactly to draw a cartography of these forms of life, to map their modes of relating to the context surrounding them through the analysis of specific films and TV series, which, at the same time, by giving a body to these subjects and spaces, also outline new potentialities and expressive power to be enacted. I will proceed by describing three complex affective states that capture the dynamics of precarity and that we will find as recurring chronotopes in the discussion of contemporary cinema and television. My analysis of film subjectivities also moves from Laurent Berlant’s arguments on what she has defined as new cinema of precarity, where precarious life extends beyond the expression of an economic condition. The cinema of precarity indicates, instead, an entire ‘affective environment’ (2011, 192, 201–202), connected with a sense of individualised insecurity and with the description of processes of marginalisation and loss of complex social and existential status (Bardan 2013, 72). It is for this reason that I am resorting to a distinction between three major chronotopes and affects framing precarious cinema and subjectivities (anxiety, depression, and expulsion/extinction), since these experiential schemes allow us to engage and access into complex mental and socio-political ecologies. Furthermore, the notion of cinematic chronotope is adopted as plastic and adaptable concept, not bound by the heuristic necessity to define structurally homogeneous categories. This notion is employed, instead, as a mapping tool evaluating the construction of each specific precarious storyworld and recognising similarities and differences in the composition and interactive coordinates of several case studies.

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Anxiety is the first recurring chronotope that will be investigated in this book, and the main object of the first section of the volume. Of course, the discussion of chronotopes of anxiety, depression, and expulsion has nothing to do with the description of simple emotional reactions, and with psychological internal states related to urgency, melancholy, and uncertainty, or with the application of psychoanalytical or clinical categories. Following Bruno’s work, I will consider these states as pre-personal philosophical and conceptual instruments, as modes of travelling through the world, and as emotional (in the sense of movement from the Latin etimology e-movere, involving transformation and complex relationality, cf. 2002, 16) maps of contemporary world. This is why these affective states will be examined as existential dimensions and as manifold ecological modalities of precarious life. The notion of anxiety is strongly connected with the transformations of labour previously examined. In accordance with the above-mentioned dynamics of the performance economy, the precariat has to undergo an infinite process of selection, evaluation, and training that concerns the categorisation of their economic and professional activities as well as a judgement on their value as individuals. Unpaid or poorly paid labour prevents economic independence and the dream of autonomy, leaves out the possibility to accomplish personal desires or to be recognised as proper professional figures, or drives the fear of existential failure and moral condemnation. The characters inhabiting cinematic chronotopes of anxiety are tormented by the perception of class differences and by the continuous confrontation with their acquaintances, friends, parents, and partners, constantly evaluating and being evaluated for their achievements. The contexts of the poor suburbs and of small towns are functional, in this sense, to set out chronotopes characterised by stillness and marginality, where the aspirations and the desires of the characters seem to face a natural and environmental opposition. Other chronotopes of anxiety stress the disturbing and violent aspect of the struggle for economic survival, focusing on precarious lives pervaded by a constant state of emergency and fear, always living at the border of exclusion and complete social marginalisation. It is also worth mentioning the fact that, in this same chronotopic and affective dimension, we can interact with negative main characters that completely embody the morality of individual success up to the point of becoming rapacious and ruthless. Furthermore, we can also find interesting dystopian maps of anxiety that, by exasperating the development of specific technologies and productive mechanisms, address

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different aspects of neoliberal economy and the type of subjectivities emerging with bio-cognitive labour. Depression is the recurrent theme of the second part of the book. This chronotope identifies a complex atmosphere and a general perceptive mode connected with failure, with powerlessness, and with the incapacity to construct a progressive and linear pattern in existence. Time of precarity, as Hardt and Negri highlighted, is an eternal present, which identifies future not simply as an uncertain destination but as an undesirable perspective (2017, 247). In a way, we could identify in the chronotope of depression a continuation of the aesthetic modes related to anxiety or the natural consequence of particular processes of selection and exploitation. The exhaustion deriving from the economy of precarity reduces vital impulses, and the mechanism of self-blaming for being unsuccessful ‘performers’ works as incisive moral mortification, implying a complete devaluation of life. Isolation becomes one of the most evident consequences of this decay, reinforcing the sense of failure and marginalisation of the characters and working as a vicious circle that always enhances mechanisms of culpability and powerlessness. Another aesthetic configuration of depression can be recognised in the reiterated use of a sombre and hollow atmosphere. Instead of choosing urgency, uncertainty, and the exasperation of emotional tones and climactic narrative constructions, many chronotopes of depression are, instead, characterised by the use of a slow cutting rate, privileging long takes, and focusing with extreme attention on the action, the dialogue, and the emotional states of the characters. In these films we tend to associate precarity with the perception of a delayed downtime as unique existential possibility; resolute actions do not necessarily lead to a positive result, and every aspiration seems to clash with a major sense of alienation and inadequacy. Political activities in reaction to this feeling of exhaustion appear as mere consolations and are actually directed to desperate and absurd projects or to paranoid fantasies aimed at filling the void of an inadequate life. The lack of existential opportunities and a feeling of melancholic resignation are also affecting the suburban lives of the main characters, whose social condition expresses a closure of the horizon of possibility, thus making economic difficulty and uncertain perspectives margins to be negotiated instead of conditions to be overcome. As last chronotopes of precarity, we find the dynamics of expulsion and extinction. These aesthetic configurations are connected with the description of pervasive destitution, with multifaceted levels of exclusion and differential inclusion in social life, or with extreme mechanisms of exploitation.

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The affective and relational dimension of expulsion/extinction seems to further radicalise the experiential patterns previously analysed. The struggle for economic success is replaced, in many cases, by the simple fight for survival, in which the dog-eat-dog competitive massacre is tied with strategies for social control and, at the same time, allows the reproduction of surplus value. The dynamics of expulsion and extinction, however, cannot be reduced to the selection of disposable bodies; they involve different forms of inclusion by margins, as Deleuze and Guattari would put it (2005, 178–180), and are related to modes of ‘precarious citizenship’. Nonetheless, these non-citizens are quintessential for the continuation of specific power relations since, with their marginalised and excluded existences—which are also associated with extreme social disempowerment— they fuel several forms of extraction and production that ground their effectiveness exactly in the difficulty for opposition and transformation. The sense of extreme crisis and fear characterising these final chronotopes is to be extended also to a context of catastrophic urgency. Case studies examined in this section address environmental disasters, or apocalyptic scenarios, and do not necessarily provide a path for human survival or for a more harmonic future. These works, sometimes, directly tackle a posthuman dimension, in which anthropocentrism is already collapsed and replaced by a complex and often traumatic ecological entanglement. Furthermore, in films and TV series that tackle the posthumanist transformation of our existential context, it also appears evident how capitalism has become capable of exploiting the biosphere itself or of building an economy of disasters, which strives to continue by managing and extending an always more precarious notion of life. The chronotopes described here constitute the fundamental framework for my cartography of cinematic precarity, and I will attempt to discuss each case study as a specific and singular audiovisual event, which, nonetheless, can be dialogically combined and connected with other films and TV series. Indeed, anxiety, depression, and expulsion/extinction are not essentially separated. Each of these chronotopes has its peculiar elements to be investigated, but there is no strict line of separation among them; therefore, I will always attempt to generate a sense of unity in my discussion trying to bring together different aspects of precarity for the purpose of an effective and creative analysis.

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Is There Something Our Bodies Can Do? Having described the general dynamics of precarity and outlined the different cinematic chronotopes that I am going to investigate, it is necessary to present the philosophical and ethical dilemma that is driving the drafting of this book. I have described precarious lives in many of their terrifying aspects and how the machine of production and of subjective relational enslavement encompasses all our affective and intellectual life, determining many forms of differential governance that find their expressive translation in equally different and complex chronotopic constructions. Following this line of thought, cinema and audiovisual experience can be identified as other forms of machinic enslavements, which mould our perception, direct our participation and the construction of taste and aesthetic appreciation (together with all the possible related activities) to extract surplus value, and manage a re-modulation of financial and data flows. Long story short, if we know that contemporary capitalism works through a complete subsumption of life to capital and that our bodies in all their relational compositions constitute the centre and the periphery of collective social subjection and of specific forms of machinic enslavement, how can we subvert this? What are there our bodies for? Are they just the notebooks of our debts, sins, guilt, and pains as Kafka and Nietzsche knew (In The Penal Colony [2000] and The Genealogy of Morals [2007, 41–42])? Or as Shakespeare’s Shylock (The Merchant of Venice [2005]) clearly understood claiming a pound of flesh as repayment of debts? Or is there something else our bodies can do? To attempt answering these petrifying questions, I would start by arguing (as many others have done cf. Ciccarelli 2018, 92–95; Hardt and Negri 2017, 118, 144) that, although the evident and extreme pervasiveness of capitalist machinic enslavement, this system of power relations is, in reality, becoming extremely ‘ineffective’ and, paradoxically, unproductive. The triumph of sad passions of hatred and resentment linked to precarity, and the terrible resurgence of nationalist, racist, and sexist policies led by the reactionary turn of neoliberal state machine since its origins with Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, in fact, reveals a massive crisis in the production of subjectivity that capitalism attempts to drive (cf. Lazzarato 2014, 10–12; Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 125). On one side, it could be possible to argue that this reactionary turn reveals a specific weakness in perpetuating the mechanisms of social mobility and partial redistribution of wealth, defining, instead, a state of ‘secular stagnation’,

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characterised by a chronic lack of demand and possibility for economic expansion (Summers 2016). The Keynesian stage of capitalism, starting with the New Deal and expanded after WWII, had, indeed, created an illusory idea of eternal coexistence between a welfare-based democracy and a regulated market, a pact strengthened by the capacity of the working classes to mobilise against capital4 (see Fumagalli and Lucarelli 2019, 96–97). The neoliberal transformation, in particular and in more extreme forms after the 2007/2008 crisis, instead, involves the absolute negation of a clear path for compromise between capital and labour, with the former responding to its internal dysfunctionalities with even more aggressive doses of ‘competitive measures’ and austerity policies (cf. Lazzarato 2012, 115–118). Thus, we also witness the stigmatisation of the population (in particular of the weaker strata) accused of costing too much and on a progressive punishment of these same social sectors through cut to welfare and pervasive controlling measures (cf. Lazzarato 2012, 130–131). As many scholars have argued, the neoliberal restructuring of the capitalist state involves the absolutely non-democratic5 idea of managing every aspect of life as a ferocious competition-based market system and the consistent negation and limitation of the existence of any subjectivity beyond these functionalist logics (cf. Dardot and Laval 2017, 11; Foucault 2008, 116–118; Hall 2017; Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 91–93). Advanced capitalism essentially pushes forward a growth based on the constant reduction of life standards and expectations on the future, making impossible to think of social bondages not regulated by competition and, thus, perverts the ecological and even cooperative mechanisms grounding human interactions into a monological economic structure. Consequently, it is also important not to underestimate the terrible ethical and existential risks and nightmarish scenarios opened by the reactionary reterritorialisation that capitalist state machines are continuously enacting with the purpose of controlling and managing global societies. In any case, we can notice that capitalism has explicitly become an anti-­ productive apparatus that implements always more destructive policies to survive. It consumes the biosphere (specifically the possibility for human 4  Nonetheless, it is worth remembering that the Keynesian-Fordist compromise was based also on the still continuing colonial-economic exploitation of the Third World (see Federici 2019, 19). 5  Or, according to Foucault’s analysis, a central state supervised by market logic, whose main function is to act as a facilitator of business (cf. 2008, 160–161; 191–192).

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survival) and the power of the subjects in a perpetual flow of stupidity and decomposition, associated also with the impossibility to construct and imagine future scenarios for itself. Deleuze and Guattari were the first to diagnose the absolute craziness of capitalism as a system of subjection based on a pathological schizophrenia opposed to the active creation of lines of flight (cf. 2000, 235–238), a narcissistic suicidal appetite perfectly visualised by Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). This film is emblematic of the current state of affairs since it describes the utterly vicious tendency of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, mostly embodied by financial institutions, where the search for the continuation of short-­ term-­related monetary flows compromises every other aspect of life without any kind of social strategy or creative effort. ‘We don’t create shit, we don’t build anything,’ says Mark Hanna (McConaughey), economic and ‘moral’ mentor of the main character, to Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio), who, with his firms of psychopathic ludicrous brokers, dominates Wall Street by generating always more destructive, incoherent, and impossible offers of wealth and richness for himself and his clients. Robert Burgoyne rightly pointed out that, in terms of chronotopic construction, Scorsese’s film works as carnivalesque subversion of the financial drama genre, in a way comparable to the bitter criticism of absurd economic mechanisms presented in Adam McKay’s The Big Short (2015) among other films. The Wolf of Wall Street deconstructs the capitalist myth of rational management of monetary flows driven and constructed by ultra-competent economic actors and by obscure ‘more than human’ computational mechanisms (2018). Capitalism does not work as a form of mephistophelic rationality controlling the world from above, as it seems when looking at the cunning Gordon Gekko of Oliver Stones’ films. It is a grotesque anti-productive mechanism, which nonetheless works because of our activity as machinic subjects. Capitalism exploits and burns everything with its endless search for short-term re-modulations of financial flows, but the production relies on the precarious multitude. It is the collective labour power, as Roberto Ciccarelli highlights, that detains a primary expressive quality, the essential force allowing social existence to reproduce itself (Ciccarelli 2018, 109; Hardt and Negri 2017, 110). This creative and expressive tension, a Spinozian impersonal immanent striving that pervades life, is antecedent to every form of human and machinic enslavement, and the very energy that capital tries to tame. At the same time, we should not forget that the very notion of machinic assemblage reveals the relationality and collective

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nature of the ‘human’, its existence as multitude, as composition of bodies in constant becoming. The precarious multitude is an indefinite relational potentiality (we do not know what our bodies can do, Spinoza would add, see 2002, 280–281), which includes its capacity to continuously redefine its positioning in terms of codification of gender, race, class, ability/disability, and ecological politics. The multitude thus appears as a processual entity whose compositions can not only adapt to existing configurations of power relations but also enact a production of subjectivity that shutters the order of things. Indeed, following Deleuze and Guattari’s irregular Marxism, to critically understand capitalism, we should not solely focus on its productive structure, but understand its intrinsic lines of flight, or rather how it prevents becoming and transformation to take place (Deleuze and Guattari 2005, 438–439, 461–462; Fisher 2018, 562–566; 694–698). Concurrently, collectivity has to be understood as a creative instance; collectivities are expressions of the affirmative and inventive ethical power of the multitude assembling itself opposed to a standardised and unitary concept of community6 (national, territorial, and ‘cultural’), which simply operates as further engine of a singularised and fixed individual identity. Capitalism, in order to justify its natural role, needs to rely on an individualised notion of the body, one that describes it as the property of a closed and atomised (conscious/guilty) owner, sovereign over its material nature; nothing more distant from the actual existence of the body as ecological and operational agent, embedded in patterns of immanent relations. Following Genevieve Lloyd, we could argue that we need a Spinozian relational body in order to get rid of the Lockean tradition of the body as a property (1994, 11–12). It is, indeed, also from the critical discovery of the ecological nature of the human, from the recognition of its collective constitution that the cognitive and affective response to current state of affairs has to move forward. However, a variety of ‘intellectuals’ keeps repeating the same slogan: There is no Alternative (TINA); motivational speakers and pseudo-psychologists incite to self-determination and competition, indicating every instinct of ethical revolt and rage as aberrant, wicked, and destructive. The implicit social Darwinism, or more precisely Spencerism-Malthusianism, of these discourses attempts to reduce life to an absurd ‘survival of the fittest’ struggle denying the existence of cooperative levels of experience or the collective nature of labour power itself (cf. Ciccarelli 2018, 10–11; Dardot and Laval 2017, 32–34). However, as 6

 As collective movements such as Black Lives Matter and NiUnaMenos demonstrate.

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capital attempts to control a life that is always superior and primary to its endeavours and finds no other ruling strategy than exploiting hatred, fear, and resentment (the Spinozian sad passions typical of tyrannical power, cf. 2002, 536–537), none of its control mechanisms is inviolable; none of the chains it forges unbreakable. The power of cinema and audiovisual experience is exactly that of disrupting a terrifying system of knowledge and framing of ‘the human’ by unleashing a Bakhtinian dialogical subversion. Maurizio Lazzarato correctly points out how Bakhtin’s theory reconnects subjectivity to its multiple, transformative, and subversive nature, by focusing on the dialogical potential that always precedes and exceeds normative configurations of language and communication, thus generating productive events (Bakhtin 1986, 72; Lazzarato 2014, 180–181). A cinematic event allows for our bodies to test new compositions, to get out from their individual signifying/closed structures by reconnecting them with their multitudinous and creative power (cf. Bakhtin 1981, 364–365, 368; Lazzarato 2014, 138; Hardt and Negri 2017, 35). As Bakhtin affirmed, when commending the peculiarity of Dostoevsky’s novels, if capitalism had created the conditions for an ‘inescapably solitary consciousness’, the dialogical nature of artistic experience exposes this falsity by externalising it and presenting subjectivity in its immanent, relational, and multiple nature (1984, 288). Audiovisual experience, as affirmative political and ethical activity, liberates a multiplicity against the monological construction of the world, a potential that can only be experimented and mapped. The cinematic chronotope, therefore, is the instrument that helps us in producing a taxonomy to analyse screen culture and in discussing and observing the potential of a particular film event, its capacity to assemble, associate elements, generate a proliferation of discourses, and examine its subversive and creative power. The affective and intellectual power of films is not offering diversions; its power resides in presenting maps and subjectivities to embody and interact with, problematic encounters with their own ethical and political potential. We can travel within precarious worlds and give a body to unknown forms of life (‘In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself,’ Frantz Fanon argued, cf. Bruno 2002, 428; Fanon 2008, 179) and to new intimate/ public geographies. Cinema gives us the possibility to experience our power beyond the mere life for capital survival and reproduction, by interrupting this flux and introducing new languages, thus discovering and rejoicing of what our bodies can do in the world, and enacting the production of a precarious multitudinous class as an event (cf. Ciccarelli 2018,

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15–16). Of course, I am not arguing that cinema is the political and ethical instrument par excellence, and detains a unique power no other activity could display, nor I am affirming that films and audiovisual media indiscriminately produce subversive discourses. What I am stressing here is that cinematic experiences can reconnect viewers with the immanent tension that pervades existence (the Deleuzian ‘belief in the world’ see 1997, 172), with the Spinozian conative search for new possibilities and activity against sad passions and the mortification of life we constantly participate in. Thus, I also embrace the idea of audiovisual media as capable of contributing to embodied and practical ethical ‘invention of a people’ (Deleuze 1997, 217; Holtmeier 2016; Steyerl 2012, 72–74). As demonstrated also by the fundamental contribution of Jacques Rancière and Martin O’Shaughnessy on political cinema, I believe film experience to be an occasion for ethical transformation and conceptual creation, not just for the denunciation of injustices (O’Shaughnessy 2009, 4–5; Rancière 2009, 55–57). The cinematic chronotopes of precarity can, paraphrasing Rancière, disjoint and disrupt subjects and bodily compositions rejecting their imagined functionalities and introducing changes in the ‘cartographies of perceptible’ (2009, 72). Aesthetic experiences as ethical events enact a never-ending journey with no Promised Land or earthly utopia waiting for an elected people, but allowing for the invention of life itself, and generating the opportunity for a missing precarious people to stutter new words of hope.

Chapter Outlines and Limitations In the first part of the book, I will explore different cinematic chronotopes of anxiety, addressing the affective and experiential dimensions of urgency and relentless social and emotional pressure related to the subsumption of the self, in its entirety, to work (Chap. 2, ‘Sorry to Bother You: Visualising the [Embodied] Soul at Work’). The transformation of work into a performative activity allows us also to explore the redefinition of social structures (Chap. 3, ‘From Welfare to Workfare: I, Daniel Blake and The Measure of a Man’) and how gender dynamics as well respond to mechanisms of competition and to the construction of identity in relation to specific economic and contextual forces (Chap. 4, ‘Fish Tank: Cinematic Performances of Femininity’). Education and the formation of individuals in a free-­ market economy, in this sense, also appear as extended forms of work reducing subjects to a perennial ‘youth and immaturity’ and outlining the

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invasion of competitive logics within every sphere of existence (Chap. 5, ‘Himizu: The Precarisation of Education and Social Relations’). Extracting value from life itself is the core element of digital capitalism, in which technological apparatuses describe, what is more, modes of assembling and shaping subjectivities (Chap. 6. ‘Black Mirror and Nosedive: Becoming Algorithm’). The relentless violence of chronotopes of anxiety is, in the second part of the book, substituted by the slow rhythm of small communities, isolated from the activity and opportunities of big urban centres, and closed in their atomised loneliness, which intersects with the precarious embodiment of specific gender identities (Chap. 7, ‘Kelly Reichardt: Film Chronotopes of the Precarious Northwest’). Other times, the precarious and depressed urban isolation of the characters corresponds with a peripheral setting, an ecology with its own specific chronotopic and experiential rules (Chap. 8, ‘Italian Peripheral Cinema: Boys Cry and Don’t Be Bad’). Operating in a performative economy that requires individuals’ complete commitment is source of uncertainty and distress but also of an exhausting emotional labour that carries with it the depressing and disempowering construction of a guilty consciousness for the subject at work (Chap. 9, ‘Gig Workers and Emotional Labour: Sorry We Missed You, Araby, Two Days, One Night’). Affective labour and care-work have always been, what is more, the essential characteristics of a gender-based division of labour, now assuming new traits with the economy of precarity, which has demolished previous distinctions and boundaries between the private and public spaces of life (Chap. 10, ‘Social Reproduction and Cinematic Care-Work: The Cases of Roma and The Chambermaid’). In conclusion of this section, we will also see how the sense of pre-determination of ethical powerlessness emerging with the cinematic chronotopes of depression is not to be strictly attributed to the sphere of labour, as it manifests itself also in the incapacity to adequately respond to massive historical transformations of contextual social fabrics (Chap. 11, ‘China is Purest Capitalism: The Cinema of Jia Zhangke’). The third part of the book, then, focuses on the most radically violent and marginalising aspects of precarious life, starting from the description of cinematic chronotopes of expulsion coinciding with the association between work and a gladiatorial all against all battlefield (3.1, Parasite, or The Economy of Massacre). These audiovisual patterns also relate to forms of precarious citizenship and differential inclusion, addressing the experience of subjects codified as non-members of a national or political community (3.2, Border as Method and Precarious Cinematic Citizenships: Mediterranea, Wind River, and Junction 48) or

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to enclosed and segregated subjects, destined to specific forms of exploitation (3.3, Differential Inclusion in Show Me a Hero and Orange Is the New Black). The experience of social expulsion and urban confinement also allows us to explore several non-central urban ecologies, and the features of childhood, friendship, and growth within these specific chronotopes (3.4, Expulsed Childhoods: A Ciambra and The Florida Project). As conclusive topic, we will address the dynamics of precarious existence in the context of catastrophic environmental shocks and the emergence of new forms of life in connection with the Anthropocene, new modes of experiencing and travelling through the world in response to a perturbing lack of futures (3.5, Cinematic Memories of an Infected Planet: Beasts of the Southern Wild). The exploration of these maps of precarity always exceeds the denunciation of problematic states of suffering and marginalisation; encountering precarious subjectivities involves a productive affective and conceptual dialogue. In this sense, a first limitation to be indicated in this book is related to the fact that I will not adopt Judith Butler’s fundamental work on precarity. Although I recognise the essential importance of her studies, I do not aim to address precarious lives in terms of vulnerability and of building solidarity with these subjectivities through a recognition of their state of destitution, and an empathic connection with their suffering aimed to renew the social body (2006, 43–45). More specifically, I examine the connections with precarious subjects as opportunities for critical openings, as experimentations of new ethical and political spaces. These audiovisual encounters, therefore, rather than creating links of understanding between different and separated individuals (the ‘self’ and the ‘other’), involve the ethical challenge of sharing new existential territories, exploring folds and facets of the world surrounding us and, by doing so, opening new possibilities for collective action, for a new conceptualisation of social and relational experience. I would also like to apologise in advance for the limitation of my analysis in not addressing contemporary audiovisual productions in a more extended and precise form and for leaving aside many filmmakers and productive contexts. What I am trying to fulfil with this book is the drawing of a cartography of cinematic precarity that observes this dynamic from a global perspective, and this is why the films and TV series that I am going to discuss belong to very different national contexts. At the same time, my choice was also limited by the consideration of common aesthetic factors and by the capacity of these case studies of more

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emblematically embodying the dynamics of precarity. Trying to be Spinozists, the recognition of this inadequacy should not limit the desire to look for maps and the attempt to outline a taxonomy of the real and of its endless movement. In a way, this book is motivated by an underlying clinical intention (see Deleuze 1998, 1–4), not, of course, in psychiatric terms; on the contrary, it is the search for health and affirmative power against sad passions, a re-politicisation of suffering aimed at countering a cynical and mortifying resignation to impossibility.

References Alliez, Eric, and Maurizio Lazzarato. 2016. Wars and Capital. Translated by A. Hodges. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e). Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by M. Holquist, translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated C. Emerson, introduction by W.C. Booth. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Edited C.  Emerson and M. Holquist, translated V.W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 1993. Towards a Philosophy of the Act. Edited by M.  Holquist, and V. Liapunov, translated by V. Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bardan, Alice. 2013. The New European Cinema of Precarity: A Transnational Perspective. In Work in Cinema, ed. E. Mazierska, 69–90. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bateson, Gregory. 1979. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. London: Duke University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2018. A Theoretical Framework for Critical Posthumanities. In Theory Culture and Society. Special Issues, Transversal Posthumanities, 1–31. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0263276418771486. Brown, William. 2013. Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Bruno, Giuliana. 2002. Atlas of Emotions: Journey in Art, Architecture, and Film. London: Verso. ———. 2014. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. London: The University of Chicago Press. Burgoyne, Robert. 2018. Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Wall Street Film. In Global Finance on Film: From Wall Street to Side Street, ed. Costantin Parvulescu, 42–55. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Butler, Judith. 2006. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Celis Bueno, Claudio. 2017. The Attention Economy: Labour Time and Power in Cognitive Capitalism. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Ciccarelli, Roberto. 2018. Forza Lavoro: Il Lato Oscuro della Rivoluzione Digitale. Roma: DeriveApprodi. Coffey, Clare, Patricia Espinoza Revollo, Rowan Harvey, Max Lawson, Anam Parvez Butt, Kim Piaget, Diana Sarosi, and Julie Thekkudan. 2020. Time to Care: Unpaid and Underpaid Care Work and the Global Inequality Crisis. https://oxfamilibrar y.openrepositor y.com/bitstream/handle/10546/ 620928/bp-­time-­to-­care-­inequality-­200120-­en.pdf. 10.21201/2020.5419. Coin, Francesca. 2018. A Genealogy of Precarity and Its Ambivalence. In Gilded Age: A Year of Chinese Labour, Civil Society, and Rights, Made in China Yearbook 2017, ed. I. Franceshini and N. Loubere, 30–33. Canberra: ANU Press. Dardot, Pierre and Laval, Christian. 2017. The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society. Translated by G. Elliot. London: Verso. Del Río, Elena. 2016. The Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas. London: Bloomsbury. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations. Translated by M.  Joughin. New  York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1997. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by R.  Galeta and H. Tomlinson Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1998. Essays Critical and Clinical. Translated by D.W.  Smith and M.A. Greco. London: Verso. ———. 2002. Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. Introduction by J.  Rajchman, translated A. Boyman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. 2000. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by R.  Hurley, H.R.  Lane, and M.  Seem. London: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2005. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translation and foreword by B. Massumi. London: University of Minnesota Press. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2018. European Cinema and Continental Philosophy: Film as Thought Experiment. London: Bloomsbury. Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by C.L.  Markmann, introduction by H.K. Bhabha and Z. Sardar. London: Pluto Press. Federici, Silvia. 2019. Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Oakland: PM Press. Fisher, Mark. 2018. K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writing of Mark Fisher from 2004–2016. Edited by D.  Ambrose, foreword by S.  Reynolds. London: Repeater Books. https://repeaterbooks.com/product/k-­punk-­the-­ collected-­and-­unpublished-­writings-­of-­mark-­fisher-­2004-­2016/. Fleming, David. 2017. Unbecoming Cinema: Unsettling Encounters with Ethical Event Films. Bristol: Intellect.

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Foucault, Michel. 2008. In Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. M. Senellart. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fumagalli, Andrea. 2019a. Twenty Theses on Contemporary Capitalism (Bio-­ cognitive Capitalism). In Cognitive Capitalism, Welfare and Labour: The Commonfare Hypothesis, ed. A.  Fumagalli, A.  Giuliani, S.  Lucarelli, and C. Vercellone, 61–76. Abingdon: Routledge. ———. 2019b. New Form of Exploitation in Bio-cognitive Capitalism: Towards Life Subsumption. In Cognitive Capitalism, Welfare and Labour: The Commonfare Hypothesis, ed. A.  Fumagalli, A.  Giuliani, S.  Lucarelli, and C. Vercellone, 77–93. Abingdon: Routledge. Fumagalli, Andrea, and Stefano Lucarelli. 2019. A Financialised Monetary Economy of Production. In Cognitive Capitalism, Welfare and Labour: The Commonfare Hypothesis, ed. A.  Fumagalli, A.  Giuliani, S.  Lucarelli, and C. Vercellone, 94–115. Abingdon: Routledge. Giuliani, Alfonso, and Carlo Vercellone. 2019. An Introduction to Cognitive Capitalism: A Marxist Approach. In Cognitive Capitalism, Welfare and Labour: The Commonfare Hypothesis, ed. A.  Fumagalli, A.  Giuliani, S.  Lucarelli, and C. Vercellone, 10–32. Abingdon: Routledge. Guattari, Félix. 1995. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Translated by P. Bains and J. Pefanis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2000. The Three Ecologies. Translated by I. Pindar and P. Sutton. London: The Athlone Press. Hall, Stuart. 2017. Selected Political Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays. Edited by S. Davison, D. Featherstone, M. Rustin, and B. Schwarz. Durham: Duke University Press. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. London: Duke University Press. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2017. Assembly. New  York: Oxford University Press. Hardt, Michael, Negri, Antonio. 2019. Empire: Twenty Years On. In New Left Review, Vol. 120 (Nov.–Dec.), 67–92. Hesselberth, Pepita. 2014. Cinematic Chronotopes: Here, Now, Me. London: Bloomsbury. Holtmeier, Matthew. 2016. The Modern Political Cinema: From Third Cinema to Contemporary Networked Biopolitics. Film-Philosophy 20: 303–323. https:// doi.org/10.3366/film.2016.0017. Hven, Steffen. 2017. Cinema and Narrative Complexity: Embodying the Fabula. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Jordan-Haladyn, Miriam. 2014. Dialogic Materialism: Bakhtin, Embodiment and Moving Image Art. New York: Peter Lang.

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Kafka, Franz. 2000. The Metamorphosis, In The Penal Colony, and Other Stories, with Other Two New Stories. Translated by Joachim Neugrochel. London: SIMON & SCHUSTER. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2012. The Making of the Indebted Man. An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. Translated by J.D. Jordan. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). ———. 2014. Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Translated by J. D. Jordan. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Lloyd, Genevieve. 1994. Part of Nature: Self-Knowledge in Spinoza’s Ethics. London: Cornell University Press. Lübecker, Nikolaj. 2015. The Feel-Bad Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Marazzi, Christian. 2008. Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy. Translated by G. Conti. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Marx, Karl. 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translation and foreword by M. Nicolaus. London: Penguin Books. Mazzucato, Mariana. 2018. The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. London: Penguin. Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Translation by S. Corcoran. London: Duke University Press. Mckay, Adam. 2015. The Big Short. Produced by Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner et al. US: Regency Enterprises and Plan B Entertainment. DVD, 130 mins. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2019. The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism. London: Duke University Press. Moore, Jason. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2007. On the Genealogy of Morality. Edited by K.  Ansell-­ Pearson, translation by C. Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Shaughnessy, Martin. 2009. The New Face of Political Cinema: Commitment in the French Film Since 1995. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Pasquinelli, Matteo. 2019. On the Origins of Marx’s General Intellect. Radical Philosophy 2 (6) https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/on-­the-­origins-­ of-­marxs-­general-­intellect. Pisters, Patricia. 2012. The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by G.  Elliott. London: Verso. Sassen, Saskia. 2014. Expulsion: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scorsese, Martin. 2013. The Wolf of Wall Street. Produced by Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Riza Aziz et  al. US: Red Granite Pictures, Appian Way Productions. DVD, 180 mins. Shakespeare, William. 2005. The Merchant of Venice. San Diego: ICON Classics.

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Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2016. Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience Through Film. Abingdon: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Cinematic-­EthicsE x p l o r i n g -­E t h i c a l -­E x p e r i e n c e -­t h r o u g h -­F i l m / S i n n e r b r i n k / p / book/9781138826168. Spinoza, Baruch. 2002. Complete Works. Edited by M.L. Morgan, translated by S. Shirley. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Standing, Guy. 2011. Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury. Steyerl, Hito. 2012. The Wretched of the Screen. New York: Sternberg Press. Sticchi, Francesco. 2019. Melancholy in Contemporary Cinema: A Spinozian Analysis of Film Experience. Abingdon: Routledge. Summers, Larry. 2016. The Age of Secular Stagnation: What It Is and What to Do About It. In Foreign Affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-­ states/2016-­02-­15/age-­secular-­stagnation. Wheeler, Wendy. 2016. Expecting the Earth: Life, Culture, Biosemiotics. Chadwell Heath: Lawrence and Wishart.

CHAPTER 2

Sorry to Bother You: Visualising the (Embodied) Soul at Work

The action is set in Oakland in a dystopian present/near future. Cassius (Cash) Green (Lakeith Stanfield) is a precarious worker living with his partner Detroit (Tessa Thompson)—a likewise unstable visual and performance artist and sign-turner—in his uncle’s garage struggling to pay the rent. Cassius finds an occasion for recognition and ‘economic inclusion’ through his work as telemarketer in the company RegalView. However, while climbing the ladder of success within the company, he will also be forced to make a drastic ethical choice between financial well-being, his morality, love, and solidarity with his colleagues. This is the premise of the schizo-dark indie/sci-fi comedy Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley 2018) with which I am starting the discussion of the anxiety chronotope. The film, we could argue, presents a very linear redemption arc for the main character (whose perspective and point of view we share for the most part of the experience), passing from selfish aspirations to collective awareness. However, we will see how the material and experiential structure of the film expresses extremely productive elements to discuss and elaborate on the notion of cinematic precarity. The beginning of the film explicitly primes the viewer into its main topic and experiential coordinates by showing Cassius’ job interview and its entrance to RegalView as telemarketer. The most interesting aspect of this sequence is that it is constructed around a ‘fake performance’. Cassius presents a false resume, indicating work experiences in several sectors, and even shows a counterfeit sport trophy to highlight his general qualities as © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Sticchi, Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63261-8_2

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human being. The employer managing the interview will soon reveal the fraud beyond these alleged achievements and, nonetheless, hire Cassius exactly because of this reckless spirit of initiative. What we also discover is that the job position Cassius has obtained is actually a very modest and exploitative one. He will work on commission, without a guaranteed good salary. This initial sequence establishes the specific surreal and grotesque atmosphere of the experience, enacted through the use of saturated colour tones, ‘unnatural’ and excessive acting, and the combination of implausible fantastic elements and frequent use of wide angles (cinematography by Doug Emmett). In accordance with Carl Plantinga’s work on the role of film affects in viewers’ engagement, we can argue that these aesthetic features distort the perception of specific situations and generate an experiential mood justifying and motivating the exasperation of film events, of actions and situations (cf. 2014, 146–149). This sequence also implicitly stages a particular perspective on precarious work. It is not really his experience or competence that make Cassius obtain the post of telemarketer, but rather his ‘initiative’, his willingness to abide to every request and to demonstrate his suitability for every kind of activity that, instead, stress his adequacy for the job. We can see, therefore, how the film effectively conveys the idea of work as primarily a ‘work on the self’, as the reconstruction of subjectivity functional for being employed, to be also associated with a general desire for self-improvement and continuous formation. The condition of a precarious subject is, therefore, associated with the embodied effort to get out of an unsatisfactory existential state, to demonstrate ‘practical’ achievements and results as indicators of one’s own human capital. This notion, in fact, does not merely reflect the valorisation of specific characteristics of a working subject; human capital, as Roberto Ciccarelli highlighted, ‘inhabits a middle-ground between language, perception, and praxis. It is a ghost perceived as the measure of ways of being’ (translation of the author 2018b, 13). Again, as Dardot and Laval have noticed, work in the neoliberal age involves a restructuring of the soul, meant to transform the subject into an embodied enterprise, taking upon itself all the risks (opportunities, guilts, and failures), and separated from any imagined collective ground (2017, 263–264). It is not incidental, therefore, that by initially interacting with Cash, viewers can also perceive how this character is obsessed by the meaning of his life, by the absence of personal purposes and a sense of mission. Cassius feels explicitly guilty for not having the capacity to demonstrate some sorts of professional achievements, envies his partner as she seems to have a

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genuine passion, and craves for separating himself from his own social background. In accordance with a Bakhtinian notion of artistic experience (see 1981, 315), Cassius’ action and behaviour express a semantically and experientially enclosed system of beliefs and a personality (or a Bakhtinian speech to be embodied and aligned with) in dialogical correlation with the viewer and with the complex chronotope of the film. Cassius’ speech, therefore, seems to be based on the cynical acceptance of values of economic success and individual emancipation, even though he recognises the incredible systematic injustices surrounding him. The main character, thus, perfectly embodies a ‘cruel optimistic’ attitude. In line with Lauren Berlant analysis, contemporary culture is pervaded by a sense of resigned abnegation towards neoliberal illusion of economic self-improvement, through which we, even when doubting of the functionality and positivity of the current economic system, obey nonetheless to its logic, hoping to be among the fortunate ones to benefit from it (2011, 13). Cruel optimism, therefore, can be considered as a sad passion involving resentment and abandonment of critical power (or ethical strength and invention), and favouring the reproduction and re-modulation of current power structures, a resented attachment to the current state of affairs (2011, 27–28). In this sense, an interesting dialogical contraposition between the aspirations of the character and what he perceives as existential failure is conveyed by the small early sequence describing him driving with his colleagues and partner. When Detroit starts telling anecdotes about Cash’s past in high school, he abruptly interrupts the conversation adding that he does not want to talk about his life as a student and instantaneously refers to his friends during that period as examples not to follow, as people stuck in the past. In this case, the dialogic opposition between this desire for self-­ improvement and the idea of inability to achieve life goals is enacted through the surreal and ironic presence of a group of old friends, who used to be the school football team, still, as adults, playing at night in the same field (they are shown through a long-shot alternated with the medium close-up of Cash’s talking). The experiential storyworld, what is more, allows viewers to clearly connect desires and intentions of the characters with a sense of distressing urgency, emphasised by the use of a fast cutting rate and through the alternation between chiaroscuro cinematography and exasperated and saturated chromatic tones (purple and yellow). These frantic affective tones are also reinforced by the dynamic and syncopated use of the score, composed and performed by the Tune-Yards and The Coup (Riley’ band). Furthermore, the emotional and intellectual

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chronotope of anxiety constituting the film emerges also through the continuous opposition of social statuses among characters, a proximity and never-ending confrontation that emphasises a pre-existing sense of instability and difficulty in acting. The continuous reference to self-formation and the use of ‘motivational’ support/speeches are, not incidentally, the core of RegalView’s work dynamics, as we can see many times the managers of the precarious telemarketers stressing the possibility for becoming power callers focused only on a very rich clientele. This continuous effort to obtain the commitment of the work-group is stressed in exchanges in which we see selling compared to hunting, or to the collection of personal trophies and corpses. The ‘inspirational’ practices are, nonetheless, dialogically contrasted by the visible detachment of the management (placed in other closed rooms or higher floors) and by the extreme confinement of each worker, produced through sound isolation and through small walls separating them from one another. We can notice similar chronotopic patterns also in other recent  films addressing telemarketing precarious jobs. For instance, in Your Whole Life Ahead of You (Tutta la Vita Davanti, Virzì 2008), we follow a brilliant philosophy graduate (played by Isabella Ragonese), scraping a living by working in a call-centre, being involved in motivational collective dances at the beginning of every work-shift. In Sorry to Bother You, the request of extreme dedication on behalf of the workers is accompanied by the (hilarious) attempt to describe the work environment as a joyous family, where there are no bosses or employees; and yet team-members are asked to continuously accumulate new skills (financial and cultural capital) for their personal growth, and ‘social currency’ is considered to be more valuable than a normal salary, therefore, it is not necessary to ask for higher wages. Thus, the functioning of the company presents an internal dialogical multiplicity; the polyphonic combination of different discourses aimed to encourage commitment and diminish internal conflict, in their co-presence, tend to produce an ironic and subversive effect, as they drastically reveal internal hierarchies and power relations. Adding to this experiential irony is also the fact that this allegedly synergetic and symbiotic work environment is topographically contextualised in the basement level of a building, characterised by constrained and limited spaces, and featuring consumed furniture and dated equipment (the dominating colour tones in this location are soft blues and greys). The sense of claustrophobic restriction is also reinforced by the camerawork used to describe the life in the office, essentially based on the

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alternation of close-ups of the characters, with low-angles to emphasise emotional distress and medium shots for occasional dialogues. However, the most effective expression of the idea of work as self-­ management involving the construction of a reliable subjectivity is embodied in the emblematic white voice. At the beginning of his career at RegalView, Cassius appears to be a clumsy telemarketer incapable of obtaining the attention of his clients. For this reason, he receives an unusual advice from a veteran, Langston (Danny Glover), who suggests using the white voice during the phone calls. This aesthetic device, obtained through the over-dubbing of the characters from other actors (for instance, David Cross for Cassius’ voice or Lily James for Detroit’s), is presented not as the attempt ‘to pass as whites’, but to convey an idea of whiteness. This concept is connected with an optimistic sense of satisfaction and absence of conflict and fears, the embodiment of a self-reliant individualist ideal. Indeed, when Langston describes the white voice, he argues that it should sound as what ‘whites’ are supposed to be instead of displaying a simple imitation, and adds that it should reflect the absolute absence of worries, the affective resemblance of success. Indeed, the use of over-dubbing to produce this strange vocal device generates a  surreal Brechtian estrangement aimed at highlighting the idealised nature of this inner voice. In this sense, we could argue that ‘sounding white’ is not only associated with the attempt to adapt to and fit in a dominating idea of ethnic belonging, to be part of a moral majority; this technique is also related to the continuous marketisation and advertisement of the self, with the necessary demonstration of an image of reliability and adequacy that is at the core of being an effective worker and a regulated subject. Indeed, it will be exactly because of Cassius’ capacity to regulate himself (‘Stick to the Script’ is one of the company slogans) and adapt to these social and economic demands that his use of the white voice will lead him to the achievement of the status of power caller selling weapons of mass destruction and unpaid human labour to rich clients around the world. The racialisation of the worker appears, therefore, as a fundamental element of the composition of each one’s human capital (although playing a foundational role since the dawn of capitalism), operating through the association of a particular amount of social and moral credit to every individual (cf. Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 43–44). This mechanism further implements and reinforces an  existing division of labour on the line of race, generally placing minoritarian subjects at bottom of the workforce, justifying and naturalising these processes and enacting harsh social

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segmentations, which, in turn, prevent and block collective action (see Ciccarelli 2018a, 108; Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 42). Cassius’ precarious and anxious adventures, which feature him changing life status and moving to a luxurious apartment in the city centre, are also placed within a general chronotope of turmoil and uneasiness as Oakland’s life and the urban ecology oscillate between irreconcilable levels of social disparity. Comfortable neighbourhoods with vertically developed buildings are associated with images of rough sleepers in street camps or with people living in their cars filling the background. The outskirts of the town (where Cash and Detroit initially  live) feature dejected housing structures placed in an indefinite horizontal space, accessed only through the limited perspective of the characters. In this sense, a further interesting topographical characteristic, adding to the racial politics described in the film, is the setting of the events in Oakland, the centre of the activities of the Black Panthers Party, with its intrinsic connection to a tradition of radical community organising. However, these images of resistance dialogically clash with the discussed claustrophobic construction of the space and the constant affective states of alert and anxiety diminishing the sense of possibility and, concurrently, reducing the space for political action. As mentioned before, RegalView headquarter also presents strong internal oppositions. We have seen how the main activities are carried out in the low-key and poorly decorated basement level, opposed, however, to the higher floor accessible only through a very peculiar and sophisticated golden elevator. In the higher level, everybody is forced to use the white voice. Here, the décor and architectures are characterised by the presence of glass walls, modern and minimalist furniture, and very open and comfortable spaces, in complete contrast with the claustrophobic dimension of the basement. The camerawork also emphasises this dissonance, by describing the action through more spatially relaxed medium shots and medium close-ups. Thus, the film builds up a multiple topography of affects by setting highly opposed architextures, as Giuliana Bruno would argue (2014, 28–29), which are associated with dialectically conflicting elements, enacting a participation highly grounded on the recognition of extreme class differences. Therefore, the material conceptuality of the film, in its totality and in combination with characters’ speeches, enacts these experiential and political tensions, identifying in the construction of identity (the white voice) a further intersected layer of contextual social divisions.

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Other experiential elements also contribute to the complexity of this cinematic chronotope. For instance, since the first moments of the film, we see reality TV shows describing life at the WorryFree: a dystopian version of contemporary logistic/manufacturing companies, managed by the egomaniac and pseudo-messianic CEO Steve Lift (Armie Hammer), where workers autonomously decide to live within the factory walls without salary in exchange of food and housing for life. The company is described as a revolutionary venture, changing the concept of workforce, while actually producing and distributing modern slavery to be sold by power callers at RegalView. At the same time, WorryFree’s advertisements and billboards across the city try to convey a sense of serenity and fulfilment by showing happy families living in the work environment or praising the responsible choices of their employees. All these features participate in demolishing the separation between work and life, exasperating the idea of an existence completely subsumed to capital reproduction and to the generation of a reliable self. Similarly, another recurring TV show displays participants publicly humiliated and beaten in exchange of money, underscoring the ‘saleability’ of every aspect of human life, and reinforcing the coexistence between self-improvement, guilt, and shame exactly as part of the same notion of human capital (cf. Fisher 2018, 516). In dialogic confrontation with these oppressive forces, we see street-­ artists of the ‘left-eye movement’ (Detroit is a member of the group), subverting these same messages and codes. For instance, during another early dialogue between Cash, Detroit, and other characters, we can see in the background a WorryFree billboard showing an African American man on a sofa holding a drink and a remote controller, while the advert says: ‘Show the world that you are a responsible babydaddy.’ This advert clearly indicates both a racial stereotyping (the lazy black man) and the strong exhortation to join the company in order to show responsibility and adequacy. This billboard passes from the background to the foreground at the end of the sequence, through a slow camera movement and forward zooming, and is used as visual reference point for the passage to the next sequence (in cross-dissolve), displaying a completely transformed image. The character on the sofa has been modified in order to resemble the iconic picture of Huey Newton (a founding member of the Black Panthers) seated holding a rifle and a spear, while the advert reads: ‘Show the world your response baby!’. This dialogical opposition extends the chronotope of a disharmonic world, pervaded by internal conflicts and

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tensions, difficult to reconcile or to conduct to a functional unity. At the same time, since everything appears marketable or saleable, even opposition and the idea of revolt can be turned into products. This appears evident when Cassius (being now a power caller) passes over the picket line formed by his precarious colleagues (now forming a union) and is hit by a drink-can thrown by one of the protesters. The video of Cash being hit becomes instantaneously a viral YouTube clip and, then, adopted for the most diverse commercial purposes (even a Halloween costume) or used in various TV shows. The news report that the same protester who launched the can has been hired by the company producing the drink, and we observe the attack being completely deprived of its political purpose and turned it into a message of pacification between workers and capital when in a commercial, displayed later on, the protester is kissing an actor interpreting Cash. By combining all the elements discussed so far, we could say that the film presents a general polyphonic chronotope of anxiety by making viewers experience a divided society where subjects are forced to an endless work on themselves and where capitalism resembles a pervasive all-­ extracting force. The mode of production is described as a totally distributed de-personalised force, operating through different institutions and hierarchies, but simultaneously affecting the social body as a whole, involving a complete construction and reconstruction of subjectivity functional to its re-modulation. This notion is in line with what we have defined as the extractive function of capital connected with the description of subjectivity as a machinic assemblage, as a dynamic ecological construct, to be continuously identified and captured for the accumulation of value (Fumagalli 2019, 82; Hardt and Negri 2017, 122–123). In this existential dimension, therefore, adapting to economic and social demands seems necessary and unavoidable. Indeed, alongside Cash, who more explicitly embraces dominating ideals, also other characters, including Detroit, have to effectively ‘perform’ their reliable identities in order to find a personal space in society. In this sense, it is worth discussing other two moments in which the use of the white voice is fundamental to recognise the strategies of social distinctions and subordination described in the film. When Detroit manages to complete her art exhibition (focused on the never-ending connection between slavery, exploitation of the  African continent, and capitalism), and to publicly open it, she will be shown discussing with ‘rich’ guests and possible art collectors, using her white voice. This vocal device will also be

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used during the main performance, consisting of her being half naked on the stage, continuously repeating lines from the movie The Last Dragon (Schultz 1985), while the audience is allowed to throw at her sheep blood and commodities produced through the exploitation of African workers and soil. The dialogical combination between an apparent anti-capitalist performance with the use of the white voice, however, generates a disturbing polyphonic and contradictory effect, as it associates something that we could perceive as ‘subversive’ with the embodiment of the same power mechanisms described by the film. Furthermore, the general effect of this sequence/performance, involving also many members of the audience violently hitting Detroit in a constant grotesque crescendo of the soundtrack and of the cutting rate (editing by Terel Gibson), seems to reduce the transformative power of the same artistic act. The combination of contrasting elements reframes the show as a different form of commodity, as an enjoyable cathartic gesture, deprived of ethical potentialities, through which it is possible to unleash a vacuous indignation towards inequalities and social injustices. As the violence of the performance increases, we see Cash interrupting it and asking Detroit the reason she submits to such humiliation, to which she replies that she is simply ‘sticking to the script’. Similarly, right after the sequence describing Detroit’s exhibition, we follow Cassius participating in Steve Lift’s party. At the beginning, the WorryFree CEO appears friendly and enthusiastic of Cash’s qualities as power caller, but then asks him, in virtue of the fact that he is an African American from Oakland, to tell a story of criminal life experiences in front of his guests without using the white voice. Cassius, however, has no gangster stories to tell and is, then, forced to improvise a rap, although not having any musical skills. Indeed, he appears incapable of uttering any word as a music base is put on, and then, in order to please the audience, he starts shouting repeatedly ‘n****r shit’, with the guests enthusiastically repeating these lines in tune with the music. Detroit’s and Cash’s ‘performances’ express their forced adaptation to financial and social necessities, a process that, again, entails the enclosed definition of saleable identities. Detroit needs a white voice to convey ‘sophistication’ and ‘elevated cultural level’ in order to sell her art; Cassius who, on the other hand, is losing the capacity to use his natural voice in everyday life (indicating a complete identification with the social ideal) is reconfigured as ‘black’ with the purpose of amusing an upper-class audience with racial stereotypes. Thus, he abides to a violent self-humiliation,

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analogical to the grotesque performance of Detroit, which reinforces the social distinctions and hierarchies pervading the film chronotope. These elements add to the idea of a total subsumption of life to capital taking place through the combination of soft (but pervasive) control mechanisms (the work on the self, Lazzarato 2012, 42), and the hardcore management of the workforce through harsh class-based divisions. Furthermore, they also show how differences, in this case ‘cultural’ and ‘racial’ heterogeneities, are exploited as further sources for economic accumulation, being reduced to easily categorisable elements, which confirm existing social structures (cf. Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 37) and make these deviances innocuous. The complete embodiment of capital rationality finds its absurd and grotesque realisation in Steve Lift’s secret plan to transform his workers into half-human/half-horse beings (equisapiens) capable of satisfying every demand without presenting the ‘weaknesses’ of traditional human labour. This terrifying project, to which Cash is asked to participate in by becoming the half-breed manager of the equisapiens, is presented by Steve Lift through a stop-motion animated short (directed by Ri Crawford). The film, with an ironic ‘pedagogical’ tone, describes the lineage of human evolution as only functional for work (tracing a line from the first homicide committed using a tool) and, therefore, the connection between the racialisation of the workforce and its complete animalisation (cf. Mbembe 2019, 167, 177–179); as Rosi Braidotti and Achille Mbembe have pointed out, this link reveals the economic opportunism of capitalism in diminishing life and labour power to mere functionalities, to the level of zoe, of an inhuman and disposable existence opposed to the hierarchical superior bios belonging to privileged species and forms of life (Braidotti 2013, 7–8, 61, 2019, 10, 96; Mbembe 2019, 182–183). In fact, the project is described by Steve Lift as a totally ‘rational’ and natural step, a simple necessary transformation to which Cash is asked to contribute by becoming the controller of this future species of workers, actively involved in preventing every rebellion (he has to be, Lift argues, their Martin Luther King). This complete process of dehumanisation reinforces the core ‘speech’ of the film describing life as totally subordinated to capital accumulation and value extraction and underscores the impossibility to counteract this sense of domination and confinement. Even the attempts Cassius makes afterwards to publicly accuse WorryFree on various media platforms have the distorted effect of simply boosting the stock value of the company. However, if, on one side, the film enacts a complete sense of urgency,

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limitation, and subordination, on the other hand, there is a conflicting dialogical tension also pervading the experience. For instance, we have seen how Detroit, as many other characters, adapts and conforms to various social demands and skilfully uses the white voice; nonetheless, she also organises and participates in protests or in street art actions always trying to convey subversive political messages. Cassius as well presents different contrasting speeches, visually expressed, for instance, by the photo of his father he always carries with him, acting as his externalised political consciousness harshly responding to the main character’s unethical decisions. We could argue that the only monological figure and function in the film is embodied by the leftist organiser Squeeze (Steven Yeun), who, by always pushing colleagues and other characters to form unions and participate in collective actions, enacts a ‘class consciousness’ speech, the continuous reminder of the possibility for solidarity and mutual support. The polyphony of the main characters, and the co-presence of these conflicting speeches, do not simply reflect the complexity of the experience and of our possibility to interact and align with the protagonists. The internal dialogical multiplicity of the characters and of the cinematic chronotope in its entirety, indeed, unleashes a subversion of pre-existing utterances (cf. Bakhtin 1981, 263, 278–279), by defining possibilities and spaces for the transformation and counter-enactment of these same experiential dynamics. Subjectivity, which we have experienced as the centre of economic control and exploitation, thus appears not reducible to a simple individualised apparatus functional for the accumulation of value, but presents a complexity and a plurality that makes it uncontrollable. This aspect is vividly expressed when Cash decides to join RegalView workers’ strike in collaboration with the equisapiens in order to organise an effective protest and finally block the activity of the company. This collective action displays a polyphonic potential that is not confined to the simple response to a sense of injustice and domination. In the first place, we perceive a joyous and ironic reframing of the same devices we have seen as symbols of domination or as indicators of passivity and inaction. All the protesters, for instance, wear Cash’s wig with a can, reusing it as a collective political sign, and thus transform its value from innocuous object of consumption to the configuration of a shared condition. Likewise, the football team we encountered earlier on as relentlessly stuck in an (absurd) nostalgic past participates in the strike and blocks the first charge of the police, together with the help of many of Detroit’s sculptures, used before in the ‘elitist’ exhibition and now assembled as wall to protect the

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protesters. In this sense, we can observe a simultaneous response to a state of inability to change through solidarity and action, and a further visualisation of a direct political use/potential of art. The dramatic images of police repression (handheld camera movements following the action), therefore, cannot contain the enthusiastic protest saved, in the end, by the epic and supernatural intervention of the equisapiens. The integration of all these dialogical openings enacts the perception of solidarity (with every form of life) and collective struggle as re-signifying practices capable of changing reality in a broad sense and allowing for the disruption of the logic of individualisation and atomisation of subjectivity. Indeed, we have seen how capitalism in the film is expressed as a ferocious mechanism of extraction of value, which requires a continuous work on the self, a never-ending adaptation of identity connected with the promise of economic emancipation and success. The power dynamics described emphasise the sense of individual isolation and restriction of possibility, which a chronotope of anxiety enhances and radicalises. Nonetheless, this same existential confinement can be overcome through solidarity and collective organisation, which are expressions of a new power to act in the world and to resist the cruel optimistic resignation to a current state of affairs and to the coercive logic of the human capital. The dialogical openness enacted by the film through its experiential and chronotopic dynamics, however, does not necessarily foresee a happy ending. In the epilogue, Cash and Detroit will go back together to their initial condition (living in Cassius’ uncle now renovated and restyled garage) with the awareness to be part of a collective force, finding a shared life purpose in this social struggle. Reversing our expectations, we will soon find out that Cassius is inevitably mutating into an equisapiens, since he was forced to unwarily assume the medication to transform earlier on. The sequence, then, ends on the close-up of the altered face of the character, cutting to the end credits, and then to a small coda, in which we see a mutated Cassius leading other equisapiens to the attack of Lift’s mansion. In this final shift, we can observe also a dialogical overturning of the previously expressed animalisation of the human. If becoming zoe reveals the pervasive commodification of life, on the other hand, this same notion indicates the ecological and collective ground of the human, our existence as part of a continuum with the world. Recognising ourselves as ecologically complex and entangled beings involves also the possibility and

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necessity to shape different ethical bonds of solidarity (Braidotti 2013, 50, 86; Braidotti 2019, 177) capable, as we have seen, to overturn the extractive and atomising rule of capital in order to affirm new paths for collective existence. A simple protest and conflict, however, as the film ending reveals, is not sufficient per se, since freedom, as Angela Davis would argue, is a constant struggle (cf. 2016, 4–11), an endless experimentation of what collective bodies, including every existing  form of life and new species to come, can do together.

References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by M. Holquist, translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. London: Duke University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2019. Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press. https://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509535255. Bruno, Giuliana. 2014. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. London: The University of Chicago Press. Ciccarelli, Roberto. 2018a. Forza Lavoro: Il Lato Oscuro della Rivoluzione Digitale. Roma: DeriveApprodi. ———. 2018b. Il Capitale Disumano: La Vita in Alternanza Scuola-Lavoro. Roma: Manifestolibri. Dardot, Pierre and Christian Laval. 2017. The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society. Translated by G. Elliot. London: Verso. Davis, Angela. 2016. Freedom is Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundation of a Movement. Edited by F. Barat, foreword by C. West. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Fisher, Mark. 2018. K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writing of Mark Fisher from 2004–2016. Edited by D.  Ambrose, foreword by S.  Reynolds. London: Repeater Books. https://repeaterbooks.com/ product/k-­p unk-­t he-­c ollected-­a nd-­u npublished-­w ritings-­o f-­m ark-­ fisher-­2004-­2016/. Fumagalli, Andrea. 2019. New Form of Exploitation in Bio-Cognitive Capitalism: Towards Life Subsumption. In Cognitive Capitalism, Welfare and Labour: The Commonfare Hypothesis, ed. A.  Fumagalli, A.  Giuliani, S.  Lucarelli, and C. Vercellone, 77–93. Abingdon: Routledge. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2017. Assembly. New  York: Oxford University Press.

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Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2012. The Making of the Indebted Man. An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. Translated by J.D. Jordan. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Translation by S. Corcoran. London: Duke University Press. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2019. The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism. London: Duke University Press. Plantinga, Carl. 2014. Mood and Ethics in Narrative Film. In Cognitive Media Theory, ed. T. Nannicelli and P. Taberham, 141–157. New York: Routledge. Riley, Boots. 2018. Sorry to Bother You. Produced by Nina Yang Bongiovi, Kelly Williams, et  al. US: Cinereach, Significant Productions, MACRO, MNM Creative, The Space Program. DVD, 112 mins. Schultz, Michael. 1985. The Last Dragon. Produced by Rupert Hitzig, Berry Gordy, Joseph Caracciolo. US: Motown Productions. DVD, 107 mins. Virzì, Paolo. 2008. Tutta la Vita Davanti. Produced by Paolo Virzì and Guido Simonetti. Italy: Medusa Film. DVD, 117 mins.

CHAPTER 3

From Welfare to Workfare: I, Daniel Blake and The Measure of a Man

I have started this book by claiming that one of the main intentions of my discussion was not to produce a universal aesthetic subject for the precarious age, but to draw maps of the lives and spaces emerging with the transformations of global capitalism. Precarity is strongly connected with the passage from a welfare system, based on a series of guaranteed social rights connected with the dynamics of the Keynesian-Fordist economy, to the workfare of neoliberal economy, where each subject has to demonstrate her/his reliability as economic agent in order to access rights. This gigantic mutation in the governance of the workforce, which shuttered every distinction between work and life, finds a perfect embodiment in Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake (2016) and The Measure of a Man (La Loi du Marché 2015) by Stéphane Brizé. Both films, among many others, register the passage of subjects codified as traditional workers to more recent configurations of exploitation. I will be discussing how these films effectively map the exit of extractive processes from the closed environment of the factories/offices, and, therefore, express complex chronotopes of lives entirely at work. Loach’s film (his seventh collaboration with the screenwriter Paul Laverty), for instance, starts on a black screen with the voice over of the main character, Daniel (Dave Johns), a fifty-nine-years-old widow, working as carpenter, during an interview with a ‘health-care professional’ (called Amanda) of the employment and support allowance (ESA). Daniel has suffered a heart attack and has been advised by his cardiologist to not © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Sticchi, Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63261-8_3

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return to work; thus, he is asking for a disability pension. The first minutes of the conversation consist of the interviewer presenting a series of general and often extremely vague questions about Daniel’s ability to perform everyday activities, a questionnaire to which he responds with irony and anger. At first, Daniel is bothered by the fact that the interview does not focus on his heart condition, and, afterwards, he starts questioning the interviewer’s professional qualification and her ability to evaluate his health, stressing also how he desires to go back to work as soon as possible. Daniel also points out how the services offered by this office are managed by a North American company, thus revealing and questioning the merely financial and bureaucratic nature of the agency. This dialogue takes place mostly off-screen; indeed, it is only after a couple of minutes that we finally see Daniel’s close-up, although we are not able to perceive Amanda. This composition emphasises the distance between the characters, exasperating the surreal tone of the conversation, and the discomfort and estrangement emerging at every new question. The dialogue is, therefore, framed as a Kafkaesque confrontation with a cold and detached administrative structure, which appears de-personalised and unable to understand the needs of those requiring its assistance. Later on, this chronotopic pattern is effectively reiterated by the fatiguing waiting for phone operators answering Daniel’s calls and his request for clarifications about the results of his health assessment. With the initial dialogue, the film sets up one of the main recurring chronotopic motifs of the film, which is, indeed, grounded on the continuous passage of the character among several institutions, administrative offices, and governmental structures meant to evaluate and control his status and his eligibility for welfare and support. The nonsensical nature of the questionnaire, with its related distressing impact, is, in turn, revelatory of the transformation of labour during the precarious age. Indeed, the operator is not addressing the seriousness of Daniel’s health in order to decide the most adequate assistance; main function of the interview is to evaluate his status as working citizen, his abstract feasibility to work, which will, eventually, lead to the final rejection of his request for financial support; at the core of what the character experiences there is an endless process of evaluation, replicating what Deleuze identified as one of the main features of contemporary work: a continuing education extending the management of subjectivity through never-ending exams and practices of control (1995, 179, italics in the original).

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A similar chronotopic dimension is the one inhabited by Thierry (Vincent Lindon), the main character of The Measure of a Man, describing his journey through unemployment and towards the obtainment of a new occupation. At the beginning of the film, we see him during an interview as well, this time, however, with a recruitment agent. The sequence is built on a shot reverse shot composition of medium close-ups of the two characters, privileging the focus on Thierry’s physicality and facial mimic, and thus allowing viewers to directly engage his visible disappointment. The main character complains about the pointlessness of the training for brick workers he had to attend in order to justify his unemployment benefits. A course he thought might have led to a new job and revealed to be inadequate and partial or disconnected from specific professional needs (he has been in vocational training for fifteen months). As Daniel, Thierry laments the loss of time and the absurdity beyond this bureaucratic mechanism, the uselessness of many professional figures managing the welfare structures, and appears strongly attached to his identity as active worker, also because he was employed in a factory for many years and cannot stand the absence of a proper occupation. For this same reason, he rejects the prospects, as his former colleagues, to be continuously involved in trade-union causes aimed to obtain compensations for the unlawful and unfair termination of their contracts. Thierry just wants to find a new job and emotionally rejects the fact of being recognised as an unemployed, as an economically inefficient subject, since having a professional qualification constitutes one of the tenets of his identity. Likewise, even though without a specific occupation, Daniel finds motivation and recognition in manual labour; he often appears handcrafting objects or working on pieces of furniture and helping friends in setting and fixing their apartments or, right after the initial interview, visiting his colleagues and observing with admiration valuable building material. In this sense, we can see that both films enact characters’ speeches based on a discomforting and humiliating entrance of two subjects, whom we could define as ‘traditional’ working-class members, within the existential space of precarity, and thus dealing also with what has been defined as a general feminisation of work (cf. Ciccarelli 2018a, 110–113). Indeed, what precarity involves is the extension to the entire social body of practices of exploitation meant to individualise the subject (cf. Giuliani and Vercellone 2019, 24; Standing 2011, 89) and also the expansion of forms of relational activities and care-work practices, traditionally destined to women or to minoritarian subjectivities, to the whole working class. This redefinition of the old division of labour, replaced by new gender

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dynamics, necessarily implies, as we have seen, the enlargement of work beyond the assembly line or the precise old-style life-work balances (or at least what Fordist labour was perceived to be) and the necessity for continuous updates and self-training on behalf of the working citizens. This latter aspect is, therefore, also connected with what has been defined as ‘male fragility’ or rather with emasculation and existential uncertainty affecting (white) male workers who, because of recent economic transformations, suffer the loss of a superior social status traditionally attributed to them—a phenomenon that can be identified and expressed also in very successful comedies, such as The Full Monty (Cattaneo 1997, see De Pascalis 2014, 130–133; Standing 2011, 60–64). In the films several sequences are emblematic of Daniel and Thierry’s experiencing the expansion of work to the relational and performative sphere. After knowing that his request for disability pension has been rejected, Daniel will then try to appeal this decision and, in the meantime, be requested to apply for unemployment benefits. However, this same process will require him to get involved in training and professional formation activities demonstrating his willingness to work by looking for jobs, thus openly contradicting his doctor’s indications and his aim of having his health issues recognised. To this purpose, he will attend a training session on how to write CVs (an activity he has never done) and demonstrate his ‘exceptionality’ to possible  new employers. During the workshop sequence, we learn about the necessity for job seekers ‘to stand out from the crowd’, to do more than expected in order to be considered valuable for a job position. ‘It is not enough these days just to show that you have the skills,’ the trainer affirms, and the willingness to work and to sacrifice or to commit yourself more than others, instead, are seen as signs of a subjectivity worthy of a professional status. In association with the trainer’s points, we see close-ups of various people attending the session, at first amused by his rhetoric and by few jokes made by Daniel in response to it and, then, petrified by the ferocious panorama of pervasive unemployment and precarity described in the session. Furthermore, this and other training sequences also reveal Daniel’s inadequacy to fit within the current ‘job-market’. He laughs at many agencies’ officers requiring him to do online applications and stating that they are ‘digital by default’ by answering that he is ‘pencil by default’ and has no competence in using software and filling online forms. Indeed, it would be only through the help of his young neighbours and of kind passers-by that he will finally submit the

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required documentations; however, these lacks in his education further appear to diminish his reliability and value as a worker. While Daniel jumps from one grotesque situation to the other, we ­follow Thierry during a Skype job interview and, then, at a collective ­session of evaluation and training. In the first sequence (long take and medium shot), we see Thierry’s silhouette while talking to the screen (viewers cannot manage to see the monitor frontally) and hear the conversation. The main character is asked about his competences and willingness to accept work positions with smaller salary and minor professional qualifications, and his availability to be timewise flexible. While showing his readiness to abide to all these requests, Thierry is criticised for the lack of clarity in his curriculum, showing a not enough dedicated work of preparation, and for his occasional reticence when answering, demonstrating, apparently, a limited level of commitment. Similarly, in the second sequence, we see a recorded video of him on a television screen while responding to questions related to how he would act to avoid specific relational issues between him and a possible employer (therefore, Thierry evaluates himself on the screen). At the end of the video, the lecturer managing this collective training asks the participants to share their views and suggestions on the performance. The camera remains mostly on Thierry, at the centre of the shot, surrounded by the other participants, whose comments and criticism (about his posture, behaviour, vocal tone, dress choices, timing, etc.) we mostly hear off-screen. Again, the main point raised during the session is the need, for Thierry, to feel attuned with the employer, demonstrating his desire to be interviewed for having a job, his openness and availability. The chronotopic construction of both films, therefore, describes the fatiguing succession of repeated training sessions trapping the characters within an affective dimension where anxiety and exhaustion are strongly interconnected, an overworking that is not necessarily only manual or intellectual but also moral. The weariness deriving by these sessions is related to what we have defined as work on the self or rather with the ‘injunction to take upon oneself the costs and the risks of economic disaster’ (see Foucault 2008, 225–228; Lazzarato 2012, 6, 130–131). This biopolitical transformation of the concept of labour, on one side, we have seen, involves the entrance of production within in every sphere of affective and cognitive existence, and also the concurrent mutation of work in a perpetual mandatory activity. On the other hand, the operations and training Daniel and Thierry carry out are also connected with another

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aspect of the subjectification and individual embodiment of human capital: ‘the living ideology of merit’ (Ciccarelli 2018b, 98–103; Fana 2017, 84). Occupation and salary are, therefore, transformed from necessary aspects of the life of each citizen to awards and achievements to be continuously deserved on behalf of the workers. This is why Deleuze argued that one of the main innovations of contemporary capitalism was modifying work in a TV game-show logic, substituting wages with pays based on results, and implementing a ‘healthy competition’ between colleagues (Deleuze 1995, 179). However, it is also necessary to add that the meritocratic management of the workforce, instead of producing a simple reduction of welfare measures, involves, as we can see in Daniel and Thierry’s cases, the proliferation of a Kafkaesque ‘inefficient’ bureaucratic system meant only to justify contextual inequalities and extend practices of control (cf. Ciccarelli 2018b, 103; Fisher 2009, 40–42, 51; Fisher 2018, 464; Graeber 2018, 284–285). Indeed, it must be remembered that the word meritocracy was firstly introduced in 1958 by the sociologist Michael Young in derogatory terms, indicating a dystopian tendency towards a society where only the citizens evaluated as efficient and valuable have access to rights (Villani 2019; Young 2017). It is also important to add, in this sense, how contemporary capitalism does not describe ‘the absence of the state’, but configures a proliferation of governmental institutions meant to evaluate the social body through an infinite grotesque process of assessments and production of abstract data. At the same time, on the micropolitical level, the pervasiveness of bureaucratic control is embodied and expressed in the form of self-management (cf. Hardt and Negri 2017, 129–131, 211). Affective states of anxiety and exhaustion infuse the chronotope of both films, emotional moods and conditions viewers participate in by embodying the physical and behavioural dispositions and actions of the characters within their storyworld. The engagement with these specific affective patterns is also associated by similar aesthetic and stylistic features, generating analogical topographical and experiential maps. In both films the camerawork (cinematography by Robbie Ryan for I, Daniel Blake and Eric Dumont for The Measure of a Man) closely focuses on the characters, following their emotional states and interactions with the environment through medium close-ups and medium shots (mostly abiding to the fictional figures’ heights) and thus facilitating our empathic dialogical correlation with them. However, in Loach’s film the character’s speech is managed by describing his life as being part of a group, of a collective, or,

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more precisely, of Newcastle’s (where the action is set) working-class world. Sometimes, the focus passes on Katie (Hayley Squires), a struggling single mother of two children, ‘expelled’ from London because of her economic inefficiency, or to Daniel’s neighbours and friends. In this sense, we can clearly see how the chronotope of the film is composed by a constellation of human relations and bonds—dialogically opposing the atomising and alienating dynamics of bureaucratic control Daniel has to undergo—and is associated with clear ecological maps of estate councils and working-class neighbourhoods. The polyphonic integration of these differential elements contributes in defining the peculiar affective and interactive coordinates of the film and describes one of the most relevant differences with Thierry’s journey in the world of precarity. In Brizé’s film, in fact, the character is mostly isolated, displayed at the centre of the shot, and the camera often lingers on him capturing his silence, hesitation, and discomfort by expressing a topographical map and a temporality of almost absolute alienation, where the character’s possibility to interact with the environment is either limited or difficult to define. While Daniel responds with irony, anger, and pride to many distressing and grotesque situations, Thierry, instead, appears humiliated, often incapable of acting or expressing his feelings, as we empathise also with a profound sense of existential weakness. His worries and economic concerns are also connected with the desire to provide opportunities and a comfortable life for his disabled son, and with his fear of being expelled from a zone of social security, again connecting financial indigency to personal guilt (cf. Lazzarato 2012, 130). Thus, we also understand his angry resistance to the possibility of selling his moving house for a price inferior to market value (even though in need of money) because that would become a revelation and confirmation of his state of precarity. In this sense, Thierry’s speech reveals a more submissive, although conflicting, attitude in  his dialogical relation to contextual dynamics, in particular if compared to the openly rebellious stance of Daniel. The interactive and affective differences outlined by two films, sharing similar chronotopic constructions, allow us also to observe how Bakhtin’s analytical instruments are functional for the discussion of varying experiential and interactive patterns as their application goes beyond recognising a strict formal and thematic continuity and consistency among several case studies (cf. 1981, 251–252). It is also interesting, in this sense, to put the dialogical dimensions of the two films in relation with another recent Brizé’s work, At War (En Guerre 2018), describing the active resistance of

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Laurent (again played by Vincent Lindon), a union organiser trying to fight back against the decision of his company to close the factory where he works together with other 1100 employees. The chronotopic and dialogical dynamics of this film describe quite manifestly a binary division of the ethical field through a clear opposition between capital and labour, an open war, indeed. The company management is merely worried about the possibility to increase and expand the revenues and profits for the shareholders, whereas the workers desire to keep their jobs and reject the idea of abruptly becoming unemployed. Their struggle will appear deemed to fail and will require Laurent’s final sacrifice to be acknowledged in all its dramatic urgency. In this sense, we can say that the dialogical tension expressed by the characters of this latter film describes marginalised subjects trying to resist the fall into precarity and thus embodying a strong collective identity connected with traditional class consciousness and solidarity. Nonetheless, in At War both these classical compositions and organisation of conflict fail to be effective and victorious. For Daniel and Thierry, instead, the predicament is that of having already been ‘identified’ as isolated precarious subjects, separated from their old-style class consciousness and trapped in vicious circles of individual exploitation. However, we have also mentioned how Daniel’s dialogical interaction with the environment and with the different subjectivities composing his world reveals a more articulated definition of the precarious working class and of its ways of coming together and organising. As noticed by Jacqueline Gibbs and Aura Lehtonen (2019), solidarity and mutual care describe a major aspect of his personality. For instance, he helps his two young neighbours in their not-completely legal trade of original athletic shoes from China (to be sold locally to a cost inferior to their current price) and is, in turn, supported by them in overcoming his digital illiteracy or through the explicit offer of financial aid. Daniel’s two young friends (China and Piper) feature further dialogical elements in outlining the world of precarity as they describe their illicit business as a way to get out from ‘crap jobs’, from partial and unsecure forms of employment making impossible to think about a stable life. Of course, the major and most important relation of the main  character is constituted by the encounter with Katie and her two young children, Daisy and Dylan. The two characters first meet at the JobCentre when Daniel waits for information about his benefits and sees her engaged in an animated discussion with the agency officers, who are proceeding in sanctioning her for an unfortunate late arrival to an appointment for economic help. Daniel automatically reacts to this event by

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trying to (unsuccessfully) assist Katie in resolving this bureaucratic issue but, from this moment onwards, will be tirelessly supporting her by fixing the new house and taking care of the two children in their difficult transition to their new environment. Thus, we also discover how Katie is willing to work and to continue her education in order to obtain a good job and to better support Daisy and Dylan, although she feels guilty for not having been able to do so in the past, as she has ‘forced’ them to lose their friends in London or to pass from one precarious living condition after the other. Katie’s precarity, therefore, involves a complex set of issues, bringing together her care-work, the guilt of not being a reliable mother and, at the same time, the genuine desire to ‘improve’ herself in order to give her children a better future. Many small scenes are focused on her silent desperation at night while cleaning or fixing the new house or trying to comfort Daisy for having been bullied at school for her old broken shoes. Two sequences most emblematically express the complexity of Katie’s predicament. Both moments convey the profound humiliation the character undergoes because of her precarious economic state, as, in the first case, we see her going with her family and Daniel to a food bank, a scene in which she will break in a desperate cry motivated by her hunger and by the moral despair associated with it. This sequence, however, has also the function of extending the focus beyond individual ‘exceptional’ stories of precarity, as it shows the long queue attending for the opening of the food bank and thus allows viewers to associate the characters’ issues and difficulties with a more general socio-economic condition. In the second sequence, displaying her being caught while shoplifting few sanitary products she cannot afford, instead, we remain more distinctively on her subjective suffering as the camera closely follows Katie through medium shots and close-ups capturing her reactions and her embarrassment after being discovered. By comparing these moments, we could argue that both sequences, although presenting different features, allow us to interact and empathise with her discomfort and, in turn, reinforce the chronotopic integration between a social dimension of precarity and an individualised existential sense of guilt; these same mechanisms will drive Katie’s decision to resort to sex-work as only available choice for a more stable income. In this way, I, Daniel Blake enacts an understanding and definition of precarity in non-essentialist terms, describing various subjectivities falling within this condition, although experiencing different forms of exploitation, control, and marginalisation. Katie’s precarity, indeed, is related, on one side, to her being evaluated as unable of living in London and to

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participate to the gentrification of the big city centre (a process aimed exactly at extracting rent from living spaces, see Hardt and Negri 2017, 169). On the other hand, her precarity also depends on traditionally sexualised divisions of labour, confining her in the definitions of unpaid care-­ worker for her family and, concurrently, of sex-worker using her body as financial capital when needed (see Federici 2009, 94–96, 2018, 54, 2020, 93–97). Katie’s vulnerability describes exactly also the transformation of familial relation under neoliberal precarious economy, where women’s ‘affective’ reproductive labour remains unrecognised but is brought within categories of financial efficiency (see Federici 2019, 18, 62–63). On this note, the film enacts also a dialogical tension between Daniel and Katie based on his moralising indignation and dramatic rejection of her choice, implying a classical stigmatisation of sex-work further emphasising gendered divisions of roles (Federici 2020, 29–30). As highlighted by Miguel Mellino (2017), Daniel’s ethical ground is highly defined by his ‘enclosed’ white/male working-class status, associated with a nostalgic celebration for past political organisations and by a consequent inability to recognise in Katie an equally struggling worker or to empathise with her decision. Therefore, we could argue that his male privilege allows him to display a judgemental stance in her regard, which will lead him not to speak to the young woman for a long time and to perceive her action as a sort of ethical betrayal. While I, Daniel Blake allows us to travel through a diverse panorama of precarious lives in contemporary Newcastle, Thierry lonely insecurity unravels itself in a different dialogical direction. He will finally find a job as supermarket security guard, monitoring the behaviours of costumers and other employees. Having this occupation gives him a momentary financial relief, but, on the other hand, it will also force him to face difficult ethical compromises. Thierry will be obliged to inflict penalties on occasional shoplifters, often poor people stealing few commodities they are unable to afford. These punitive practices are also associated with long sequences describing him checking the activities taking place in the supermarket by looking at all the monitors connected with CCTV cameras, occasionally zooming on specific subjects that capture his attention. These moments do not simply describe his work and the long uninterrupted series of operations he has to carry out. The association between Thierry and control devices dialogically enacts the adaptation of the subject to a particular form of machinic enslavement in relation to a specific social and economic role. This composition outlines his transition to a new model of

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worker autonomously capable of embodying and carrying out surveillance activities. In a certain way, we could say, therefore, that Thierry’s training revealed to be effective as it led him to accept the redefinition of his subjectivity, dialogically passing from the collective/factory consciousness to the individual atomisation of precarity, and also to the clear perception of other workers as opponents to be controlled and possibly sanctioned. This latter aspect, indeed, will enact the most dramatic turning point in the narrative. When a cashier (Françoise) will be caught ‘stealing’ some shopping vouchers, Thierry will participate in her identification and punishment. This sequence is placed in the final section of the film and mostly features a long take shot from Thierry’s perspective (over the shoulder), showing Françoise (who worked in the supermarket for twenty years) being conducted in a separated room where to be interrogated about her misbehaviour and criticised by the personnel manager. The latter visibly humiliates her and calls into question her trustworthiness and value as employee, accusing Françoise of having betrayed her colleagues, a mortification visually emphasised by her being isolated at the centre of the image for most of the action. This clash will finally lead to her dismissal and, in turn, to her suicide. In addition to this, a further dialogical element adding to tragic affective construction of the events is the fact that after her suicide, the management will address Françoise’s behaviour by describing it as the result of personal choices and private problems, specifying that nobody ever had any issue with her as employee. This event will trigger a radical repositioning of the main character, who, feeling responsible for Françoise, will abruptly abandon his job position when involved in a similar situation implying the possible dismissal of another colleague. The events of the film lead to an open ending describing Thierry’s final reaction but not providing any information about the evolution of his professional, familial, and emotional life. In any case, Thierry’s ultimate rebellion introduces a different temporality in ironic (where irony, in Bakhtinian terms, refers to a conflicting interactive polyphony, see 1986, 121) opposition with the main chronotopic map of precarity described in the film and in particular with the sense of subjective identification with ‘the reliable human capital’ previously analysed. Thierry’s behaviour, indeed, displays an association between the resistance to this subjective construction with the rejection of work, with a clear rupture which, nonetheless, as the open ending reinforces, is limited to individual choices and actions.

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The contrasting and opposing temporality described by I, Daniel Blake, instead, we have seen, is based on the possibility of mutual care and solidarity among the working class. Daniel effectively embodies these stances, together with China and Piper, in dialogical opposition with the institutional precarisation he suffers. We even find out, as the narrative unravels, how Anna, a staff member of the JobCentre, tries to counteract the cumbersome and alienating machine of workfare by assisting Daniel and giving him tips and how his fight will encounter the support and solidarity of people assisting to the injustices he undergoes. In this sense, the value of a mutualistic recognition between members of the precarious class is extended beyond the individual example of the main character (see Gibbs and Lehtonen 2019). On the other hand, after finding out about Katie’s choice to become a sex-worker, Daniel decides to isolate himself, rejecting everyone else’s offer of help and, thus, falling in a downward spiral of even more precarious economic state (becoming extreme after receiving a final rejection of unemployment and health benefits). It will be only because of Daisy’s intervention, putting into question Daniel’s unwillingness to be helped in turn, that the main character will finally get out of isolation and be able, with Katie’s assistance, to appeal for his welfare provisions. Nonetheless, he will die before discussing the case, and the speech prepared for this occasion will finally be read during his funeral by Katie (in the closing sequence). His last words are, indeed, a final reinforcement of the character’s speech as they express his refusal to be considered a data, a costumer, or a scrounger, but a citizen claiming and defending his rights, thus also rejecting the malediction and stigmatisation of poverty that saturates the emotional texture of the film chronotope. This series of traumatic ruptures, leading to the final tragic evolution of the film, underscores, however, how the value of solidarity needs to be grounded on reciprocity and transformative recognition against a univocal moral entitlement. The last sequences, indeed, reveal that Daniel and Katie are reconciled, although we do not know if she keeps being a sex-­ worker. Consequently, we are also led to think about their new bond as not based on a paternalistic and misogynistic approach on behalf of Daniel, but on an equal sense of interdependence between the two characters. As Daisy’s reprimand emphasises, it is possible to enact a different temporality by envisaging in working-class solidarity a practical ethical answer to the fatiguing anxiety of precarious lives—a solidarity, however, which cannot be built upon traditional and nostalgic assumptions or on the essentialist idealisation of this concept. Mutualism in the precarious age is

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defined as an experimental practice, capable of recognising the complex multi-layered features of each one’s subjectivity and, more importantly, of stressing how concepts of work, welfare, and exploitation exceed the boundaries of our individual understanding of them.

References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by M. Holquist, translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Edited C.  Emerson and M. Holquist, translated V.W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press. Brizé, Stéphane. 2015. La Loi du Marché. Produced by Christophe Rossignon and Philip Boëffard. France: Nord-Ouest Films and Arte France Cinéma. DVD, 93 mins. ———. 2018. En Guerre. Produced by Christophe Rossignon and Philip Boëffard. France: Nord-Ouest Films. DVD, 105 mins. Cattaneo, Peter. 1997. The Full Monty. Produced by Uberto Pasolini. UK: Redware Films and Channel Four Films. DVD, 91 mins. Ciccarelli, Roberto. 2018a. Forza Lavoro: Il Lato Oscuro della Rivoluzione Digitale. Roma: DeriveApprodi. ———. 2018b. Il Capitale Disumano: La Vita in Alternanza Scuola-Lavoro. Roma: Manifestolibri. De Pascalis, Ilaria A. 2014. Il Cinema Europeo Contemporaneo. Scenari ­transnazionali, immaginari globali. Roma: Bulzoni. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations. Translated by M.  Joughin. New  York: Columbia University Press. Fana, Marta. 2017. Non è lavoro, è sfruttamento. Bari: Laterza. Federici, Silvia. 2009. Caliban and The Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation. 3rd ed. New York: Autonomedia. ———. 2019. Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Oakland: PM Press. ———. 2020. Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism. Oakland: PM Press. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Ropley: Zero Books. ———. 2018. K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writing of Mark Fisher from 2004–2016. Edited by D. Ambrose, Foreword by S. Reynolds. London: Repeater Books. Foucault, Michel. 2008. Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Edited by M. Senellart. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Gibbs, Jacqueline, and Aura Lehtonen. 2019. I, Daniel Blake (2016): Vulnerability, Care and Citizenship in Austerity Politics. Feminist Review 122: 49–63. https://doi.org/10.1177/0141778919847909. Giuliani, Alfonso, and Carlo Vercellone. 2019. An Introduction to Cognitive Capitalism: A Marxist Approach. In Cognitive Capitalism, Welfare and Labour: The Commonfare Hypothesis, ed. A.  Fumagalli, A.  Giuliani, S.  Lucarelli, and C. Vercellone, 10–32. Abingdon: Routledge. Graeber, David. 2018. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. London: Penguin. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2017. Assembly. New  York: Oxford University Press. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2012. The Making of the Indebted Man. An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. Translated by J.D. Jordan. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Loach, Ken. 2016. I, Daniel Blake. Produced by Rebecca O’Brien. UK: Sixteen Films, Why Not Productions and Wild Bunch. DVD, 100 mins. Mellino, Miguel. 2017. I, The White Working Class. Ken Loach, Daniel Blake e la nostalgia (post)laburista. In Highly Recommended (May), no. 17: 244–254. Standing, Guy. 2011. Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury. Villani, Daniele. 2019. Il Potere Meritocratico. Jacobin Special Issue: Il Nemico Capitale della Democrazia 3: 74. Young, Michael. 2017. The Rise of the Meritocracy. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 4

Fish Tank: Cinematic Performances of Femininity

We have seen how mapping precarious film lives and chronotopes involves a consistent study of the modes of acting and relating to a specific storyworld, and, therefore, an examination of the spaces in which film events take place. Spatial configurations and bodily relations to specific geographies are the main experiential dynamics from which the discussion of the celebrated film by Andrea Arnold Fish Tank (2009) will start. Kate Ince has already demonstrated how this film constitutes an essential case study for the discussion of female subjectivity in connection with embodied practices (2017, 50–51), in particular as it presents a very energetic dialogical opposition between different ‘speeches’ of femininity. More specifically, what I will be observing is exactly how the body of the main character, Mia (Katie Jarvis), carries out specific discursive practices, expressing a precarious femininity in continuous confrontation with contextual dynamics, which enact a specific chronotope of anxiety and marginality. Therefore, the film allows viewers to embody the storyworld (cf. Bakhtin 1981, 177) by using Mia’s corporeality as an experimental vector, exploring and engaging through her actions the various temporal and spatial features of her existential dimension. The action is set in an East London council estate, where Mia Williams, a fifteen-year-old young woman, lives with her single mother Joanne (Kierston Wareing) and her little sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths) and struggles to find her place in the world and to nurture her desire of becoming a hip-hop breakdancer. From the beginning of the film, viewers are © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Sticchi, Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63261-8_4

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enacted and primed to a strong involvement with Mia’s physicality, as the film starts with a black screen and background noise of her loudly breathing, and the very first images are constituted by the knee shot of the main character appearing fatigued after the self-made dance training she regularly carries out. Right after these initial moments, we follow Mia going outside in a courtyard, talking to her sister and shouting at a neighbour, and then stopping by a small park where a group of young women is dancing (in a seductive fashion) a R&B song. Here we can appreciate a first very significant dialogical confrontation between the physicality of the group of young dancers and Mia’s one. The main character wears a large grey-hooded sweatshirt and has her hair tied, whereas the other young women all wear shorts, visible make-up, and low-cut t-shirts. We observe these dancers through Mia’s perspective (pov shots/medium shots), in alternation with analogous shots displaying a group of young men featuring as the audience of the performance. Therefore, there is a strong visual conceptualisation of the dance as a spectacle meant to please a male audience and, in relation to this, Mia at first reacts by mocking the young women and, then, physically attacks one of them. What we clearly observe, therefore, is a critical opposition between a speech and specific codification of femininity and, on the other hand, Mia’s position, which, in virtue of her attempt to present an autonomous subjectivity, is in direct semantic and experiential conflict with it. The antagonism between an over-eroticised and objectified femininity and Mia’s speech is one of the grounding dialogical motifs of this cinematic chronotope, reinforced and enacted also through the reciprocal hostility with her mother (abiding to the former category), with whom, in fact, she is involved in an endless series of verbal and physical fights. Furthermore, the dialogical negotiation between these different models of female subjectivities allows us to ground the experience by aligning with a character in complete conflict with her existential context, a chronotope where her desires and expectations appear evidently abnormal. The necessity for a continuous oppositional attitude on the side of the character, therefore, is also motivated by the topographical film maps she inhabits. The council estate and neighbourhood of Mia is, indeed, characterised by series of buildings surrounding the landscape and thus enacting a sense of closure and confinement (a chronotopic fish tank, indeed). The camerawork (cinematography by Robbie Ryan), what is more, only very rarely moves the perspective above characters’ height and is mostly constituted by handheld camera movements following Mia’s actions and expressing

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her point of view, or keeping viewers in a constant frontal contact with her physical states and reactions. The combination of the dynamic shakiness of the handheld camera and the restricted focus of the perspective provided by these stylistic patterns reinforces the sense of confinement and limitation generally affecting the main film chronotope. The integration of these affective features generates also what Giuliana Bruno has defined as negative space-affect (2002, 217), a sense of precarious proximity with the characters and the storyworld, which prevents clear orientation and a regulated construction of the film space. These aesthetic choices and chronotopic configurations can, indeed, be identified in many films describing economic and social marginalisation. Pepita Hesselberth, for instance, takes into account how the Dardenne’s brothers famous film Rosetta (1999, see 2014, 64–66), together with other movies realised by the two directors, grounds its interactive dynamics on a discomforting sense of closeness with the main character through a ‘stalking’ style and unsteady camerawork for long take sequences. This spatial configuration generates a temporality characterised by an unavoidable ‘now’ (Hesselberth 2014, 71), an eternal present connected with the externalised ‘inner or subjective duration’ of the characters (cf. Bruno 2014, 108), displaying their existential states and becoming. According to Hesselberth, in Rosetta this ‘transmission of affect’ (2014, 68) allows for a direct encounter with the main character economic condition, the embodiment of a sustained sensation of a precarious existence. We can find analogue patterns also in films like Good Time (Safdie Brothers 2017), where the sense of proximity prevents a complete or harmonic perception of the urban environment surrounding the characters, and thus thwarts a clear and effective orientation in space, and limits viewers and fictional figures to a temporality of perpetual emergency. Therefore, our encounter with Mia is driven by the continuous ­discomforting engagement with her ‘confined’ bodily states; however, her own speech, as main dialogical function within the chronotope of the film, enacts a polyphonic contrast to these coercive experiential dynamics. The stylistic and interactive features of the film are in turn reinforced by the specific choice of the Academy Ratio (1.33:1) that emphasises the spatial enclosure and the limitation and physical proximity among the characters. Within this context, the only dialogical variation is constituted by the presence of a tethered female horse in a traveller encampment, which Mia tries to liberate at their first encounter; she is, consequently, attacked by its owners, among whom there is Billy  (Harry Treadaway), who will

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eventually become her friend and embody the only opportunity to move out from her current living condition. The dialogical opposition between this ‘natural’ element and the main chronotope of the council estate allows us to align with Mia’s spontaneous action, motivated by the recognition of their mutual conditions of confinement. Indeed, Mia feels automatically sympathetic with the state of the horse and continuously asks if the owners want to kill her. Further differential elements are constituted by the occasional presence of other breakdancers in the neighbourhood or by Mia watching YouTube clips showing the hip-hop London City Crew, which includes women. We can visibly observe the admiration the character nurtures towards these artists as they embody her desire and dream for a particular form of emancipation and construction of subjectivity. All these speeches and dialogical elements refer, therefore, to an outside, to a possibility of getting out of specific contextual dynamics, associated with the possibility of reaching London city centre, where opportunities for Mia’s subjective accomplishment are available. One of the most relevant dialogical lines Fish Tank offers is the implicit conflict between the (absent) city centre and the (unavoidable) outskirts and estate council where most of the narrative action takes place. What Mia experiences is a form of partial expulsion by being part of a non-gentrified or economically attractive topographical map, which, however, belongs to a wider constellation of living spaces connected with London. The form of marginalisation the character undergoes is, therefore, not based on being rejected on the outside of the city (as for Katie in I, Daniel Blake) in the direction of the deindustrialised countryside or of the small towns lacking connections with important urban centres. This segregation, instead, takes the form of a differential inclusion within ‘London’ or the Global City, as Saskia Sassen would put it (2005, 2014, 28–29), where opportunities for social or subjective mobility are strictly connected with the capacity to be a reliable and economically efficient component of these contexts. The subjects that instead cannot afford to keep up with economic requirements of the city centres, or appear as financially inefficient citizens, are relegated to the margins of the urban environment (cf. Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 146–147), with a limited series of life choices left to take. Thus, we can clearly observe how what is usually identified as creative labour describes extreme levels of economic and social differentiation that, on one side, outlines dynamics of self-exploitation and, on the other hand, reinforces the divisions of professional perspectives among the classes (McRobbie 2015). In this sense, the frequent appearance of reality TV

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programmes, showing the extravagant behaviour of rich people dissipating their wealth, and accompanied by the ironic and admiring comments of the audience (often Tyler), reinforces a double-bond with a dimension of absolute possibility, which appears as a persistent reference point and, at the same time, as an unrealistic status to be reached. Mia’s desires and her construction of subjectivity express, therefore, an open challenge to her predicament, in which her femininity is not deemed as immoral or unethical, but rather as inadequate and practically impossible. Thus, the film experiential dynamics perfectly situate class and gender divide by intersecting the economic and geographical marginalisation of the characters with a precarious status of female identity and with the urgent affective push for Mia to normalise her subjectivity in relation to her context. In this sense, the film clearly enacts a recognition of gender subjectivities as non-­ essentialised and socially constructed identities, which, nonetheless, find their extreme concrete modulations and transformations within ecological systems and immanent bodily dynamics (cf. Braidotti 2013, 39; Sharp 2011, 176–179). The intrinsic implication of the selective economic dynamics enacted in the film is also the fact that only few subjects are allowed for moving out of the existential borders of the periphery, while this very dream of ‘exceptional’ social mobility also prevents any conception of universally shared social rights, reducing possibilities for economic emancipation to awards for the efficient conduct of individuals (cf. Dardot and Laval 2017, 183). These dynamics in turn contribute to exasperate the need for subjective commitment and for a harsh competitive attitude on behalf of Mia. A similar sense of spatial and urban marginalisation connected with reduction in the possibility to negotiate particular forms of femininity is recognisable in many contemporary indie/dark comedies (for instance, Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya, 2017 or Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, 2017) and is, indeed, also the main aspect of another Andrea Arnold’s film, American Honey (2016). Likewise, these films associate the exclusion and affective anxiety pervading the characters’ lives with cruel competitive behaviours and with  the obsession for individual ‘performances’, which constitute central elements of neoliberal economy (see Bayman 2019; Lagerwey et al. 2016; Thoma 2014, 130–131). All the main female characters inhabiting these different film chronotopes embody and reproduce the logic of the gig-economy, since they appear continuously involved in a process of production of their own subjectivity (see Lazzarato 2014, 56)—a machinic

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enslavement functional to make them stand out as atomised self-controlling ‘egos’. This is why the performance, whether of femininity or of artistic and intellectual qualities, appears as the central moment for affirmation and recognition (cf. Bayman 2019) and, we could add, as possible economic validation of specific subjective choices. Performative events and practices also play a central role for Mia and in the ecology of the film, since we often closely participate (thanks to the proximity of the camera) in her training sessions, embodying her aggressive and tense physical engagement and, therefore, also her desire for emancipation and approval. Fish Tank, more specifically, reinforces this affective dimension of anxiety—connected with personal aspirations—with an extremely evident dialogical and conflictual position of its main character, challenging in toto contextual social dynamics. The clash between different models of femininity, and in particular between Mia and Joanne (who even affirms that she had planned to abort Mia), is exasperated by the encounter with Connor (Michael Fassbender), a young and attractive man, who makes his appearance as Joanne’s occasional partner. The first time the two characters meet (and viewers as well initially engage him) is in Mia’s kitchen. She is watching a hip-hop music video and training by improvising movements and imitating the dancers on the screen. Connor appears half naked, presents himself as a friend of her mother, and compliments Mia for her dance, arguing that she ‘moves like a black’. Apart from expressing a direct recognition both of Mia’s quality as dancer and external approval for her femininity (see also Ince 2017, 51), these moments ground the attraction between the two characters—an affective tension that will drive not only the later traumatic developments in the story events but also the evolution of the already introduced dialogical and polyphonic elements. The confrontation between Mia and her mother is heightened by Connor’s presence later on, during a party at their house restricted to the adult friends of Joanne. Mia is waiting for Connor to join, and as soon as he arrives, she tries to talk to him, but is interrupted by her mother’s intervention, who aggressively intimates her to go to her room. Right after these moments, we see from Mia’s perspective (pov shot), Joanne and Connor involved in a very intimate dance, and in reverse shot the close-up of her visibly upset and disturbed by the scene. This emotional tension and Mia’s distress are reinforced by the sense of limitation and discomforting closeness generated by the narrow spaces and also by the presence of many other people involved in sexual interactions. These features underscore the dialogical confrontation between Mia’s

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sexuality and the other subjects surrounding her, an opposition that, nonetheless, does not prevent her from obtaining Connor’s attention. Indeed, we will participate in an intimate moment between them (depicted with an unusual slow motion recurring many times during their exchanges) when the man will, at the end of the party, hold a drunk Mia in his arms and bring her to bed, an intimacy stressed by the use of pov shots (from Mia’s perspective) closely observing Connor’s movements and physical details. It is relevant, in this sense, also to observe how, all along the narrative, Connor is the only figure encouraging Mia to dance and, later on, to participate in a competition for a job post as dancer in a local club, a dialogical element further indicating their closeness and reciprocal appreciation. A further moment of strong physical and emotional proximity between the characters is described when, right after the party sequence, Mia and Tyler crash in a small ‘hike’ organised by Joanne and Connor. For what concerns the chronotopic and experiential configuration, this sequence describes a dialogical variation by moving the action to a more open and spatially harmonic non-urban environment, where the sense of limitation and confinement finds a partial reduction. In this same dimension, as Mia gets wounded on her foot by helping Connor catching a fish in the near river (differently from Joanne and Tyler), the two find another occasion for close physical contact. Again, the sense of intimacy and proximity between them is underlined by the use of slow motion accompanied by the enhancement of diegetic sounds, a syntony protracted by Connor’s invitation to dance on the notes of James Brown’s Get Up Offa That Thing right after. This moment becomes a further occasion for Mia to demonstrate her ability and also to be sexually appreciated by a complacent Connor (see also Ince 2017, 53–54), a recognition that is interrupted by Joanne reappearance, causing Mia’s brusquely stopping the dance and by her abrupt return home alone. This sequence, however, apart from strengthening the emotional connection between the Mia and Connor, also accentuates the association and relation among this encounter and a possible realisation of the protagonist’s dream in opposition to Joanne’s speech and dialogical function as vividly eroticised and objectified woman. This sense of opportunity, however, is in dialectical integration with other contextual elements that, on one side, reduce its validity and strength, and, on the other hand, increase the need for an escape. For instance, during the day out sequence, we see the close-up of the fish Connor captured dying on the ground and suffocating in a way that, we may add, re-evokes Mia’s initial loud breathing or, later on, a detail of the same animal being

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eaten by her dog. This image occurs in simultaneity with the protagonist seeing Joanne talking to a social worker about Mia’s possible admission to a referral unit. Again, the sense of conflict between models of female subjectivity is coupled with notion of confinement and precarious existential state, together with a clear codification of Mia’s behaviour as insane and inadequate. Likewise, we find her many times peeping on Joanne and Connor having intercourses or observing their intimate exchanges, as further feature of this emotional and experiential tension. It is in connection with these affective dynamics that we see Mia ­looking for Connor’s complicity and help (she borrows his small camera) to apply for the dancer job post (for which she obtains an audition) and attempting to reach a discomforting intimacy with him. When Connor ‘jokingly’ spanks her for her aggressive manners, we can also notice how their flirting is also built, on his behalf, on a double game of attraction towards and, simultaneously, on the attempt to control the ‘diverse’ femininity Mia embodies. The latter, on the other hand, teases and challenges Connor using her friendship with Billy to make him jealous. Mia and Connor’s relation reaches its pivotal moment as the two find a moment of privacy in the living room of the young woman’s apartment at night. Mia shows the number prepared for the dance audition, revealing that she has chosen as accompanying music California Dreamin’ covered by Bobby Womack, the same song indicated by Connor as his favourite. This additional moment of recognition and attraction between the two ends up with them secretly having sex, an intimate climax that is not, however, associated with new affective possibilities. The morning after, indeed, we find out that Connor has snuck out Mia’s house; we observe Joanne in pain, and, then, the main character both trying to contact him via the phone and, after being incapable to hear from him, going to Tilbury, where he resides. As Mia approaches Connor’s neighbourhood, a  further chronotopic opposition  is enacted; we see, indeed, that he lives in a small terraced house within an apparently (low) middle-class suburban residential area, whose less-restrictive topographical characteristics oppose the limited spaces and ecological dynamics of Mia’s estate council. By ‘invading’ this different chronotope and breaking into his house (when none is in), Mia shockingly discovers that Connor has a wife and a daughter, called Keira, and no real intention to be emotionally involved with her—an acknowledgement to which she reacts by aggressively occupying his domestic space and then by urinating on the floor. Since the beginning of the sequence, Mia’s appearance in Connor’s

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neighbourhood is framed as an intrusion. We see her, for instance, being observed suspiciously by a woman passing by (over the shoulder shot from Mia’s point of view) as soon as she reaches the road where Connor lives. Furthermore, as the external space contributes in putting Mia’s and Connor’s environments  in dialogical confrontation, the interior of his house, characterised by new, clean, and well-ordered furniture and décor (we observe them through several over the shoulder shots), reinforces this opposition by adding to it a clear economic and wealth divide. We can engage with her violation of Connor’s domestic environment and the later decision to kidnap Keira (constituting the most tense moments of the film) both as a revenge against him and as part of her continued effort to bridge the experiential division between the two social dimensions (see Ince 2017, 134–136)—an attempt that is completely rejected by Connor’s final intervention (after Keira’s return home) strongly hitting Mia and, then, definitively negating every possibility for future relations. In this sense, the embodied fabula of the film enacts a closure of the same small sense of possibility experienced before by presenting the affective and emotional connection with Connor as an illusory or partial opening within the chronotope. These ecological and existential limitations, and the experiential ­overturning of the polyphonic opportunities described by the film, are confirmed by the audition sequence taking place right after the final rupture between Mia and Connor. We follow the main character’s ­ ­preparation and dressing-up process for the event through a series of close-ups and few details of her hands fixing the jewellery chosen for the occasion, making Mia appear, in the end, in a complete professional ­breakdancer suite. Nonetheless, as soon as the character reaches the club where the interview is taking place, she notices the evident diversity of the other participants. Viewers are allowed to understand, indeed, that the job post was actually intended for an erotic dancer (it is an adult nightclub) as they see another young woman exhibiting in a very sensual and allusive stripper act, naturally associated with a voluptuous look. We assist to this performance through a medium shot expressing Mia’s perspective and in reverse shot the close-ups of her displaying a visible discomfort. In ­combination with these images, several pov shots reveal that the likewise sexualised appearances of the other competitors, thus leaving Mia in a complete precarious state of isolation. The sense of distress generated by the contrast between Mia and the other women is then heightened as soon as her name is called and she gets on the cube where to perform the

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prepared dance number. She is addressed by the interviewers who initially ask her to untie her hair and afterwards comment that in this way she looks a lot more ‘feminine’; in addition to this, they also enquire about why she is not wearing hot pants or shorts. As the music starts, Mia stands still for few moments on the cube (medium close-up) and abruptly leaves the club when realising her total misplacement within that environment. This dialogical overturning, which closes all the previously imagined windows of opportunity, leads to the discovery of the killing of Billy’s horse, which was too sick to survive and, as the young man adds, ‘she was sixteen, it was her time’. This further event leaves Mia in tears lying on the ground (close-up, action depicted in slow motion) and eager to accept Billy’s offer to move with him to Cardiff since, we could add, her time has come as well (she is, in turn, almost sixteen) to abandon a specific existential path. The dialogical overturning of Mia’s process of emancipation, therefore, describes what we may indicate as a negative performance, a conceptual and affective negation of the recognition and approval her strong physical interaction with the world attempted to obtain. In this sense, the fact that Connor appeared as the only character approving and supporting her choices and, at the same time, the one brutally denying the space for acknowledgement, emphasises the failure and isolation experienced by the character. The refusal to exhibit during the audition, therefore, emerges as the conscious recognition of this performative failure and as the melancholic acceptance of a specific economic status, to which determined forms of femininity need to be attached. Indeed, Mia’s professional fiasco is comparable to the collapse of an entire human-enterprise, as her unsuccessful investment is translated also in affective terms, forcing her to renounce to the affirmation of a specific subjectivity, and thus outlining a complete existential defeat. The final sequence of the film, then, describes her leaving the house. The passage between the two scenes is enacted through a direct cut to various shots of the exteriors of the estate council, a configuration that reinforces a chronotopic return to the initial sense of confinement. A closing dialogical confrontation between models of femininity, and more specifically between Mia and Joanne, is enacted by a final physical encounter of the two. The former finds her mother crying and moving on the notes of one of Mia’s CDs (the song is Nas’ Life is a Bitch) and, after a short verbal exchange, the two women start dancing and both imitating their movements while facing each other (with Tyler joining later on). The dialogue of these female bodies, on one side, reproduces the differences between the heterogeneous subjectivities experienced throughout the film. On the other hand, it also seems to enact a sort of mutual

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acknowledgement and non-conflicting encounter among them, which the camera closely follows through medium shots and a slow cutting rate (nine cuts for one minute and eleven seconds long action), a composition that releases and reduces the affective tension characterising the entire film. Thus, the sequence also generates a momentary cathartic relief within the widely discomforting and distressing affective mood of the experience. The closing images of the film, following Mia saying goodbye to her sister, show a balloon flying over the estate council and then leaving the screen on the left, coupling Mia’s escape and constituting also, in this chronotope, the only concrete vertical opening and spatial violation of its ecology. Mia’s final decision, therefore, merely expresses a limited viable option to avoid the referral unit or to escape the worsening of her already precarious condition, recognising the absence of clear plans for the future, as well as of assurances about the possibility to nurture her passion. The ecological and experiential structure of the film allows us to explore, by following and engaging with the main character’s strong bodily presence, a narrative path of conflict and exclusion, constructed around the urgent need to avoid a persistent enclosure of her femininity and subjectivity. These same emotional tensions are, nonetheless, negated in the evolution of the story events, thus reaffirming in an even more atrocious form the same chronotopic sense of marginalisation on which the experience is based. The same final cathartic moments with Joanne, in this sense, also seem to enact and underline a remissive renunciation of conflict and Mia’s acceptance of the impossibility to renegotiate a lost image of herself. A similar affective path can be detected in Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood (Bande de Filles, 2014), in which the economic and social emancipation of Marieme (Karidja Touré), a sixteen-year-old African-French woman living in one of Paris’ banlieues, depends on her capacity to modify her femininity in connection with specific economic functions. In the film, we see her moving out of school due to low grades, joining a gang of same age women, and earning money and social acceptance through small crimes, which, however, finally lead her to sell drugs for a criminal organisation. In this film, as for Fish Tank, different social and existential statuses are strictly connected with externalised and embodied ecological dynamics. Marieme moves from appearing as a naïve, athletic young woman with dreadlocks to a more aggressive, fashionable gang member, wearing more seductive clothes and jewellery or featuring straight hair to show the obtainment of superior wealth and, finally, engages into a mere economic use of her femininity when becoming a drug dealer. In the end, indeed, she will embody a sort of ‘masculine’ attitude by cutting her hair and

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wearing a band to cover her breast and, at the same time, dress up as a wealthy sensual woman only when interacting with rich clients. Likewise, Mia’s femininity, although not undergoing a similar visible transformation throughout the film, is also codified by situated social and economic dynamics. The segregation to the claustrophobic and closed outskirts of the Global Cities prevents the two young women from every active negotiation and attempt to reconsider their subjectivities, thus forcing them, in the end, to simply accept a contextual order of things. This chronotopic configuration, therefore, blends together a sense of urgency and anxiety, emerging from the desire for emancipation and recognition, with a final melancholic acceptance of situated rules. For Mia, indeed, this involves a direct renunciation to the affirmation of her femininity through breakdancing and the reception of every possible way out from the estate council as a strategic action for survival. By doing so, we could add, Mia still finds a limited escape and a way to retain her autonomy avoiding a radical adjustment of her femininity. Within a dimension of restriction and impossibility, apart from the final flying balloon, only two details of broken windows (the first appears in a junkyard while she is out with Billy, and the second is shown right after the discovery of the horse’s death), with no direct narrative function, seem to enact the presence of a different chronotope external to the existential borders of the film. As also highlighted by Catherine Grant (2016), these broken surfaces, as few other escaping objects, appear to interrupt the persistent process of experiential containment by remembering us of the possibility and necessity to violate these same limitations in order to generate new temporalities and spaces. It is, indeed, only by travelling through our existential fish tanks that we discover the cracks and opportunities for new openings, an ethical affirmation that comes exactly from the possibility of mapping and transforming the cartographies of our submission.

References Arnold, Andrea. 2009. Fish Tank. Produced by Nick Laws and Kees Kasander. UK: B Films, UK Film Council et al. DVD, 123 mins. ———. 2016. American Honey. Produced by Thomas Benski Lars Knudsen et al. UK-US: Maven Pictures, Film4 et al. DVD, 163 mins. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by M. Holquist, translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Bayman, Louis. 2019. Performance Anxiety: The Competitive Self and Hollywood’s Post-Crash Films of Cruelty. New Review of Film and Television Studies, June 18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2019.1622878. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bruno, Giuliana. 2002. Atlas of Emotions: Journey in Art, Architecture, and Film. London: Verso. ———. 2014. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. London: The University of Chicago Press. Dardenne, Jeanne-Pierre, and Luc Dardenne. 1999. Rosetta. Produced by Jean-­ Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Belgium-France: Les Films du Fleuve. DVD, 93 mins. Dardot, Pierre and Laval, Christian. 2017. The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society. Translated by G. Elliot. London: Verso. Gerwig, Greta. 2017. Lady Bird. Produced by Scott Rudin, Eli Bush et al. US: IAC Films, Scott Rudin Productions et al. DVD, 94 mins Gillespie, Craig. 2017. I, Tonya. Produced by Tom Ackerley, Margot Robbie et al. US: LuckyChap, Entertainment Clubhouse Pictures et al. DVD, 119 mins. Grant, Catherine. 2016. Beyond Tautology? Audio-Visual Film Criticism. Film Criticism 40 (1). https://doi.org/10.3998/fc.13761232.0040.113. Hesselberth, Pepita. 2014. Cinematic Chronotopes: Here, Now, Me. London: Bloomsbury. Ince, Kate. 2017. The Body and the Screen: Female Subjectivities in Contemporary Women’s Cinema. London: Bloomsbury. Lagerwey, Jorie, Julia Leyda, and Diane Negra. 2016. Female-Centred TV in the Age of Precarity. Genders, University of Colorado Boulder, Issue 1, no 1. https://www.colorado.edu/genders/2016/05/19/female-­c entered-­t v-­ age-­precarity. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2014. Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Translated by J. D. Jordan. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). McRobbie, Angela. 2015. Is Passionate Work a Neoliberal Delusion? Opendemocracy: Free Thinking for the World. https://www.opendemocracy. net/en/transformation/is-­passionate-­work-­neoliberal-­delusion/. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2019. The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism. London: Duke University Press. Safdie, Benny and Josh Safdie. 2017. Good Time. Produced by Paris Kasidokostas Latsis, Terry Dougas et al. US: Elara Pictures and Rhea Films. DVD, 101 mins. Sassen, Saskia. 2005. The Global City: Introducing a Concept. Brown Journal of World Affairs 11 (Winter/Spring, 2): 26–43. ———. 2014. Expulsion: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Sciamma, Celine. 2014. Bande de Filles. Produced by Bénédicte Couvreur, Rémi Burah et al. France: Arte France Cinéma Canal+ et al. DVD, 113 mins.

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Sharp, Hasana. 2011. Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization. London: University of Chicago Press. Thoma, Pamela. 2014. What Julia Knew: Domestic Labor in the Recession-Era Chick Flick. In Gendering the Recession: media and Culture in an Age of Austerity, ed. D. Negra and Y. Tasker, 107–135. London: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Himizu: The Precarisation of Education and Social Relations

Cruelty constitutes one of the most significant affective patterns of ­chronotopes of anxiety, recurring in the guise of performative brutality and, sometimes, of bleak optimism or ‘dreary’ hope (Berlant 2011, 194). However, this experiential dynamic is intersected with more general mechanisms of the economy of precarity: the extreme individualisation of risk together with measures of financial and existential marginalisation per se define a very bleak existential scenario to which it is often associated an image of inevitability or the hollow acceptance of a sociality based on violence and exploitation. Mark Fisher described this psychosocial mechanism as Capitalist Realism (2009): the melancholic and disempowering affect connected with the neoliberal condition, identifying it not simply as the best of the possible worlds but as the only one imaginable (16–17). In a similar logic Sono Sion’s Himizu (2011, from the homonymous manga by Furuya Minoru) opens up on a post-Fukushima Japan, in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami, describing a disrupted and collapsed urban landscape (images that are often recurring in the dream sequences of the protagonist Sumida Yuichi [Sometani Shȏta]), where, nonetheless, the actions and lives of the characters proceed uninterruptedly. The social body in its complexity, as we will see, is not involved in upheaval or protests, but relentlessly carries out all the roles and duties it is expected to perform. The economic and governmental structures, therefore, are alive and functioning, notwithstanding the very precarious existential mood, emphasised by prevailing dark chromatic features and by © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Sticchi, Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63261-8_5

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a constant environmental fogginess produced by an endless rain, generating a gloomy synesthetic effect (cf. Plantinga 2013, 103). Through these affective and interactive patterns, we are enacted to participate in an obscure and melancholic chronotope, where the lack of bright or saturated visual features is met by an overall ecological confinement overburdening the characters and limiting their agency. It is within this precarious experiential setting that we encounter Sumida, a fourteen-year-old boy living in a log cabin by a lake in the outskirts of a north-eastern city, where he manages a small family owned boat renting business. He lives with a very negligent mother, who will soon leave him alone, and is surrounded by a group of what we could define as climate refugees, former middle-class people, as Yoruno Shozu (Watanabe Tetsu), previously working as CEO, forced to move because of the environmental disaster; furthermore, the ecological threat on this precarious environment is constantly stressed by the presence of a small wooden construction halfdrowned in the lake in the background. Sumida is also endlessly abused by his drunk father, who insistently asks him for money, often beats him, and accuses the young man of being an impediment to his happiness. He resents Sumida for not having drowned and died in an accident when he was a child, thus not allowing him to earn a small fortune from life insurance. In relation to what we could define as a constant affective abuse and pressure (the image of drowning is a persistent reference point in the film), Sumida presents a multi-layered character’s speech, in which contradictory elements coexist in a conflicting and distressing manner. Initially, we understand that he mainly aspires to normality, to be classified as a standard good citizen and, indeed, shouts ‘ordinary is the best’, when asked by his teacher about his life dreams and goals. We see this aspiration as a dialogical response to the exceptional emotional hardships he has to undergo in his intimate life, associated also with the image of the mole (himizu in Japanese), the animal he wishes to be, living underground, hidden from the horrors of the world surrounding him. It is for this same reason that he seems to endure all these troubles in a kind of stoic way, hardly responding to violence or to stimuli from his social reality. On the other hand, being normal, according to him, also implies emancipating himself from the economic and moral failures expressed by his parents and by the people surrounding him, who are defined as burdens to society. In addition to these grounding affective patterns, the research for his life’s purpose and identity dialogically complicates Sumida’s subjective construction. This theme is expressed and reiterated through the use of

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Francois Villon’s famous Ballade, underlining the impossibility of really knowing oneself. We hear this poem through the voice over of Chizawa Keiko (Nikaidô Fumi), who is the other protagonist of the story, and a schoolmate and dedicated admirer of Sumida, whom she constantly follows by collecting all his statements and behaviours. This latter motif adds a further aspect of uncertainty to this gloomy cinematic chronotope, where a precarious ecological predicament is met by violent and abusive parental relations together with a constant feeling of existential doubt and ambiguity concerning the proper choices to make in life. This is also why Sumida just aspires to rent boats: an existential motivation which ‘would not make him happy or unhappy’, but only reach an apparently impossible emotional stability. Furthermore, notwithstanding this very bleak panorama, the precarious youth of Sumida and Chizawa is not simply determined by a material lack of possibility and opportunities. The two characters carry also the burden and the responsibility to provide a future for the entire country. Indeed, in one of the initial sequences of the film, we see the teacher in class complaining about the young generations’ lack of moral stamina; they have never experienced war and real adversities—­this character argues—and now they need to find a personal/individualised path in life in order to fulfil their duty and rebuild Japan. This discourse is accompanied by the nationalist and identitarian praise of Japanese society as one that is built on atrocities and on the capacity to reconstitute itself after natural and collective disasters. The ecological and economic precarity in which the characters are chronotopically contextualised, therefore, is not framed as problematic issue to be addressed through solidarity and mutual understanding, but only as a matter of individual responsibility and guilt. A personal burden young women and men should take on their shoulders without useless complaints and unmotivated rebellious stances, since it indicates a natural moral obligation. The cruel stigmatisation on the younger generations is highlighted also in Chizawa’s familial situation, since she is perceived as the main reason of her parents’ discontent. The latter, however, repeatedly exploit her and have prepared a hangman’s block for the young woman to use in order to finally leave them alone and allow their prosperity. In addition to these essential traumatic emotional maps, both Chizawa and Sumida continuously receive suggestions and reprimands, by different characters, about how to properly manage their lives without wasting time and energy. In an absurd display of this logic, even a Yakuza gang leader (a loan shark to top the grotesque irony), who persecutes Sumida for the repayment of debts

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contracted by his father, will approach the young man, later on, giving him advise about his life decisions. Sumida is warned about the fact that he is not moving in the right direction for his self-realisation and, the gangster adds, ‘he is losing time to adjust himself’. The combination of the dialogical features discussed so far enacts a chronotope where the possibility for an affirmative ethical transformation is abolished or completely closed, in favour of a cruel acceptance of a contextual reality, in which existence per se is conceived as something to justify through the commitment in personal purposes or through the achievement of economic success. Nonetheless, this same painful acceptance is also accompanied by the endless encouragement the characters receive for being responsible and decent citizens, giving their best and never giving up personal dreams of emancipation. These emotional and conceptual utterances allow us to experience what Mark Fisher and Roberto Ciccarelli, we may argue, describe as the relationship between paternalism and precarity (cf. Ciccarelli 2018, 158, 190–191; Fisher 2018, 199–204). This social mechanism of control over precarious subjects is built upon the stigmatisation of poverty (already discussed in the case of I, Daniel Blake and The Measure of a Man) observed as the natural consequence of laziness or of inefficient individual behaviours. Furthermore, this same process leads precarious subjects to turn into eternal students, always in professional formation or, as in Sumida’s and Chizawa’s cases, of being identified as targets for moral teachings about how to become efficient managers of their existence. Furthermore, our interaction with these contrasting but coexisting emotional and conceptual dialogical patterns is enacted also through the frequent occurrence of frenzied handheld camera movements (cinematography by Tanikawa Sôhei). These aesthetic and stylistic choices allow viewers to more easily embody and engage the tense pace of the action and the moral and physical brutalisation Chizawa and Sumida have to suffer (or often inflict each other), empathising also with the sense of threat pervading their lives. In turn, the constant existential anxiety of this cinematic chronotope is emphasised by the grotesque and exasperated acting, generating an integrated synesthetic affective state of fatigue associated with the cruelty of the images. The atrocious tone of Himizu, indeed, has been praised for its capacity to condense an entire state of the nation (Lyttelton 2011; Young 2011) and to highlight the complex affective structures supporting specific social dynamics.

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The moral system embedded in the world of the characters is based on a combination of stigmatisation and encouragement, blending the desire of individual uplifting together with the intimation for social responsibility. This ambiguous affective mechanism is easily relatable to the twofold action of subjectification and subjection, where the precarious individual does not simply receive the command and adapts to it, but becomes also the centre of this auto-exploitation and moral enslavement (Ciccarelli 2018, 174; Hardt and Negri 2017, 120; Lazzarato 2014, 9–10). Precarity is, again, associated with instances of guilt and debt, as we observe the persecuted and vilified Sumida and Chizawa being asked to demonstrate their decency and economic reliability, in order to save the nation and its future, while intensively engaging in a normative work on themselves already as teenagers. As a consequence of this social dynamic, youth and education in a precarious world pass from being an interregnum in the formation of the working citizen (as, we could argue, in the Foucauldian disciplinary societies, cf. 2008, 258–260; Deleuze 1995, 177) to become a selective moment where to operate an early division of labour and the evaluation of competences and financial assets of each subject; the ‘promise’ of intellectual emancipation connected with secured  social rights is, thus, substituted with a cruel process of individualisation functional to guarantee the perpetuation of the pervasive machine of valorisation (cf. Ciccarelli 2018, 86–89; Standing 2011, 67–68). It is for this same reason that Chizawa and the refugees living around Sumida’s house enthusiastically help him in improving his boat business, arriving to the point, in Yoruno’s case, to kill and steal in order to repay his family’s debts with the Yakuza since they perceive supporting the young man as an investment in the future of the country. In this regard, a crucial dialogical element is introduced exactly in the sequence describing Yoruno’s money theft from a naziskin’s apartment, a robbery carried out with the help of a pickpocket he previously observed and asked for ‘professional’ guidance. While the two are in the flat looking around, the owner comes back and turns on the TV. The programme he is watching shows an interview to an intellectual commenting on Fukushima nuclear disaster and calling out the government and economic institutions’ responsibilities for it, since, he affirms, they knew about the risks connected with that particular plant, but kept having it in function for the maintenance of their power. The words of the intellectual cause the violent reaction of the naziskin, who proudly asserts the right to use nuclear energy, in connection with an idea of national and racial

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supremacy. The show continues with the interviewed proceeding with his invective against the recklessness characterising the nation’s institutions in highly regarding nuclear technology while other countries are quickly abandoning it. Indeed, he concludes, the central aspect of Japanese morality, reflected in the behaviour of its military, economic, and social powers, is the strict desire not to change, to keep the world as it is and defend the status quo. The words resonate in the room while Yoruno and the pickpocket are fighting with the naziskin and eventually kill him, thus creating a disturbing integrated dissonance between all the elements of the sequence. The statements of the intellectual, we could argue, express a dialogical and critical opposition to the normative values the film chronotope enacted so far. In this cinematic  ecological dimension, citizens (in particular, the younger generations) are asked to take upon themselves the responsibility for its reconstruction and reaffirmation without rebelling and, instead, by showing a self-sacrificing (and auto-destructive) attitude. The intellectual, instead, highlights the need for change and social transformations against a situated order of things, while also underscoring the inherent brutality of these same situated power relations pushing for collective annihilation (as the fight in the room also seems to suggest). The chaotic integration of these elements is stressed by the limited and repulsive site of the action (the apartment is completely overwhelmed by garbage, including the presence of a corpse), creating a connection between the events taking place and the described suicidal dynamics affecting Japanese society as a whole. A violence, therefore, operating on the level of self-stigmatisation aimed to keep every subject in her/his own position. In line with this logic, Sumida will experience a profound psychological and moral crisis after killing his father in reaction to the latest abuse and humiliation. This event will determine the impossibility to be an ordinary citizen and, therefore, the failure of his declared life purpose. For this reason, he will decide to become a sort of vigilante, wandering around the city to kill and persecute all the ‘losers’, all those appearing as a burden to society. This change in his personality reveals what we could define as a micro-fascist desire residing exactly in his aspiration for moral approval, a desire operating on the micropolitical level, describing individual subjects embodying a fatal masochistic aspiration for their own repression (Braidotti 2019, 178; Deleuze and Guattari 2005, 215–216). Micro-fascism, indeed, does not require molar formations and mass organisations, but is built upon petty fears of insecurity, instability, resentment, sad passions driving subjects to see their repression and confinement as sources for affirmation and even involving them becoming agents of such power dynamics. Sumida’s transformation exasperates the desire for conformity and

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normality into a homicidal and suicidal attitude, looking for affirmation through murders and annihilation, since a more conventional social adaptation appears impossible. During his travels around the city, however, he will also find other ‘losers’ who, like him, are looking for human ‘burdens’ to punish. After following and stopping two of them from committing random assassinations in the streets, Sumida also notices how these young men, like him, are obsessed by the impossibility of knowing themselves and by the absence of purposes in life. These encounters describe a further failure of Sumida’s dreams of self-affirmation and reveal the social nature of his micro-fascist desire, in turn, dialogically connected with his recurring fantasies about urban disasters and suicide. A final apparent catharsis, however, takes place, thanks to Chizawa’s intervention, who, after saving Sumida from committing suicide, persuades him to confess to the police the murder of his father, thus repaying his debt with society and having a second chance to become a decent citizen. Chizawa adds that she will be waiting for him and promises that once he will come out, they will marry and work together at their best to become respectable persons and beloved parents. The last sequence of the film, then, shows Sumida and Chizawa running together to the police while crying and screaming incitation to live, and not to give up their dreams, remembering, as the teacher told them, that they are unique flowers with their own exceptionality. These words of (alleged) individual hope are in dialogical contraposition with the tone of the sequence and with  what the embodied fabula has enacted so far. Although this final scene seems to provide a certain affective reconciliation by describing a possible future for the two protagonists, it is constructed as the forced conclusion of a restrictive and distressing chronotope, which abolished the possibility for affirmative emancipation. If the encounter and bond with Chizawa has prevented Sumida to totally fall within the blackhole of micro-fascist homicidal/suicidal desires (see Deleuze and Guattari 2005, 214–215), this catharsis takes place in the guise of resignation to the surrounding social order; indeed, the desperate tone of the action characterised by the protagonists’ cry and frantic acting, and reinforced by the melancholic music theme of the sequence (Samuel  Barber’s Adagio for Strings), works in an opposite direction, revealing the hopelessness at the centre of this film ecology. Not incidentally, the film ends on a reiteration of the images of a devastated urban landscape we have seen all along the narrative, affectively and experientially removing the possibility for an outside to the cruel chronotope of this particular storyworld.

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In this sense, we could argue that Himizu’s affective patterns of anxiety develop through a cruel affirmation of the status quo, a violent resignation that passes through the humiliation of the main characters who wilfully decide to participate in their own submission. Notwithstanding this crucial critical element, the polyphonic construction of the experience also helps in revealing the power structures of the world they inhabit and how the process of subjectification the characters undertake is generated and justified by violent processes of moral and physical domination. A different chronotope of anxiety and cruelty is described by Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrwaler (2014). As for the previous case study, this film is set in a very distressing urban landscape (the outskirts of Los Angeles, mostly in nocturnal setting), although, in this case, the topographical map is composed by a disorienting web of broad streets the main character, Louis Bloom, ‘Lou’ (Jake Gyllenhaal), relentlessly drives along. This setting and the architectures filling the background present an unbounded horizontal composition, which precludes a clear mapping of the space generating an ecological homogeneity and a consequent experiential inability to delimit the storyworld. We have, therefore, the perception of a chronotope where the affects of anxiety are not determined by the frantic rhythm of the events, by a precarious proximity with the main character, or through clear architectural oppositions. Instead, it is the impossibility to effectively orient in space that generates a dangerous and obscure urban fabric (cf. Bruno 2014, 39) Lou, nonetheless, capably penetrates as an earthworm (indeed). Differently from many character’s speeches analysed so far, Lou expresses a complete identification and embodiment of utilitarian neoliberal values. He is presented as a precarious subject, living at the margins of the city and resorting to expedients and thefts in order to survive, who, notwithstanding his economic and social condition, enthusiastically displays a ‘managerial’ definition of himself. Lou’s interactions are always determined by strict economic functions and transactions. His language is solely connected with the idea of performing as a company (as an individual start-up, cf. Ciccarelli 2018, 83), constantly selling himself by describing his quality, his financial and professional perspectives, or emphasising his motivations as entrepreneur. Even his self-awareness is reduced to considerations about economic risks, challenges, and opportunities described by a particular event. Nightcrawler, for these reasons, has been identified by Louis Bayman as a key case study within a series of contemporary productions expressing the performance anxiety of the economy of precarity (a characteristic we

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have observed also for Fish Tank). These storyworlds are grounded on the cruel expansion of individual competition within every sphere of existence (Bayman 2019) and feature protagonists whose existential and professional aspirations are solely to emerge as the best in their field. This same attitude and moral stance, consequently, diminishes cooperative and collaborative attitudes or empathic emotions to the level of dysfunctional behaviours. Lou’s character’s speech in this sense enacts a complete adherence to this logic, as he perceives every interaction as a performance meant to obtain a specific countable result (also sexual intercourses are seen as means for economic exchange). At the same time, he appears incapable of sympathetic emotions, in particular with Rick (Riz Ahmed), a young hustler in extreme financial difficulty, who will become his collaborator. Lou will build his personal fortune by accessing the market of freelance journalism, by selling to local cable news stations gory videos of accidents and urban crime following the philosophy that ‘if it bleeds it leads’, of acquiring visibility and high ratings through the exploitation of gruesome material. He will follow this cold and brutal economic strategy up to the point of carefully manufacturing events in order to come up with intriguing crime stories or of literally sacrificing Rick to increase the value of his videos. The attitude of the main character, what is more, does not come across as a dialogical exception, but is inserted within the wider ecology of the cable news industry and their visual language, in turn, justifying and strengthening it. Indeed, we soon discover how Nina (Rene Russo)—the director of the news station to which Lou is selling his videos—is risking her position in a harsh competition for rating against other companies. She begs Lou and her collaborators to produce material that, more than merely describing urban violence, has to explicitly aim at the petty fears of the middle classes by showing L.A.’s wealthy neighbourhoods as if invaded by hordes of immigrants and criminals threatening their lifestyle. Like her competitors, therefore, Nina has no interest in commenting political events or social issues, but simply of offering the most disturbing and, therefore, impactful infotainment for the viewer, manipulating stories and facts with the same ability and recklessness shown by Lou. As in a sort of reinforcing pattern, consequently, the world described by Nina’s and other news stations is one where ‘society does not exist’ (to use Margaret Thatcher’s famous statement) and the only thing that matters is intensifying the perception and participation in an insecure existence. Los Angeles has to appear as a battlefield where everyone is against everyone (denying the factual reality of constantly reducing rates of crime and violence) and

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where, in particular, those who have climbed the social ladder are always in danger of losing their safety net. This morbid obsession for violent images, reinforcing biases and prejudices, is, therefore, functional to not engage in complex political and social reflections or actions and works, instead, in the direction of facilitating a capitalist realist attitude, the acceptance of society as a cruel competitive system, where everybody struggles to survive. Lou’s absurd and even grotesque cruel and methodical behaviour, which culminates with the decision of killing his main competitor and of eliminating Rick as soon as he discovers to have a bargaining power against him, therefore, should not be seen as a simple parody of the market logic. As Sean Brayton highlighted, the apparently excessive tone of the experience and Lou’s ridiculous performative attitude reveal, instead, the interrelation between the competitive and ‘Spencerian’ neoliberal morality with mental illness, with sociopathic behaviours preventing the perception of other individuals as beings to sympathise with (2016). Lou expresses a perfect and complete adherence to these dynamics, answering to Rick’s accusation of not being capable of communicating with other individuals by affirming that ‘he does not like people’ and that he is ready to commit any kind of violence to reach his purposes. In this sense, the cruel nocturnal chronotope of the film, describing a precarious and violent ecology, is not in dialogical opposition with Lou’s speech. On the contrary, we could argue that it reinforces the experiential logic enacted through our encounter with the character by expressing the urban imaginary as the perfect externalisation of his subjectivity, displayed in the obscure and homogenous architectures of the city (cf. Bruno 2014, 191–192). These topographical maps, indeed, intensify an affective dimension that abolishes and excludes alternative chronotopic constructions or even small differential patterns, letting a utilitarian and cruel performative attitude emerge as the only rational choice available. We have already mentioned how this cruel and melancholic realism is a typical affective component of many contemporary cinematic chronotopes, which effectively map the transformation of work and of human existence into a sort of merciless gladiatorial battleground. They also manifest the reorganisation of every field of affective and intellectual life in terms of a competitive system, where to realise and aim for personal ‘excellence’ against the risk of elimination or of extreme marginalisation. In David Fincher’s Gone Girl (2014) and The Social Network (2010), for instance, even dimensions that appeared completely detached from explicit

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economic functions become, instead, fields of valorisation, and human relations are perceived as pure investments in cultural and financial capital. Gone Girl, as has already been noticed, presents a parody of the battle of the sexes as framed in our current media landscape, by describing the dysfunctional and pathological relationship between Amy (Rosamund Pike) and Nick (Ben Affleck) (cf. Bayman 2019). On the other hand, this film also enacts a perfect conceptualisation of how affective bonds are reframed (although the heteropatriarchal family has always been a central enginge in productive processes) within the neoliberal weltanschauung. Deciding to engage in a relationship or, later on, opting for a divorce are choices to be made in terms of measurable future results. As Amy’s voice-over comments (after we discover that her disappearance and apparent murder by Nick were properly manufactured by her in order to move out from an unproductive bond), their becoming a couple was observed as a good deal between the parts. Nick gave Amy relax, ease, and fun, and, in exchange, she forged the man of her dreams, turning her husband into a sophisticated member of New York middle class. Thus, they became the best couple on the scene (‘what is the point in being together if you are not the happiest couple,’ she affirms) with Amy appearing as a charming enfant prodige who writes quizzes on newspapers, and Nick as an athletic, smart, and funny writer for a men magazine. It is the Wall Street crash of 2007/2008, indeed, that reshapes their economic equilibrium, forcing drastic modifications in their expectations, which, eventually, lead to Nick’s betrayal and to Amy’s sophisticated revenge. Likewise, at the end of the film, Nick’s capacity to become valuable again by effectively marketing himself as sorrowful and inconsolable guilty husband motivates Amy’s return and the decision to cast a ‘new marriage deal’. This new bond openly guarantees both of them popularity and influence, and the possibility to regain the lost economic status. What is more interesting, however, is that their renewed marriage contract works explicitly and solely as a financial transaction, since it is built on their mutual distrust and resentment. In a similar way, The Social Network allows us to experience the entrance of market logic within prestigious universities and research institutions (as Harvard University), which lose their ‘ivory tower’ intellectual charm to become differential chronotopes for cruel economic competition. The foundation and critical early years of Facebook are described as the pitiless and infantile fights between young brilliant minds obsessed by popularity and by the recognition of their unique capacity to climb the social ladder. The same act of researching, therefore, loses its creative and imaginative potential to be understood only as an indicator of individual success,

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revealing the radical neoliberal restructuring of universities into ‘exclusive’ precarious workplaces, where academic activities are reduced or bound by constant financial assessments (Braidotti 2019, 25–29; Chomsky 2014). It is not incidental, therefore, that Gone Girl and The Social Network present analogous chronotopes with connected affective and aesthetic patterns. For instance, the prevalence of desaturated grey tonalities for the cinematography (by Jeff Cronenweth in both cases) generates a noir-like grim atmosphere, which is in turn stressed by the non-linear embodied fabula and exploration of the story events they both enact. These chronotopic and dialogical features, indeed, produce a mood of moral disenchantment and distrust, a dark topographical map intensifying the cynical belief in the sanity of the market utilitarian logic. Again, the realist melancholic mindsets expressed by the chronotopes discussed in this section reduce the imagination of any form of solidarity and of collective organisation (as we have observed happening in Sorry to Bother You) to pure impossibility or to the standard of a pathological delusion. For these same reasons, the characters’ speeches analysed allow, in different and unique modalities, to embody lives completely subsumed to capital, as we participate in the dialogical enaction of subjectivities that either adapt or wilfully participate in a system of economic cruelty. The sad passions characterising these experiences, however, do not serve simply as immobile cartographies of cruel precarious lives in a market-led existence; by encountering these subjectivities, the films engender also a crucial ethical challenge. They allow us to recognise ourselves as integral parts of the social reality they unleash, and force us to observe the radical catastrophic consequences of common-sense assumptions about the rationality of economic self-interest for existence. Thus, these chronotopes provide us with the affective and conceptual instruments to counteract the processes of subjectification the characters enact by openly embodying the morality of the human capital. These speeches, in their cruel ecological complexity, demonstrate how the very notion of the individual exists as a processual construct and how subjectivity can be affirmatively reshaped exactly by liberating it from narratives of self-improvement and by resorting to the dialogical and polyphonic creativity that grounds our existence as parts of the world. As Bakhtin highlighted (1993, 32), the essence of our subjectivities resides in their event-based nature, which makes our encounters not phenomenologically closed and abstract experiences, but transformative and experimental connections, the exploration of possible becomings.

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References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1993. Towards a Philosophy of the Act. Edited by M. Holquist, V. Liapunov, translated by V. Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bayman, Louis. 2019. Performance Anxiety: The Competitive Self and Hollywood’s Post-Crash Films of Cruelty. New Review of Film and Television Studies, June 18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2019.1622878. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. London: Duke University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2019. Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press. https:// politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509535255. Brayton, Sean. 2016. The “madness” of Market Logic: Mental Illness and Late Capitalism in The Double and Nightcrawler. Communication and Critical/ Cultural Studies 14, no. 1: 1–17. 10.1080/14791420.2016.1216576. Bruno, Giuliana. 2014. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. London: The University of Chicago Press. Chomsky, Noam. 2014. The Death of American Universities. JacobinMag. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/03/the-­d eath-­o f-­a merican­universities/. Ciccarelli, Roberto. 2018. Il Capitale Disumano: La Vita in Alternanza Scuola-­ Lavoro. Roma: Manifestolibri. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations. Translated by M.  Joughin. New  York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 2005. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translation and foreword by B. Massumi. London: University of Minnesota Press. Fincher, David. 2010. The Social Network. Produced by Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti et al. US: Columbia Pictures, Relativity Media et al. DVD, 120 mins. ———. 2014. Gone Girl. Produced by Arnon Milchan, Joshua Donen et al. US: Regency Enterprises, TSG Entertainment. DVD, 149 mins. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Ropley: ZeroBooks. ———. 2018. K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writing of Mark Fisher from 2004–2016. Edited by D. Ambrose, foreword by S. Reynolds. London: Repeater Books. https://repeaterbooks.com/product/k-­punk-­the-­collected­and-­unpublished-­writings-­of-­mark-­fisher-­2004-­2016/. Foucault, Michel. 2008. Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Edited by M. Senellart. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gilroy, Dan. 2014. Nightcrawler. Produced by David Litvak, Jake Gyllenhaal et al. US: Bold Film. DVD, 117 mins. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2017. Assembly. New  York: Oxford University Press.

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Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2014. Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Translated by J. D. Jordan. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Lyttelton, Oliver. 2011. Venice ‘11 Review: Sono Sion’s Himizu is Close To Unwatchable, And Yet Vitally Important. IndieWire. https://www.indiewire. com/2011/09/venice-­1 1-­r eview-­s ono-­s ions-­h imizu-­i s-­c lose-­t o­unwatchable-­and-­yet-­vitally-­important-­116529/. Plantinga, Carl. 2013. The Affective Power of Movies. In Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies, ed. A.P.  Shimamura, 94–111. New  York: Oxford University Press. Sono, Sion. 2011. Himizu. Produced by Haruo Umekawa, Masashi Yamazaki. Japan: GAGA, Himizu Film Partners et al. DVD, 129 mins. Standing, Guy. 2011. Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury. Young, Deborah. 2011. Himizu: Venice Film Review. The Hollywood Reporter. https://www.hollywoodrepor ter.com/review/himizu-­v enice-­f ilm-­ review-­231642.

CHAPTER 6

Black Mirror and Nosedive: Becoming Algorithm

Black Mirror (2011–ongoing) is one of the most discussed and popular TV series of the last decades, highly regarded by critics and commended as a caustic satire and exploration of the ethical impact of digital technologies—a choice reinforced by its setting of the events in near future or parallel/present timelines. The capacity of the series—ideated and written by Charlie Brooker—to catch widespread global anxieties has also generated an extended literature, observing in depth how it addresses the relationship between the human and the technological spheres (see Cirucci and Vacker 2018; Garofalo 2017). What I will be discussing here is, to borrow Deleuze’s words, the relation between the machinic assemblages and forms of enslavement the series displays and enacts, with the collective apparatuses that allow the appearance of these specific machines (Deleuze 1995, 175). I will analyse the chronotopic and dialogical configuration of several episodes that contribute in mapping the current modes of capitalistic accumulation, based on the exploitation of relational posthuman/ cybernetic subjects caught in a web of interconnections with the complex media ecologies surrounding them (cf. Bergamaschi 2019). Main focus of this chapter will be Nosedive (directed by Joe Wright, written by Rashida Jones and Micheal Schur, 3x01, 2016), to be dialogically associated with chronotopes emerging from other episodes of the five seasons released so far, in order to examine and map the dataisation of the human (or rather metadataisation, ‘information about information’, see Celis Bueno 2019), and the politics and functions of algorithmic fluxes. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Sticchi, Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63261-8_6

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In the society described in Nosedive, every citizen is equipped with eye implants, which, through their interconnection with smartphones, computers, and all imaginable digital devices, allow for a complete online sharing of daily activities on social media platforms. These same actions can be rated on a one-to-five-star scale, which provides every user with an average score. The rating obtained, however, does not merely describe popularity or abstract measures of appreciation, it defines the social position and economic status of every user, determining the access to specific services, health-care, careers, commodities, means of transport, and spaces of collective life. Lacie (Bryce Dallas Howard), the main character of the episode, is an employee for an unspecified company in an indefinite geographical location. She lives with her brother and apparently belongs to a low middle-class status, which precludes her to move to an aspired bigger and more comfortable house in a high-class neighbourhood. Nonetheless, her obsessive dedication to social media guarantees her an average score of 4.2, a rating that seems to envision the opportunity for an upgrading. The desire for an improvement of class ranking, however, will lead Lacie to an auto-destructive path, which will find its conclusion exactly in the complete failure of her initial purpose, with the removal of the eye implants and a total declassification from the social media hierarchy. From these initial premises it is possible to observe how the episode (as the entire TV series to some extent) contributes in widening the definition of chronotopes of anxiety—an affective pattern, which, in this case, as many reviewers have noticed, is based on a satirical extremisation of contemporary addiction to social media (Gilbert 2016; Wollaston 2016). In Nosedive, the pathological use of online platforms, however, is not indicative of individual risks and probable subjective abuses of digital technology. Indeed, Lacie’s morbid dedication to rating activities is not unique and peculiar, but the most common form of interaction in her context, thus outlining an entire social system and order organised via users’ assemblage with digital technologies. This power relation is, in turn, not reducible to univocal dynamics since, within itself, it displays different forms of collective enslavement. One of its most evident aspects is that it establishes a form of horizontal and diffused control. The interrelation and interdependence of the users, as we can clearly notice by observing the actions of Lacie and of all the characters she encounters, involves an endless mutual evaluation and assessment. The ‘cooperative’ nature of self-evaluation (cf. Hardt and Negri 2017, 119), therefore, does not establish a clear social

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hierarchy based on traditional top-down domination, but on an open-air system of circulation and re-modulation of information. In this transversal interaction, therefore, we can identify a further passage to the already mentioned control societies: social systems not based anymore on the definition of closed disciplinary spaces with a specific internal logic, but on diffused webs of relations providing every citizen with passwords and data (making them dividuals) that define their agency within a certain ecology (Deleuze 1995, 181–182). These instruments define the mobility of every user establishing a very fluid and pervasive monitoring system, which is never perceived as external or as the central unequal gaze of the panopticon (see Foucault 1991, 170–177) because it is enacted and reproduced exactly by the activity of every member. Concurrently, control societies are not overtly prohibitive or despotic, because they encourage all their citizens to participate and contribute to their functioning. An even more drastic chronotopic configuration of control dynamics (helpful to understand the horizontality of power relations) is the one visualised in White Bear (Tibbets, 2x02, 2013), where, by any means, we observe the description of an ‘open’ prison system. The punitive space for the main character, convicted for the homicide of a child, is an unbounded park, where masked men continuously chase her and threaten her life. The purpose of the punishment is to force the convicted (deprived, at end of each day, of the memory of her crime) to rediscover her guilt and to be caught in an endless loop of existential precarity and public humiliation. Indeed, the most important aspect of this punitive system is that, apart from relying on the perpetual sense of danger conveyed to the condemned, it is open to visitors following her actions and filming her through their smartphones. It is the presence and participation of the public, therefore, that acts as evident machinic element of stigmatisation, since it configures the possibility for a collective moral blaming of the prisoner. Through this example, we can clearly see how the absence of closed disciplinary/punitive spaces does not involve the disappearance of power structures or of a repressive social apparatus, whose functions are carried out by the same ‘free-users’, who become agents of their own control. Matilde Orlando (2019), for instance, adds that the exhibited and collectively shared nature of punishment engenders what has been defined as penal populism: the reactionary desire for public humiliations and suffering (a chronotopic motif that we can detect also in the episode Shut Up and Dance, Watkins 3x03, 2016) functional for the maintenance and management of the social order.

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Likewise, notwithstanding Nosedive’s horizontal ecology and the apparent absence of class distinctions, the political structure of the storyworld, on the other hand, enforces an extreme vertical social hierarchy. For instance, having an upper-class status is obviously associated with high social scores, which, in turn, define a ‘positive’ autoreferential sphere of influence, a high-end inner circle that reinforces its exclusivity and, thus, prevents any attempt to undermine its persistence. It is for this reason that Lacie desperately tries to be surrounded by people with high influence and sees having been chosen as maid of honour for the weeding of a rich old friend (Naomi [Alice Eve], whose score is 4.8) as the crucial opportunity to jump to a new status. This relationship and structure between the classes, therefore, involves an autonomous tendency, on behalf of the average-­ranked citizen, to social servitude, to a subordinated linkage with the wealthy and influential ones, enforced through an individual embodiment of social media rules. The data and scores accumulated are, then, effectively translated into an exchangeable crypto-currency, into digital information usable as individual credits and merits, involving users’ competition to acquire and accumulate them. The chronotope of anxiety of the episode is enacted also through a clear opposition between the architectural and ecological context and the behaviour of the characters. Seamus McGarvey (director of photography) has described the style and aesthetic features of the episode by affirming that it was meant to generate a ‘sickly pastel feel’ (Turchiano 2017) through an excessive environmental luminosity meant to make the storyworld ‘so sweet as to become almost indigestible’. The prevalence of pink, bright, and clear tonalities is extended to the architectures, décor, and characters’ clothes (which in turn appear tacky and unnaturally neat and tidy), generating a fatiguing homogeneity. The urban geography of the episode reiterates these disturbing oppressive features, although not resorting to evident architectures of reclusion and marginalisation. The distress produced by these visual and dialogical patterns in turn expresses the malaise and discomfort associated with the necessity for every citizen to behave adequately and to perform at their best in accordance with general social expectations in order to receive positive scores and to avoid downgrading. This is what happens, for instance, to one of Lacie’s colleague, Keith, who because of an abrupt break-up with his partner, is overwhelmed by a series of resented low scores by all the people surrounding him, causing his expulsion from the workplace. This common social predicament, therefore, involves citizens’ endless psychophysical attempt to

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align with the collective mood, an activity that is dialogically emphasised by the feverish acting, grotesquely stressing enthusiastic reactions and an ‘apparent’ mutual kindness and appreciation. The continuous performance of adequacy every character enacts ends up defining social media interaction as a proper life-long labour, where the production of valuable images of oneself in exchange of social credits is the central commodity. In Nosedive’s storyworld, careers and jobs remain mostly unspecified and all the characters, to some extent, seem always dedicated to the sharing of information, even on what appear as their workplaces. The centrality of social media, thus, highlights and relates to the complete repositioning of the site labour and of value extraction enacted by algorithmic capitalism. Indeed, we have discussed how the production of data and the circulation of information is one of the crucial features for the accumulation and reproduction of capital in the neoliberal economy (cf. Deleuze 1995, 180; Lazzarato 2014, 39). The manufacturing and sharing of individual reactions and states, together with the exchange of evaluations, beyond engendering an inherent social hierarchy, also generate value for the company owning the service since every data contributes in expanding its financial weight. Consequently, we can see that monopolistic platform capitalism (see Eugeni 2019) relies on a free army of ‘prosumers’ in association with other multitudes of precarious workers involved in programming, managing the flows of information, or stocking commodities. One of the most evident effects of this transformation of labour is that despite its centrality in the production of value, it appears as a form of ‘unpaid work’ (cf. Fumagalli 2019, 87; Lazzarato 2014, 93; Hardt and Negri 2017, 141), generating information and financial assets from which their producers are completely alienated. The activity and interaction of each prosumer is masqueraded, instead, as a free service (or even as a gaming activity, cf. Ciccarelli 2018, 58) the social media company provides, claiming itself as sole rightful owner of those data to be sold and exchanged with other partners as bulks of usable statistics for marketing, political campaigns, and surveillance—a mechanism meant to monitor behavioural patterns and channel and influence future choices of every user (Ciccarelli 2018, 37–40; Eugeni 2019). The double process of alienation and expropriation (from the value directly produced and from the ones deriving from its exchange) every social media user undergoes is also connected with a striking paradox. The more the work is unpaid, the more it requires the greatest cognitive and affective effort on behalf of its actor, thus

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becoming a captured ‘living labour’, featuring a wide subsumption of existence to data mining and capital accumulation (Ciccarelli 2018, 119–120; Hardt and Negri 2017, 273). We can also see how the Silicon Valley myths of automation and end of labour are translated, instead, into the drastic extension of always more exploitative and less paid forms of employment (Ciccarelli 2018, 44–45). A similar dialogical pattern can be found in the episode Fifteen Millions Merits (Lyn, 1x02, 2011), in which large portions of the population live confined within factories where to accumulate credits through the production of energy by cycling in front of a screen or through their ‘enjoyment’ of streaming services. All these operations are performed with the purpose of buying a ticket to participate in a talent show offering them the opportunity to become stars and parts of the same TV programmes they enjoy. The cognitive pleasure of watching is, therefore, connected with the continuous physical effort of cycling and with the demonstration of bodily responses of appreciation, creating a compulsive circular pattern between unceasing production and the endless consumption of commodities. Even the instinct to rebel is reduced to a good to be consumed, as it happens for the main storyline of the episode, emphasising the complete exploitation of affective and intellectual life. Likewise, Lacie’s compulsive social media interaction (continuously checking updates and other people’s new posts) does not envisage a pure and abstract production of data; it is accompanied by an endless emotional and neural work on herself aimed to align with the expectations and desires of the ‘community’ and to engender connected positive affective responses. For instance, this process of adjustment involves the reinforcement of an acceptable ‘feminine’ image, dialogically integrated by her make-up, by her choice of clothing, and by the objects she surrounds herself with—a construction to be blended with her being extremely submissive and acquiescent, while attempting to look ‘natural’ in her behaviour (as a social media consultant suggests her to be). Thus, we can see that her social networking describes a fully embodied and enworlded activity, putting subjectivity, in all its complexity, at work (see Fumagalli 2019, 68–69, 88), a complex entanglement that reflects also the processual continuity between the working subject and the technological assemblage surrounding her/him. Furthermore, the definition of the face of each user, their faciality ­(visagitè cf. Deleuze and Guattari 2005, 168), acts as the centre and ­reference point of this labour. Indeed, it is important to stress how the social network establishes its basic functions through the configuration of

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facial patterns for each user, which the eye implants automatically assemble into an identity with an assigned average score. This automatic form of individualisation and identification, therefore, allows the fluid and ­constant exchange of data and evaluations among every citizen, together with their instantaneous placement in the social ladder. The existential centrality and dialogical function of the face is stressed in one of the first moments of the episode, showing Lacie in her bathroom rehearsing her facial expressions in front of the mirror, looking for the perfect smile and laugh. Apart from stressing the exasperated desire for appearing adequate and for collective appreciation, the centrality of the face connects also with a crucial aspect of what Caludio Celis Bueno defines as the politics of the algorithms (2019). According to the scholar, who draws upon Deleuze and Guattari’s work on the topic, the universalised face of the ‘individual’ functioned as reference point in disciplinary society, working through the opposition between the singular subject and the masses of workers. In algorithmic capitalism, instead, where the process of data mining is the key to transform subjects’ life into dividuals (codes indicating wealth, debts, credits, etc.) to create predictive patterns that direct human activities, the face carries out a completely different function. The faciality of each citizen, in its constant modulation operated by artificial intelligence devices (CCTV cameras, smartphones, and computers), acts as surface of reterritorialisation of the data fluxes, which per se tend to be deterritorialised, but find their space of re-composition and identification around subjects’ faciality. The politics of algorithms, therefore, combines the double function of recognition and extraction, since it produces the privatised and individualised body containing the financial and identity-related information necessary for predictive processes and for the accumulation of the value deriving from them. This is why we talk more about metadata instead of simple digital statistics decoding the operations of users and citizen, since the process of data mining involves the extraction of information and simultaneously the creation of an identity to be mapped and steered. The multiple and apparently contradictory nature of exploitation can be, therefore, understood in accordance with what Félix Guattari defined as mixed semiotics (or a combination of socio-semiotics and semio-­ pragmatics 2011, 54–56; see also Eugeni 2019). This expression, indeed, identifies human interaction as a processual combination of the abstract flows of information with a pre-linguistic embodied activity, subsumed to capitalist accumulation through the integration of representational signifying codes with operational states (Celis Bueno 2019; Lazzarato 2014,

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101–102). The data and the algorithmic fluxes, furthermore, are not objective representations and maps of human experience; they have their own rules and biases enforcing class/gender/race/ability-based distinctions that automatically position the recognised subject in a particular part of the social order (Celis Bueno 2019; Hardt and Negri 2017, 221). It does not come as a surprise to observe that the Chinese government (in line with practices already put forward by other major economic and political agents) is implementing a social rating system, very similar to the one described in Nosedive, aimed to map the financial and moral reliability of each citizen (Pieranni 2019). We can see, therefore, how the liquid and perpetually changing nature of contemporary capitalism is met, on the other hand, by the necessity of finding a closed and subjectified territory (the body and the individual in this case) where the despotic functions of segmentation and subjection take place. Nosedive presents a perfect enactment of how, in advanced capitalism, the machinic enslavement due to our relational composition with digital media is associated with a social apparatus of strict individualisation and atomisation, an assemblage meant also to separate subjects from their collective existential ground. Indeed, what appears evident in the episode is that the social interaction provided by the digital platform, by relying on strict measures of individual recognition and evaluation, prevents any kind of empathic correlation between the users, who are caught in an endless fatiguing work of mediation between harshly defined identities. The difficulty in connecting due to facial barriers is what motivates also Lacie’s troubles in having an open emotional relation with her brother, Ryan (James Norton), since his average score of 3.7 makes him appear as a dysfunctional and unproductive contact. Similarly, Lacie’s encounter with Susan (Cherry Jones), who will help her reaching Naomi’s wedding party, is initially built on distrust, fear, and despise, because of her 1.4 score, making the woman appear even as a dangerous subject. In a more radical way, Men Against Fire (Verbruggen,  3x05, 2016) addresses the repressive function of facial recognition technology by describing soldiers forced to wear a device that produces an image of reality justifying the rationality behind their duties and orders. This involves, in particular, to perceive migrants and refugees they are asked to kill, as monsters. The extraction and abstraction of value deriving from the dataisation of the human is also mapped with similar affective and interactive patterns in White Christmas (Tibbets, Special 2014) and Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too (Sewitski, 5x03, 2019). In both episodes, we observe the development of

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technologies aimed to conflate consciousness into clear, usable, and reproducible digital patterns, visually condensing the human into a hard drive. In the first case, the dataisation of consciousness is dialogically interconnected with punitive mechanisms and with the prediction of behavioural responses; in the second, instead, the algorithmic codification of experiences and cognitive patterns is aimed to categorise artistic creativity, to canalise emotional and aesthetic perception and imagination into a clear marketable logic. In these recurring chronotopic and dialogical maps, we can observe, again, how algorithmic capitalism does not simply aim to map our labour power and represent it through codes and statistics. Its purpose is to clearly direct creative and unpredictable patterns into manageable variables. To this aim, the machinic composition described by the technological assemblages of the various episodes discussed attempts to deny the relational and ecological nature of emotional and intellectual life. We experience this individualisation of consciousness with the recurrence of facial identity devices, closed data collecting support systems, or finite numerical variables: the reduction of subjectivity to an abstract Cartesian and disembodied function, expropriated of its concrete and embodied/ immanent affective power. Thus, the machinic enslavement described by these technologies tries to hide the same cooperative and interactive nature of the work that allows their functioning (the General Intellect in its creative and unpredictable power), with the purpose of transforming this labour power into a purely objectified commodity (cf. Ciccarelli 2018, 187; Hardt and Negri 2017, 118). It is through this pervasive abstraction of social cooperation that capital, indeed, is able to obtain a full precarious employment, an absolute social subjection generated by the reterritorialisation of work into a private and atomised body, whose function is to collect the flows of metadata describing its debts and credits. Nonetheless, the prospect of a possible happiness and satisfaction, though consequent to the enslavement to machinic processes, is the drive that moves Lacie’s desperate attempt to participate in Naomi’s wedding as her sole existential objective. Indeed, as she tells Susan—after being asked why she dedicates so much attention to her social appreciation—obtaining influence and being recognised as a valuable person is the only way to aspire to a certain level of well-being and stability, a state that will not force her to be constantly worried about the future and socio-economic needs. Lacie also admits that accepting the ‘numbers’ game’ is the only way to move forward, and so she has to take reality as it is. The character’s speech, therefore, highlights another recurring pattern of the anxiety

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chronotope: the cynical resignation to a social order based on auto-­exploitation and on the reduction of every aspect of human life to economic functions. The same attitude, however, is expressed by Naomi, whose choice of Lacie as maid of honour was not motivated by the desire to have an old friend at her side, but by the mere evaluation of the positive social impact of letting a ‘less fortunate’ acquaintance celebrating her. On the other hand, as soon as Lacie, because of various accidents, is degraded to a below three status, Naomi abruptly dismisses her participation, since now she is identified as an undesirable or even anti-social person. Notwithstanding her downgrade, Lacie frantically manages to sneak into the very exclusive wedding party (accessible only to people with a minimum 3.8 average score), attempting desperately to regain her lost position and even to be accepted within the high society. However, her speech is not what was planned to be, and instead of being a rhetorical celebration of past memories and indissoluble childhood friendship, Lacie’s monologue becomes a confused and embarrassing combination of opposed emotions. On one side, she still attempts to obtain approval and upgrading by trying to please the audience and by humiliating herself, though her words are met by the nervous and uncomfortable reactions of all the guests, associated also with continuous negative evaluations. On the other hand, this moment introduces a polyphonic rupture for the character, whose anger was repressed or contained to limited spontaneous reactions so far. The monologue becomes, indeed, an occasion for Lacie to finally express her rage and resentment towards Naomi, pointing out her hypocrisy, the fact that she always exploited her and used Lacie’s insecurity and difficulty growing up for her own social advantage (‘I always looked up to Naomi, which means she always looked down on me, with a smile though,’ Lacie affirms). Lacie’s furious and confused speech, ending with her abrupt arrest, therefore, presents itself as an anti-performative moment, in dialogical opposition with the construction of her subjectivity experienced so far. Indeed, instead of providing the guests and viewers with a clear purpose-based monologue, meant to elicit specific reactions and to obtain expected measurable results, Lacie’s words appear as the enaction of her emotional and intellectual complexity; they reveal a multifaceted personality beyond the boundaries of social media identity. Furthermore, while the speech further underlines the anxious and fatiguing experiential temporality of the episode, it also highlights a conflictual reality, as Lacie stresses, although in a very disordered way, the exploitative social relations she has to endure. The episode then moves to

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the final sequence describing her incarceration and the removal of the eye implants—an event that is automatically described as liberating since it allows her to look around with wonder. Thus, she meets the eyes of another prisoner staring at her. Lacie is instantaneously upset and starts attacking the man, who vehemently replies to her criticism. From this moment, we witness a climatic exchange of insults between the two characters (initially depicted in shot reverse shot of medium close-ups), culminating, in the end, with a fast succession of their extreme close-ups (both characters looking into camera), which generates a complete mixing between their screaming faces. Beyond the most palpable aspect, condensed in the association between the removal of the social media device and the rediscovery of the world, these last moments enact a complete reversal of the chronotope of the episode. First of all, the harsh (although ironic) confrontation between the two prisoners expresses a re-emergence or a final externalisation of conflict, an affective pattern in complete contrast with the submissive and restrained emotionality viewers engage through the entire experience. However, by observing the narrative and emotional path of the character, we can relate this transformation with what has been defined as the ethical and affirmative power of exhaustion. We have discussed, indeed, how the machinic enslavement produced by social media activity configures a fatiguing endless work on the self, connected with the constant perfomative anxiety of appearing and behaving efficiently for the obtainment of a positive score, a purpose that has found its grotesque failure in Lacie’s wedding monologue. The character’s exhaustion and complete fiasco is opposed to the simple emotional fatigue and tiredness due to the constant cognitive and affective labour, and reflects Lacie’s necessity to reposition herself, a threshold of transformation of forces allowing the subject to rediscover the conflictualitie(s) characterising the world surrounding her (see Braidotti 2019, 17–18). The final confrontation, in this sense, instead of being a simple expression of anger or resentment (as for her wedding speech), appears as a moment of concrete ethical experimentation. Lacie’s joyous expression, while finally screaming, is, in this sense, the indication of an existential discovery associated also with more radical overturning of one of the main chronotopic dynamics of the experience: the subversion of the face. Rediscovering conflict and a life beyond the parameters of machinic enslavement is associated with the breaking of the individualised and privatised face, which, we have seen, acts as a reterritorialising centre for the flows of data, allowing subjection and value extraction to

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take place. The polyphonic mixture between the prisoners’ faces, on the contrary, enacts faciality as an unmappable surface, as a complex and dynamic dimension impossible to be reduced to atomised abstractions: a liberation of the face from its individualised cage. With its closure, the episode reshapes its chronotope, bringing back to its primary function the untamed collective and ecological basis of our interaction as relational agents. Indeed, as we have already observed, it is our social cooperation, our existence as  a multitudinous entity, that grounds our labour power, the force that capitalism, as an extractive machine, captures and accumulates. For this same reason, however, this vital and experimental tension cannot be quantified or totally objectified. Notwithstanding the complex and intricated mechanisms of enslavement and the oppressive social apparatus determining precarious lives, the possibility for this ethical potential to re-emerge is always in place (cf. Ciccarelli 2018, 188–191). This is, for instance, what we experience in Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve 2017), where the posthuman and cybernetic subjectivity of K (Ryan Gosling) is not determined by the algorithms building up its genetic codes, but appears as a process of re-enactment and re-invention of its identity in the world; or, going back to Black Mirror, the affirmation of a new power to act is exactly what ‘Ashley Too’ (in episode 5x03), the AI reproduction of the singer Ashley Ortiz, carries out, by reclaiming the right for an unbounded and ‘dysfunctional’ (or rather not commodifiable) artistic creativity. This is, we could add, the purpose of Bakhtin’s literary theory: to liberate arts from closed monological boundaries by mapping the patterns of becoming, the differential dialogical power every artistic experience enacts (cf. 1981, 263–266; Jordan-Haladyn 2014, 23, 36–38). Recognising our existence as cybernetic agents does not imply, therefore, the acceptance of the reduction of life to algorithmic flows and atomised devices. On the contrary, it involves a creative tension in experimenting the possibilities of our ecological entanglement with every surface surrounding our mutating bodies, the construction of subjectivity as a processual continuum in an always becoming reality (cf. Wheeler 2016, 244–245). To conclude with Rosi Braidotti, being posthuman agents means that ‘I am materially embodied and embedded, with the power to affect and being affected’ (2019, 5)—acknowledging an experimental force that is only up to us to realise.

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References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by M.  Holquist, translated by C.  Emerson, M.  Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bergamaschi, Matteo. 2019. Dopo l’utopia. Ipotesi sul cyborg neoliberista a partire dalla serie Black Mirror. Philosophy Kitchen: Rivista di Filosofia ­ Contemporanea vi (10): 99–106. Braidotti, Rosi. 2019. Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press. https:// politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509535255. Celis Bueno, Claudio. 2019. The Face Revisited: Using Deleuze and Guattari to Explore the Politics of Algorithmic Face Recognition. Theory, Culture & Society 0 (0): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276419867752. Ciccarelli, Roberto. 2018. Forza Lavoro: Il Lato Oscuro della Rivoluzione Digitale. Roma: DeriveApprodi. Cirucci, Angela M., and Barry Vacker. 2018. Introduction. In Black Mirror and Critical Media Theory, ed. A.  Cirucci and B.  Vacker, vii–xiv. London: Lexington Books. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations. Translated by M.  Joughin. New  York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 2005. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translation and foreword by B. Massumi. London: University of Minnesota Press. Eugeni, Ruggero. 2019. The Post-Advertising Condition. A Socio-Semiotic and Semio-Pragmatic Approach to Algorithmic Capitalism. In Social Computing and Social Media. Communication and Social Communities. HCII 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, ed. G. Meiselwitz, 11579, 291–302. Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­21905-­5_23. Foucault, Michel. 1991. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by A. Sheridan. London: Penguin. Fumagalli, Andrea. 2019. New Form of Exploitation in Bio-Cognitive Capitalism: Towards Life Subsumption. In Cognitive Capitalism, Welfare and Labour: The Commonfare Hypothesis, ed. Andrea Fumagalli, Alfonso Giuliani, Stefano Lucarelli, and Carlo Vercellone, 77–93. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Garofalo, Damiano. 2017. Black Mirror: Memorie dal Futuro. Roma: Edizioni Estemporanee. Gilbert, Sophie. 2016. Black Mirror’s ‘Nosedive’ Skewers Social Media. The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/10/ black-­mirror-­nosedive-­review-­season-­three-­netflix/504668/. Guattari, Félix. 2011. The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis. Translated by T. Adkins. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

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Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2017. Assembly. New  York: Oxford University Press. Jordan-Haladyn, Miriam. 2014. Dialogic Materialism: Bakhtin, Embodiment and Moving Image Art. New York: Peter Lang. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2014. Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Translated by J. D. Jordan. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Lyn, Euros. Dir. 2011. Black Mirror. Season 1, episode 2. “Fifteen Million Merits” December 11. Channel 4 Orlando, Matilde. 2019. L’Economia Morale del Castigo. FataMorganaWeb. https://www.fatamorganaweb.unical.it/index.php/2019/03/11/punire-­didier­fassin/. Pieranni, Simone. 2019. The Chinese Panopticon, from Cybernetics to Social Credit. il manifesto Global Edition: https://global.ilmanifesto.it/ the-­chinese-­panopticon-­from-­cybernetics-­to-­social-­credit/. Sewitsky, Anne. Dir. 2019. Black Mirror. Season 5, episode 4. “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too” June 5. Netflix. Tibbets, Carl. Dir. 2013. Black Mirror. Season 2, episode 2. “White Bear”. February 18. Channel 4 ———. Dir. 2014. Black Mirror. Christmas Special. “White Christmas”. December 16. Channel 4. Turchiano, Danielle. 2017. Black Mirror DP Seamus McGarvey Talks About Finding the ‘Photographic Heart’ of Nosedive. Variety: https://variety. c o m / 2 0 1 7 / t v / a w a r d s / e m m y s -­b l a c k -­m i r r o r-­s e a m u s -­m c g a r v e y ­interview-­1202520496/. Verbruggen, Jakob. Dir. 2016. Black Mirror. Season 3, episode 5. “Men Against Fire” October 21, Netflix. Villeneuve, Denis. 2017. Blade Runner 2049. Produced by Andrew A.  Kosove, Broderick Johnson et al. US: Alcon Entertainment, Columbia Pictures et al. DVD, 164 mins. Watkins, James. Dir. 2016. Black Mirror. Season 3, episode 3. “Shut Up and Dance” October 21. Netflix. Wheeler, Wendy. 2016. Expecting the Earth: Life, Culture, Biosemiotics. Chadwell Heath: Lawrence and Wishart. Wollaston, Sam. 2016. Black Mirror Review- This Nightmare Sterile World Is Only Five Minutes Away. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-­ and-­radio/2016/oct/21/black-­mirror-­r eview-­charlie-­brooker-­nightmare­sterile-­world-­is-­only-­five-­minutes-­away. Wright, Joe. Dir. 2016. Black Mirror. Season 3, episode 1. “Nosedive”. October 21, Netflix.

PART II

Depression

CHAPTER 7

Kelly Reichardt: Film Chronotopes of the Precarious Northwest

We have concluded our discussion of the anxiety chronotope with considerations on the becoming algorithm of the human and on the exploitative dynamics of the digital economy. To start our journey into the chronotope of depression, we drastically move back to a more ‘traditional’ scenario using as first case study the cinema of one of the most celebrated contemporary independent filmmakers: Kelly Reichardt. Apart from being commended for her peculiar minimalistic style (see Littman 2014), Reichardt is also considered one of the best narrators of the American Northwest (the setting of all her films) and of the lives of precarious subjects inhabiting this peculiar ecology. In this chapter I will start analysing Certain Women (2016, based on several short tales by Maile Meloy) and connect the affective construction of this case study with other two films: Wendy and Lucy (2008) and Night Moves (2013). These productions are directly united by particular spatial and temporal configurations, which allow viewers to engage related affective dynamics of economic, environmental, and gendered marginalisation. As Reichardt herself stated, her cinema aims to depict people ‘who do not have a safety net’ (BFI 2017), to tackle the various ways in which precarity becomes a dominating force and determining factor in contemporary lives. In these films we will see how marginalisation is associated with a completely different temporality (compared to those previously analysed), based on delayed interactions and on an extreme widening of spatial configurations. As Fusco and Seymour have noticed, Reichardt’s cinema describes the ‘relentless quality of emergency’ © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Sticchi, Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63261-8_7

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(2017, 46), an ontological uncertainty and openness where every small accident can turn into a life-threatening event. This same quality is what, for the two scholars, makes her films fall within Berlant’s definition of ‘the cinema of precarity’; productions entangled with the neorealist tradition, but capable of addressing current socio-economic dynamics1 (2011, 201; Fusco and Seymour 2017, 10, 22–23). In Certain Women, similar affective patterns determine and pervade the lives of four different characters: Laura (Laura Dern), Gina (Michelle Williams), Elizabeth (Kristen Stewart), and Jamie (Lily Gladstone), who embody and enact heterogenous forms of precarity blending together their economic status with their gender roles. Recurring dialogical and chronotopic features of the film, indeed, concern their difficulty in being recognised as workers and the affective implications of this existential disempowerment. The action is set around Livingston in Montana and is initially focused on Laura, an attorney, and on a resentful client, Fuller (Jared Harris). The latter has been tormenting Laura for eight months about a case concerning the obtainment of insurance money from his former employers after an accident, causing him sight issues and the impossibility to go back to his profession as carpenter. However, since Fuller has accepted an initial small settlement from the company, he cannot require further financial support or proceed with a connected legal action. Laura continuously points out this critical problem; however, Fuller rejects her concerns by asking for more confrontational actions and even considers her incapable of dealing with his issues. Only when Laura, rightfully bothered by Fuller’s distrust, brings him to another (male) lawyer, who confirms the problems connected to his case, he is finally convinced of the impossibility to proceed. From the presentation of these initial events, therefore, we can see how the conflicting relation between Laura and Fuller enacts one of the central dialogical patterns of the experience, that is the difficulty for female professionals to be recognised as such. Indeed, as also Laura argues, she just hoped to have been a man for a moment in order to gain the client’s respect, the same trust and recognition Fuller has demonstrated to be so eager to attribute to her male colleague. Considering their conflict, it is interesting, however, to observe also how both characters’ speeches describe precarious subjectivities. Indeed, if Laura undergoes 1  Although her cinema also addresses, in a revisionist and critical form, the topoi and motifs of the western.

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discrimination because of her gender identity, determining her not being evaluated as efficient lawyer, Fuller lives a distressing lack of social support as unemployed and uninsured disabled worker, abruptly removed from his existential and experiential ground (he was considered a highly respected artisan). Their mutual marginalisation should apparently facilitate their interaction, favouring the emergence of a sympathetic recognition; instead, we can clearly identify a specific misogynistic tension dividing them. These elements allow us to expand the examination of gender dynamics in the context of precarity. While a more traditional division of labour on the line of gender persists, in the neoliberal economy women are also required to engage more consistently in professional activities or to demonstrate their economic efficiency as mothers (parenthood becomes a status to be assessed in financial terms, see Foucault 2008, 228–230; 243–246; Rottenberg 2018, 86–87, 95). Likewise, emancipation for women is to be understood exclusively in terms of individual financial success and, concurrently, objectified and essentialist construction of female identity are not overcome, but co-opted by the overruling market logic (McRobbie 2004; Rottenberg 2018, 99–102). Therefore, the necessity of adopting an adequate feminine subjectivity remains and connects with related forms of mandatory auto-discipline (cf. De Pascalis 2014, 116–117; Thoma 2014, 118–120). The apparent independent and ‘empowered’ subjectivity Laura embodies, in this sense, can be connected with the prototypical figure of the cruel post-recession female entrepreneur or freelance professional (Leonard 2014, 50–52), threatening male economic supremacy with her spirit of initiative. This particular construction of Laura’s identity is also emphasised by her first appearance, presented through a fixed medium shot depicting her within a very fragmented interior location. Laura is half naked in the bedroom, while, in the adjacent bathroom, her partner Ryan (James Le Gros) is dressing up. The composition of the frame and the architecture allow us to experience the two characters as completely separated (we will later discover that Ryan is Gina’s husband), thus providing what would appear as an intimate moment with a sense of cold detachment. Such affective patterns reinforce the image of Laura as cynical independent professional, apparently reluctant to emotional engagement. On the other hand, the context of the small town and her living and working environment remove Laura from the high social value often attributed to the legal profession (as, for instance, we can see in TV series such as The Good Wife, see Lagerway et al. 2016) and reduce a supposed idealisation

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of her status. Furthermore, images of her lonely routine also act as affective disenchantment about her accomplishments. In line with these dynamics, we can see in Fuller’s misogynistic distrust in her capacity a resented attempt to recover a lost authority and social role as white/middle-aged working man, assisted by a female professional and, thus, relegated to a minoritarian position. The detachment and emotional hostility determining the relation between the two characters is also emphasised by the constant use of soft colour tones and by a very static camerawork (cinematography by Christopher Blauvelt) mostly based on the use of medium shots and medium close-ups (on the height of the characters). These aesthetic features, together with the slow cutting rate, generate a synesthetic sense of dejection, which, combined with the physical distance of the characters, mostly never touching each other or shown in intimate contact, contributes in enacting the overall sombre mood. In such existential context, the rhythm and pace of the events, and the lack of emotional elicitation reduce the sense of possibility and the trust in the future by building sustained affects of passivity. Concurrently, Fuller later assault to his former company, taking hostage a security guard, appears as the ultimate desperate attempt to regain his status or, at least, to obtain recognition for the injustice he has suffered. It will be Laura, in the end, who will help the police stopping him, after reading a document confirming how Fuller was, indeed, cheated in accepting the initial settlement. With Fuller’s arrest, the focus then passes on to Gina, who, like Laura, is also a highly trained professional living in a rural context, experiencing, however, a serious difficulty in balancing her working status and her role as wife/mother of a teenage daughter. We encounter her while training in the woods near the site where she and Ryan are planning to build their new home. She wears a complete running outfit, presenting the image of a sophisticated ‘neoliberal’ woman, highly dedicate to self-care and confident in her abilities (see Rottenberg 2018, 15, 55, 70–72). These elements are dialogically reinforced by her actions and attitude, showing her as the decision maker of the family, together with being (as we will discover) the home breadwinner. Gina is, however, contrasted by her daughter’s disaffection and by the complaisant attitude of her husband, which translates into automatic sexist behaviours diminishing her ‘authority’ and position. These dynamics are evidently enacted in the sequence depicting the couple discussing with Albert  (Rene Auberjonois), an elderly friend, about the possibility to buy his ‘native’ sandstone. The latter always interrupts her and appears to see in Ryan the only real interlocutor, while reacting with

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surprise when he finds out that Gina is the boss of their family company. On the other hand, Ryan seemingly undermines Gina’s efforts in persuading Albert by arguing that he does not have to feel obliged to sell. Although not affected by economic grievances, Gina, therefore, undergoes a sort of similar sexist backlash to her accomplishments as the one suffered by Laura, since her economic emancipation is met with a constant diminishment of her qualities. This dimension of affective constriction also appears to motivate her strict and confrontational stances in the way she relates to Ryan and her daughter, pridefully revendicating her central role. The dialogical correlation between Laura and Gina’s episode, however, reinforces also another experiential pattern of the film: the incapacity to communicate effectively. The division of roles and labour prevents an open and sympathetic interaction between the characters, forcing every individual in a state of isolation and conflict with the other. Precarity, therefore, primarily emerges as an extreme form of isolation, with every subject carrying out a specific function with associated subjective expectations, connected, in turn, with resentments and hatred based on codified identity norms (gender roles here, of course, are the primary source of these dynamics). The impossibility for a productive cooperative interaction defines, consequently, a chronotope of depression based on the negation of affirmative ethical action, where passivity and affective detachment constitute the determining factors of everyday existence. For Gina, the development of this chronotope ends in a moral failure: as she has obtained the native stones desired for her house, in the final moments of her episode, we see her having a barbecue with family and friends in their temporary tent camp home. We see the signed territorial markers of the house she is planning to build, but the stones supposed to become part of its foundation and walls are accumulated on a pile; also, she is strongly separated from the main group, ending up drinking wine alone. Her professional and authoritative status within the family is, therefore, affirmed, but so are also the divisions, separations, and the lack of connections that we have previously experienced. On a different note, these dialogical and chronotopic elements are reiterated in Jamie and Elizabeth’s tale. While Laura and Gina embody, although in a disenchanted fashion, the realisation of female economic emancipation, the lives of these other two main characters, instead, blend together the affective isolation and fragmentation already discussed and a state of professional uncertainty. Jamie is a ranch-hand, individually managing a property outside Belfry during the winter season. Her life and

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work routine proceed in a very monotonous way, without presenting particular accidents or critical difficulties. She appears to enjoy the presence of the animals inhabiting the ranch and dedicatedly takes care of them. Although not affected by explicit challenges, Jamie’s life, however, seems constrained by a sense of inexorableness and by the definition of an unescapable repetition of actions, in turn associated with extreme loneliness and insecurity due to the temporary and unstable nature of her work. Indeed, the images introducing Jamie are partial details of her arms and legs (or we have a limited view of her entire figure), which present a scattered and fragmented idea of the character. These elements are, what is more, connected with her being a native, a condition adding to her feeling of being a complete outsider as confirmed by her affirming that she ‘does not know anybody in town’. Plus, this same alienation is put in ironical correlation with the following moments of Jamie watching a sci-fi TV show. We hear a voice talking about ‘new frontiers’ and possible galactic exploration; the image of the frontier is easy to associate exactly with the landscape she inhabits (the western grasslands); however, this same ecology is far from providing epic existential possibilities of realisation and emancipation and builds, on the contrary, images of isolation, disorientation, and immutability. Elizabeth is a newly graduated lawyer residing in Livingston (a two-to-­ four hour drive away town), where she works as precarious collaborator in a local legal firm, plus running an evening class on education law in Belfry. The two women meet during Elizabeth’s first class. Even though not interested in the topics, Jamie appears instantaneously drawn to her, regularly approaching Beth and inviting her for dinner. Three conversations (lasting respectively two minutes and twenty-four seconds, one minute and five seconds, and two minutes) between Jamie and Elizabeth constitute the backbone of their relationship (mostly featuring a static shot reverse shot composition of medium close-ups) describing its evolution and transformation. Because of Jamie’s kind attitude towards Beth, the latter appears taking advantage of these encounters to discuss her condition and the reasons why she came up teaching a class so far from her home. Beth explains that she accepted the job abruptly after completing her law degree since she was worried about the repayment of her student loan and afraid of having to accept low-paying manual jobs as her mother and sister. Becoming a precarious lawyer and teacher, therefore, identifies her as a privileged worker aiming for an improvement of her social status.

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This life perspective is, however, dialogically overturned by the experiential reality of her work routine. Indeed, apart from being forced to drive to Belfry twice a week, she has to fulfil every kind of duties in the office she works in. Furthermore, the sequences depicting her lectures consistently display a difficulty in communicating her knowledge to the class. Beth, who is at her first teaching experience and is not exactly an educational law expert, attempts to enrich her classes using her knowledge of law history in order to present general information about the evolution and institution of particular rights. However, her efforts are met with the explicit disinterest of the attenders (teachers in professional training), who, in response, frequently ask her information completely disconnected from the topics presented (e.g. specific allowances for teachers or professional procedures), questions Beth does not know how to answer. This embarrassing condition is enacted also through long knee shots closely reporting her actions and allowing viewers to empathise with her visible discomfort while delivering lectures, a job that she will quit after few weeks. In this sense, Beth’s tale contributes in enacting the absurdity and even ‘inefficiency’ of precarious work in what is generally defined as learning society (cf. Ciccarelli 2018, 61–62). Precarious subjects are, in fact, required to demonstrate, as part of a process of managerial self-improvement, their ability in engaging every kind of activities, even forms of employment completely separated from their professional background, thus transforming work in a grotesque performance of ‘autonomous subordination’ (cf. Ciccarelli 2018, 58–60; Fana 2017, 88–90). Apart from presenting an excruciating work routine, Beth’s experiential dimension enacts also a particular chronotope, one preventing human correlation or an active perception of time as a dimension of possibility. If Jamie longs for seeing her new friend, Beth, during their conversations, appears completely detached and unwilling to listen to the other interlocutor. Their dialogues display univocal and unproductive interactions, describing and exasperating an affective dimension of complete alienation. The precarious lives of the characters are presented in the form of over-­ extended chronotopes that do not allow for the construction of clear communicative channels among individuals or for the imagination of different existential and ethical possibilities. Even the wide and open natural landscape operating as ecological backbone of the events, instead of generating a romantic connection with the environment, produces a disorienting and alienating affective topography, disrupting the  clear positioning of the

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characters in the context. This lack of precise experiential ground, what is more, allows us to participate in the extremely delayed temporality of the characters’ worktime and, simultaneously, vividly expresses the radical spatio-­temporal distance between them. In line with the erasure of existential perspectives, Beth and Jamie’s relationship ends up abruptly with the former stopping teaching. Nonetheless, Jamie attempts to keep their connection alive by driving at night to Livingston and trying to meet Beth in the morning before her getting into the office. Their final encounter, however, goes against the expectations for an emotional opening. Indeed, after responding with surprise to Jamie’s visits, Beth appears visibly embarrassed and incapable of engaging in a conversation with her, who, on the other hand, tenderly declares that she felt compelled to do it as she feared that, otherwise, they would have never met again. Their story, therefore, concludes on an underwhelming note, with Beth’s indifference and self-absorption forcing Jamie to eventually leave, as she finds herself unable to express her feelings. The sense of impossibility and the consequent decay of existential expectations emerging from the cinematic chronotope of Certain Women can be dialogically interconnected with the apparently distant ecological precarity described in Night Moves. The story events are set in Oregon and deal with three radical environmentalists, Dena (Dakota Fanning), Josh (Jesse Eisenberg), and Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard), planning and realising the bombing of a dam damaging the local flora and fauna. Their terrorist attack will be successful, although it will not produce the general upheaval they expected and, instead, will cause the death of a camper and lead to Dena’s repentance and killing by Josh’s hands in order to prevent her from going to the police. If the chronotope of depression in Certain Women is constituted by an individualising impossibility to establish productive affective relations, Night Moves, instead, presents its experiential coordinates in the forms of an existential incapacity for transformative actions. Since the beginning, we know that the three characters completely distrust conventional collective political activism. In an early sequence depicting a meeting with an ecologist group, indeed, we see Dena criticising the approach of the main guest, a documentary director and journalist, presenting her film on the climate crisis, by assessing that it does not provide clear strategies to directly tackle the issue. The journalist replies that in order to address ecological crises, a slow and multiple type of approach is required, contemplating and cultivating several grassroots and collective

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solutions, and avoiding thinking about singular all-encompassing responses. This confrontation, therefore, already sets the ethical position of the characters, defining their desperate longing and craving for a massive moment of palingenesis in relation to a catastrophic predicament. As Matthew Holtmeier pointed out, the characters express a univocal relationship with the world or a mental ecology (referring to Guattari’s notion of subjectivity, cf. 1995, 28–31; Holtmeier 2017) configuring their political approach in individualistic and singularised terms. Thus, they are prevented from perceiving the issue in terms of collective transformative engagement. Indeed, this psychological framing appears to be also the main drive of Josh’s increasing paranoia after the bombing, an affective state of isolation—emphasised through the use of intense long close-ups of the character or of slow motion pov shots (see Holtmeier 2017)—leading him to his final murderous act. The complete existential alienation of the characters is enacted and experienced also in the sequences describing the preparation of the attack. As they navigate towards the dam, we see long panoramic shots describing the effects and impact of human activity on the local vegetation. The soft colour tones, furthermore, contribute in creating a sombre mood, which dialogically interrelates with a decaying natural landscape, thus confirming a state of total moral and affective dejection. The sensation we engage with is not, then, the anxiety emerging from an upcoming natural disaster, but the depressing and passive affects generated by a slow and relentless degradation (see Fusco and Seymour 2017, 75–76). It is, indeed, the experiential absence of positive visions of the future, then, that allows us to directly participate in their actions and even in empathising with the  three characters as the reality they inhabit does not seem to offer opportunities for alternative ethical routes. In this sense, it is also interesting to observe how, as it has already been noticed (Bradshaw 2014; Fusco and Seymour 2017, 1–3, 8, 114–116; Tallerico 2014), the film avoids the typical rules of the political thriller genre, by enacting an anticlimactic embodied fabula, which, instead of expressing an emotional path leading to a dramatic decision and event, directly places viewers in the aftermath, or final moments, of this affective process. By doing so, the film concentrates on the hopelessness of the characters framing them, and us viewers interacting with the events, within an existential dimension of failure and powerlessness. Likewise, the final sequence of the film—showing Josh, after having murdered Dena, escaping from the farm where he works and applying for a job in a camping shop—contributes in reinforcing a circular

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and non-progressive cinematic chronotope. Indeed, the last shot features a detail of a circular mirror displaying costumers all absorbed in their shopping activities or looking at their smartphones (a habit Josh wanted to stop with the bombing), and thus unchangingly proceeding with their lives. As for Certain Women, the natural setting does not provide a conciliatory connection with the environment, expressing, on the contrary, a sense of inevitable decay associated with the disorienting vastness of the space. The tragic and disturbing lack of spaces for existential transformation we experience in the film, in this sense, can be easily related to the more general landscape of climate breakdown, now assessed also in terms of mental health and associated with the rise of depressive behaviours (or ‘climate grief’ see Lee and Majeed 2017; Scher 2018). Powerlessness and absence of future and of alternative existential paths are also consistent chronotopic and dialogical aspects of the intimate tale of Wendy and Lucy, observing the travel of Wendy (Michelle Williams), a young unemployed woman, moving with her dog from Indiana to Alaska with the prospect of working in a cannery. At the beginning of the film, Wendy’s solely fundamental affective relationship appears to be the one with Lucy (her family, we will see, seems to have abandoned her), and her only possessions are a car and few hundred dollars. Notwithstanding these elements, denoting an extreme precarious condition, as Seymour and Fusco have noticed, Wendy appears as a ‘cruelly optimistic’ subject, expressing a desire for individual emancipation and mobility, featuring an evident trust in her abilities and a concurrent sceptical distance towards other character she encounters (2017, 40). As she stops in a small town in Oregon, however, two very ordinary accidents bring her to the brink of absolute affective and economic deprivation. Firstly, her car irreparably breaks and, then, she is arrested for a small theft in a local supermarket. With these two events, she loses at once her only travel means (she will be forced to use trains illegally) and Lucy, which has been adopted by another family while she was in jail. Therefore, these two mundane occurrences allow us to understand how Wendy’s predicament, in complete opposition with her dream of self-realisation, reveals, on the contrary, a state of absolute determination, dependence, and uncertainty, depriving her of any real agency (see Watkins 2016, 89–91). In the end, when she finds out the house Lucy was sent to, we assist to the pivotal emotional sequence of the film. These moving moments show us the dog and Wendy playing in the garden of her new home, with the woman slowly accepting that she cannot have Lucy with her anymore, and

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thus leaving with the unrealisable promise of a future re-encounter. The scene enacts this emotional passage through the succession of long and slow handheld camera movements (the sequence is three minutes and thirty-three seconds long), small pans and tilts accurately catching their actions together, and more explicitly the change in Wendy’s behaviour and her realising the necessity to abandon Lucy: ‘I have lost the car,’ she adds as form of justification to the dog. Their separation, therefore, is experienced as the obvious consequence of the unavoidable economic difficulties Wendy undergoes, which define emergency and precarity as the predetermining existential horizon. Indeed, although moving, their separation does not take place in the form of a traumatic event, but as a melancholic realisation and acceptance of the impossibility to respond to a particular problem. The absence of economic means acts, therefore, as a practical phenomenological barrier excluding the possibility for an affective entanglement between the two main characters. The same appropriation and privatisation of Lucy behind the house fences (featured in her close-ups) reduces the dog to the status of commodity, thus practically evoking what Marx defined as the ‘stupidity of private property’, which establishes a one-sided relation with the world understood only in terms of possession and commercial uses (1988, 106). From the discussion and analysis of these three case studies we can see how a sense of absolute determination, of inevitable fragility, operates as fundamental chronotopic motif for the lives of the characters: ‘It is all fixed,’ the security guard (Walter Dalton) tells Wendy, defining economic marginality as a sort of existential immobility (see Fusco and Seymour 2017, 77), where the only option left is adapting to specific contextual dynamics. However, all these films do not work by enacting monological affective structures, based on a passive sense of inevitability. Indeed, consistent elements invert this apparent unitary composition by polyphonically opening and subverting it through the enactment of opposite emotional and experiential dynamics. In Certain Women, for instance, we have observed characters often incapable of reaching one another; the ending of Laura’s tale (taking place after the farewell between Jamie and Beth), instead, inverts these same affective coordinates. In this late sequence we see Laura visiting Fuller in prison, sometime after his arrest, and although the composition of the scene does not present particular stylistic variations (a shot reverse shot composition of medium close-ups), the tone of the dialogue features a complete transformation in the way the two characters relate. The desire and attempt to find connection appear, indeed,

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paramount in their interaction, as for the aspiration to overcome their previous distrust and diffidence (they agree to have a regular epistolary correspondence). As Laura’s gest of bringing Fuller food and drinks, and his letter of apology demonstrate, what is more, there is an affective instance that emerges from their exchange: the necessity for a mutual affective care in order to respond to loneliness, to isolation, and to the marginalisation and confinement described by precarious existence. Similarly, we can see how, in the sequence describing Jamie and Beth riding a horse together, these actions of mutual emotional support operate as complete disruption of a pre-existent experiential dynamic. If the relationship between the two women is blocked by a sort affective closure, in this sequence, instead, we see them in a strong physical contact and finally reaching one another (the scene is one minute and ten seconds long, features only two cuts, and is mostly composed of medium close-ups plus slow following camera movements). The silence of the characters and the absence of music theme contribute in synesthetically reinforcing the solemnity and power of this final encounter, which describes an existential possibility beyond the restricting framework of individual existence. Even minimal events, therefore, as for the security guard giving Wendy few dollars before she leaves the town, operate as a profound element of resistance within the affective fabric of the films, as they enact an explicit rejection of the alienating dynamics of capitalism. Not incidentally, as Reichardt herself affirmed, her films came out from the necessity of rediscovering responsibility for collective welfare and communal existence against the mythological construction of individualised identities (Inside Criterion/On the channel 2019). Small acts of care, therefore, produce, within the chronotopes of Reichardt’s films, polyphonic openings, signals of possibility beyond the closure of temporality envisioned by a precarious life. They act as the configuration of a new collectivity and evoke the necessity for a new identity, something that we can see dialogically enacted also in the form of absent and/or partial images of first nations people: Laura looking at the dance of the natives at the mall, the native stones that Gina wants to use to build the house, Jamie’s care and craving for connection (or other similar images returning in Reichardt’s films). All these instances of a missing people evoke the need to establish a new way of experiencing the world by rebuilding, reconstructing, and healing relations. This same perspective is the one emerging in Night Moves when Sean (Kai Lennox), the leader of the cooperative farm Josh lives in, advocates a slow but constructive process aimed at rebuilding a positive connection with the environment

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against easy conciliating answers as the terrorist attack. The mutual care polyphonically enacted by these moments, however, does not envision ethical affirmation as a uniquely positive and linear process. This path requires the capacity to live through and being capable to acknowledge the level of suffering and mortification connected with inhabiting a precarious existence and building, in creative opposition to that, a collectivity of care. As Sara Ahmed and Rosi Braidotti demonstrated, affirmative and ‘joyful’ (or rather powerful in Spinozist terms, cf. 2002, 334–338) ethics are produced exactly through a clear recognition of the pain and suffering pervading the fabrics of our reality (Ahmed 2010, 213–216, 222–223; Braidotti 2019, 169–171). Actively dealing with the negative, in turn, reminds us of our relationality, of our immanent interconnection with the world and with one another, and of the consequent necessity for cooperative experimentation, in order to settle the possibility for new communities to emerge.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. London: Duke University Press. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. London: Duke University Press. BFI. 2017. Kelly Reichardt: My Films Are About People Who Don’t Have a Safety Net. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9A0M6S0nbE. Bradshaw, Peter. 2014. Night Moves Review—Jesse Eisenberg Makes a Convincingly Numb Dam-buster. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian. com/film/2014/aug/28/night-­moves-­review-­jesse-­eisenberg. Braidotti, Rosi. 2019. Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press. https:// politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509535255. Ciccarelli, Roberto. 2018. Il Capitale Disumano: La Vita in Alternanza Scuola-­ Lavoro. Roma: Manifestolibri. De Pascalis, Ilaria A. 2014. Il Cinema Europeo Contemporaneo. Scenari transnazionali, immaginari globali. Roma: Bulzoni. Fana, Marta. 2017. Non è lavoro, è sfruttamento. Bari: Laterza. Foucault, Michel. 2008. Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Edited by M. Senellart. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fusco, Katherine, and Nicole Seymour. 2017. Kelly Reichardt. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Guattari, Félix. 1995. Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Translated by P. Bains and J. Pefanis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Holtmeier, Matthew. 2017. Communicating Cascadia: Reichardt’s Three Ecologies as Bioregional Medium. Screen 58 (4): 477–496. https://doi. org/10.1093/screen/hjx040.

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Inside Criterion/On the channel. 2019. Questioning the American Dream in Reichardt’s Cinema. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6327­questioning-­the-­american-­dream-­in-­kelly-­reichardt-­s-­cinema. Lagerwey, Jorie, Julia Leyda, Diane Negra. 2016. Female-Centred TV in the Age of Precarity. Genders, University of Colorado Boulder, 1, no. 1. https://www. colorado.edu/genders/2016/05/19/female-­centered-­tv-­age-­precarity. Lee, Jonathan, and Haris Majeed. 2017. The Impact of Climate Change on Youth Depression and Mental Health. The Lancet-Planetary Health 1 (3, June): 94–95. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-­5196(17)30045-­1. Leonard, Suzanne. 2014. Escaping the Recession? The New Vitality of the Woman Worker. In Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity, ed. D. Negra and Y. Tasker, 31–58. London: Duke University. Littman, Sam. 2014. Reichardt, Kelly. Senses of Cinema. http://sensesofcinema. com/2014/great-­directors/kelly-­reichardt/. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1988. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and The Communist Manifesto. Translated by Martin Milligan. New York: Prometheus Books. McRobbie, Angela. 2004. Postfeminism and Popular Culture. Feminist Media Studies 4 (3): 255–264. https://doi.org/10.1080/1468077042000309937. Reichardt, Kelly. 2008. Wendy and Lucy. Produced by Larry Fessenden, Neil Kopp, et al. US: Field Guide Films, Film Science, et al. DVD, 80 mins. ———. 2013. Night Moves. Produced by Seimi Kim, Neil Kopp, et  al. US: Maybach Film Productions, RT Features, et al. DVD, 112 mins. ———. 2016. Certain Women. Produced by Neil Kopp, Vincent Savino, et al. US: Film Science, Stage 6 Films, et al. DVD, 107 mins. Rottenberg, Charlotte. 2018. The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism. New York: Oxford University Press. Scher, Avichai. 2018. Climate Grief: The Growing Emotional Toll of Climate Change. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/mental-­health/ climate-­grief-­growing-­emotional-­toll-­climate-­change-­n946751. Spinoza, Baruch. 2002. Complete Works. Edited by M. L. Morgan, translated by S. Shirley. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Tallerico, Brian. 2014. Night Moves: Review. RogerEbert.com. Accessed August 30, 2019. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/night-­moves-­2014. Thoma, Pamela. 2014. What Julia Knew: Domestic Labor in the Recession-Era Chick Flick. In Gendering the Recession: media and Culture in an Age of Austerity, ed. D. Negra and Y. Tasker, 107–135. London: Duke University Press. Watkins, Robert E. 2016. Freedom and Vengeance on Film: Precarious Lives and the Politics of Subjectivity. London: I. B. Tauris.

CHAPTER 8

Italian Peripheral Cinema: Boys Cry and Don’t Be Bad

Peripheries and urban outskirts constitute, as we have seen, recurring chronotopic patterns in our discussion. These ecologies embody core dynamics of neoliberal governance, in particular they operate as marginalising forces, separating the subjects inhabiting them from the spaces and opportunities of adjacent metropolitan centres (cf. Sassen 2014, 213–215). We have observed how peripheral chronotopes, in the case of Fish Tank, produce a sense of constant emergency and anxiety connected with the craving for an alternative existential path in a framework of complete limitation. In this chapter, using case studies from contemporary Italian cinema, we will see how this same affective dimension of exclusion can be translated also into a more definite ethical weakness, restructuring the horizon of possibility for the characters to short-term and self-destructive choices. When I refer to the concept of peripheral cinema, however, I am not addressing films and TV series produced in marginal contexts and existing at the borders of mainstream screen culture exhibition and distribution (cf. Brown 2018, 2; Iordanova, Martin Jones and Vidal 2010, 6–7). What I am discussing is the periphery as chronotope of precarity and its intrinsic affective and dialogical dynamics. The impossibility to affirmatively imagine the future is, indeed, one of the main characteristics of what I would dare to define as a cycle in contemporary Italian cinema, which finds its most appropriate and functional setting exactly at the margins of big cities. In many cases the periphery has become the ideal scenery for successful crime drama shows and films, as © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Sticchi, Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63261-8_8

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we can see, for instance, with the choice of suburban areas of Naples (Scampia and Secondigliano) in the series Gomorrah (2014–ongoing), or of Ostia (a seaside city close to the Italian capital) and the outskirts of Rome in the movie Suburra (Stefano Sollima 2015), and in the homonymous TV series (2017–ongoing). In these cases, the decaying and threatening landscape of the periphery appears as the perfect background for criminal and immoral activities, coupling the ethical collapse expressed by the characters operating in it. In other films, these chronotopic patterns are connected with melodramatic tones, letting us walk through the desperate intimate lives of characters, such as single mothers, or of young outsiders, trying to find their own identities and expressing their need for love and recognition against visible social restrictions (this is the case, for instance, of Fiore, Giovannesi 2016, and Pure Hearts [Cuori Puri], De Paolis 2017). The decaying and abandoned periphery can also be translated in a sort of primordial and brutal predicament as in the peculiar Dogman (2018) by Matteo Garrone. Likewise, the two films that I will be discussing more extensively in this chapter, Don’t Be Bad (Non Essere Cattivo, Claudio Caligari 2015) and Boys Cry (La Terra dell’Abbastanza, D’Innocenzo Bros. 2018), are characterised by similar chronotopic elements and are both located in the outskirts of Rome. The two films clearly fall within the crime drama genre and allow us to highlight challenging ethical and affective features of precarious lives at the periphery. While in case studies discussed in the first part of the book the city centre remained a faraway (but present) location to aspire to, in these films, instead, it appears as completely abolished and impossible to reach—a detachment that reinforces and strengthens the desperate behaviours of their characters. In Don’t Be Bad, set in 1995, we follow the two main characters, Vittorio (Alessandro Borghi) and Cesare (Luca Marinelli), scraping a living in Ostia through small crimes and low-­ level drug smuggling. The two characters do not seem to have consistent plans for their futures and just look for forms of momentary enjoyment or for distractions from the inexorable repetition of everyday life miseries. In this sense, we will see how the development of the story events builds up a specific embodied fabula, in particular if compared with those emerging from chronotopes of anxiety, where precarious lives are connected with immobility rather than with constant sensations of threat and urgency. The first sequence of the film (re-enacting also the beginning of Caligari’s first feature Amore Tossico [Toxic Love 1983]) already puts viewers at the centre of this existential dimension and shows Cesare running

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towards Vittorio (establishing/long-shot in top-down perspective associated with left to right panoramic movement), who is waiting at the seaside. As they meet, Cesare accuses the friend of not doing enough to find drugs for the evening, whereas Vittorio promptly responds by showing few pills. Apart from the everyday search and consumption of narcotics, few other activities, such as going to dance clubs, seem to drive Vittorio and Cesare. Their usual meeting place, a bar placed on the seaside at the centre of a big empty parking lot, where many other unemployed, drug addicts, and members of small gangs spend their entire days, operates as one of the main chronotopic and emotional setting of the experience. Its topographical mapping within an open and undefined space limits the possibility for a clear physical orientation by not providing specific reference points and can be easily associated with a lack of agentive and interactive possibilities. The sense of dejection and inaction produced by the absence of linear and progressive topographical patterns, however, is extended to the entire film ecology, characterised by small and decaying buildings and mostly poor residential constructions. This chronotope, therefore, shows a public space where no particular social activity takes place (the types of businesses shown in the film are also very limited), automatically reducing the imagination of existential alternatives for the characters, who appear stuck in an unchangeable and immobile temporality (see also Santoro 2015). As Caligari affirmed, while talking about Ostia and the precarious life of Roman outskirts—constituting the main setting and focus of his films—drug smuggling and consumption is the only expression of the periphery’s participation in a modern consumerist society (Raimo 2014). Heroin, cocaine, and psychotropic pills embody the only real commodities available in this specific setting, and, at the same time, the commerce of these substances represents its only structured industry and welfare system. As  Brutto (Alessandro Bernardini), the leading figure in the small gang Vittorio and Cesare belong to, argues, ‘a lot of people here make a decent living by selling it’, often accompanying drug dealing with legal low-paid jobs. The sole dialogically opposed element in the topographical c­ onstruction of the film is constituted by the openness provided by the sea in the ­background, which, nonetheless, contrasts with a landscape where other harmonic and balanced elements are absent and abolished, together with the impossibility to clearly map the boundaries of the periphery. Indeed, the lacking of a distinct territorial demarcation between the periphery and its outsides prevents any comparison between different spaces, limiting the

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horizon to an endless reproduction of similar chronotopic patterns. A very incisive dialogue taking place between Cesare and Brutto, while they are concluding a heroin shipment, perfectly expresses the consequences of these experiential dynamics. The two characters are looking at their wealthy client getting on a yacht; Cesare asks his friend if he ever went on a boat like that and where would he go with one of those. He also adds that ‘it would be nice to move out of all the shit surrounding us’ while the partner sardonically replies, ‘And where would we go?’ arguing that Cesare should not look at the sea, otherwise he will start thinking too much. The chronotopically divergent element expressed by the yacht, embodying an idea of luxury and possibility for movement within a context pervaded by a sense of misery and decay, therefore, is not enough to allow the characters to figure an ‘outside’ from the periphery. On the contrary, as Brutto and Cesare’s lines remark, it only reinforces the idea of their confinement, the absolute exclusion of an alternative. Furthermore, apart from the initial sequence, most of the shots and of the camera movements (cinematography by Maurizio Calvesi) are placed on the height of the characters, thus allowing viewer to travel within the space from their perspective and clearly engaging with a particular emotional definition of the storyworld, in which higher and detached positions are abolished. The soft tonalities charactersing the entire experience (with desaturated grey and blue palettes) further contribute in the definition of overall affects of depression. Similar ‘peripheral’ chronotopic and experiential patterns can be noticed in Boys Cry, in which we follow the two teenagers Mirko (Matteo Olivetti) and Manolo (Andrea Carpenzano) passing from being two high school students, with plans for a precarious but legal future, to joining a local criminal organisation. As for Don’t Be Bad, the periphery presents itself as a horizontally extended space, of which it is impossible to map boundaries and clear reference points, with the consequent abolition of an outside. Even the limited sequences set in Rome city centre do not allow us to interact with differential experiential patterns, as they are mostly constituted by close-ups (in particular for what concerns external locations), whereas medium shots are used mainly to describe interior spaces. Differently from the previous case study, however, this urban space possesses more disturbing and discomforting features, produced through consistent use of chiaroscuro and an aggressive saturation of colour tones (cinematography by Paolo Carnera), in particular, acid yellows and greens, which exasperate the violent emotions pervading the environment also in daytime set sequences (van Hoeji 2018). On the other hand, while in

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Don’t Be Bad we experience a mostly standardised architectural composition of the landscape, the periphery of Boys Cry is disharmonic, featuring building with heterogeneous shapes and colour tonalities combined with their visible material deterioration. Furthermore, the intricate assemblage of roads and infrastructures filling the ecological background participate in this experiential discomfort, replicated in interior locations by the use of very small spaces overwhelmed by objects and furniture limiting the operational possibilities of the characters. We could argue, therefore, that the melancholic mood of Don’t Be Bad emerges with the impossibility to define an outside to that particular existential framework; in Boys Cry, this same pervasive affective pattern appears exasperated also in a form of existential insecurity, emerging from its distorted aesthetic features. Both these chronotopes allow us to define the periphery, following Giuliana Bruno’s analysis, as a specific sensuous geography, as a ‘lived space’ with its particular emotional life, plasticity and haptic possibilities (cf. 2002, 251–253), configured around depressive experiential tones. Bruno’s considerations on geographical and emotional maps, indeed, are essential to remember how, in film experience, the intimate life of the characters is always externalised and in constant interaction with the architextural composition of the storyworld that may reinforce, contradict, and enrich the affective complexity of the fictional figures exploring them (cf. 2002, 96–98). Following this line, by examining Cesare and Vittorio’s affective life, we see that while the latter does not seem to have important familial or love relationships, Cesare, instead, is attached to his old mother and to his orphan young niece affected by HIV (contracted from her dead mother) and lives together with them. Cesare’s existential position is, consequently, characterised by the pressuring necessity to find ways to provide for his family (indebted with local loan sharks), a need that drives him to extreme choices and to always look for money in the fastest and riskiest manner. While these existential differences between the two characters—visibly united by a strong relationship of brotherhood and complicity—do not seem to separate them, an initial turning point is dialogically expressed by Vittorio’s meeting with Linda  (Roberta Mattei), a single mother who pushes him to find a proper job and to make plans for the future. This encounter presents the possibility for a different path for Vittorio, who, indeed, will become a brick worker, will move to Linda’s apartment, and will progressively limit his interaction with Cesare and the usual gang, thus establishing a profound emotional and ethical division between the two.

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After an unspecified period of time, we see Vittorio, who has stopped from using drugs, accusing Cesare of just losing time and wasting his life, whereas the latter complains about being abandoned by his ‘old brother’. Their existential separation is reinforced in the sequence in which we see Vittorio trying to have Cesare join a crew working on a building site. In this occurrence, while the former is concerned about his reputation and respectability as professional, Cesare uses this occasion to pilfer as much money as possible and even scams the site manager. The introductory section of Boys Cry presents an analogue affective path, describing an emotional connection that finds a moment of tension and distress with the outlining of economic and ‘career’ separations between Mirko and Manolo. The first sequence of the film makes us directly access the strong friendship between the two main characters, as we observe their eating and having a good time together in Mirko’s car. The communication of their bond of brotherhood is enacted through a very intimate aesthetic composition, based on shot reverse shot succession of extreme close-up, emphasising their closeness and connection. The two talk about their prospects for the future, opting for careers as bartenders and waiters or aspiring to become chefs, while driving back home at night and incidentally killing a passer-by. After not reporting the event, abandoning the victim, and asking for Manolo’s father (Danilo [Max Tortora]) counsel, the two discover that the person they have killed was the enemy of a local criminal organisation (the Pantano clan), a police collaborator hiding in order to avoid retaliations. Danilo sees this tragic occurrence as an opportunity for Manolo’s and his own economic emancipation and convinces his son to reach out for the Pantano’s leaders and pretend that he killed the man out of respect for them, in order to join the clan afterwards. What clearly emerges from these initial developments of the story events is a level of complete ethical disarray pervading the fictional world of the characters; an accidental homicide is framed as an economic occasion, and the initial justifiable panic of Mirko and Manolo for the accident dialogically transforms into an opportunity for social mobility. We have observed, indeed, how the periphery sets an existential dimension lacking alternatives routes and outsides, an absence increased (in this case) by a menacing atmosphere. In this chronotope, therefore, having the possibility to access a criminal organisation and then killing, smuggling drugs, or exploiting prostitutions of young women are not categorised as extreme acts, as marginal options. These are, instead, perceived as life-turning points, as reasonable chances. Svoltare (‘to turn one’s life  around’) is,

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indeed, the typical Roman expression often used in the film to emphatically indicate a lifetime occasion (or generally a game-changing event), which, in this instance, comes from criminal activities. Apart from Danilo’s enthusiasm for the event, Mirko and Manolo as well seem to perceive in the accidental murder an unmissable occasion. The cause of the tension between the two young men is exactly the fact that Manolo accesses the gang without bringing his friend with him, causing Mirko’s envious reaction and multiple quarrels. Again, as for Don’t Be Bad, differing economic opportunities end up constructing alternative paths for the characters; of course, in the first case, Vittorio embarks on a legal profession involving the imagination of a future as family man, whereas Mirko and Manolo directly point to the admission into the gangsters’ underworld. It is in this difference that we can appreciate the diverging affective and chronotopic patterns between the two films, where, in the first case, melancholy and dejection are dominating sad passions, while a sense of corruption pervades the world of Boys Cry. Likewise, we can dialogically relate Mirko and Manolo’s enthusiasm for joining the criminal world with their conversation in the car at the beginning of the film. While discussing their future in the catering industry (they study in a hotel management school), indeed, they continuously point out how, although desiring to work, their aspirations and existential plans are very limited. They add with a certain level of despise that ‘even Albanian, Romanians, and Gipsies are barmen and waiters nowadays’ stressing, with these racist remarks, how their professional prospects involve exclusively low-paying/precarious forms of employment (typically assigned to the migrant workforce). Against a lifetime of hard work not providing certainty of economic well-being, therefore, passing to the crime business appears as an appropriate financial choice, generating clearer routes for emancipation and, eventually, for exiting the periphery. Indeed, as the same D’Innocenzo Bros. affirmed in an interview, the social ecology of Mirko and Manolo is not exactly one of pure economic destitution, but of precarious proximity to it, involving a certain level of economic prosperity allowing for the aspiration of a class upgrade (Berlino Magazine 2018). The original title of the film (La Terra dell’Abbastanza, literally ‘The Land of the Enough’) indicates, therefore, a grey zone between poverty and a low middle-class position. This status justifies also Mirko and Manolo’s coveting for social mobility and for the enjoyment of a consumerist dream, which, on one side, prevents and undermines any sense of social awareness and motivates, instead, a complete subjective

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embodiment, on their behalf, of the myth of economic individualism. We could argue, therefore, that while Vittorio and Cesare (at the beginning) try to make a living without particular options for a different future, Mirko and Manolo, on the other hand, still pursue a dream of the outside, which they apparently reach through illegal activities: ‘I am going to live in a hotel now, have you ever been in one before?’ Mirko boastfully tells Manolo after he moved out of his mother’s house. The two characters’ parental figures also seem to dialogically underscore their lack of positive ethical coordinates and reference points. We have seen, for instance, how Danilo instantaneously sees joining the criminal world as a lifetime dream (he is also a gambler and failed to become a member of the clan himself), effectively expressing an evident moral corruption, whereas Mirko’s single mother, Alessia  (Milena Mancini), is unable to stop her son in his self-­ destructive path. Concurrently, one of Mirko’s initial motivation appears that of finally becoming the home breadwinner and to better provide for his mother. The chronotopic variations between Don’t Be Bad and Boys Cry are ­further indicators of how the films’ topographical maps do not operate as simple spatial markers, but express affective geographies interconnecting experiential dynamics with the ‘public’ intimacy of the characters. The periphery of the first case study, with its constant patterns of exclusion, lack of progressive elements, and immobility, therefore, matches Cesare and Vittorio’s acceptance and management, in divergent ways, of their own precarity; on the other hand, Mirko and Manolo’s moral corruption is refracted on the distorted and poisonous urban landscape surrounding them. Notwithstanding these important experiential differences, the two films share a fundamental interactive coordinate in the sense of entrapment and encapsulation that they enact. These cinematic chronotopes enable viewers to perceive the characters as subjectivities stuck in specific spatial coordinates and in a connected network of relations, similar to the one noticed by Maria Poulaki when analysing Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah (Gomorra 2008), where these experiential features allowed for the embodiment of a complex criminal ecology (2012). In the  case studies we are discussing, however, the entrapment of the characters mostly functions to emphasise their passivity and ethical impotence, as they seem incapable of actively directing their lives and just inadequately respond to changing conditions. Another common affective motif between the two movies is the major importance of male friendship and brotherhood within the ecological system of the periphery. Vittorio and Cesare, as Mirko and Manolo, grew up

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together sharing all sorts of life experiences and aspirations; moreover, these close bonds feature a sort of economic and social complicity between them. Central path of both friendships is a constant mutual support: ‘If I don’t help him (Cesare), who does,’ argues Vittorio, whereas Mirko tells Manolo that they have passed all the school years together and then they will also be helping each other on their workplaces. This chronotopic pattern, what is more, is also another element shared with Garrone’s Gomorrah, in which one of the principal episodes focuses on the two young men, Ciro and Marco, tragically attempting to become ‘independent’ gangsters against well-established contextual criminal organisations. However, the affective bonds in both case studies, as we have seen, face critical moments not because of moral and affective divergences but in correspondence with differing financial opportunities. Mirko visibly and harshly resents Manolo for not helping him joining the Pantano’s clan from the beginning; nonetheless, he is very eager to overcome his grudge as soon as the occasion is found for him to become a gangster as well. The fastness and mobility in these interpersonal exchanges, associated with the ‘professional upgrades’ of the characters, allow us to see how friendship is enacted exactly as a sort of micro-entrepreneurial organisation, with a connected minimal form of mutualism through which precarious subjects support each other. Therefore, their fellowship is not grounded on what we could indicate as an ethical transformative level, but on a competitive basis, as it also involves the two of them helping each other in climbing the social ladder. Vittorio and Cesare’s friendship, on the other hand, although established on an explicit empathic bond, will start to fade away irremediably after Cesare’s niece’s death. The insurmountable distance between them is, indeed, effectively enacted in a sequence showing them doing brickwork together one last time. As they stop for a lunch break, we see Cesare exhausted lying on the wall and Vittorio worried looking at him (shot reverse shot composition), since he recognises that his friend has not stopped using drugs but, eventually, turns a blind eye on him. Cesare and Vittorio’s separate lives are, nonetheless, in close dialogical interrelation. Both men end up trying to build new families: Vittorio with Linda, and Cesare with Viviana  (Silvia D’Amico). In the first case, the effort to build up a decent and honest life appears arduous, but achievable; for Cesare, instead, the path seems impossible to follow as we can assume from the ecological setting of his new home: an abandoned and decaying building in the countryside. Although Cesare and Viviana refurbish its

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interior décor with all the facilities necessary for a family home and cover it with posters and painting of exotic locations, the external isolation and visible material consumption of the house oppose the internal ‘hopeful’ elements. This contrast enhances even more Cesare’s lack of prospects and accompanies us to his final desperate act: a failed armed robbery during which he will be shot. He will die, then, in Viviana’s arms, showing him the money gained from what he thought was an unresolved and unsuccessful drug deal. Cesare’s tragic departure appears, therefore, as the result of a slow process of decay and defeat, associated also with his inability to effectively plan his life, leading to his necessary and unavoidable end. This trajectory is dialogically contrasted by Vittorio’s apparent emancipation; a divergent destiny conveyed through a temporal jump of one year, using the fake exotic background of Cesare’s house walls as reference for a cross-­ dissolve cutting on the sunset on Ostia’s shores and on Vittorio’s family unity, featuring him with Linda and her son Tommasino fishing together. If Cesare’s journey into illegality is irredeemably destined to a negative outcome, Mirko and Manolo activities with the Pantano’s clan have no glamorous or uplifting impact on their teenage lives. On the contrary, it is possible to argue that the criminal world in Boys Cry is presented in completely underwhelming tones, embodying, again, a ‘peripheral’ phenomenon, disconnected from ambitious economic aspirations. Mirko and Manolo are used as cheap workforce, committing every kind of illegal act and risking their lives for a low pay, enough to buy some commodities (new smartphones or laptops), instead of allowing for social status change. The ‘work environment’ of the clan (a countryside home, with dark and narrow interiors overloaded with fumes deriving from cigarettes and the production of drugs) is far from showing an exit from the previous existential landscape. The same appearance and behaviour of Simone and Angelo (the leaders of the gang, played by Giordano De Plano and Luca Zingaretti) contributes in providing a generally distasteful image of gangsters’ lives. These two characters, in a sort of dialogical reversal of the criminal iconography, wear cheap clothes, their beards are unkempt, and they do not feature a strong physical presence or any idea of cunningness. Notwithstanding these specific features, their ecology is pervaded by a sense of danger, moral corruption, and brutality. Indeed, a long sequence (halfway through the narration), set in the headquarter of the clan, manages to combine these apparently opposed sensations describing, on one side, a very poor dinner between the gangsters, in which buffalo mozzarella is presented as a luxury course. On the other hand, this same scene

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shows the repulsive rape of young immigrant women (destined to the sex market) at the hands of Angelo and other members of the gang. Mirko and Manolo, notwithstanding their visibly subordinate position in the clan, in turn, embody and reproduce a similar cruelty when interacting with the sex-workers or with the calm they show when killing people. Mirko, in particular, reiterates an aggressive and sexist behaviour also in his intimate life, causing his girlfriend to abandon him and an increasing conflict with his mother. Both characters also display a compulsive consumerist attitude by continuously buying commodities in order to compensate for the distress related to their roles. Another example of the underwhelming tone accompanied with their dangerous criminal life is constituted by the sequence of their final ‘mission’: killing a competitor of their clan. Instead of presenting this tense moment through a direct involvement in the action, the murder remains off-screen, and the scene is mostly shot with a fixed bird’s-eye view (top-down perspective) diminishing the dramatic intensity of the moment. This event leads to the unexpected and concurrently daunting suicide of Manolo, who was clearly hiding his affective discomfort in living a gangster’s life. Mirko, devastated for the death of his friend, will find a similar tragic end and, after a final act of repentance to his mother, will be killed (by his own gang) when trying to turn himself in to the police. The relaxed pace through which we see these two tragic destinies developing effectively communicates the sense of inevitability and pre-determination connected with them, thus emphasising even more the absurdity of their choices and the complete lack of awareness of the characters. Likewise, Simone’s words, when suggesting Angelo to use Mirko and Manolo for their final job, are emblematic both of the exploitative condition subsumed by the two young men and of their extreme ethical passivity. The gangster, indeed, argues that ‘they are naturally born for killing, as they do not seem to understand what they are doing’, implying that they are just cannon fodders to be used in every kind of task without taking a risk. Mirko and Manolo’s unsurprising defeat functions as a reaffirmation of the implicit limit of the periphery denying, on one side, illusions of alternatives. At the same time, the disenchanting development of the story events demolishes the dream of (criminal) individualist economic emancipation, which is reduced to a suicidal and ethically disempowering fantasy.1 The final sequence of the film with Alessia 1  Similar chronotopic patterns are recognisable also in Piranhas (La Paranza dei Bambini Giovannesi 2019).

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and Danilo meeting some time after their sons’ deaths also reaffirms the existential starting point of the narrative, their social grey zone (‘the enough’) with the woman stating that she is going to prepare a meal for her stepdaughter using ‘whatever she may find’. A declaration that by reiterating the social fragility of the character finally removes the image of economic emancipation from the chronotope of the film. If the ending of Boys Cry strongly directs the viewer towards a ­melancholic process of disenchantment, the final minutes of Don’t Be Bad operate, instead, a distressing dialogical overturning in the embodied ­fabula of the film. Vittorio’s life seems to be going on without troubles, as we experience a sort of idyllic moment describing him and Tommasino tiling together. The relaxed mood of the sequence, reinforced by a ­harmonic series of cross-dissolves and by the serene expressions of the two characters, affirms Vittorio’s pride for his work and professionality and an apparent sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. These elements are, however, soon after dialogically contrasted when Linda states that they need more money, as what they have is not enough. The previous positive family picture soon collapses as Vittorio discovers that Tommasino tried to join Brutto’s gang in order to economically contribute to the house income, whereas the main character hesitates about doing some drug ­dealing as well. These passages, therefore, dramatically enact a failure of Vittorio’s dream of a honest life built around hard work, presenting a reversal in the embodied fabula through an apparent return of the main character into the world of small criminality. As for Boys Cry, the ‘enough’ involves a desire for more, the aspiration to be part of a wealthier milieu and embody, in consonance with the zeitgeist and temporal setting of the film, the Berlusconian ‘incitement to enjoy’ and the neoliberal myth of affirmation through consumerism and self-management (see Dardot and Laval 2017, 287). A subjectivated mythology of success that undermines the possibility for ethical renovation, which remains as an impossible hope, embodied in the final discovery of Viviana and Cesare’s new-born son. Notwithstanding the fact that the embodied fabulas of both films enact processes of predictable failures and relentless exclusion, these c­ hronotopes also provide us with productive ethical challenges. By putting to test the dream of social mobility and observing the extreme consequences of the application of individualist self-management rules, these peripheral stories allow viewers to experience these constructions of subjectivity as ­emotional and geographical traps, as ethical cul de sac with no transformative and progressive horizon. This same utilitarian morality disempowers the

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genuine ethical ground emerging from friendship, brotherhood, and emotional bonds, which need to be liberated from their imagined economic functionality in order to become spaces for solidary organisation. The periphery is, therefore, also a periphery of the ‘soul’, of a close identity incapable of perceiving and producing alternative territories that can thrive in every space of social existence, but need to be invented, imagined, and built collectively.

References Berlino Magazine. 2018. Berlinale 2018, intervista ai Fratelli D’Innocenzo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gwqrenKVjk. Brown, William. 2018. Non-Cinema: Global Digital Cinema and the Multitude. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Bruno, Giuliana. 2002. Atlas of Emotions: Journey in Art, Architecture, and Film. London: Verso. Caligari, Claudio. 1983. Amore Tossico. Produced by Giorgio Nocella. Italy: Iter International. DVD, 96 mins. ———. 2015. Non Essere Cattivo. Produced by Paolo Bogna, Valerio Mastandrea, et al. Italy: Kimerafilm, Rai Cinema, et al. DVD, 103 mins. D’Innocenzo, Damiano, and Fabio D’Innocenzo. 2018. La Terra dell’Abbastanza. Produced by Ivan D’Ambrosio. Italy: Pepito Produzioni. DVD, 95 mins. Dardot, Pierre, and Christian Laval. 2017. The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society. Translated by G. Elliot. London: Verso. De Paolis, Roberto. 2017. Cuori Puri. Produced by Carla Altieri. Italy: Rai Cinema, Young Films. DVD, 115 mins. Garrone, Matteo. 2008. Gomorra. Produced by Laura Paolucci, Domenico Procacci. Italy: Fandango. DVD, 137 mins. ———. 2018. Dogman. Produced by Paolo Del Brocco, Matteo Garrone, et al. Italy: Archimede, Le Pacte, et al. DVD, 103 mins. Giovannesi, Claudio. 2016. Fiore. Produced by Beppe Caschetto, Valerio Mastandrea, et al. Italy: Pupkin Production, IBC Movie, et al. DVD, 110 mins. ———. 2019. La Paranza dei Bambini. Produced by Carlo Degli Esposti, Nicola Serra. Italy: Palomar, Vision Distribution, et al. DVD, 111 mins. Iordanova, Dina, David Martin-Jones, and Belén Vidal. 2010. Introduction. In Cinema at the Periphery, ed. D. Iardanova, D. Martin-Jones, and B. Vidal, 1–19. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Poulaki, Maria. 2012. The Subject Trapped in Gomorrah: Undecidability and Choice in Network Cinema. Film-Philosophy 16 (1): 55–71. https://doi. org/10.3366/film.2012.0004.

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Raimo, Christian. 2014. Caligari, due film bellissimi in trent’anni. E il terzo?. In Internazaionale. https://www.internazionale.it/opinione/christian-­raimo/ 2014/11/15/caligari-­due-­film-­bellissimi-­in-­trent-­anni-­e-­il-­terzo. Santoro, Giuliano. 2015. Non si esce vivi da Ostia. In Prismo. http://www.­ prismomag.com/non-­essere-­cattivo-­caligari/. Sassen, Saskia. 2014. Expulsion: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sollima, Stefano. 2015. Suburra. Produced by Marco Chimenz, Riccardo Tozzi, et al. Italy: Cattleya, Rai Cinema. DVD, 130 mins. Van Hoeji, Boyd. 2018. Boys Cry’ (La terra dell’abbastanza): Film Review. Berlin 2018. In Hollywood Reporter. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/ boys-­cry-­la-­terra-­dellabbastanza-­1086210.

CHAPTER 9

Gig Workers and Emotional Labour: Sorry We Missed You, Araby, Two Days, One Night

The management of subjectivity as a private enterprise is a recurring chronotopic and dialogical element of many of the case studies discussed so far and has been examined specifically in connection with affective patterns of anxiety. In this chapter, we will focus on a variety of working subjects who have completely embodied the dynamics of the performance economy, but only look for ways to adapt and negotiate their position within existentially pre-determined and disempowering chronotopes. These characters do not go through intense processes of transformation related to the adoption of cruel competitive stances, nor feel the discomfort of accessing an alien dimension of contemporary work, but assume the features of individualisation, segmentation, and ethical isolation of the workforce as pure facts and essential elements of their realities. The ‘aesthetic of the fragments’ of the working class discussed in this chapter, as Martin O’Shaughnessy has highlighted when discussing contemporary French political cinema, however, is not only functional to recognise the suffering and the ethical weakness of precarious subjectivities; it enacts a process of active affective reconstruction, a ‘making sense’ of tragedies liberating the space for a new connectivity and political dimension (2009, 100–101, 128). Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You (2019) can be easily dialogically connected with I, Daniel Blake, which, in many ways, acts as its companion piece (the film is set as well in Newcastle); also in this case the film begins with an interview (with the dialogue starting on black screen and, then, later on cutting to the figures talking) involving the main character, Ricky © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Sticchi, Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63261-8_9

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(Kris Hitchen), applying for a job as independent driver for a delivery company (‘you do not work for us, you work with us,’ the manager states when describing the job). The camerawork is also very similar, being based on a shot reverse shot composition of medium close-ups, using natural light for the interior environment (again the cinematography is by Robbie Ryan). However, in the case of Daniel, the first sequence was essentially based on showing the discomfort of the main character in having to deal with unknown workfare institutions and procedures. For Ricky, on the other hand, the initial moments express a positive exchange between him and his soon-to-be very despotic manager, Maloney  (Ross Brewster). The main character describes his misadventures in passing from one poor job to the other without never being able to uplift his family from long-lasting financial pressures. Ricky, therefore, appears optimistic about opening his own franchise, to finally have the opportunity to be awarded for the good efforts he has always shown as a worker (his salary will be based on fees, not wages). Being part of the gig-economy, paid on a commission base, connected with the quality of the services provided, for Ricky means becoming his own boss (as he argues during the interview), implying how his idea of employment does not involve collective bargaining or critical awareness about the existence  of hierarchical structures. Contrary to Daniel, he is completely absorbed in the dynamics of the neoliberal economy, not expressing opposition to the idea of taking on himself, as worker, all the economic risks of the private enterprise, together with the personal accountability for all the equipment necessary for his profession. In a certain sense, we could add that Ricky becomes his own ‘start-up’, an atomised company in competition with rivals/colleagues driven by an apparent dream of autonomy and independence (cf. Ciccarelli 2018, 157–160). The provider company, on the other hand, because of its absolute negotiating power, connected with the unaccountable and obligation-free relationship built with each worker, can push an isolated and atomised employee to provide her/his services under always more precarious circumstances (cf. Fana 2017, 40–42). The dynamics of the gig and performance economy, indeed, define an experiential horizon where work does not involve repeating specific tasks, but performing, operating every time at the best of one’s own capabilities in order to demonstrate being worth the salary, which becomes the award of a guilty and moralised working subject. Thus, as many scholars have pointed out, in the gig-economy we assist to the combination of very old methods of exploitation, such as piecework, with the intricate mechanisms of digital capitalism (see Ciccarelli 2018, 61–62; Fana 2017, 35–38) in a

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way that seems to prevent previous modalities of collective organisation. Indeed, an exchange involving Ricky’s wife, Abbie (played by Debbie Honeywood)—who is also operating in the gig-economy as an in-home nurse on zero-hour contracts—with one of her patients, displays the notion of workers’ union as an idealised image from the past. We see her client (an expression Abbie hates) showing a picture from the anti-­ Thatcher protests and talking about it with a melancholic and nostalgic longing, highlighting the strength of collective actions, and the joy and possibility connected with those struggles. The confinement of these experiences to memories of a lost (and defeated) past emphasises, on one side, the irrecuperable distance with this historical and social dimension and, therefore, increases the sense of fragmentation and political subjection affecting Abbie and Ricky. Here, we can also see a further dialogical feature separating the film from I, Daniel Blake, which, despite its affective cruelty, presents a main character who still expresses a substantial trust in the power of a classical notion of working class’ solidarity. The gig workers are said to be independent and free, owning their own small companies in partnership with bigger service providers, thus becoming the only subjects responsible and accountable for their results or for the possible accidents and misfortunes happening on the job. Nonetheless, these workers continuously carry on them the signs of their own subordination. Ricky always wears jumpsuits or shirts with the company logo on and has very strict rules to respect in order to fit to the standards required by the management, which are associated also with incessant forms of measurements of his performance, in the shape of costumers’ feedback and of a mandatory availability to work. All these features, which position Ricky, as every gig worker, on a very precarious and mutable state, are, nevertheless, accompanied by a machinic and horizontal form of tracking and monitoring, enacted by the same digital device used for accessing the necessary information for every delivery. This same technology, because of the use of the worker, and of the algorithmic elaboration of the data produced by its tracking calculations, therefore, automatically assesses the value of the subject adopting it, making her/him victim of unaccountable ‘abstract’ decisions. As we have observed already in the episode Nosedive of Black Mirror, again, the highest level of social subjection and control coexist with an apparently free and autonomous use of the digital platform, which constructs a specific machinic enslavement combining the fluxes of data and commodities with reterritorialised processes of subjective exploitation and extraction of value. The ‘mechanisation of living

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labour’ in the gig-economy, as Roberto Ciccarelli highlighted, is connected with the depressive perception of an omnipotent and ontological force preventing active decisions and movements on the side of the workforce (2018, 64–65). Furthermore, the reduction of labour to a platform-related service contributes in denying the very existence of a hierarchy on the workplace and pushes the workers to embrace their own fragmentation and isolation as an unavoidable condition (as Maloney states during the interview, ‘you are the maker of your own destiny,’ see also Ciccarelli 2018, 63). Delivery services assume, it is worth adding, a major importance in the digital economy dominated by monopolistic logistic platforms, since it constitutes the physical and immanent expression of the processes of stasis/storing and movement/circulation of information and commodities (cf. Fana 2017, 43–45; Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 134–138; Sassen 2014, 126–127, 220). In this sense, Ricky finds himself at the centre of this value-­extracting process combining direct and continuous control on the physical activity of the worker with the financial valorisation and expropriation of the same. Notwithstanding this extreme form of exploitation, which drastically reduce his presence and participation in family life, Ricky embarks in his new work as delivery driver without regrets or doubts, being also willing to risk personal financial capital to buy his own van. The acceptance and confidence of the character, in this sense, are dialogically opposed by Abbie, who does not share the same trust in the opportunities of the gig-­ economy. She carries out her profession conscious of not being able to change its dynamics, having, against her beliefs, to accept the reduction of health-care to a pure commodity for those who can afford it, and not defended as a right for each citizen. The embodied fabula of the film, by describing a slow and progressive unravelling of this project of economic emancipation into a familial and social drama, automatically denies the existence of concrete spaces for financial uplifting through the blackmailing mechanisms of self-employment. Likewise, the open ending of this cinematic chronotope, with Ricky’s acceptance to go back to work after an aggression received during a delivery, outlines an unavoidable destiny of pointless but necessary sacrifices for the main character, unveiling a forced existential route without resorting to an overtly dramatic tone. Indeed, it is already after a small initial period of relative success that we see Ricky starting to acknowledge the extreme financial and health risks connected with the necessity for constant presence on the workplace and for always quicker deliveries. Likewise, not being able to grant his presence or to

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rapidly find replacements can lead him to be fined and repay the company for the absence of the same service. Therefore, the sorrowful ending of the film simply indicates and underpins an already established existential route with its depressive and melancholic effects. Apart from stressing these radically exploitative dynamics, which will soon pull Ricky in a spiral of always more precarious and riskier approach to his job, the activities that both him and Abbie perform involve a complete emotional and affective engagement on their behalf. Ricky commits to his delivery tasks by having to adopt an always willing and positive attitude, which implies a constant cognitive awareness making him able to calculate and plan the best choices at every new assignment; Abbie passes from one patient to the other having to quickly readapt to the conditions of each client, while also measuring the time and costs of every shift. The structure of the emotional labour carried out by the characters leads to a quick and visible exhaustion, which, for Ricky, implies the incapacity to positively interact with his teenage son, Seb (Rhys Stone) and, to a minor extent, with the younger daughter Lisa (Katie Proctor); for Abbie, this fatigue translates into the paradoxical impossibility to show her emotional connection and care for her family. As viewers perceive Abbie as a subject more aware of her working condition, indeed, they also engage her continuous effort in putting the family together and in mediating, more specifically, the conflict between Seb and Ricky. However, her more conscious approach to the gig-economy is still associated with the inability to establish a limit between work and life, together with the embodiment of a clear resignation to a current state of affairs in her social and relational existence. In this sense, these characters share an affective ground similar to the one inhabited by the figures of Kelly Reichardt’s films because of the analogue ethical depressive chronotope limiting their existential options and their ability to empathically interact. Concurrently, aspirations for social mobility are ascribed only to Lisa and Seb, who are asked, on one side, to be very independent and autonomous in fulfilling their needs, mostly growing up without their parents because of their long work-shifts; on the other hand, they are also supposed to achieve excellence in their school career in order to aim for a less precarious professional future. However, a key family meeting sequence contributes in dialogically countering also these expectations, as we see Ricky and Abbie having an argument with Seb, after he has been found having cans of spray paint (he uses for graffitis with his friends) he has bought by selling his winter jacket. Their confrontation, realised through a series of medium shots on the

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heights of the characters, providing all of them with a similar role and status in the exchange, shows the preoccupation of the parents for Seb’s recent behaviour and for his missing presence from school. Ricky and Abbie are worried for his apparent lack of professional plans and concerned about his intention of not going to university. On the other hand, with a sort of grim awareness about the condition of his parents, Seb replies by showing his distrust in a prosperous future, scared by the possibility of becoming indebted through students’ loans and almost certain to be following on his parents’ footsteps by having to embark in a forthcoming precarious profession. This same harsh confrontation visibly enacts the unamendable division and loosening of family bonds, and the consequent difficulty in finding a harmonic solution and reconciliation for always more painful relational fractures. By collecting these elements, we could argue that the chronotopic construction of Sorry We Missed You describes a closed existential temporality associated with an affective fragmentation and with the impossibility to separate intimate spaces from spheres of production. The family, as minimal social unit, is both the centre of this affective dismemberment and the place of an attempted resistance, in the form of a minimal space of solidarity and mutual care where precarious subjectivities try to negotiate and respond to their marginality. An example of this affirmative side of familial bonds is provided later on as we see Abbie being asked to quickly respond to the need of one of her patients on a Saturday evening—an urgency that interrupts family dinner and a moment of relax and unusual harmony. Nonetheless, this same urgent occurrence becomes, thanks to the intervention of Lisa and Seb, an occasion for cooperation, as the entire family decides to go with Abbie and to continue their dinner and reunion on Ricky’s delivery van. If the family envisages this ambiguous space useful for the negotiation of a certain stability in a world of precarious employment, Cristiano’s (Aristides de Sousa) destiny in Araby (Arábia, João Dumans and Affonso Uchoa 2017), as migrant worker continuously displaced around contemporary Brazil, is one of repeated displacements and separations. Passing from one partial and momentary job after the other, Cristiano is unable to build durable relations and passively adapts to varying economic conditions. This chronotopic closure is reinforced by the fact that the main narrative section of the film starts off by following the young and apathetic André (Murilo Caliari) finding Cristiano’s notebook after a fatal accident has occurred to him on the workplace. The main character’s tale,

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therefore, is, from its beginning, the story of a defeat, emerging from the context of misery in which also André lives with his aunt and ill younger brother (Marcos). These affects of depression are emphasised by the dialogical opposition between the opening sequence of the film and the presentation of the main cinematic chronotopes defining the lives of the characters. Araby, indeed, starts off on an elegant long take based on backward camera movements (medium shot, cinematography by Leonardo Feliciano) following André going home on his bike, while we hear the placid ballad Blues Runs the Game by Jackson C. Frank, (a song that also dialogically introduces the pattern of nomadism and displacement) as music theme of the scene. However, these same romantic moments are succeeded, right after the conclusion of the sequence, by the presentation of a peripheral urban context (in a nocturnal setting) covered by industrial fumes, dust, and noises interconnected with Marcos coughing. In this chronotope, as this latter figure argues, it is easier to believe in the Devil than in God; furthermore, the dialogical contrast between these initial sequences emerges also through the camerawork and rhythmic construction of the experience, which, in the first case, is built on a dynamic following of the actions. For most parts of the succeeding moments, instead, the film is characterised by a steadier construction, featuring a slow cutting rate and the use of medium shots, which, on one side, facilitate the participation in the exchanges and dialogues between the protagonists of the story; on the other hand, this composition reduces the dramatic tension of the embodied fabula, allowing us to embody the relentless delayed temporality of this precarious dimension. As we start participating in Cristiano’s ten-year journey with the discovery of his notebook—which he began to write under the encouragement of a theatre group in his factory—we see him initially going to prison for stealing a car and, then, hitting the road in search of jobs after spending his sentence. The precarious wanderings of the character feature the wearing need to build connections and relations at each displacement, while having to lose them at the end of each seasonal contract. Being a drifter involves the dynamics of ‘infinite adaptations’ typical of the gig-economy; however, the incapacity to establish durable emotional bonds, connected with the fact of not having a fixed residence, makes even more evident than in the case of Abbie and Ricky, the ethical passivity affecting Cristiano, and the impossibility to actively impact the ecology surrounding him. This same condition not only makes difficult to imagine forms of rebellion or of collective action; it also engenders a consistent fatigue for Cristiano in

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negotiating his position within the described chronotope (‘I feel like an old tired horse, I breathe heavily,’ he affirms near the ending of the film). The embodied fabula of the film, therefore, consists on the description of a series of existential defeats for the main character, moving from one hardship to the other, losing friends and, more importantly, Ana (Renata Cabral), a colleague we will encounter later on in the narrative, whom he describes as the love of his life. Their relationship presents an extremely tender affective bond, which emerges through the disclosure of the memories of their first date and of moments of intimacy together. However, the necessity for Cristiano to move to another place prevents them from effectively dealing with Ana’s miscarriage, a distressing occurrence that ends up drastically separating the couple, reducing their bond to another lost memory. Cascao, one of Cristiano’s friend, encountered several times along his travels (and lost in as many occasions because of unpredictable economic circumstances), argues, when describing their predicament, that the life of a migrant worker prevents you from relying on anybody, not even your own family, and the only thing you can do is to move on. The instability of the world of Cristiano reinforces and reiterates, as in the case of Sorry We Missed You, the idea of collective struggle as a fantasy, a dialogical element enacted in the concluding sequence, recollecting the main character’s thoughts and dreams. It is only in his imagination that Cristiano can think about the workers abandoning the factory, leaving the furnaces emitting the toxic dust and noises we have seen pervading the landscape at the beginning, and go back to the forests, to start breathing anew, as his voice over adds. The furnace (Cristiano’s last workplace before his death) is, according to him, a machine draining people’s hopes, reducing life expectations, and undermining their psychophysical health. Indeed, this existential fragility is enacted in the sequence exactly through the dialogical opposition between Cristiano’s voice over commenting on his dream of freedom while the images present us the relentless and slow progression of a nocturnal shift with its unavoidable repetition of mechanical actions. Sorry We Missed You and Araby, therefore, because of the chronotopic and experiential affective depression they enact, ‘put the dead to work’, to use an expression adopted by Martin O’Shaughnessy to describe contemporary Francophone cinema focused on precarious labour (cf. 2019). These films employ the emotional and cognitive suffering of their main characters as privileged vantage point to observe the productive dynamics they participate in and, by doing so, they enact the distressing effect of a

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complete subjective subsumption of the neoliberal morality of self-­ entrepreneurship. The affective reversal of the dream of individual emancipation of the human capital is clearly visible, O’Shaughnessy maintains, through Sandra’s (Marion Cotillard) depression in Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit, Dardenne Bros. 2016), a mental state that becomes emblematic of an entire social/subjective condition. The psychic distress of the character is initially indicated as the alleged cause of her dismissal from the solar panel factory she was working in—an event supported by her colleagues’ acceptance of the boss’ proposal to cover her work-shifts in exchange of a €1000 bonus. Thus, the film sets up its narrative structure by accompanying Sandra and, in some occasions, her family, over a tense weekend during which she has to convince her previous co-workers to renounce the bonus and to support her in a second ballot to be held the next Monday. From what concerns its chronotope and experiential patterns, the film reiterates aesthetic features typical of the Dardenne Brothers’ cinema, in which unsteady handheld camera movements closely follow the main characters during their journey, mostly staying on their heights and adopting over the shoulder shots. This composition, by forcing viewers to a distressing proximity with the characters, enacts the embodiment and engagement of their cognitive and affective discomfort (a destabilising space-affect) and of their incapacity to effectively orient in the world (cf. Hesselberth 2014, 64–67). In Two Days, One Night, however, instead of presenting a character’s anxious ongoing struggle to address economic grievances, the proximity with Sandra allows us to engage the real nature of her depressive affects: a sense of guilt, an existential humiliation connected with the perception of her incapacity and failure as worker, mother, and wife. This peculiar emotional and dialogical construction related to the embodiment of the logic of the human capital is also operated by the repetition, in different moments of the film, of a particular image: the close-up of Sandra looking at herself in the mirror. As argued by Martin O’Shaughnessy, these images generate, and allow us to participate in, the over-identification of the character with her own disposability, her acceptance of an image of total existential failure to be be traced back to individual responsibilities (2019). Sandra’s hardships are, therefore, perceived as a sentence on her identity, a condemnation of her subjectivity in its totality; ‘I do not exist, I am nothing,’ Sandra screams, thus highlighting a judgemental instinct through which she sees herself as the only cause of her own defeat. This same self-blaming attitude, which persuades her of the fact that she does

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not deserve to be loved by her family, is reinforced by the necessity to meet every colleague in the search for help and solidarity. This request, therefore, appears as a humiliating begging for support, having to rely on their pity and availability to renounce the bonus. Although it appears evident how both Sandra and her co-workers are victims of a process of fragmentation orchestrated by the management of the company, through which they see each other as a threat and as the possible cause of an economic loss, no collective reaction is produced against this situation, neither we assist to particular resistance against her initial dismissal. On the contrary, mutual unbounded competition is embodied as the mainstay of collective relationships and as the only real moral reference point to orient in the world. For these same reasons, her request for help is, at times, met by resented reactions, with colleagues judging her demand as intolerable and immoral, or even becomes the cause of harsh divisions within particular familial contexts. The effect of this affective and chronotopic composition, as for the two previous case studies, is naturally a reduction of the ethical openings and of the experimental and practical agency left to the subjects living in these storyworlds. On the other hand, this impotence explicitly testifies or operates a re-politicisation of emotional fatigue and distress. As famously argued by Mark Fisher, one of the characteristics of neoliberal governance, and direct effect of the extreme atomisation of workers, is a ‘mental health plague’, the systematic diffusion of psychological distress and suffering, which even become the most treated conditions by different public health services (2009, 19). However, the tendency to observe this suffering as a personal disorder to be rebalanced through specific methods of psychological engineering (as demonstrated by the wide use of psychiatric drugs aimed at improving work and social performances) contributes in exasperating and in reinforcing the solely individual understanding of psychic pain (Fisher 2009, 21, 2018, 747; see also The Guardian 2015). On the other hand, by engaging with Sandra’s existential humiliation, with Ricky and Abbie’s exhaustion due to the constant readiness to work (see also Fisher 2018, 461), and with Cristiano’s lack of affective stability, we experience a direct re-politicisation of this alleged subjective suffering. Although these characters may perceive themselves as ‘the masters of their own destinies’ and, therefore, as the causes of their own defeats, by following them, we are also dialogically involved in the set of complex power relations clearly determining their conditions and translating their depression into systematic affective states. Thus, we can move these mental ecologies within a

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wider social space (see Guattari 2000, 49–52), bringing their pain and distress back into the collective sphere—a conceptual shift necessary, according to Fisher, to produce an effective ethical critique and practical contrast of contemporary capitalism (cf. 2009, 37, 2018, 748–750). Furthermore, these case studies, although pervaded by a melancholic and discomforting mood, by making us engage these lives in pain, also dialogically trace lines of flight, instruments of resistance, and reaction to the predicaments enacted on screen. In the case of Sandra, the necessity to ask for others’ support ends up engendering a new form of solidarity, rebuilding a dignity and a consciousness that translates into her final refusal to be readmitted at the expenses of a colleague on a temporary contract. Notwithstanding the fact that, as O’Shaughnessy highlighted, Sandra’s proud rejection of the management’s ethical blackmail reveals a sort of righteous and noble suicide deprived of a consistent future path of resistance (2019), it is also true that these same final acts reignite the imagination of a previously fragmented political community. ‘We fought well’ are the final and joyous world of Sandra, who has found a way to recover self-trust and a positive attitude to life exactly because of the possibility of constructing solidarity and cooperation with her colleagues. In Sorry We Missed You, the embodied fabula of the film leads us to a final ethical failure in building existential alternatives, with Ricky ignoring his wounds and desperately accepting to return work in order to avoid financial penalties. At the same time, a dialogical opening is expressed by the role of mutual care, on a familial and microsocial level, which is enacted as primary source of agency to negotiate individual precarity and also as a method of resistance and political autonomy against the forced legitimacy of contextual power relations (as we have discussed for Kelly Reichardt’s films). The political relevance of relations of mutual affective assistance is effectively embodied in the final sequence of the film with Abbie, Lisa, and Seb coming together to stop Ricky from his self-sacrifice, but it is as well a consistent dialogical pattern in the chronotopic economy of the film. It emerges, indeed, from small gestures of kindness, support, and sympathy expressed by members of a vast and diversified workforce recognising each other’s suffering and marginalisation. If these two case studies enact an exit from their apparently unavoidable chronotopes of precarity through recognition, solidarity, and care, Araby contributes by adding a further dialogical element to the imagination of an alternative space: the importance of storytelling. Cristiano’s opening words (heard in voice over), for instance, tell us that he initially thought to have nothing to say when writing on his notebook, but, then, he

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enjoyed recalling the memories of the encounters he made and of the spaces he visited. These recollections allowed him to recompose a vast and diverse ecology of precarity, reconstructing the tenderness and empathy felt with the people met in various moments of his migration and giving dignity to their marginal existences (‘everyone had a story, even the quiet ones,’ his voice adds). Writing makes possible for Cristiano to understand and express the depth of his love for Ana, as well as becoming an occasion to re-enact, to reprocess the world he has travelled through. For instance, his diary brings back the forgotten story of Barreto (a retired farmer labelled as a troublemaker for having organised his colleagues in order to obtain a fixed wage), and, by remembering this tale, it rebuilds the consciousness and imagination of political struggles. Thus, as highlighted at the beginning of this chapter, these stories are not simply presenting the suffering of the characters and pushing us to recognise them as victims of particular forms of exploitation. By allowing us to intellectually and affectively engage and reconstruct the chronotopes of these precarious lives, these films operate a conceptual shift, and they change the meaning of an experiential dimension by re-enacting it (‘I was alive, and I could still breathe’ are the closing words of Cristiano’s notebook). These chronotopes re-politicise suffering in order to indicate new ways of organising and composing the social body rejecting any reductionism to individual and personal stories of pain. To recursively go through (cinematic) worlds that may seem limiting and negating the imagination of ethical power and agency means dialogically rediscovering them, unravelling the power dynamics pervading them and, thus, experimenting new subjectivities and new affective lines of care and solidarity within their contexts and spaces. Paraphrasing Gregory Bateson’s work on denotation and play and on the constant process of experiential and semantic reframing involved in communication and interaction (see 1987, 186, 197–198), we could say: to tell a story is not to represent it, it involves always changing it, repositioning its meaning and significance at every turn within likewise mutating ecologies.

References Bateson, Gregory. 1987. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. London: Jason Aronson Inc. Ciccarelli, Roberto. 2018. Forza Lavoro: Il Lato Oscuro della Rivoluzione Digitale. Roma: DeriveApprodi.

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Dardenne, Jean-Pierre, and Luc. 2016. Deux Jours, Une Nuit. Produced by Dardenne Brothers, Denis Freyd, et al. Belgium-France: Les Films du Fleuve, Archipel 35, et al. DVD, 95 mins. Dumans, João and Affonso Uchoa. 2017. Arábia. Produced by Vitor Graize. Brazil: Katásia Filmes, Vasto Mundo, et al. DVD, 97 mins. Fana, Marta. 2017. Non è lavoro, è sfruttamento. Bari: Laterza. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Ropley: ZeroBooks. ———. 2018. K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writing of Mark Fisher from 2004–2016, ed. D. Ambrose, foreword by S. Reynolds. London: Repeater Books. https://repeaterbooks.com/product/k-­punk-­the-­collected-­and-­ unpublished-­writings-­of-­mark-­fisher-­2004-­2016/. Guattari, Félix. 2000. The Three Ecologies. Trans. I. Pindar and P. Sutton. London: The Athlone Press. Hesselberth, Pepita. 2014. Cinematic Chronotopes: Here, Now, Me. London: Bloomsbury. Loach, Ken. 2019. Sorry We Missed You. Produced by Rebecca O’Brien. UK: Sixteen Films, BBC Films, et al. DVD, 101 mins. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2019. The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism. London: Duke University Press. O’Shaughnessy, Martin. 2009. The New Face of Political Cinema: Commitment in the French Film Since 1995. Oxford: Berghahn Books. ———. 2019. Putting the Dead to Work: Making Sense of Worker Suicide in Contemporary French and Francophone Belgian Film. Studies of French Cinema 19 (4): 314–334. https://doi.org/10.1080/14715880.2018. 1493645. Sassen, Saskia. 2014. Expulsion: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. The Guardian. 2015. Austerity and a Malign Benefits Regime are Profoundly Damaging Mental Health. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/ a p r /17/a us te ri t y-­a n d -­a -­m a l i gn -­b en e f i t s-­r e gi me -­a r e -­p r of oundl y ­damaging-­mental-­health.

CHAPTER 10

Social Reproduction and Cinematic Care-­ Work: The Cases of Roma and The Chambermaid

The connection between the entirety of our cognitive and relation life with modes of value extraction produces what we have defined as a general feminisation of work or the extension of particular activities, traditionally reserved to gendered employment, to the entire workforce (Ciccarelli 2018, 112–113). However, as we have already mentioned discussing Kelly Reichardt’s films and other case studies, it would be a mistake to argue that this general feminisation has basically overthrown gender-based power dynamics or drastically re-dimensioned the heteropatriarchal composition of micro and macro social organisations. What we are engaging with, instead, is the reorganisation of these same structures within the dynamics of neoliberal anthropology. In this chapter, we are going to address this complex issue by principally analysing the chronotopic constructions and polyphonic composition of The Chambermaid (La Camarista, Lila Avilés 2018) and Roma (Alfonso Cuarón 2018), which have already been associated because of their similar geographical setting (Mexico City) and focus on care-work professionals (Hans 2019). Female or gendered labour has always been related to a particular ­collective function, that is, the necessity for social/emotional r­ eproduction and care-work. As Silvia Federici famously argued, indeed, capitalism could have never taken place without a primitive accumulation on the line of gender. Primitive accumulation, which for Marx identified the initial ‘enclosure’ of the commonwealth/good and workforce into the form of private property (cf. 1990, 873–876), also involved the construction of a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Sticchi, Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63261-8_10

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sexualised division of roles, expropriating and separating women and their knowledge from specific communal spheres of social and affective existence (a dynamic that traditional Marxist analyses overlooked and was firstly addressed by feminist movements and scholars, see Alliez and Lazzarato 2016, 49, 266; Federici 2009, 12, 62–63, 2019, 16–17; Hardt and Negri 2017, 17). Thus, we witnessed the confinement of the female body within the modern familial space (the heterosexual unity of parents and children) together with the incorporation of specific identity codifications necessary for the imposition of an unpaid care-work. Managing the private/domestic space, the breeding, and education of the children, all constitute activities necessary for the continuation of capitalist accumulation as they provide its basic biological source-material together with a safe haven separated from the assembly line for the male worker (and breadwinner), and are vital, therefore, for the reproduction of his labour power (see Federici 2009, 9). These fundamental operations and various forms of sexual work, indeed, were never recognised as proper (unwaged) labour, but codified as biological givens, as constant natural functions and moral destinies to be necessarily carried out (Federici 2009, 14–15). This codification, of course, involved also a strict restructuring of the female body in terms of its capacity to negotiate its reproductive function, posing a social injunction against abortion and alternative management of motherhood. Moreover, female labour was, until recent elaborations, set on the outside of capitalist relations, whereas it constitutes one of its key supporting mechanisms (Federici 2019, 17). However, these considerations should not make us assume that female subjectivities were understood only in terms of their reproductive function and that they never participated in the assembly line or in other spaces of production. Furthermore, it must be specified that primitive accumulation does not envisage a remote event confined to the origins of capitalism; it is an endemic, continuously re-enacted process meant to colonise every aspect of existence within the realm of value extraction (cf. Alliez and Lazzarato 2016, 16–17, 253; Federici 2019, 15, 19; Luxemburg 2003, 250–251, 345–348). In the neoliberal age, care-work and gender norms are reconfigured through a new primitive accumulation integrating these same codifications within a world-market not anymore confining the female body on its (apparent) outside; furthermore, we see these same mechanisms combined with the economy of debit/credit and with the invasion of financial/competitive logic in every sphere of existence, defining a general crisis of social

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reproduction (Federici 2019, 18, 62–63, 65, 181). Katie in I, Daniel Blake, as single mother, is meant to assess her economic efficiency in order to justify the access to housing or to welfare provisions, whereas Abbie in Sorry We Missed sees her care-work reduced to a private service and experiences a progressive detachment from her familial and affective life. On the other hand, many films of the ‘post-recession era’, as noticed by Pamela Thoma, feature female characters trying to balance a professional and economic emancipation with the desire to remain ‘feminine’ and to not lose their capacity to nurture relationships and to take care of the domestic sphere (cf. 2014, 126–128). In other cases, as we have seen with Laura and Gina in Certain Women, the economic crisis and the falling of an idealised image of efficient masculinity emphasise the financial vitality of post-­ feminist heroines cruelly embodying individualist morality (see Lagerwey et al. 2016; Leonard 2014, 51–52). The two case studies of this chapter, in this sense, allow us to engage the power dynamics of contemporary female labour by taking into account its dialogical manifold articulation. These films refer to two distinguished historical frames; The Chambermaid is set in our days, whereas Cuarón’s Roma takes place during the years 1970–1971 (in a way, we could argue, at the beginning of the neoliberal turn); however, the films (although featuring almost conflicting chronotopic configurations) allow us to observe a sort of progression in the practices of care-work within historically situated intersectional power relations together with emphasising similar depressive affective patterns revealing a state of ethical and existential closure. The main character of Cuarón’s Oscar winning film is Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), a diligent and tender live-in maid of a middle-class family in the Colonia Roma neighbourhood. Cleo’s minoritarian status, as migrant domestic worker of indigenous descent (opposed to her whitexican employers), is visibly enacted through the architextural and chronotopic composition of the home environment. Though always involved in all family events and necessities, Cleo and Adela (another servant) live separated from the main mansion. The central domestic space is surrounded by a back courtyard, while the interiors include a large and open living room on the ground floor and the bedrooms on the first floor. Cleo and Adela are accommodated in a small apartment within an external building, close to cellars and storage rooms and not provided with all the facilities and comforts of the main house (even their access to electricity is rationed). Furthermore, at lunch time, as it possible to observe on many occurrences,

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the maids eat in the kitchen while the family enjoys its meals together in the living room. The separation of the house-workers from their ‘families’ is reiterated in many points of the narration, allowing viewers to perceive these subjects as leading parallel/isolated existences detached from their employers. This division is also emphasised by the fact that the maids are often united by linguistic and ethnic bonds, as demonstrated by their speaking in Mixtec when they are in their closed/safe spaces, a composition which, at the same time, stresses the contrast between the two poles of power of the domestic ecology. As noticed by César Albarrán-Torres, the presence of two opposed but interdependent classes and social agglomerates operates by reinforcing the links of submission and exploitation between these two realms and reiterates the primitive accumulation that is operated on the body of Cleo (2019). Indeed, notwithstanding the visible spatial and experiential division, she is dialogically configured as a constant presence in the family life, not just for carrying out conventional caring and housekeeping duties. Cleo continuously supports the various members of the family, acting as mediator in their relational conflicts and participating in their joys and sorrows. An early sequence effectively enacts this dialogical ambiguity by showing the main character as a proper member of the family. We see, in fact, Sofia and Antonio (the parents respectively played by Marina de Tavira and Fernando Grediaga) watching television at night, after the emphatic coming back home of the male breadwinner (who, as a physician, is also a highly recognised professional), together with their four kids. The scene starts off by showing us a close-up of the television broadcasting a comic show and then cuts to a medium shot (from the TV height and perspective) with the camera panning around the room displaying the entire family enjoying the programme. Cleo participates in this family event and, at the same time, continues to perform her duties, satisfying every request of the employers or cuddling the children. When the camera cuts again, moving on the back of the characters, the dialogical irony of Cleo’s presence is emphasised by her sitting on the floor against the entire family comfortably watching the show on the sofas. One of the recurring experiential and chronotopic patterns of Roma, indeed, is exactly making us travel through the ambiguous entanglement of Cleo within the family environment, continuously integrating moments of extreme connection between her and the family members, and, on the other hand, visible forms of exclusion and exploitation. The main character of The Chambermaid, Eve (Gabriela Cartol), is a precarious and

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tenacious cleaner in one of the most luxurious hotels of Mexico City. Differently from Cleo, Eve experiences a complete disconnection from the familial and domestic sphere. The events of the film all occur within the work environment limiting the presence of her four-year-old son, Ruben, to occasional exchanges through phone calls. Eve works extra-hours to afford childcare and hopes for a professional upgrade. In order to help ends meet, she also limits her lunch choices to the cheapest meals available at the hotel diner. At times, Eve sleeps in the hotel since the long commuting to her home in the extreme outskirts of the city and the extra-duties she carries out prevent an equilibrate management of the work and rest hours, while she also attends an adult education course for employees who desire to pass the GED exam. Eve’s explicit aim is to secure a promotion to the forty-second floor, the attic and most exclusive section of the hotel, an advancement that would allow, apparently, her access to a better pay and to a more manageable work-life balance. Together with these elements, we could argue that Eve presents a sort of ruthless and unempathetic work morality. In the opening sequence, we see her rapidly cleaning a room acknowledging, only after two minutes, the presence of the guest sleeping on the floor. The Stakhanovite attitude of Eve is dialogically met with the recurring tendency to collect the remnants of the guests’ passage. She enjoys reading the notes or books left by them, steals remaining snacks and sweets, or hopes to obtain a lost fancy red dress, embodying, with its chromatic and aesthetic features contrasting the dominant grey and soft colour tones of the film, her aspiration for a more satisfying life. Having to deal with the debris of guests and employers’ passage is, in a way, a dialogical characteristic shared by both films. Roma enacts this aspect by continuously presenting us with excremental elements and starts off with the image of the water scrubbing the driveway in the courtyard of the house. The affective role of water in the film ecology is that of reiterating the bonds of ownership connected with material sources, underscoring that it is up to the patrones to use and waste them; the servants, on the other hand, are left with its management or, as in the case of the sequence of the fire at the country house of rich American friends, with the consequences of its catastrophic accumulation. For Eve, as well, the main duty is to cancel and, in a way, take on herself the liquid and physical traces of the hotel’s comers trying, at the same time, to leave her presence unnoticed. It is, indeed, a moment of panic, the one in which Eve discovers to have left some menstrual blood on a duvet, a trace to be quickly removed as every sign of her passage.

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Apart from these comparable elements, the films complex chronotopes offer two distinguished ecologies. Roma, indeed, combines the ambiguous belonging of Cleo within the family with a sumptuous black and white cinematography (by Alfonso Cuarón) and with a camerawork and visual construction integrating the use of long takes, tracking shots and depth of field (keeping the camera mostly on the character’s height). Thus, Cleo’s story is always perceived as the complex relation of a subject with the surrounding environment, which necessarily assumes as much relevance as the vicissitudes of the protagonist, enacting a continuous dialogue between background and foreground. Furthermore, the chronotopic construction of Roma presents us a baroque plenitude of details and objects filling the diegetic space, an aspect reinforced by the Spanish-Moorish colonial architecture defining the main topographical setting. It is because of this close connection with the film world that Roma effectively problematises Cleo’s story within an articulate series of familial interactions and with her own socio-historical situatedness. Eve’s ecology, instead, features the claustrophobic and repetitive succession of similar environments. The camera (cinematography by ­ Carlos F. Rossini) is always following her with perspectives that alternate medium shots and close-ups, providing an overall sensation of enclosure and confinement. These topographical elements, although not necessarily generating a constant sense of urgency (the shots are mostly stable and the slow cutting rate does not over-intensify the rhythm of the action), still functions in limiting the character’s options and even deconstructs the glamorous image of the hotel she works in. Indeed, the twenty-first floor managed by Eve more than resulting as the perfect option for upper ­middle-class guests appears to us in the form of grey and cold corridors and rooms, characterised by minimalistic modern décor. In this sense, we can see that there is a main dialogical opposition between the motivated competitive attitude of the character and the context she operates in. The repetitive and monotonous duties Eve performs would seem to set up an unchanging existential and, therefore, ethically depressive space. In ­contrast with this ecological and chronotopic positioning, Eve’s behaviour appears relentlessly stoic and self-sacrificing, always adding more efforts and further working duties in order to aim for a professional advancement and for an escape from the static repetition of completely self-absorbing shifts. It is emblematic of her character’s speech the fact that Eve beats many male co-workers and the teacher of the course she is attending in a pain resilience challenge (handling electric shocks) while keeping her

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unbending attitude (she is labelled by Miriam, a colleague, as ‘so small but so resistant’). Notwithstanding the uniqueness of Eve’s hardworking stance, the individualist and competitive cold morality she embraces is widespread among her colleagues, causing the exchanges between the hotel workforce of being characterised mainly by the defence of specific hierarchical roles and by the expression of cautionary reminders. ‘You can’t eat in here’ is the only sentence uttered by the elevator operator when at first meeting Eve, a reprimand that, however, is not directed as well to professional figures in higher positions. Likewise, the only way in which the colleagues seem to be ‘positively’ interacting is by exchanging favours and duties, reducing links of friendship to utilitarian deals, without possibilities for concrete empathic bonds. At the same time, the managers communicate only in a moralising fashion, limiting their interventions to the expression of evaluations and professional recommendations as we can clearly notice in an exchange, in which Eve is warned for the inappropriate and incomplete cleaning of a room’s toilet by a supervisor. This character, in a condescending way, while providing relief by stating that everybody makes mistakes, also argues that being a hotel maid is now an easy job, since when she was in Eve’s position, punishments for negligence were far harsher, and finally adds, ‘so smile and get back to work’. By combining these elements, we could argue that the chronotope of the hotel, in its complexity, operates as a sort of haunted space, sucking every possibility for emotional and intimate life of the workers or reducing it to the limited enjoyment of lost objects and of few escapist pleasures (Eve dedicatedly reads Johnathan Livingston Seagull). The only moment of eroticism is expressed later on when we see Eve ceding to the silent advances of a window cleaner often teasing her. Eve performs a striptease and masturbates in front of him in a scene that, on one side, is pervaded by a sensual tension between the two characters and that, on the other hand, reiterates the absence of direct contact. Consequently, although their attraction is also reinforced by the exchanges of romantic messages and embarrassed glances in the workers’ cafeteria, their relationship will never develop; an affective closure that is epitomised by the composition we can observe later on in the diner: the man is having a  cheerful intimate chat with a female co-worker (in the background), whereas Eve (back to camera, right side of the shot, close-up) seats alone observing them. As the story discloses the affective and ethical failure of Eve in obtaining the professional and existential advancement expected (the forty-second has been assigned to Miriam), therefore, also the hope

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for a romantic encounter is closed down; likewise, even the final obtainment of the red dress cannot provide any substantial consolation and is rapidly traded by Eve in exchange of a toy for her son. The isolation of Eve within a competitive environment together with her forced separation from Ruben all contribute in outlining a chronotope in which the entirety of her emotional and affective power is used to provide for the maintenance of the hotel and its guests. Similarly, Cleo, although visibly connected with her employers’ emotional journey, finds impossible to build a life outside of the walls of the patrones’ house. Her momentary relation with Fermìn (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) will soon turn into a complete emotional failure, leading to an undesired pregnancy and to a tragic stillbirth. Similarly, in the second part of the film, we hear from Adela that Cleo’s mother’s land is being seized by the government, and subsequently, she is urged to go visit her parent, a remark to which the main character responds with visible discomfort since she has no possibility for concretely helping her family. Here we can observe a dialogical reference to contextual neo-colonial dynamics as Cleo’s mother lives in the Oaxaca state, a mostly Mixtecan part of the country that has been subject, in particular in recent years, to massive processes of extraction of natural resources on behalf of big corporations (see Albarrán-Torres 2019). Cleo’s impossibility to help her parent also perfectly encapsulates the level of alienation from her affective power; what she and Eve experience, indeed, is the accumulation and expropriation of their care-work for the purpose of the reproduction and continuation of both a heteropatriarchal familial system and the services industry. The nature of the exploitation of this socially reproductive labour is emphasised in particular through the ambiguous relation Cleo and Eve entertain with two dialogically connectable female characters. In Roma, we see a bond of complicity and mutual understanding growing between the main character and Sofia as soon as Antonio leaves the family. This mostly absent patriarch decides, midway through the narrative, to abandon his wife and children and to start living with another woman. For Sofia—who has been so far received as a very despotic employer, often unleashing her resentment and frustration on Cleo—being single and having to provide alone for her family implies the necessity to go back to work and the management of a traumatic divorce. In this narrative section, therefore, we experience an affective reconciliation between the two main female characters and an emotional turn starting with Sofia parking her husband’s car drunk. This scene dialogically couples Antonio’s initial

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appearance: he was introduced in the first part of film through a peculiar editing sequence intercutting details (describing the various meticulous manoeuvres necessary to park the car in the narrow house courtyard) of his hands on the steering or handling cigarettes, alternated with shots of the car interior and exterior facets, and of the family adoringly observing him. In the first occurrence (concluded by the close-up of Antonio), the composition has the clear effect of stressing, up to the point of paroxysm (the action is accompanied by the diegetic use of symphonic music), the importance of the family man, his status, and centrality. In the second case, instead, we see Sofia completely leaving aside any concern about the car’s integrity and hitting the walls at every movement (the events are mostly described through a continuous medium shot). As soon as she gets out from the car, Sofia is welcomed by a worried Cleo, to whom she says, ‘We are alone, no matter what they tell, women are always alone.’ This same lament suggests and facilitates the generation of a common affective ground between the two characters, as we see the misfortunes of Sofia reiterating Fermìn’s previous aggressive rejection of Cleo. Apart from disappearing after knowing of Cleo’s pregnancy, indeed, he had angrily humiliated her in front of his paramilitary comrades and mocked her for being a servant when she tried to reach out to him for explanations. The two women, therefore, both find themselves in a position in which they are being left alone in the management of their maternal roles. Their bond of solidarity is reinforced by Cleo’s tragic loss, an event that motivates her joining Sofia and the kids for a trip to the seaside, in Tuxpan. This becomes an opportunity for Sofia to finally share with her kids the nature of the breakup with her husband and to inform them of the fact that she is going to be working full time from that moment onwards. Notwithstanding these changes, Sofia assures them that the unity of the family is not going to be compromised and hints at Cleo, confirming her role in this relational restructuring (in these moments, depicted through a long take [medium shot] composition, she is always present supporting the kids while Sofia speaks). At this point, we observe the most intense climatic emotional point of the film. The morning after this reunion, two of the kids are swimming under the supervision of Cleo (who cannot swim) against Sofia’s admonishment (this sequence is also constructed through a long take, with horizontal tracking shots following the development of the events). As soon as Cleo realises that the children are in danger, she manages to bring them back to the shore risking her own life. At this point, Sofia and the others join in an intense collective hug (the image

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has been used also as poster of the film), and, during this moment, all the family expresses its love for Cleo, while the protagonist takes advantage of this position to confess that she did not want her child to be born, receiving, in turn, their comprehension. These moments seem to seal a new and perfect familial union, not determined by the presence of a patriarchal figure but relying, instead, on the complicity and collaboration between Sofia and Cleo. This same alliance, however, encounters a dialogical overturning in the closing sequence of the film, during which, after their coming back home from the trip, we see the house-maid going back to live in her zone of the house, separated again from the main environment and restricted to fulfil, one could say even with more dedication, her care-work duties. Indeed, in the very final moments we follow Cleo, on the rooftop of the building, going to wash the family’s clothes. The complicity between Cleo and Sofia, therefore, does not entail an equal relationship between them, but actually makes even more explicit the relation of subordination the protagonist undergoes. The catharsis we have participated in with her heroic gesture and the family’s collective hug appears to be only a moment of compensation of the pre-existing tension describing Cleo’s status as an outsider while still being a fundamental part of the domestic composite. By enacting Cleo’s failure to properly become a member of the family (for whose survival she has sacrificed her life outside of work), the film poses a dramatic chronotopic closure condemning her to the incapacity to assess the centrality of her affective role. A different ambiguous relation is the one involving Eve and Romina (Augustina Quinci) in The Chambermaid. In the first part of the film we see the main character encountering this extrovert wealthy Argentinian woman (waiting in the hotel for her husband out for business), mother of a young baby (Martincho), wanting to pay Eve for extra-duties, such as looking after her son when she has a shower or desires to relax and take ‘care’ of herself. Eve reluctantly accepts, while Romina is happy to know that she is a mother as well and soon starts appreciating her quality when tending to the baby. Romina, then, adds, after asking about Eve’s private life, that she is lucky to have somebody who can take care of Ruben and that she would love to go back to work, as she feels unsatisfied in being only a mother (desiring a ‘life of her own’). Romina uses expensive cosmetic products and shaves her legs, while in the background Eve takes care of Martincho (we see this composition specifically in their second encounter). In their third and final sequence together, Romina even invites Eve to come back with her to Argentina and to become a live-in maid.

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One of the main observable dialogical oppositions between these two women is enacted through the explicit contrast of Romina’s usually naked body and the ‘professionalised’ physicality of Eve (wearing her work clothes all the time). The confrontation between these two women, on one side, stresses the same problematic tension already observed in Roma: the coexistence of different forms of femininity separated on the line of class and social roles, where the minoritarian subject is expropriated of her affective power in order to allow the social reproduction of the familial system. Differently from Cleo, who lives in a limbo between being or not a member of the family she serves, Eve appears totally disconnected from this tension; her maternal qualities are on rent, required in specific moments and in pre-arranged quantity, and her care-work is—generally speaking—directed to the functioning of the hotel. She is a professional and, we may argue, independent woman, capable of providing for herself and, at the same time, to afford somebody who can look after Ruben; however, this same professionalisation of her gendered work prevents her from enjoying her sexuality or participating in the familial space (see Federici 2020, 28, 69). It is on this line that we can see the dialogical irony enacted by her encounter with Romina, a woman that, in reason of her wealth, can negotiate her motherhood, professional status, and, at the same time, an enjoyment of her own identity. Their contrast nullifies the image of ‘independent’ woman of liberal/neoliberal feminism, in which individualist market morality foresees the main path to emancipation by reducing the gendered struggle against oppression to a focus on the economic quality and talent of each subject (see Rottenberg 2018, 144–149); a position that denies class differences and collective power dynamics and, as in this case, hides the necessity, exactly for those privileged women able to ‘break the glass ceiling’, to lean on a commodified cheap female care-work in order to thrive and reproduce themselves (Aruzza et al. 2019, 4; 11–12). To understand the precarious gendered intersectional dynamics ­characterising the exploitation of Eve and Cleo, it is also necessary to analyse the role that an aggressive masculinity plays within both film ­ ­chronotopes. In The Chambermaid, for instance, we see the capricious VIP guest Mr Morales always asking for more toiletries while watching shows and debates dealing with the ‘survival of the fittest in social r­ elations’ or with the role of capitalism in connection with a supposedly competitive natural order. In Roma, Cleo and Sofia suffer the unilateral decisions of self-­centred partners to not feel any affective and ethical responsibility towards them. What is more, we see images on the television of Professor

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Zovek, a popular personality performing superhuman acts of strength, and this same figure will reappear during the above-mentioned confrontation between Cleo and Fermìn, as trainer of the fascist paramilitary group (Los Halcones, supported by US operatives) the young man has joined. Fermìn will also ridiculously exhibit his samurai-like martial abilities a couple of times, using them to assess his masculine dominance or to visibly threaten Cleo. All these elements, therefore, contribute in constructing two cinematic chronotopes where gendered labour is associated with the constant presence of a sort of militarised competitive morality; the explosion of this ecological dynamic can be found in the sequence of Roma describing the violent repression of a student protest on behalf of Los Halcones (referring to the real events taking place in Mexico in 1968 and its aftermath, see Albarrán-Torres 2019). The primitive accumulation of the female body, and its colonisation in the form of cheap labour in the neoliberal economy, therefore, is constantly connected with dynamics of violence and repression, with the enforcement of a supposed natural order justifying mechanisms of exploitation and specific social functions. Notwithstanding these terrifying chronotopic constructions, the two films offer us ways to dialogically renegotiate them. In the final section of The Chambermaid, we see a disillusioned Eve wandering around the luxurious forty-second floor looking without enthusiasm at its luxury and comforts, which appear, eventually, as lifeless objects deprived of any glamorous status. Her interest moves to the discovery of the rooftop, where to eventually access an open-air space (long-shot, slow down-up panoramic movement revealing the sky). Likewise, in the very ending, we see Eve decisively exiting the hotel from the main entrance, leaving, with a renewed conflictual consciousness, the place of her exploitation. For Cleo there seems to be no option outside her condition. Nonetheless, as Pepe (Marco Graf, the youngest of the kids and the one most attached to her) highlights with his dream recollections describing different past lives, there is always space for re-enchanting the world (see Federici 2019, 8, 188–190; 2020, 126–171), to make new sense of what our bodies can do together against any supposed fixed natural order confining them.

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References Albarrán-Torres, César. 2019. The Fluids of Roma: Necropolitics and Class in Cuarón’s Cinematic Memoir. Senses of Cinema 90 (Mar.) http://sensesofcinema.com/2019/feature-­a rticles/the-­f luids-­o f-­r oma-­n ecropolitics-­a nd-­ class-­in-­cuarons-­cinematic-­memoir/. Alliez, Eric, and Maurizio Lazzarato. 2016. Wars and Capital. Translated by A. Hodges. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e). Aruzza, Cinzia, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser. 2019. Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto. London: Verso. Avilés, Lila. 2018. La camarista. Produced by Lila Avilés, Tatiana Graullera, et al. Mexico: Amplitud, Bambú Audiovisual, La Panda. DVD, 102 mins. Ciccarelli, Roberto. 2018. Forza Lavoro: Il Lato Oscuro della Rivoluzione Digitale. Roma: DeriveApprodi. Cuarón, Alfonso. 2018. Roma. Produced by Nicolás Celis, Alfonso Cuarón et al. Mexico Esperanto Filmoj, Participant, Pimienta Films. DVD, 135 mins. Federici, Silvia. 2009. Caliban and The Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation. 3rd ed. New York: Autonomedia. ———. 2019. Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Oakland: PM Press. ———. 2020. Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism. Oakland: PM Press. Hans, Simran. 2019. The Chambermaid Review-Maid to Measure. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jul/28/the-­c hambermaid-­ review-­la-­camarista-­lila-­aviles. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2017. Assembly. New  York: Oxford University Press. Lagerwey, Jorie, Julia Leyda, and Diane Negra. 2016. Female-Centred TV in the Age of Precarity. In University of Colorado Boulder: Genders 1 (1) https:// www.colorado.edu/genders/2016/05/19/female-­centered-­tv-­age-­precarity. Leonard, Suzanne. 2014. Escaping the Recession? The New Vitality of the Woman Worker. In Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity, ed. D. Negra and Y. Tasker, 31–58. London: Duke University. Luxemburg, Rosa. 2003. The Accumulation of Capital. Translated by A. Schwarzschild. London: Routledge. Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1. Translated by B. Fowkes. London: Penguin Books. Rottenberg, Charlotte. 2018. The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism. New York: Oxford University Press. Thoma, Pamela. 2014. What Julia Knew: Domestic Labor in the Recession-Era Chick Flick. In Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity, ed. D. Negra and Y. Tasker, 107–135. London: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 11

China Is Purest Capitalism: The Cinema of Jia Zhangke

Jia Zhangke is largely recognised on the international scene among the greatest narrators of a changing China, of the mutation of the country from a Maoist/collectivist society to a neoliberal one (Szeto 2009). In this sense, his filmography is often celebrated for its capacity of effectively integrating social criticism, documentary-style filmmaking, and a magical realist and intimate tone (Rayns 2013). In this chapter, I will comparatively discuss two of his latest works, A Touch of Sin (天注定, 2013) and Ash is Purest White (江湖儿女, 2018), which fall within the categories of drama/ gangster films, using, as it has already been noticed, patterns of the wuxia genre and of traditional Chinese Opera (Cai 2015). Although the action, in both cases, is set around several regions, stressing the differences and interconnection between the various cityscapes constellating the transforming body of the nation, the main narrative focus is grounded in Shanxi, a northern province (homeplace of the director) once site of well-­ established coal mines industries. All the characters of the two films, it is possible to argue, enact a visible effort to adapt, in different ways, to massive social mutations and, through their difficult interaction with a hostile political and ethical environment, reveal the conflictualities and the multiple spatial and temporal layers pervading contemporary China. Of course, the critical observation of the mutations the nation went through

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to transform into a neoliberal superpower1—starting with the long period of ‘reforms’ initiated by Deng Xiaoping—has nothing to do with the celebration of a previous supposed Golden Age of social justice; it is, instead, the examination and focus on the trauma of immense historical passages, underscoring the ethical depression pervading the social landscape and, more in general, the consistent sense of precarity and pre-determination affecting the agents of these storyworlds (cf. McGrath 2016; Nelson Schultz 2016; Zhangke 2010). The embodied fabula of the two films is quite different, since, in the first case, A Touch of Sin displays four independent ‘extreme’ individual stories, thematically interconnected and inspired by real events. On the other hand, Ash is Purest White is built upon the evolution of the relationship between Qiao (Zhao Tao), a young woman living in Datong, and her partner Bin (Liao Fan), a gangster working for a local corrupt property owner. Notwithstanding these differences, the two films share very similar chronotopic motifs, in particular in relation to the topographical and architextural mapping they enact. As for many other Zhangke’s films, indeed, peripheries and urban ruins constitute the essential operational landscape for the story events, displaying an affective ecology where fragmentation and lack of clear existential directions are dominating patterns. All these emotional maps are displayed in their relevance and central role through the extensive use of long takes, long-shots, and tracking shots, which, apart from highlighting the connection of the characters with their surrounding environment and closely reporting their movements through spaces, also show the relentless precarity and fragility pervading the existential context. Corey Kai Nelson Schultz (2016), indeed, has argued that ruins in Jia Zhangke’s films constitute an entire psychogeography (see also Bruno 2002, 219–221), establishing a specific relation between space-­ time compositions and the idea of progress. In this emotional geography, we do not perceive social mutations and transformations in a linear and progressive direction; on the contrary, these ruins enact a perception of historical movements as continuous cycles of destruction and promises of developments not necessarily leading to the affirmation of new possibilities. Ruins, in a certain sense, constitute 1  Although the label of neoliberal economy may appear a bit reductive when analysing the Chinese model, which brings together a free-market-based competitive system with dirigiste policies characterised by long-term state-planned investments (see Giovanni Arrighi 2007, 361-366; Friedman 2020).

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the ‘real’ precarious body of history, where socio-political shifts take place through the demolition and fragmentation of a previous existential landscape and of the lives of those inhabiting them. In the first section of Ash is Purest White, we see often Qiao and Bin, or other characters, talking about likely estate investments to make in Datong, taking advantage of the restructuring of the once mining urban centre into a more commercial and service-economy-led town. These same conversations and ideas of financial plans, however, take place in a context of urban degradation and marginalisation, in which the hopes for the future seem actually absent or difficult to reach. Not incidentally, a small early scene in which we see Qiao and Bin discussing these opportunities (backward tracking shot/long take, cinematography by Eric Gautier) ends up with the latter being attacked by two young gangsters of a rival organisation, which will soon dethrone him from his position of Datong’s tough guy. While Bin appears to be open minded regarding future business plans, his character’s speech clearly frames him as a man of the past, as a jianghu (traditional Chinese criminal underworld) chivalric hero. This construction of the character appears evident from the first moments we meet him. Bin is playing Mah-jong in his gambling club (we reach him through a series of Steadicam pans and movements following Qiao in the building), while Jia and Sun, two of his men, are quarrelling about an unreturned money loan. Bin promptly resolves the conflict between them by asking to confess their real deeds in front of small statue of Lord Guan (a historical and legendary heroic figure). The sequence presents, therefore, a charismatic character capable of effectively dealing with the criminal world surrounding him by relying on ‘codes’ and symbols of martial honour and discipline. These same symbolic features of heroic masculinity are reiterated when we see him and his men watching together with admiration John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986), a dialogical element further stressing the type of mythology these gangsters rely upon. Bin’s framing as an old-style gangster, however, also interplays with his inadequacy in effectively adapting to a changing social dimension, a disconnection leading to his defeat and ultimate saving by the hands of Qiao, who will sacrifice her freedom in order not to have Bin serve a long sentence in prison. In a similar way, Hu Dahai (Jiang Wu), the protagonist of the first episode of A Touch of Sin, is an apparently idealist coal mine worker struggling against corruption and the transformation of his company set in Wujinshan (the episode is called ‘Black Gold Mountain’) into a privatised enterprise. He publicly accuses the management of selling the company’s

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assets without sharing it with the workers or contributing to the welfare of the city (as they were supposed to do) and unsuccessfully tries to contact central political institutions asking them to intervene and to punish the wrongdoings of the ‘businessmen’. What Dahai is visibly fighting for, therefore, is to maintain and preserve the rules of a collectivist mode of production, having the workers sharing parts of the profits and of the decision-making process. These ideals and notions, nonetheless, are framed as nostalgic remnants of the past. One of his colleagues argues that he was born in the wrong moment in history: ‘if he had been born during the war, he could have been nominated general.’ The framing as a man of the another era, connected with the egalitarian communist ideal, is dialogically associated with a sense of failure and inadequacy. Apart from the distress and isolation among his co-workers, who try to avoid being associated with him, the environment per se seems to strongly oppose Dahai’s intentions and desires. The snowy and gloomy landscape of this northern city, with its decaying buildings and industrial structures filling the horizon, describes, again, a psychogeography in ruin dialogically subverting the expectations of the main character, where symbols of the Maoist period remain as disempowered signs of a previous era. The fragility and decadence of a previous political symbology stands as a common chronotopic feature in both films, reiterated in Ash is Purest White, in the body of Qiao’s father, an old union organiser, who, much like Dahai, protests against coal mines privatisation and the neoliberal transformation of their management. We encounter him following Qiao listening to his voice on village speakers, complaining against ‘the paper tigers’ selling out the companies. The famous Maoist slogan is then dialogically subverted with his image (appearing as soon as Qiao reaches him) as a drunk lonely protester, speaking alone from the radio, and ignored by those around him. The weakness and fragility of this character is further revealed by Qiao explicitly taking care of him and by his later statement that he will stop protesting and solely dedicate to playing Mah-jong. The obsolescence of the communist imagery, what is more, finds its most radical expression in the final episode of A Touch of Sin, displaying an erotic dance for the rich guests of a brothel (called ironically Golden Age) performed by sex-workers dressed up as socialist soldiers and marching on the notes of an old parade tune. Likewise, San Pei Nu (Li Meng), one the main characters of this episode, is shown, later on, providing her services to an angry costumer in a mock copy of old railways reserved for Party cadres (cf. Rayns 2013), playing the role of the inefficient train conductor

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punished for her juvenile lack of purpose. The polyphonic overturning of the socialist symbols of the country, as well as of the traditional gangster imagery, therefore, more than indicating a nostalgic longing, generates further vivid metaphorical ruins of previous forms of collective experience, which cannot be regained and reconstructed. At the same time, the ‘moral corruption’ of these images and inconography also reinforces the establishment of a social context where competitive and consumerist attitudes have paradoxically become the central ‘institutional discipline’. It is, in particular, on this point that Dahai’s failure dialogically encounters its most direct expression, as he appears incapable of understanding that the entire political landscape has been completely reshaped against his vision of the world. This relates to the consideration we have made in the introductory section of the book, when talking about how neoliberal governance has nothing to do with mere financial mechanisms deprived of ‘State’ control; it involves, instead, a reconfiguration of social, individual, and institutional life altogether (cf. Dardot and Laval 2017, 301–302). In accordance with his incapacity to reconcile with the immense reforming of his existential ground, we will see Dahai being humiliated and beaten by his boss’ men and receiving the scorn of all his fellow villagers. Likewise, the ending of the episode, with Dahai furiously killing the manager and all his subjects, does not seem to be related to a supposed revolutionary act of justice. On the contrary, we could argue that somehow the sequences showing Dahai’s revenge against corruption totally deconstruct and diminish the supposed chivalric heroism associated with his extreme acts. On one side, indeed, we see the character wrapping his shotgun in a towel with a tiger printed on it and then confidently moving around the old city centre of his town, all images that infuse his acts with ideas of martial valour and bravery. On the other hand, Dahai’s murders are presented in a sort of softened tone. The rhythm and style of the action characterising the film in general (mostly shot through long takes made with Steadicam) does not transform in accordance with the violent events taking place (as also demonstrated by the consistent use of mainly diegetic sound). Thus, instead of displaying this violence as a dialogical rupture within the pre-existing chronotope, the film frames it as the consequence of a slow process of moral and affective consumption. For this same reason, Dahai’s revenge does not seem to embody an ethically productive power, being reduced, instead, to an individualised resentful and desperate reaction, connected with personal anguish and humiliation. The episode, after showing a relieved Dahai, happy for the completion of his revenge,

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closes on images of the same unchanging industrial landscape we have seen before and on a horse, early on ‘liberated’ by the protagonist from his mean owner, moving in an empty field without precise directions. As dialogical confirmation of the uselessness of this personal vendetta, in the short coda closing the four episodes, we will see a picture celebrating the exact same corrupt coal mines boss killed by the protagonist. This failure, associated with a reversal of themes of individualised martial heroism, is strongly reiterated also in the second and third episodes of the film. For instance, the second section deals with Zhou San (Wang Biaoqang), a flawless thief and assassin, nomadically travelling around different regions with his motorcycle, always looking for new targets. The cold and immutable facial mimic of the character and his appearance in dark leather clothes could be easily associated with the iconography of errant knights, stoically performing their duties in accordance with an unwritten code of justice and loyalty (cf. Cai 2015). Nonetheless, as for Dahai’s ‘journey’, this chivalric form of heroism is once again subverted, in even more explicit terms, by associating this traditional literary image with the series of cruel crimes for mere economic profit. The ethical distress connected with this type of extreme actions is also dialogically connected with Zhou San being an ‘efficient’ son and husband, always providing for his family (the episode is centred around his return to Wushan to visit his relatives during his mother’s birthday and the celebrations for the new year). On the other hand, he tells his wife to file divorce and feels no particular attachment for his son (as, of course, for his victims). Two moments further contribute in participating in this character’s speech; halfway through the episode, we see Zhou San imperturbably witnessing a fight between different people in a gambling house (fast handheld camera movements, cinematography by Nelson Lik-way Yu). Later on, as his son looks at the new year’s fireworks, Zhou San adds that they could participate and coldly fires his gun. These two scenes effectively enact his impassive stance (he affirms to be bored by everything apart from shooting) and, at the same time, his disinterest in emotional bonds up to the point of gloomily parodying collective celebrations. The dialogical integration of these affective patterns defines Zhou San as an ethically passive figure, featuring an intellectual life grounded on mere financial calculations and automatically reproducing behaviours meant to expand and guarantee his economic possibilities. For these reasons, we could argue that this character, in an extreme form, perfectly embodies the value of a self-centred enterprise, capable of ‘extracting’ profit at every occasion and

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of moving throughout the space without having to rely on consistent affective roots or even desiring to break these emotional connections, which appear as existential enclosures. If the ethical depression and corruption of Zhou San appear as the violent acceptance of situated social values of economic realisation, reversing literary chivalric myths, in the third episode, instead, we experience a different dialogical subversion of such trope. Set in the southern and more florid province of Hubei, this section deals with Zhen Xiaoyu (Zhao Thao), a receptionist working in a night sauna, involved in a long-lasting relationship with a married man, not willing to leave his wife. After having to endure several emotional and physical humiliations (such as being publicly beaten and insulted by his lover’s jealous wife and by other two men), Xiaoyu is assaulted by two rich night-comers (two corrupt government officials) on her workplace, demanding her erotic services (against Xiaoyu’s duties). Her refusal is met by the violent reaction of one of two men, repeatedly hitting the character with a bundle of notes—an aggression to which Xiaoyu eventually responds by killing them with his lover’s knife. Her revenge is interestingly portrayed as an elegant martial performance, with Xiaoyu precisely hitting her molesters with fatal physical movements and accompanying every strike with loud battle screams, in accordance with the convention of the wuxia genre. Nonetheless, this gallant chivalric revenge does not lead to particularly heroic and epic outcomes and, on the contrary, reveals the state of destitution and precarity of the character, who, in addition to having her fragile affective relation fading away, is forced to lose her job and position and finally confesses her crime to the police. The ironic reversal of the wuxia dynamics examined so far can be enriched by Zhangke’s comments on A Touch of Sin, as he stated that the heroes of traditional knightly tales and of Chinese Opera are easy to be compared with people living at the margins of contemporary society, for they both exist and try to find their place in precarious worlds (MiFF 2013; Rayns 2013). This existential disorientation is what makes the characters lost, incapable of imagining affirmative ethical actions and, thus, passively responding to contextual social dynamics by recurring to violent or desperate acts. Not incidentally, the original title of A Touch of Sin (‘Tian zhuding’) literally translates as ‘fated doom’ already indicating the limited agency connected with the characters’ lives and their filmic worlds. Following this line of thought, another common chronotopic pattern in both case studies is the recurring presentation of a humanity and workforce in constant movement and displacement. If A Touch of Sin starts

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with the lonely ride of Zhou San, Ash is Purest White as well introduces Qiao among a group of travellers on a bus, probably moving to Datong’s city centre after the closure of coal mines and old factories. Qiao’s emotional arc as well takes the form of a continuous movement across different provinces, engaging both with the fast transformations of the existential landscape and consequently with the major difficulties in adapting while travelling within these spaces. As we have seen, Qiao is initially presented as the boss’ woman, as a strong figure living, nonetheless, on the side of her man for whom she willingly sacrifices her freedom. After spending five years in jail, however, she will not find Bin waiting for her, and we will accompany her going to Fengije, where the once gangster has supposedly started a new life and business. Again, Qiao’s movement to a richer and more urbanised location is accompanied with the distress and disorientation of the character observing a completely renovated reality unfolding in front of her eyes. In this narrative section, a small forward tracking shot follows Qiao moving on the deck of the boat she is travelling on and reveals the majestic landscape of the Three Gorges Dam (its traumatic ecological and psychosocial impact is a central feature of Still Life, 2006), an immense hydroelectric facility, around which a massive urbanisation has taken place (the results of which we can see in the background). This same development, however, is happening through the cancellation and flooding of large archaeological and pre-existing urban sites and with the displacement of more than one million people, as the voice over of a speaker explains us (while the camera describes the surroundings through several panoramic shots), adding that the landscape in front of the travellers’ eyes may disappear forever. The huge historical evolution described by these images couples Qiao’s affective and intimate displacement, as she finally encounters Bin after several unsuccessful attempts and discovers that he failed to keep his role in the jianghu underworld when coming out of jail, and now is a changed man, engaged with another woman. The thematic pattern of ruin and of the traumatic passage of history is enacted again in the form of a massive natural disruption shattering relationships and pre-­ existing spatial connections altogether. Qiao and Bin, consequently, separate and, as the story proceeds, we follow the woman next steps around China, on a train directed back to Datong, where she meets a passenger pretending to be organising a tourist site in Xinjang around the possibility of U.F.O. (unidentified flying object) hunting. This new encounter, however, constitutes only another false promise of new opportunities, since the man—whom she promptly abandons—actually runs a convenience store and, as her, is migrating

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alone in the desolated space surrounding them. In this moment of maximal affective and economic destitution for Quiao, a magical revelation takes place, as we see her moving within a desert nocturnal landscape and observing the appearance of an alien spaceship crossing the sky. The dialogical opposition and contamination between the affective and ethical disempowerment of the characters, the hostility enacted by a horizontally unbounded and undefined setting, together with the fantastic element expressed by the U.F.O., reinforces and reiterates the sense of passivity and impossibility connected with the film chronotope. ‘We are prisoners of the cosmos,’ the man from Karamay affirms when talking about his fake tourist project, whereas, to confirm such powerlessness, Qiao responds later on, ‘I’m one of the prisoners you talked about.’ The absence of existential lines of flight, which can be, therefore, embodied only by fantastic and supernatural elements, is what leads Qiao back home, retaking, now as leader, her role in the local criminal underworld, thus describing her wandering around China as a forced circular journey. The affective and existential displacement we see enacted by Qiao’s voyage is comparable to travelling of Xiao Hui (Luo Lanshan) and, to some extent, of San Pei Nu in the fourth episode (‘Oasis of Prosperity’) of A Touch of Sin. The young man, in particular, is seen passing from one precarious job after the other, moving around Guangdong province, the most ‘free-market friendly’ and economically active zone of China (due to its closeness to Hong Kong). His migrations, as for Cristiano in Araby, are associated with loss of friendship and intimate bonds together with presenting a character trapped in varied exploitative contexts with the hope of new freedoms and existential paths to be disclosed. Xiao Hui is forced to leave his factory because he is held responsible for a co-worker’s injury (he was only talking to him during a shift) and is hired as doorman and waiter at the Golden Age night club where also San Pei Nu works. By following the two characters, we can observe a rapidly developing affective bond between them. However, the dynamics of sex-work (‘in my world love does not exist,’ San Pei Nu melancholically argues), and the constrictions due to both their professional routines, end up dividing them. In the end, after having abandoned also this position, Xiao Hui starts working in another factory, living in a common dorm for young precarious workers, goaded by his mother’s request for money. Although apparently different in its chronotopic construction, by presenting locations where economic development and wealth are visible and appear attainable, in the form skyscrapers and modern constructions, this episode keeps on reinforcing the

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sense of pre-determination and closure already observed. In accordance with the neoliberal mode of production, work and life are indistinguishable for Xiao Hui and his colleagues, who observe the erasure of every notion of free time preventing the constitutions of relations not determined by a clear economic logic. Xiao Hui drastic decision to commit suicide, in this context of exploitation and impossible promises of freedom (we can observe also the dialogical and ironic function of the title of the episode), therefore, takes place (as for many violent acts displayed in both films) without dramatic emphasis. The absence of an emotional score and the depiction of the tragic decision of the character through simple pans accompanying his movements and his deadly fall, indeed, provide the extreme gesture with a distressing reasonability. ‘Animals commit suicide too,’ says a surprised Xiaoyu, after having watched a nature documentary, to a colleague, who answers with the proverb ‘better a miserable life than a beautiful death’. The violence and self-destruction we experience, although existing as part of the ‘natural order’, embody a situated political significance and role. Indeed, as Yanjie Wang has noticed, the characters’ actions have the function of revealing the ontological brutality of the contextual social order giving meaning and even a rebellious tone to them, though they are totally inadequate in subverting these power relations and ultimately reveal to be merely desperate acts (Wang 2015). Exploitation and precarity, although pervasive, are not, however, universally homogeneous in these two films, and gender dynamics intersect with the construction of subjectivities at work in the neoliberal economy. In both cases, we can see how women tend to embody in more extreme forms the total subsumption of life to capital, performing duties that shatter every distinction between public and intimate experience. In Ash is Purest White, the temporal shifts of the embodied fabula from the beginning of the millennium to our days, what is more, allow viewers also to experience the massive impact of the entrance of women in what were before traditionally male professional fields. Qiao, in the final section of the film, becomes the boss of the Datong clan and is now the one providing for an emasculated and disabled Bin, abandoned by his partner— after  suffering a stroke—for being an ‘inefficient’ alcoholic, and now returning defeated to his hometown. This subversion of roles is effectively enacted through a long take—in the final section of the film—which accompanies Qiao’s confident movements within her work environment, monitoring the guests of her gambling business and responding to their requests. The camerawork of this sequence dialogically relates to the initial

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moments of the film, in which we have seen Qiao entering in the same estate, in that case, as Bin’s woman going to seat at his side. The interaction between these two similar sequences, therefore, stresses the changes in the economic and social sphere and emphasises mutations of roles; transformations that are reflected also in the preceding moments, visualising a modernised urban setting (shown through drone shots), incomparable to the initial geography. In addition to this socio-historical reframing, we also see how Qiao seems a more efficient and adaptable leader than Bin. She rapidly responds to technological and economic transformations, as demonstrated by the upgrade of her gambling venue with CCTV cameras and digital monitors, and by her capacity to keep the clan together. Qiao is also the character with the most evident emotional strength and honesty (she is the one who openly declared the end of their story against a scared and guilty Bin), who now takes care of her previous partner in accordance with the jianghu honour code, a set of values that she appears to embody better than her male colleagues. The reversal of gender roles in the economic and managerial sphere, apart from revealing the fragility and inadequacy of a heteropatriarchal masculinity still dominating contextual social relations, is not met, however, with a new-born freedom and emancipation. Indeed, the final images of Ash is Purest White, showing the fragmented and pixelated picture on a CCTV monitor of Qiao looking for Bin, after his unexpected leave, display an isolated character whose agency is erased due to the topdown perspective of the shot. This composition places her in a passive position, as a character whose destiny and expectations are still dominated by forces and movements beyond her reach. Furthermore, Qiao’s circular return to Datong and to her initial environment (the criminal underworld) also stresses an absence of progress and reduces her becoming an efficient gangster as a forced choice, as the simple adaptation to historical processes she suffered without having the possibility to construct existential alternatives. The conclusive moments of Ash is Purest White can be dialogically related to the coda of A Touch of Sin, in which we see Xiaoyu arrival in Shanxi to apply for a post in a big company managed by the widow of Dahai’s boss. Apparently, this circular return to the initial setting, providing images of a triumphing corporate capitalism unchallenged by the described episodes of violent rebellion, reinforces the sense of inevitability and individual fragility of the characters in relation to their chronotope. This epilogue, indeed, displays a weakened Xiaoyu, victim of the

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circumstances, forced to escape from Hubei—after having served her sentence—and to hide her identity and past. On the other hand, as soon as the interview is concluded, we follow Xiaoyu attending a public performance of a classical opera (ironically describing the story of a woman punished for crimes she did not commit, cf. Rayns 2013). Apart from further stressing the recurring interaction between traditional literary and theatrical genres and contemporary dramas, this epilogue enacts a productive dialogical subversion through its very last images. As soon as the camera cuts back to the audience (after having tracked sections of the performance), we do not perceive Xiaoyu anymore. In her place, the audience, in its multiple features, closes the experience, overturning the subjective isolation of the characters, reiterated in both films, into a collective space, irreducible to individually identified components. As Matthew Holtmeier has argued, a fundamental expressive pattern of Jia Zhangke’s cinema is the definition of a pre-hodological space, which, in accordance with Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, indicates an immanent bodily dimension preceding every individual and atomised formation of the subjects (2014). The contamination of the characters with the space surrounding them, their existence as part of a social ontology, and the physical pervasiveness of ruins describing the tangible traumatic passages of history, indeed, despite outlining situated dynamics of power and exploitation, also highlight the foundational role of a pre-individual level of experience. With the Bakhtinian final dialogical inversion of A Touch of Sin, we return to this space of undecided and undetermined potentiality (cf. Holtmeier 2014), envisioning a collective body that stands as unexpressed ethical opportunity, as a possible new political formation, as a different sociality to be built. However, as the chronotopes of both films demonstrate, in order to break the existential chains of every precarious life, the masks of a failed individual chivalry or of a romantic nostalgia for lost golden ages need to be abandoned and unveiled in their structural weakness. In their place, an experimental solidarity can be born, exactly by processing, transforming, and recomposing the ruins of each one’s personal fragility.

References Arrighi, Giovanni. 2007. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso. Bruno, Giuliana. 2002. Atlas of Emotions: Journey in Art, Architecture, and Film. London: Verso.

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Cai, Shensen. 2015. Jia Zhangke and His A Touch of Sin: Social violence, the criminal knight and chilling fantasy. Film International 13 (2): 67–78. https:// doi.org/10.1386/fiin.13.2.67_1. Dardot, Pierre, and Christian Laval. 2017. The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society. Trans. Gregory Elliot. London: Verso. Friedman, Eli. 2020 Why China Is Capitalist: Toward an Anti-Nationalist Anti-­ Imperialism. Spectre. https://spectrejournal.com/why-­china-­is-­capitalist/. Holtmeier, Matthew. 2014. The Wanderings of Jia Zhangke: Pre-Hodological Space and Aimless Youths in Xiao Wu and Unknown Pleasures. Journal of Chinese Cinema 8 (2): 148–159. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2014. 915565. McGrath, Declan. 2016. The Films of Jia Zhangke: Poetic Realist of Globalization. Cineaste 41 (4): 34–39. MIFF. 2013. MIFF Interview with Jia Zhangke & Zhao Tao (A Touch of Sin). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3rMTZ6LHkY. Nelson Schultz, Corey Kai. 2016. Ruin in the Films of Jia Zhangke. Visual Communication 15 (4): 439–460. https://doi.org/10.1177/147035 7216633921. Rayns, Tony. 2013. Heard It Through the Grapevine. Film Comment. https:// www.filmcomment.com/article/a-­touch-­of-­sin-­jia-­zhang-­ke/. Szeto, Kin-Yan. 2009. A Moist Heart: Love, Politics and China’s Neoliberal Transition in the Films of Jia Zhangke. Visual Anthropology 22 (March): 95–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/08949460802623515. Wang, Yanjie. 2015. Violence, Wuxia, Migrants: Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Discontent in A Touch of Sin. Journal of Chinese Cinema 9 (2): 159–172. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2015.1020626. Woo, John. 1986. A Better Tomorrow. Produced by Hark Tsui, John Woo. Hong Kong: Cinema City, Film Workshop. DVD, 95 mins. Zhangke, Jia. 2006. San xia hao ren. Produced by Chow Keung, Tianyan Wang, et  al. China-Hong Kong: Xstream Pictures, Shanghai Film Studios. DVD, 111 mins. ———. 2010. What Remains is Silence. China Perspectives 81 (April): 54–57. https://doi.org/10.4000/chinaperspectives.5059. ———. 2013. Tian zhu ding. Produced by Xiaojiang Gao, Shôzô Ichiyama, et al. China-Japan-France: Xstream Pictures, Shanghai Film, et al. DVD, 130 mins. ———. 2018. Jiang hu er nü. Produced by Shôzô Ichiyama, Olivier Père. China-­ France-­ Japan: Arte France Cinéma, Beijing Runjin Investment, et  al. DVD, 136 mins.

PART III

Expulsion/Extinction

CHAPTER 12

Parasite, or The Economy of Massacre

The final part of this book, focused on cinematic chronotopes of e­ xpulsion/ extinction, starts off with the analysis of one of the most celebrated and awarded movies of the 2019 film season, Parasite (기생충, 2019), by Bong Joon-ho. Worldwide, the film has been commended for its capacity to capture and satirise the social inequalities affecting South Korea and metonymically the globe (LARB AV 2019). This case study clearly addresses class divisions and struggles by dealing with the Kims, a poor family living in a semi-basement apartment in Seoul, and their relationship with the rich Parks, inhabiting a luxurious mansion in a top hill neighbourhood of the town. Many reviewers have recognised the efficacy of the film in integrating patterns of genre filmmaking together with a ferocious social commentary pervaded by grotesque if not caricatural tonalities (Rose 2020; Hee Im 2019). In a sense, we could consider the film contributing to what we have observed, in the first part of the book, as performances of anxiety symptomatic of a cruel optimism in line with neoliberal competitive morality (cf. Bayman 2019; Berlant 2011, 194). Notwithstanding the fact that we can notice a clear continuity between chronotopes of anxiety and an affective dimension of expulsion, what we are more specifically going to discuss in this chapter is how the ecological composition of the film, in its dialogical and experiential complexity, draws a radically divided social cartography—a psychosocial and conceptual map of the economy of massacre enriching the landscape of the precarious cinematic world through which we have travelled so far. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Sticchi, Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63261-8_12

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The opening medium shot (cinematography by Hong Kyung-pyo) already enacts a particular configuration of the ecology by presenting the view of the street from the Kims’ apartment perspective. We access the road through a dirty window covered with iron railing and, soon, a slow top-down crane reveals the close-up of Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), the younger male member of the family, checking the access to a wi-fi network on his mobile phone. The following shots display, then, the various spaces of a small apartment together with presenting the other three members of the family (the mother, Chung-sook, the father, Ki-taek, and the daughter, Ki-jeong [respectively played by Yang Hye-jin, Song Kang-ho, and Park So-dam]). As explained by the director, the opening sequence is meant to already provide us with all the necessary information about the familial nucleus and their psychosocial condition (Vanity Fair 2019); on one side, of course, we can clearly observe their need to adapt to very small and uncomfortable spaces, made even more difficult to manage by the overwhelming and chaotic presence of clothes, boxes, and objects limiting movements and agency for the characters. The walls and cheap furniture of the various rooms, what is more, are covered with mud, thus providing us with the sensation of an unhealthy living environment. On the other hand, as the initial shot demonstrates, the family does not live in a complete underground apartment, the street is visible and accessible, and the link with higher levels of the building is not interrupted. Likewise, although not possessing an internet connection, the Kims can easily steal wi-fi from other inhabitants of the area. This dialogical contrast in the definition of the characters’ home-space expresses the ambiguity of their social position. Although obviously not being prosperous (indeed, their main occupation is folding and selling pizza boxes), they do not seem to wear signs of desperation and extreme resignation to their condition (the semi-basement is also a very common form of accommodation for non-wealthy families in Seoul; see Balhorn 2019; BBC 2020). On the contrary, we see them always working out something together to scrape a living (even with a certain dose of ironic enthusiasm in their self-entrepreneurship) and ‘taking advantage’ of every occurrence with confidence in the possibility to move to another accommodation in the near future. One of the images that synthesises this aspirational attitude is the already very popular medium shot of Ki-jeong and Ki-woo packed together in the mezzanine level of their small bathroom looking for internet signal on their mobile phone, unaware or uncaring of their very precarious condition and concentrated, instead, on an external

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dimension. In a way, this semi-basement/not completely destitute and marginalised position of the characters makes us engage a liminal space that can be connected with the aspiration for improvement and social uplifting, on one side, and the fear of falling further below, on the other (cf. O’Falt 2019). In this same initial sequence, not incidentally, we see public workers operating an insects’ disinfestation in the street and Ki-taek rapidly blocking his daughter from closing the window arguing that, in this way, they are going to have a ‘free extermination’. The grotesque result of this decision is that we see their apartment completely covered by the toxic smokes, while they, though coughing, keep folding pizza boxes. It is interesting to observe how this film presents a reversal of the previously analysed theme of familial unity within a neoliberal economy. If some of the latest case studies discussed allow us to engage its fragmentation as structure of care or let emerge the ambiguities and conflicts in emotional labour, Parasite, on the contrary, reshapes and reverses this chronotopic pattern into an economic agreement. The Kims behave like a micro-enterprise in motion and, notwithstanding the emotional connection between them, they work exactly as a minimal utilitarian composite, striving to find economic opportunities everywhere in competition with the other familial nuclei existing around them. As we have already seen in previous cases, therefore, the family is not conceivable as an outside of production; however, here it becomes, in an even more explicit form, the primordial embodiment of the logic of mutual ‘entrepreneurial’ disruption dominating social relations, thus losing any sort of romantic and emotional allure. The visible preoccupation for the characters is finding a profitable and stable occupation, and this occasion comes right after the initial moments with the offer from Min, and old school friend of Ki-woo, of substituting him as English tutor for the teenage daughter of the Parks’ family (Da-hye played by Jung Ji-so). Ki-woo and Ki-jeong will fabricate false documents assessing his status as brilliant international college student, so to give him a ‘legitimate’ access to the Park’s mansion. As the story unfolds, we will see that Ki-woo’s initial invasion of the ‘rich world’ will allow him to slowly introduce, through various subtle expedients, his entire family as members of the staff serving the Parks. As soon as Ki-woo accesses the Parks’ mansion (production design by Lee Ha-jun), we experience the class divide between the two families enacted in the form of clear chronotopic oppositions. If the Kims have a limited access to light and their home-space is characterised by a

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discomforting sense of narrowness, the Parks’, instead, live in a (apparently) three-floor villa (with a large basement/storeroom, a ground floor for the kitchen and living room, and an upper floor with the bedrooms), characterised by open and luminous spaces (features emphasised by the wide 2.39:1 aspect ratio of the film, see O’Falt 2019), surrounded by glass windows. These latter architectural components, and their different roles in the two main domestic settings, also stress the opposition between the familial groups. For the Kims glass windows exist as a feature of discomforting contiguity with their urban environment and indicate a lack of private space (the Kims are often depicted from that specific point of view); whereas for the Parks, these architectural openings appear as secondary screens enacting sensations of control and comfort, and we often see them (or the Kims) back to camera observing the outside. In the interiors of the Parks’ house we notice the constant presence of highly polished floorboard, together with a hypermodern and minimalist furniture, combining extreme functionality and sophistication with wide accessibility to the living space. The internal spaces and décor, in general, produce operational images of cosiness, freedom, and agency, where the exteriors, surrounded by a wide garden integrating a meadow with high trees, reinforce this sense of openness and possibility, up to the point of making their domestic dimension resemble a completely detached non-urban space. The limits of the property, on the other hand, provide us with dialogically opposed elements, since the previously mentioned characteristics of accessibility are associated with the presence of high thick walls surrounding the mansion, which we see only from the adjacent street. This dimension of comfort and well-­being is, therefore, combined with expressive markers of separation and delimitation, which, in turn, underline the already mentioned class divide between the two familial nuclei. The Parks, in line with the environment they belong to, appear as an ‘idyllic’, although problematic, group. Mrs. and Mr. Park (Yeon-kyo and Dong-ik played respectively by Jo Yeo-jeong and Lee Sun-kyu) are clearly constructed as very mannered and respectful persons, embodying an idea of prosperity associated also with a sense of sophisticated moderation. They appear sensitive to everybody’s exigencies (including their servants/ staff members), always eating seasonal and healthy food, and, in particular for what concerns Yeon-kyo, to be extremely concerned about the well-­ being of their children (Da-hye and the native American culture obsessed eight-year-old Da-song [Jung Hyun-jun]). Indeed, the kindness and gentleness of the Parks leads them to be perceived as naïve and easy to

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manipulate, and it is exactly by exploiting the supposedly caring side of Yeon-kyo (always wearing white or bright clothes stressing the moral purity of the character) that Ki-woo manages to present himself as an expert English tutor, capable of recognising the weaknesses and strengths of a pupil with a singular few minutes session. Likewise, he manages to introduce his sister, disguised as an art teacher with international degrees, after making few observations about some drawings made by Da-song. Indeed, right after Ki-woo’s invasion, it is the turn of Ki-jeong to attract Mrs. Park’s attention by ‘performing’ the role of an expert, laconic, and firm teacher/therapist, identifying in these sketches a repressed traumatic experience (when actually the drawings refer to the presence of another inhabitant of the mansion), and implying the necessity to act as a constant figure in the education and growth of the child. The first two ‘parasitic’ incursions present a dialogical reintroduction of the concept of work as performance. As Yeon-kyo states, she does not really care about documents and degrees (although these same falsified international certificates are the sole reason for the characters having job interviews in the first place). What she demands, therefore, are a series of gestures and attitudes that demonstrate the provision of emotional and intellectual support for the children. For this reason, Ki-jeong and Ki-woo embody completely unnatural behaviours when working, emphasising the artificiality of their operations (they are also given different names [Kevin and Jessica] in connection with the Parks’ obsession for the USA). Exactly because of this willingness to perform, however, the two receive an enthusiastic approval from Yeon-kyo. In a similar way, we will see also Ki-taek and finally Chung-sook effectively become part of the family staff, respectively, as personal driver for Dong-ik and as official housekeeper (at the expenses of the previous employees carrying out these roles). The older Kims, as well, are displayed embodying specific habits and roles aimed at satisfying the expectations of the Parks—for instance, a constant and sympathetic, but non-invasive, presence in the domestic life for Ki-taek, and a sophisticated, controlling, and governing posture for Chung-sook. The invasion of the Parks’ house, therefore, is enacted through a ­continuous work on the self on behalf of every member of the Kims, a psychological and affective labour presenting ambiguous dialogical ­elements. Although explicitly deceiving their employers, the Kims are, from every point of view, carrying out the activities they are expected to do, continuously preparing themselves (we see them often rehearsing scripts) and constantly meeting the needs and demands of their bosses or

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even affectively reassuring them. Da-hye and Da-song, in accordance with this line of thought, cannot be described as average young students ­needing some supports in specific areas of their education. They need to be ‘special’, to be separated them from the crowd; similarly, the behaviour and exigencies of the two parents have to be justified and even celebrated. The performances of the Kims, therefore, are to some extent comparable to the use of the white voice by Cassius, providing a safe image, ­constructing an ideal of success and well-being. This attitude further contributes in configuring the Kims as completely endorsing a competitive attitude, not seeing a necessity for rebellion and conflict and, instead, being ready to sacrifice themselves and others for the dream of economic uplifting. Indeed, their lack of class consciousness and solidarity can be seen in the ease with which they ruin the reputation of the previous driver (making him appear as a sexual abuser) or take advantage of Moon-gwang’s (the former house-maid) fruit allergy in order to make a case for her being affected by tuberculosis (and even end up accidentally killing her). In dialogical opposition to this, the Parks embody an idea of perfection combining wealth, good manners, sophistication, and a certain level of ingenuity, which, however, does not erase strict hierarchical dynamics. Mr. Park, who is the last member of the family introduced to us, is a very self-­ reliant businessman, continuously asserting his dominant position (he always stays on the rear seats of his luxurious Mercedes and does not contribute to house-work). He often emphasises the fact that there are social lines not to be crossed, that the employers and the employees should stay on different levels and know their places. Furthermore, the décor of the house presents many auto-celebratory elements, for instance, showing us family portraits in which he stands as the dominant figure or magazine covers framed and hanging on the wall to display his professional achievements. Ki-taek, when hired as the new personal driver, indeed, will take advantage of the narcissistic and authoritarian side of this character, always performing speeches aimed at supporting Dong-ik’s choices. Likewise, Mr. Park appears as a traditional patriarchal figure, revered from Yeon-kyo and, at the same time, criticising her excessive sensitivity and her inability to be an effective housekeeper. The strict power dynamics between the couple are already enacted by his first appearance. As soon as Yeon-kyo realises that her husband is back home, she wipes away the tears provoked by Ki-jeong’s ‘traumatic’ revelation about Da-Song’s psychic disturbs and quickly moves to the stairs Dong-ik will soon emerge from (camera back to her, small left-right pan putting the husband at the centre of the frame).

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Subsequently, the camera cuts to a medium shot (backward tracking, she is at the centre of the frame) of Ms. Park humbly introducing the new teacher to her husband and, then, we rapidly move to two left-right tracking shots following the three dogs and the house-maid hurrying to welcome the ‘breadwinner’. To emphasise the grotesque dominance of this character, Mr. Park reacts with indifference to the news Yeon-kyo has to offer, and quickly goes to his room. By combining these aspects, we could argue that the first half of the film enacts an embodied fabula characterised by the meticulous and merciless incursion of the Kims in this upper-class ecology based on the exploitation of the self-centred subjectivities of the Parks (‘money make them nice,’ Chung-sook will argue later on). This affective and experiential path reaches its emotional apex with the elaborated montage sequence (composed of approximately sixty shots, editing by Yang Jin-mo), which indicates also the separation between the two main narrative sections of the film. This sequence crosses between and integrates, in a unitary succession of events, the preparation and realisation of the plot to eliminate the previous housekeeper (marking the completion of the Kims’ parasitic attack). The synchronic harmony between these two temporal planes (emphasised by the use of the baroque music theme The Belt of Faith by Jung Jaeil), therefore, operates as balletic materialisation of the cunningness of the main characters and of their ability to successfully manipulate their victims (we see them also being able to predict the reactions of the Parks). The second half of the film, instead, presents a complete dialogical and affective reversal in the experience, downplaying the capacity of the Kims to have control of the context but, more importantly, bringing back, with a disruptive effect, those ambiguous chronotopic dynamics reinforcing the class divide between the two families. The first major twist we experience is characterised by the discovery of a secret bunker within the Parks’ mansion (the existence of which was ignored by the family), where Moon-­ gwang’s husband, Geun-se, has lived for the previous four years hiding from creditors and loan sharks. The former housekeeper was, therefore, feeding and protecting him as she knew of the bunker from her previous employer, the architect who built the house. The revelation of a precedent parasitic incursion, together with the Kims’ failure to manage their secret, initiates a brutal struggle between the two families, fighting one another while contemporarily trying to manage their appearances with the Parks, who, in this particular narrative segment, are suddenly coming back home from hiking because of intense rain.

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The experiential enactment of this same family massacre emphasises the importance of a further chronotopic and architextural elements: stairs. Indeed, their entire fight is staged in the passages connecting the two basement levels of the mansion to the central living room open space. This climbing of the social ladder, therefore, is associated with an extremely violent form of competition (leading to the death of the previous housekeeper), a brutality that may also facilitate a dialogical construction of the Kims and their competitors as pure villainous, unsympathetic, and selfish agents (Hee Im 2019). However, these same experiential dynamics, and the frequent staging of the action on architectural elements of transition, work in revealing the interdependence between the different ecological levels of the storyworld. Stairs and uphill and downhill roads connect the different settings and, at the same time, emphasise their separations and divide, reflecting the conflictual coexistence between these existential and social planes. For how much distance and affective separation there can be from the Kims’ semi-basement or from the muddy and restricted space of the secret bunker at the Parks, these locations are in correlation with the open, comfortable, and luminous main space of the villa. The practical interconnection between these settings helps in re-enacting the dialogical ambiguity emerging with the Kims’ work performances; indeed, while tricking the Parks, the main characters properly carry out their expected duties. In a similar way, the presence of a bunker, where other ‘parasites’ taking advantage of the rich family find refuge, while expressing a further manipulation, also stresses the inferior position of the invaders. In a clear dialectical relation, we see how these two different poles live in a mutual relationship of need, with the two precarious families desiring to enter the court of the rich in order to find means for economic survival and emancipation, while the Parks exploit their emotional labour and care-work activities. It is also fundamental to notice, in this sense, how the bargaining power clearly belongs to the Parks. For instance, Dong-ik complains about the previous housekeeper eating too much, and when Yeon-kyo at first hires Ki-woo as English tutor, we see a close-up showing her furtively removing money from his first payslip and arguing, after that, to have paid him as much as she would have done for the former teacher, even adding an extra for inflation. Another dialogical reiteration of this same conceptual pattern is enacted when Ms. Park fires Moon-gwang for her supposed disease. Yeon-kyo, who we have experienced as the sensitive part of the rich family, argues that she has elaborated a ‘great method to fire people simply and

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quietly’, one that does not leave space for angry reactions. The position of power of the Parks and the total absence of an oppositional attitude on the side of the precarious parasites is also dialogically reinforced by the fact that Geun-se continuously sends (by using electric lights) Morse code signals to the upper floors thanking Dong-ik for his unaware generosity. These same experiential dynamics are re-enacted during the moments succeeding the fight between the Kims and the other two invaders. The main characters are forced to hide under the living room table, trying to mask their ‘inopportune’ nocturnal presence in the mansion. At the same time, Ki-woo has to continuously answer the messages of an infatuated Da-hye and, together with Ki-jeong and Ki-taek, to stay still while Ms. and Mr. Park have a sexual intercourse on the adjacent sofa. Though enacting a comedic and slapstick-like situation (underlined by a fast cutting rate and rhythm of the action), with the Kims desperately attempting to remain unnoticed and to get out of the mansion, their precarious condition works in dialogically reiterating the subordination they actually undergo (‘hiding like cockroaches’, as Chung-sook has previously suggested). Exactly in these moments, Dong-ik, unaware of the Kims’ presence, states that he cannot tolerate Ki-taek’s smell, an odour reminding him of people taking the subway and that is stuck on all the Kims. The smell of poverty marks the absolute division between the two classes, a partition that assumes the form of a climate apartheid (the extremisation of dynamics of inequality taking place in correspondence with ecological crises; see Carrington, 2019) as soon as we see the Kims managing to escape. As in another Bong Joon-ho’s film, Snowpiercer (2013), hostile natural landscapes or ecological catastrophes operate as forces pushing to the limit situated forms of exploitation and social divides. Indeed, while the heavy rain and storm interrupting the field trip of the Parks become a natural spectacle to be observed and even enjoyed from the living room of the mansion (or a reason for playing for Da-song), they indicate a major disaster for the Kims’ well-being. We see them in a long and tortuous downhill run under the intense rain to find their house and neighbourhood completely inhabitable, thus being forced, with many others, to seek refuge in a local gym. This transition also presents another strong emotional turning point in the embodied fabula with the dramatic music theme (Water, Ocean and Water, Ocean Again by Jung Jaeil and Choi Woo-Shik) and long/aerial shots showing the tragic disruption of this poor urban area. What we see enacted, therefore, is not a simple generation of separated and opposed ecological and architectural chronotopes, but a line of brutal

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existential expulsion determining the life of the characters, one that constructs exploitative mechanisms exactly by continuously enforcing even more radical forms of dispossession and precarisation (Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 138, 224; Sassen 2014, 214–216). These brutal experiential and chronotopic twists find further reiteration in the words of Ki-taek the morning after the flooding. When answering to his son’s demands for a new plan of action (aimed at resolving their problem with the couple in the basement and their financial issues), he argues that ‘no plan is the best plan’, that there is no possibility to control events, and that the smartest way to approach life is adapting to new circumstances without hopes and long-term perspectives. This bleak definition of an eternal present, in which future is ­unimaginable, works also in dialogically deconstructing the previous idea of cunningness and efficiency they embodied, removing the possibility for social uplifting from their cruel competitive actions. The ecological and existential confinement of the Kims finds its natural evolution in the ­successive sequences, showing them going to work, despite their visible physical exhaustion, and helping the Parks in organising a celebration for Da-song’s birthday. The positions of the characters are, then, completely upturned, showing the Kims in all their disposability and vulnerability, having to obey every request from the employers (Ki-taek has to dress up as a native American for the amusement of Da-song). Indeed, the ­expulsion of the Kims does not confine them on the outside of the social body but integrates them architecturally/ecologically (as we have seen) and ­economically within productive processes in differential forms. The party, therefore, enacts the complete fall of the Kims and ends with the violent aggression of Ki-woo and murder of Ki-jeong on behalf of Geun-se (who managed to escape from the bunker). It is after this tragic occurrence that we experience the only limited sign of revolt on behalf of Ki-taek. As soon as Ki-jeong is stabbed, the action turns in slow motion (and the diegetic sound is muffled), alternating moments of violence and the panic of the guests, with the close-ups of the Parks hurrying Ki-taek to drive them to the hospital (in order to help a shocked Da-song), and of the latter powerless leaning towards his daughter and unable to react. In one of these exchanges of glances, we see a disgusted Mr. Park approaching a dying Geun-se to pick up the keys of his car, repelled by his working-class smell (he holds his nose while performing these actions). The reiteration of Dong-ik’s classist despise makes

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Ki-taek furiously attack and kill him, forcing this latter character, in the following moments, to find safe refuge in the bunker of the villa. This final act of insurgency may seem to dialogically disrupt the ­chronotope of the film, revealing the irreconcilable distance between the two classes and ecologies. However, the assault is dialogically framed as an ineffective and partial revenge; the Parks will soon be replaced by another rich family inhabiting the villa with Ki-taek taking on himself the role that was previously of Guen-se, thus circularly returning to the initial composition. Indeed, it is the same Ki-taek that, by sending a Morse message from the bunker, reveals his regret for the killing of Mr. Park, stating that he felt ‘unconscious’, as in a dream when doing it; concurrently, the entire epilogue of the film reinforces and reiterates the senselessness of his rebellion. If the first two section where characterised by a balletic and dynamic construction of the action connected with the use of intense chiaroscuro cinematography, the final moments, on the contrary, let emerge softer lights and colour tones (stressed also by a snowy/winter context and by the music themes, Yasan, Moving, and Ending) and a slower cutting rate. This final narrative section displays the aftermath of the tragic party from Ki-woo’s perspective, with him and Chun-sook returning to the semi-­ basement after being released from jail and their finding out of Ki-taek’s current situation. Subsequently, we participate in the preparation and imagination of a new plan: Ki-woo has decided to go to university, to marry ‘well’, and to become rich as fast as possible, in order to then buy the house and so liberate his father. We see these events enacted as a form of dream, with a final complete transformation of Ki-woo into a businessman eventually buying the mansion and re-encountering Ki-taek. Similarly, in the moments preceding the fight at Da-song’s party, we hear Ki-woo admiring the wealthy guests at the Parks, stating that they all look gorgeous, and asking Da-hye if he fits into that context. The combination of these dialogical elements enacts the definition of characters whose subjectivity is entirely shaped in reference to an idealised image of the upper class. Final aim of the Kims is substituting themselves to the Parks, as they partially do when the employers are not home, even pleasing themselves with the idea that, in the end, when wearing their clothes or enjoying a luxurious bath, they look exactly like them. The Kims arrive to the point of feeling grateful (as Geun-se) for Mr. Park’s money or carry absurd signs of this aspirational attitude. This is the case, for instance, of Ki-woo’s obsession for the landscape stone Min has given him (a present usually associated with wealth and sophistication), which

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he carries with him many times and that, in the end, will be the weapon with which he is assaulted. As the final sequence demonstrates, the Kims are trapped within a dream ecology, which, to paraphrase the words of a famous lecture by Gilles Deleuze, constitutes the dream of the other, the passive determination of one’s own subjectivity in relation to a hierarchically constructed source of reference (2006, 318). In this sense, the Kims embody what Nietzsche would have called a ‘slave morality’, a construction of identity only based on the masters’ terms and therefore negative, derivative, and leading to resentment and to the disempowering vengeful desire to substitute them (2007, 20–22). This sad passion, following also Francesca Coin’s observations on Joker (Phillips 2019), does not carry with it the potential for transformation, though it reveals the malaise and suffering pervading the neoliberal context with its individualising and atomising dynamics (2019). What is more, this same ethical construction underlines, in an even more extreme form, the chronotopic expulsion our precarious protagonists suffer, pushing them down again on the social ladder. Not incidentally, the closing shot of the film reveals the imaginary nature of Ki-woo’s fantasies and circularly returns to the initial camera movements (slow top-down crane in the semi-basement), thus determining the absolute absence of progression and the restrained existential path of the characters. In its chronotopic construction, Parasite, therefore, experientially demolishes the Kims’ cruel and competitive plans for social mobility and, as we have observed, demonstrates the interrelation and coexistence of the different and conflicting classes within the social body. By doing so, it also reverses the same notion of parasitic behaviour on which the experience relies upon, by underscoring the vicious dominating position of the Parks. At the same time, the film points at a missing subjectivity and at a lacking image of an outside from the closed master-slave relationship the architecture and the ecology of the film generate. The only dialogical opening seems to be enacted by Da-song’s awareness of Geun-se, a consciousness of complexity that makes him notice the interconnections between the various characters before anyone else, which is also connected with a desire for a more ‘nomadic’ dimension in rejection of the comforts of the villa. However, as in Snowpiercer with its train forming a self-referential ecosystem, there is a necessity to derail a machine that relentlessly produces mechanisms for oppressions and subjectivities functional for its reproduction. Going back to Deleuze’s lecture, the film makes us experience the striking absence of a ‘people’ to come, of an event of becoming and

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transformation to take place (cf. 2006, 324), and the consequent crisis in the production and affirmation of new ethical possibilities within an extremely divided and selective social reality. If, on the one hand, lines of flight seem abolished and we experience the lack of chronotopic fractures, on the other hand, the film enacts a clear failure of the desires driving the Kims by reducing them to senseless fantasies; the first step is, therefore, to get out of the house, to reject its own internal rules and structures, in opposition to Ki-taek and Ki-woo, who, even after the tragic events occurring to them, can imagine their future only within it. Parasite, in its intricate chronotopic and experiential composition, reveals the need for generating an existential perspective beyond the encapsulating mechanisms of resentment. The fight for a new subjectivity cannot be built around the simple opposition with the dominating forces of the villa; it requires the affirmation of a new ecology, of a new collective space existing outside the walls of a self-sufficient moral order.

References Balhorn, Max. 2019. Parasite: A Window in South-Korean Neoliberalism. Jacobinmag. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/11/parasite-­a-­window­into-­south-­korean-­neoliberalism. Bayman, Louis. 2019. Performance Anxiety: The Competitive Self and Hollywood’s Post-Crash Films of Cruelty. New Review of Film and Television Studies 18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2019.1622878. BBC. 2020. Parasite: The Real People Living in Seoul’s Basement Apartments. BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-­asia-­51321661. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. London: Duke University Press. Coin, Francesca. 2019. Joker: la rivolta dei nuovi schiavi. Jacobinitalia. https:// jacobinitalia.it/joker-­la-­rivolta-­dei-­nuovi-­schiavi/. Deleuze, G. 2006. Two Regimes of Madness: Text and Interviews 1975–1995. Trans. A. Hodges and M. Taormina, Ed. D. Lapoujade. Los Angeles: The MIT Press. Hee Im, Seo. 2019. Punching Down: On Bong Joon-hoo’s “Parasite”. Los Angeles Review of Books. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/punching-­down-­on-­ bong-­joon-­hos-­parasite/. Joon-ho, Bong. 2013. Snowpiercer. Produced by Jeong Tae-sung, Steven Nam, et  al. South Korea-Czech Republic: Moho Film, Opus Pictures, et  al. DVD, 126 mins. ———. 2019. Parasite. Produced by Kwak Sin Ae, Moon Yang Kwon, et al. South Korea: Barunson E&A, CJ Entertainment, et al. DVD, 132 mins.

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LARB AV. 2019. Director Bong Joon Ho Talks “Parasite”. Los Angeles Review of Books. https://lareviewofbooks.org/av/director-­bong-­joon-­ho-­talks-­parasite/. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2019. The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism. London: Duke University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2007. On the Genealogy of Morality. Ed. K. Ansell-Pearson and Trans. C. Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Falt, Chris. 2019. Building the ‘Parasite’ House: How Bong Joon Ho and His Team Made the Year’s Best Set. IndieWire. https://www.indiewire. com/2019/10/parasite-­house-­set-­design-­bong-­joon-­ho-­1202185829/?fbcli d=IwAR3E4Nml3jelXoDO42XIIIIbz8SWN7CHlIpNWgVylVdn7941 duTyV5u5jjU. Phillips, Todd. 2019. Joker. Produced by Todd Phillips, Emma Tillinger Koskoff, et al. US-Canada: Warner Bros, Village Roadshow Pictures, et al. DVD, 122 mins. Rose, Steve. 2020. Parasite Director Bong Joon-ho: ‘Korea Seems Glamorous, But the Young Are in Despair’. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian. com/film/2020/jan/31/parasite-­d irector-­b ong-­j oon-­h o-­k orea-­s eems­glamorous-­but-­the-­young-­are-­in-­despair. Sassen, Saskia. 2014. Expulsion: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Vanity Fair. 2019. ‘Parasite’ Director Bong Joon-ho Breaks Down the Opening Scene | Vanity Fair. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP-­eqx2X9AY.

CHAPTER 13

Border as Method and Precarious Cinematic Citizenships: Mediterranea, Wind River, and Junction 48

Capitalism, as Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson highlight, configures sets of transforming operations based on the heterogeneity of territories and forms of life pervading the globe (and acts in shaping them), which, in their modulations, allow for different methods of expropriation and extraction of value to take place (cf. 2019, 12–13. 37, 141, 151). Thus, capitalism is a dynamic and readjusting (or axiomatic) totality, which, nonetheless, does not appear as fluid ‘smooth space of difference’ (see Deleuze and Guattari 2005, 370), but actually thrives exactly from the imposition and definition of divisions, roles, frontiers on the level of subjectivity and in the ecological composition of the world (‘the border as method’). We have addressed (in Roma and The Chambermaid, for instance) how the mechanisms of primitive accumulation move beyond the pure definition of private property and enclosure of land/resources (of any kind) and define a gendered division of labour. Following this same line of thought, we can clearly see how identity, in all its implications and articulations, responds to similar dynamics by enacting zones of differentiation of capitalist operations (Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 40, 46). Likewise, if we look at the construction of a racialised subject, according to Achille Mbembe, we cannot deny its essential entanglement with the birth of capitalism (2017, 6). The line of race, which finds its current interpretation with the emergence of the colonialist discourses and related extractive processes, is also the monumental anthropological and conceptual drive defining modern concepts of citizenship © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Sticchi, Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63261-8_13

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and belonging: the non-completely human of blackness (as argued by Mbembe) that functioned as dialectical necessary for the formation of a likewise fictional universalist image of the Western Man having the right to access and conquer the entire globe (cf. 2017, 6, 11, 20, 43, 85, 96). Nowadays, we assist to a further readjustement of the separations across the line of citizenship—one that makes this concept tied with a necropolitical process (the other side of the ‘biopolitical’ management of life) that emphasises the supposed ‘pure’ belonging of a subject to a community and intensifies the violent administration of the ‘other’ separated on various degrees from it (cf. Mbembe 2019, 3, 178). Indeed, Rosi Braidotti accordingly argues (2013, 121–123) that we can define the biopolitical regime constructed by contemporary capitalism as necropolitical (Saskia Sassen strikingly defines these mechanisms as ethnic cleansing of the ‘troublesome elements’; cf. 2014, 36) for its intrinsic constant expulsive identification and management of what does not belong to the proper realm of life/bios. However, the brutality of the border and citizenship as bio/ necropolitical forces should not make us focus exclusively on the operations through which they separate or eviscerate the abnormal, but on the modes of differential inclusion they enact. As Deleuze and Guattari argued, we should look at the ways in which racism interiorises and ‘tolerates’ those who do not abide to a certain identity or sameness (2005, 178; Mbembe 2017, 2). Cassius’ white voice exemplified the process through which each subject is asked to adapt herself/himself to a non-conflictual idea of whiteness, associated with an alleged unitary community and functional for the codifications of particular internal power relations (the integrated and harmonic body of the nation); simultaneously, the instrument of identity/ citizenship serves as mainstay for structuring particular segmented productive and social roles. The trajectory of what we could define as precarious citizenship, or modes of non-citizenship, is at the centre of the case studies of this section: principally Mediterranea (Carpignano 2015) together with observations on Junction 48 (Aloni 2016) and Wind River (Sheridan 2017). In these three cases, indeed, we experience chronotopes of expulsion as strategies of marginalisation and differential inclusion and integration within the social body. This same process, while inflicting ferocious policies on the main characters, highlights also the mutable interdependence between different subjects and communities in a way that undermines every notion of stable identity and alterity.

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In Carpignano’s film, we follow Ayiva’s (Koudous Seihon, the film is based on his personal experience; cf. O’Healy 2019, 221) ‘illegal’ and terrifying journey from Burkina Faso to the orange orchards of Gioia Tauro and Rosarno in Calabria (southern Italy); he will become a farmworker (in an almost slave labour conditions), hoping in a future economic uplifting while sending money to his sister and daughter (Aseta and Zeina), who remained in the home country. The film starts off in medias res, when the impervious ‘travel’ is already taking place and, we could argue, presents chronotopic and affective patterns similar to those discussed in Fish Tank and Two Days, One Night. As for these two case studies, Mediterranea enacts a restricted fabula putting us in close affective contiguity with the main character, mostly at the centre of each shot, and with his subjective experience of the events (cinematography by Wyatt Garfield). However, while still contributing to a sense of discomforting proximity (cf. Hesselberth 2014, 65–66) with the precarious condition of Ayiva, this same aesthetic composition allows us to participate in the radical methods of ‘separation’ and selection the character undergoes. In the initial part of the film we experience the setting of one particular aesthetic and dialogical motifs that will be reiterated in different points of the narration. Right after the opening sequence, in which we have followed Ayiva organising the truck carrying a group of migrants crossing the Algerian border with the help of Abas (his companion all along the narration played by Alassane Sy), we see him the morning after selling shoes in the desert while waiting for a new vehicle to take him and few others into a nearby town. We do not experience the process of selection among the migrants supposed to continue their journey. What viewers engage, instead, is a long close-up of the main character (lasting sixteen seconds) on the truck with, in the background, the left-behind walking across the desert (first out of focus and, then, in focus as Ayiva turns to look at them). With this composition, we clearly see that a process of screening among the initial group has been carried out; however, this same violent operation takes place undramatically and is elliptically removed, thus counterintuitively appearing as a normal part of the journey. Indeed, this will be only one of the various ‘skimming steps’ Ayiva and Abas will go through in the first part of the film, conducting them to the Libyan shores where to ship out for the Italian and European border. Driving Ayiva and Abas is the example of those ‘who made it’ and even managed to enjoy a sort of consumerist lifestyle as they can see from pictures and videos on Facebook of Mades, an acquaintance waiting for them

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in Italy. Notwithstanding the very precarious position of Ayiva, therefore, we can still insert his path and motivation within chronotopic dynamics similar to those discussed so far. Migrating is part of an economic investment and carries with it the necessity for the subject travelling to be open and ready to promptly face every challenge along the way. What we can clearly see, by following the main character, is also his profound determination that makes him undergo the various difficulties of the journey with what we could assume as an optimistic ‘entrepreneurial’ spirit. This same positive attitude, however, is dialogically thwarted by the extreme hostility of the ecology surrounding the characters. At first, the desert configures a completely disorienting chronotope, in which Ayiva and other fellow migrants find themselves at the mercy of armed brigands robbing their money or forcing them to accept every sort of work in order to finance the next part of the journey. The unpredictable hostility of the desert is reiterated by the unmappable nature of the Mediterranean Sea, which the main characters has to ‘illegally’ cross with a large group of people on a small dinghy without anyone knowing how to drive it (in the end, it will be Ayiva who will riskily volunteer to do it). Reinforcing the restricted embodied fabula, the stormy sea that will wreck their boat is expressed in the form of shaky handheld camera movements with sudden flashes and loud diegetic noises on an almost completely dark screen (the sequence combines animated and live action features to simulate the storm). The European border, therefore, appears as a violent natural wall, one that literally separates between the drowned and saved, to borrow the title of Primo Levi’s famous book. The encounter with ‘Fortress Europe’, then, moves on with a series of bureaucratic procedures and phases of acceptance, which automatically allow us to experience Ayiva and Abas as illegal subjects. After their rescue they are automatically transferred to a detention centre together with other survivors from the shipwreck, and we see the heading ‘Italy’ (similar headings have accompanied the transition through the various national frontiers) dialogically associated with a form of visible imprisonment.1 1  Another relevant case study in this sense is the ‘prophetic’ L’Ordine delle Cose (The Order of Things Segre 2017), which predicted the nefarious deals European Institutions and the Italian government brokered with the Libyan Coast Guard together with internal militia groups to contain and imprison immigrants trying to cross the Mediterranean. In this case, we can clearly see how the function of the border is transferred beyond simple national frontiers (see also O’Healy 2019, 169-170).

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The access to Italy and to the ‘Global North’, therefore, combines a process of elimination together with one of marginalisation to administrative borders that initially confine and, afterwards, limit the two characters to precarious forms of living arrangements. Furthermore, Ayiva and Abas, as the various migrant population that shares their condition, are forced to squat in run-down buildings or to form small communities in slums at the limits of urban centres. The narrative again cuts off several passages in this further selective mechanism, moving directly to their joining the agricultural workforce in Gioia Tauro. For this reason, while the European frontier is chronotopically enacted as ferocious limit, at the same time, it appears more articulated and complex than a fixed territorial indicator. As further noticed by Mezzadra and Neilson, in fact, the European border (against a simplistic notion of fortress) is a filter providing various degrees of ‘subordination, rule, discrimination, and segmentation’ (2011, 191; cf. Sassen 2014, 10) and, therefore, operates a legal illegalisation and racialisation of immigrants. This same differentiation also includes the reproduction of sexualised division of roles (generally, low-paid farm labour for males and care-work/sex-work for women) and provides a limited level of political citizenship. The permeable and multifaceted nature of national boundaries, however, does not diminish or reduce the cruel mechanisms of submission they are connected to. The exclusion the main characters face is stressed right after their arrival and stabilisation in Southern Italy. We see Ayiva calling Aseta and firmly telling her not to embark in the same perilous travel he and Abas have just concluded and, since he is talking loudly in a public street, we also witness an Italian local resident shouting at him and protesting for the volume of his voice. In the successive moments, we follow Ayiva and others walking at night to the precarious residence in a nearby shantytown, and we suddenly see a car fast crossing the migrants with the clear intention of intimidating or harming them. These actions of open hostility have the clear experiential and dialogical function of placing the characters as outsiders in that particular environment, but also of identifying them as living treats for the local community, which either ‘tolerates’ them or vehemently opposes their presence. The violent subordination operated on the migrants’ bodies is extremely visible in many occurrences. For instance, we see a supervisor angrily shouting at Ayiva and others for not picking the fruit properly and arbitrarily deciding to pay them less or to ask further activities in exchange of their ‘legitimate’ daily wage, arguing that ‘Africans are incapable of

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properly doing that job’ and that their resentment against him is unjustified. This paternalistic and condescending attitude is the same we experience later on during a communal dinner organised by a local charity group (which also provides legal advice, Italian classes, and other forms of support for migrants) in a farm owned by an old lady, who nicknamed herself ‘Mamma Africa’. This same character strictly admonishes the guests to reply to her opening greetings and to remove their caps since ‘in Italy, we take away hats when we eat’ (see also O’Healy 2019, 222–223). Of course, this latter example of a patronising attitude is of lesser intensity if compared to the previous moments of clear hostility (it also ends up in a more cheering way with the woman singing for her guests); however, all these cases enact similar dialogical patterns by setting the migrants as subjects carrying with them a sort of existential debt for having being ‘welcomed’ and ‘tolerated’ as part of the community, a hospitality that involves the necessity for them to continuously demonstrate their good will and effort to deserve their precarious citizenship. In this sense the guilty consciousness of the neoliberal indebted subject always pushing her/himself to improve her/his value as human capital is here combined with the effort to earn and negotiate terms of belonging (cf. Mbembe 2017, 4, 119–120). It is in line with these affective and conceptual dynamics that the competitive and self-entrepreneurial attitude of Ayiva is matched by a desire to please and impress the various managers, in particular Rocco  (Davide Schipilliti), who owns an orange orchard and is allegedly capable of providing proper work contracts and residence permits to migrant workers. In a turning point of the narrative, indeed, we see the main character competitively distinguishing himself against the other farmworkers by winning Rocco’s trust. This happens when, during the  unloading of  a truck of oranges at night, another worker is hit by several falling boxes. Many run to his aid, while Rocco looks at the scene from a balcony and urges somebody to turn off the drill grinding the fruit. Ayiva is the only one promptly responding to this request and, for his readiness, he earns a further small job and the official access to Rocco’s favour. This passage is enacted through the reiteration of the same aesthetic and dialogical motif previously discussed, with a close-up of the main character (Ayiva is seated on Rocco’s truck) operating as central focus and small camera movements revealing in the background the ‘less competitive workers’ being left behind. From this moment onwards, indeed, it would seem that Ayiva has the opportunity of progressively improving his condition and to send money and gifts home. Likewise, he also manages to ‘invest’ some of his

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earnings by buying gloves he will sell at a major price to his colleagues in the orchard and, at times, operates as middle-man figure transacting among the farmworkers and the owners. Abas, who seemed to be the less thoughtful about long-term plans, demonstrates a certain dose of scepticism towards the possibility of social uplifting and a more critical awareness about their condition as migrants while criticising Ayiva’s complacent and individualist approach. By attending charity and local associations meetings, Abas acquires more knowledge about administrative procedures and measures for the regularisation of his status, and even informs Ayiva that he could ask for a legal family reunification if he had a proper work contract. It is for these same reasons that Abas is the one more directly involved in social and political activities meant to challenge and transform the restrictions of their condition. Notwithstanding their differences, also Ayiva will soon realise how illusory was his competitive approach, after experiencing an eviction with a group of friends and, more decisively, when realising that Rocco had no intention to give him a regular contract. This tragic turning point takes place after an extra work-shift and is constructed through a conversation between the two characters on the front seats of the truck while driving back (shot reverse shot/close-ups compositions). Rocco starts off by saying that the harvesting season is going to end and offers a cigarette to Ayiva, while mentioning that he could hire him to work for his daughter’s (Marta, with whom Ayiva has developed a friendly relation) birthday party if he does not have any particular new plan for the future. Ayiva takes advantage of this moment to humbly ask for an official work contract. Rocco replies evasively, not looking at the interlocutor and having his eyes fixed on the road; he praises Ayiva’s determination and dedication and, then, tells the story of his grandfather who emigrated to New York in his youth. ‘He earned almost nothing,’ Rocco adds by stressing that the only way to go on is for people to help one another, and finally hands Ayiva some additional cash. This dialogue clearly reverses and counters all the plans of the main character, highlighting the complete subordination and separation he experiences in relation to his bosses and the local community more in general (see also O’Healy 2019, 223). Rocco’s appeal to collective solidarity even appears as an insult, both dismissing Ayiva’s demands and denying any personal responsibility in the exploitation and racial marginalisation of the main character. It is not accidental that this dialogical reversal is right after accompanied with the explosion of protests on behalf of the migrant community. The race riot (essentially re-enacting the protests that took place

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in Rosarno in January 2010; see O’Healy 2019, 224) is caused by the killing of two African workers on behalf of members of the local community and becomes an occasion to reinforce the chronotopic separation between the two groups. We see the migrants occupying the streets shouting, ‘Stop shooting blacks’, while native residents protest against them by throwing glasses and objects from their balconies (causing even more aggressive reactions in those rioting). Ayiva is initially at the border of the event, observing as the tension and violence escalate (handheld camera movements closely follow the action), and joins in after seeing several friends hit on the ground. In this sense, as stressed by Aine O’Healy, these events, dramatically presented from the point of view of the migrant community, are not described as an exceptional expression of rage but as the construction of a collective awareness about the political and social condition of the group (cf. 2019, 224–225). They show the will to claim a public space and agency within a chronotopic and existential dimension that, as we have observed, constantly demeans their role as active members of the community. Notwithstanding the affective impact of these moments, the protest is rapidly repressed with the intervention of the police and of local inhabitants who manage to isolate and block Abas and violently beat him. What the narrative enacts, with the quick conclusion of the insurgency, is a sense of ethical resignation forcing Ayiva to keep on looking for precarious/ provisional jobs without any long-term plans. Ironically, it is Abas that, because of his being victim of a physical aggression, has the possibility to get a one-year humanitarian residence permit. Ayiva’s disillusionment is demonstrated also by his momentary intention to go back to Burkina Faso, a plan that is quickly overturned in the most emotionally intense moment of the narrative. He manages to call his family via Skype and cannot keep himself from crying when talking to Aseta and Zeina, in particular when his daughter starts dancing on the notes of a song included in the MP3 that he previously sent her. These moments appear even more distressing as Ayiva (and the viewers with him) can associate her enjoying the music with Marta’s analogous dance taking place earlier on. The two young women, as O’Healy stresses, are bridged together in their habits and ways of responding to global pop music, a connection that, however, dramatically reinforces the divides in their condition and Ayiva’s impotence in fixing this unbalance (cf. 2019, 225). The main character, then, rapidly decides to hide them the difficulties he is going through and to abandon his plans to return home and, in the final sequence, we see him

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working at Marta’s party. Again, through elliptical passages, the narrative stresses the sense of melancholic resignation the character experiences by presenting the capsizing of Ayiva’s intentions as a natural and automatic step. This final sequence enacts a further ferocious dialogical reversal in the chronotopic composition of the film. The exclusion of the character and his status as precarious citizen are, on one side, expressed by the presence as guests of the same young men who repeatedly persecuted and threatened him and his friends: an unbalance that completely diminishes any sense of agency Ayiva may have previously acquired. This same inequality is extended through the reiteration of the visual motif we have discussed before: the opposition between the character’s close-ups and the background, in this case, does not frame him as the survivor and winner of a social selection; it stresses, instead, his isolation and separation within the environment. The conclusive images of the film, indeed, place Ayiva (close-up back to camera) in opposition with the shallow-focused interiors of Rocco’s house where people are dancing. The main character joins them after the hosts’ invitation and the diegetic sound and music softens as Ayiva’s body walking into the house starts mixing with the out of focus background. These final images, therefore, confer a sense of defeat and negation, determining the exclusion of the character who still, however, exists as part of the ecology surrounding him. His racial subordination does not involve necessarily his complete erasure but, as Deleuze and Guattari argued, enacts a ghettoisation, a segmentation meant to manage the deviance he, as every other migrant, embodies (see 2005, 178). Similar extreme forms of chronotopic and ecological expulsion/inclusion are those that we see enacted in Wind River. Set in the homonymous Wyoming Native American Reservation, this neo-western/thriller starts off with the premise of tackling an understated social reality: the unreported rapes and murders of first nations women for whose disappearance (the ending credits explain) no official demographic indicator exists. At a first glance, the ecology of this film seems very different from that of Mediterranea, since it is characterised by immense wild natural landscapes and presented through a typical genre-related glamorous camerawork made of long-shots (cinematography by Ben Richardson) reinforced by the 2.35:1 aspect ratio and by the slow cutting rate (editing by Gary Roach). At the same time, the constant extreme wintery weather characterises this ecology as completely hostile and uninhabitable. It is within this context that the first nations peoples (Eastern Shoshone and Northern

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Arapaho tribes) find their ‘natural’ apartheid, by being segregated from the regular access to the social and economic institutions provided to the average American citizen. The degradation and exclusion implied in the life of the reservation make for them impossible to think about long-term plans as we see young members of the community falling into drug addiction or committing petty crimes to scrape a living. As the protagonist, Cory (Jeremy Renner, a hunter/tracker managing the wildlife in the reservation) argues, the only things left to the people of Wind River are ‘silence and snow’, a chronotope in which surviving, as the character adds, already demonstrates the strength of one’s spirit.2 The expulsion of the natives, as for the marginalisation of Ayiva, carries with it a process of brutal extraction and expropriation. Indeed, we see that while the natives have limited to none access to the outside of the reservation, oil companies can appropriate themselves of the resources of the territory and occupy it, thus presenting the re-enactment of a process of primitive accumulation on an already colonised space. This extraction, however, is not confined to the resources, but involves the implementation of a more pervasive form of colonisation on the level of subjectivity. The investigation over the rape and murder of the eighteen-year-old native Natalie (seeing the collaboration between Cory and the FBI agent Jane Banner [Elizabeth Olsen]) acts as the main narrative drive of the film; a mystery that is connected with Cory’s intimate life (his daughter disappeared as well years before the events) and that reveals how the process of appropriation involves directly the body of the natives further downgraded to the level of property. Indeed, we will discover that the crime has been carried out by several security workers (under contract for the oil company) guarding the drilling site as an act of resentment against the love affair between Natalie and one of their colleagues unwilling to ‘share’ the woman. Therefore, the brutalisation and appropriation of the female body, which is a constant component of gendered divisions of labour and roles, is here also associated with colonial dynamics of domination meant to reduce the subordinated subject to the status of pure object (see also Mbembe 2017, 111). The precarious citizen, therefore, is managed and exploited through mechanisms of delegitimisation that operate in combination with the lines 2  As it has been pointed out, however, this and other elements of the film could reflect problematic dynamics, to be connected with a traditional individualistic and aggressive morality embodied by the male main character (Firmin 2017).

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of gender and class. The governance of the colonised involves the negation of the possibility to reclaim a space as proper member of a community, whether as part of a past/pure people or of the group receiving them as immigrants (cf. Mbembe 2017, 51, 96, 178). Concurrently, we see that the inhabitants of Wind River do not remember their old rituals and habits; Natalie’s father, in enormous pain for the loss of his daughter, tries to prepare a death-face (in accordance with natives’ traditions), without having any concrete knowledge of this practice. Furthermore, the hostile nature of the reservation is far from the idealised image of the pure wilderness of the frontier; this ecology, instead, acts as a cruel warden, imposing a constant sense of disposability on the life of its inhabitants. The process of erasure and apartheid operated on the first nations peoples of Wind River is similar to the one experienced by the main character of Junction 48, Kareem (Tamer Nafar), a Palestinian citizen of Israel living in the city of Lyd/Lod aspiring to become a rapper.3 The opening titles inform us that the setting of the film was the place on which many native Palestinians were forcefully relocated during the Nakba (the removal and exile of eighty percent of the Palestinian population that took place in 1948; see Erakat 2019, 217), creating a mixed Arab-Israeli community. Kareem’s status as precarious citizen is enacted in various forms; chronotopically, his everyday experience is characterised by continuous and arbitrary procedures of police control that describe the passage and movement from his workplace/leisure spaces to his neighbourhood/ghetto; furthermore, visible physical barriers and walls fill the background of Kareem’s homelife together with displaying the constant threat of eviction and forced relocation affecting him and other members of the Palestinian community (one of the key sequences of the film delves around the demolition of one of Kareem’s friends’ house). These violent pervasive measures of surveillance integrate classical colonial forms of domination together with a more high-tech and molecular control over the body of Kareem, with the implicit necropolitical effect of denying every legitimacy to his identity as Palestinian (cf. Mbembe, 2019, 43–45; 80–83). Houses are demolished under the pretext of not having a historical justification, and Kareem is not even considered a ‘real’ Palestinian since he does not live in the West Bank or in the Gaza Strip, thus reducing his position to that of a ‘denationalised’ citizen (see Noura Erakat’s legal/historical analysis 2019, 3  The actor is a rapper, social activist, screenwriter, and founding member of the first Palestinian hip-hop group DAM.

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58–59), incapable of demanding any sort of political recognition. However, while we identify the struggle of the main characters reclaiming their right to exist as Palestinians (a fight based on affective trajectories of resilience and survival), the film does not present a simple binary opposition between colonising forces and the colonised subjects. The problem of defining his own identity, for Kareem and others, involves the necessity of moving beyond an alleged traditional definition of the Palestinian community. It is, indeed, in the name of supposed traditional habits that his professional and intimate relationship with Manar (the singer of the group [Samar Qupty]) is compromised, since a possible career as public performer is perceived by her family as immoral. Kareem writes mixing Arabic, Hebrew, and English, and addresses different crowds and ethnic groups establishing a connection with each of them while problematising it at the same time. The lyrics of one of his songs say (by readapting the verses of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish): ‘we will become a nation when the female poet will describe the male body.’ Thus, while accusing the oppression and humiliation characterising the lives of these precarious/ erased citizens of Israel, Kareem highlights the simultaneous necessity for Palestinians to reframe and reinvent the very notion of community of belonging and the desire to reject ideas of pure membership. In a similar way, the community of migrants in Mediterranea is not characterised by a specific ethnicity, but is a transnational assemblage (made of Romani, Moroccan, several sub-Saharan groups, etc.) mixing languages and codes, thus describing a social world far more multifaceted than the one envisioned in a closed national sense (cf. O’Healy 2019, 222). In Wind River, we see embodied in Cory, a mixed blood half cowboy/half native hunter, an impure form of connection to his ecology, a way of understanding and mapping it that does not involve the burden of reconstructing the past, but the desire of imaging new ways of surviving and building communities.4 The reservation can never become again the ancient idyllic grassland and, as we have seen, constitutes a terrifying natural prison. Automatically this confinement involves the need to map a new territory and to construct new commons based on a shared definition of the world (as the protests against the North Dakota pipeline demonstrated by bringing together environmental and indigenous activists; see Hardt and Negri 2017, 261). 4  Which, in this sense, may involve reassessing the past as a dimension of impurity, hybridisation, and cosmopolitanism.

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The possibility to reframe identity and to create a new ecology does not involve the underestimation of the level of suffering experienced by precarious citizens. Nonetheless, this condition carries with it an extreme ethical power. On one side, the coexistence and interdependence of these different levels of citizenship and their differential inclusion within a transformative global ecology demonstrates the absurdity of notions of pure community and reveals its functionality only in terms of control and despotic division of roles. On the other hand, the case studies discussed, in different ways, dialogically deconstruct and reverse every image of ‘pureblood’ while they reveal how racialised neoliberal policies operate first and foremost on the level of the body. The fiction of a crystallised and atomised cold and calculating individual is demolished by our interaction with the suffering flesh embodying this notion and carrying with it the signs of a constant colonisation (cf. Mbembe 2019, 175–177, 183). This same violated body appears, however, as a process, as a vector of mutation capable of redefining its status. Following Mbembe, becoming-human-in-theworld is a matter of journey, movement, and transfiguration leading to the definitions of new communities of belonging (cf. 2019, 187–189). The scream emerging from the suffering bodies of Ayiva, Cory, Kareem, and the others, expresses the desire of constructing new relations of care not constrained by identitarian images and based, therefore, on the awareness of the interdependence of our transforming collective bodies, which, as Frantz Fanon highlighted, are fields of endless questioning (cf. 2008, 181).

References Aloni, Udi. 2016. Junction 48. Produced by Udi Aloni, Stefan Ardt, et al. Israel-­ Germany-­US: Metro Communications, United King Films. DVD, 95 mins. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Carpignano, Jonas. 2015. Mediterranea. Produced by Jason Michael Berman, Chris Columbus, et al. Italy-France-US-Germany-Qatar: Audax Films, Court 13 Pictures, et al. DVD, 107 mins. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 2005. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. and Foreword B.  Massumi. London: University of Minnesota Press. Erakat, Noura. 2019. Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. C.L. Markmann and Introd. H.K. Bhabha and Z. Sardar. London: Pluto Press.

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Firmin, Jeff. 2017. Wind River and the New (Old) Action Movie. Film International 16 (1): 83–88. https://doi.org/10.1386/fiin.16.1.83_1. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2017. Assembly. New  York: Oxford University Press. Hesselberth, Pepita. 2014. Cinematic Chronotopes: Here, Now, Me. London: Bloomsbury. Mbembe, Achille. 2017. Critique of Black Reason. Trans. and Introd. L. Dubois. London: Duke University Press. ———. 2019. Necropolitics. Trans. S. Corcoran. London: Duke University Press. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2011. Borderscapes of Differential Inclusion Subjectivity and Struggles on the Threshold of Justice’s Excess. In The Borders of Justice, ed. E. Balibar, S. Mezzadra, and R. Samaddar, 181–203. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2019. The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism. London: Duke University Press. O’Healy, Aine. 2019. Migrant Anxieties: Italian Cinema in a Translational Frame. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sassen, Saskia. 2014. Expulsion: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Segre, Andrea. 2017. L’Ordine delle Cose. Produced by Francesco Bonsembiante, et al. Italy-France: Jolefilm, Rai Cinema, et al. DVD, 115 mins. Sheridan, Taylor. 2017. Wind River. Produced by Elizabeth A. Bell, Peter Berg, et al. UK-Canada-US: Film 44, Thunder Road Pictures, et al. DVD, 107 mins.

CHAPTER 14

Extraction and Confinement in Show Me a Hero and Orange Is the New Black

Continuing on the same line of thought, the next two chapters will present further investigations on the enactment and expression of precarious forms of citizenships in contemporary cinema and television. In this section, we are going to observe more directly how extractive processes can be integrated with clear forms of confinement, whether produced in disciplinary enclosed spaces or in an open-air urban context. The case studies discussed here are the TV series Orange Is the New Black (Jenji Kohan, 2013–2019) and Show Me a Hero (Haggis and Simon 2015). These two shows reiterate and further stress, in their diverse chronotopic dynamics, how capitalistic governance, following the previously used Mezzadra and Neilson’s argument, exploits differences and uses identities and deviances as source of valorisation (2019, 31–33). These same operations involve the active generation of minoritarian subjectivities, of marginalised and differentially included members of a social body in a process that, as Achille Mbembe put it, configures the universalisation of a state of subalternity— the progressive transformation of every form of life into disposable commodities (cf. 2019, 178; Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 37). In Orange Is the New Black (based on Piper Kerman’s memoir, Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison [2010]) we access to the complexity and various ramifications of the prison-industrial complex following mainly the vicissitudes of Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), being convicted in the Litchfield Penitentiary for transporting drugs in collaboration with her former partner Alex Vause (played by Laura Prepon, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Sticchi, Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63261-8_14

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imprisoned in the same facility). Piper’s position, as young white woman coming from an upper middle-class milieu, across the seven seasons of the show, allows for the enactment of various peculiar dialogical dynamics. In the first season, indeed, we experience more distinctively the difficulty of the main character in adapting to unfamiliar prison dynamics and power relations (a recurring prison drama trope). However, as the action and events evolve bringing together the intimate and public existence of different inmates, we slowly start to experience Piper’s position as a condition of privilege (she gets also an initial special treatment explicitly based on her ethnic and class profile). On the more evident side, we can see that the percentage of prison population shows a neat majority within minoritarian groups (low middle-working-class, African American, Latinx, neurodiverse, and LGBTQ+ subjects [with this latter aspect characterising, in particular, the story of Sophia Burset played by the transgender activist Laverne Cox]). On a more complex and articulate level, what the affective and emotional dynamics of the series enact is describing Piper’s misfortunes as a momentary downturn, an incident in a life route directed to assured economic well-being (‘try to look at your experience here as a mandala,’ suggests her the fellow inmate Yoga Jones). Indeed, as soon as she serves her time (end of season six), the entire final season, on Piper’s side, is dedicated to her figuring out various options for her future and restoring all her fractured affective relationships together with taking decisive steps in the formation of the love bond with Alex. This same conceptual and experiential pattern is reflected in the chronotopic configuration of the series. Naturally, ecological dimensions of confinement and enclosure appear as a dominant recurring element (in particular, in the two final seasons, when the main characters are transferred to the maximum security section of the facility). However, the most important and relevant narrative spaces are always the communal and collective areas: the dorm, the cafeteria, the kitchen, the courtyard, the prison library, laundry, and so on, where Piper is forced to interact with the prison community in its complexity. Indeed, the troubled but temporary prison experience of Piper is put in opposition with a multiplicity of characters, whose connection with the institution is either permanent or a constant existential threat connected with a precarious normality made of abuse, marginalisation, and economic hardships. Likewise, if the recurrent flashbacks characterising the embodied fabula of the show enable us to participate in Piper’s emotional background and affective history, these same narrative devices, used for other characters, articulate a visual contextualisation of their social reality,

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highlighting the systemic injustices that led them to the prison institution in the first place. What is more, these same narrative structures enact a participation with complex subjectivities with multifaceted affective lives impossible to be reduced to ‘criminal histories’. The clear opposition between existential dimensions of privilege and various contexts of destitution characterises also the opening sequence of Show Me a Hero (the events of the miniseries, taking place between 1987 and 1994, are based on the homonymous 1999 nonfiction book by Lisa Belkin). Opening on the melancholic notes of Bruce Springsteen’s Gave it a name, the show introduces us to the middle-class neighbourhood on the east side of Yonkers (New York), filled with comfortable independent houses. In visual and dialogical opposition, we see these images alternated with the segregated and poor areas of the town, inhabited by mostly African Americans and Latinx, made of crumbling houses in absence of green communal spaces, and presenting an urban landscape occupied by homogeneous brick-walled apartment buildings. It is in this chronotopic context that we engage the ferocious resistance of the mostly white population of Yonkers (and related political representatives) to the development of new public houses aimed at desegregating poor urban communities. Main focus of our attention is the personal/real tragedy of the young council member Nick Wasicsko (Oscar Isaac), who, after being elected mayor of Yonkers by campaigning against the enforcement of the housing project, finds himself having to approve it and becoming an unlikely public voice for desegregation policies. We will see how this position will trigger a persistent and vicious opposition from the inhabitants of the east side of the city (and other council members) and lead to the end of his mandate as mayor and of his political career altogether in the following years (a path concluding with his suicide). Main motivation behind the resistance to public housing, as we can see expressed in the various council meeting sequences and in the protests of Yonkers’ population, is the supposed loss of property value that would be naturally caused by these policies (involving only two hundred house units to be built in an area inhabited by two-hundred-thousand people). The ‘economic’ reasons driving the opposition is, nonetheless, dialogically associated with further allegations about the incapacity of beneficiaries of these policies to adapt to the east-side lifestyle and to become reliable members of a community of hardworking families who have ‘deserved’ their status. Of course, attached to these latter assertions we can see clear instances of racial prejudice, connecting black and non-white non-middle-class identities with an

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innate propension to crime and to the disrespect of ‘public good’, or associating these groups with images of economic inefficiency making them undeserving of any form of welfare. The association between these alleged economic reasons and the discrimination-­based arguments reveals the intersection of racialisation and private property. As Negri and Hardt argue (referring to the work of David Roediger and W.  E. B.  Du Bois) when addressing current right-­ wing politics, property is inherently racialised since it originates exactly from the partition of the commonwealth through modes of belonging to a social body. Whiteness becomes, therefore, more than an abstract idea, but a possession to be defended, a ‘wage’ or status that cannot be contaminated by the mixing with other minoritarian subjects; otherwise, its ‘value’ and consistency would necessarily decrease (cf. 2017, 51–53). Exactly for the purpose of expanding the processes of extraction and valorisation, this same notion of whiteness needs always newly generated spaces to be colonised and used for its reproduction (the famous progressive primitive accumulation pointed out by Rosa Luxemburg 2003, 350, 397–398, 434). In this sense, apart from universalising the condition of subalternity, capitalism overcomes the traditional global differentiations between South and North of the world (without, of course, cancelling the extreme inequalities existing between different geographical poles), generalising the creation of apartheids and segregation mechanisms within the walls of ‘developed’ urban centres (Alliez and Lazzarato 2016, 374–376; Deleuze and Guattari 2005, 465). On a similar line of thought, in Race for Profit (2019), Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor addresses the combination between neoliberal policies of racial discrimination and the real estate speculation activities in the US context across the decades preceding and accompanying the events of Show Me a Hero (see 232–233). When discussing the racist talking point of ‘the defence of property value’, she demonstrates how the African American community was used as preferential instrument for the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ neighbourhoods and urban areas with the consequent inflation or increase of house prices (see 2019, 6–10, 22). The gentrification or financial valorisation process of white and middle-class zones functioned as propellant for these same homeowners’ resentment against the likely implementation of social housing for low-income groups, which was perceived, again, as an open threat against an acquired status (2019, 117–118, 229–230; see also Alliez and Lazzarato 2016, 259)—an anger that in the series (and in reality) was widely exploited by the council member Hank Spallone (Alfred Molina). As for Junction 48 and Wind River, we can see policies of economic

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extraction and internal colonisation operating practical forms of erasure, enacting ‘wars on poors’ that involve visible existential borders within the bodies of urban communities (see Alliez and Lazzarato 2016, 259, 322–323; Hardt and Negri 2017, 169; Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 146–147; Mbembe 2019, 115; Sassen 2014, 28–29). A similar dynamic is displayed also in The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Talbot 2019), focusing on the trauma of the eviction of the African American communities of the aforementioned city from its glamorous touristic centre. What is more, by closely looking at how these dynamics are entailed and unravel through the progression of the episodes, we may observe also a clear opposition between the defence of a racialised private property and the care for collective well-being. The opposition to desegregated public housing (a process enforced, in the end, through court rulings) and the political will to not comply to this sentence, indeed, will see the city council be held in contempt of the law and be financially devastated by always increasing penalty payments. Therefore, the obsession for property value and for the preservation of a privileged white status is the main cause for a collective economic disruption leading to the forced closure of public libraries and other services, and preventing any active long-term political plan. In this sense, the consistent use of various Bruce Springsteen’s famous hits as soundtrack does not work only as strong element of historical contextualisation: the 1980s and early 1990s are often associated with the moment of Springsteen’s widest popularity, and the musician’s social background even recalls an ecology similar to that of Yonkers. These songs are also easy to associate with a particular divided economic landscape, embodying all the contradictions, horrors, and ‘enthusiasms’ of the Reagan years, radically shaping and segmenting the American population in their hopes and possibilities for social mobility (Dolan 2012). With a visible ironic effect, the contrast between these two distinct social sides is reiterated also in the various sequences describing the respective rallies organised by the Save Yonkers Federation, opposing housing, and by groups advocating desegregation policies. Both political sides adopt the famous slogan ‘No Justice, No Peace’ as their protest chant; this feature dialogically enacts the conflict between an idea of justice as exclusive protection of privilege (even masked as respect for democratic popular will) against, on the other hand, a claim for policies balancing visible existential inequalities. We could argue, using Guattari’s taxonomy, that through these conflicts we experience the combination between a social and psychological

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ecology, with homeowners expressing on the point of view of subjectivity the composition and distinctions characterising their urban landscape (1995, 6–7). In particular, we engage these affective lines through the character of Mary Dorman (Catherine Kenner), who will become one of the most vocal opponents to the housing project and effectively embody all the fears and anxieties of the homeowners. On the other side of the spectrum, we also participate in the struggles and anxieties of Alma (Ilfenesh Hadera), Billie (Dominique Fishback), Doreen (Natalie Paul), and Norma (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), who have to cope with different levels of subordination and with the absence of collective systems of care while hoping to become recipients of the new houses in the east side of the city. Indeed, all their stories combine states of precarious motherhood, the impossibility to receive proper public support for disabilities, or the absence of political programmes for education and employment. Billie and Doreen’s arcs, as young and unwaged single mothers, underscore the fragility and vulnerability of an existence deprived of networks of solidarity, except the conflicting and contradictory ones provided by the limited familial welfare. It is exactly because of this inadequate capacity to affirmatively plan their lives that we see many young people resorting to the drug market as limited mean for economic survival or falling into addiction as a form of escape from a peripheral and segregated existence (in the case of Doreen). Billie’s economic deprivation is connected, instead, with the difficulty to get out of an abusive relationship, one that will lead her, in the end, to lose the public house assigned to her and to move back to the poor areas of the town. It is, in fact, also necessary to stress that even the subjects having the opportunity to access to the new houses are not exonerated from further forms of marginalisation and segregation. Several experiential and aesthetic elements reiterate and expand motifs of separation and confinement: at the end of the fourth part of the miniseries, for instance, we experience the final realisation of the so-much debated (and expected on the side of the viewers) public houses; various moments accompanying the rapid and efficient completion of the buildings (associated with Springsteen’s love ballad Secret Garden) are rapidly succeeded by scenes from Wasicsko’s wedding and by images of Doreen requesting her family’s help to get out from drug addiction. This final sequence, seemingly providing a resolution for several conflicts previously experienced, ends up with a chronotopic and dialogical reversal. Indeed, the very final moments of the episode show the newly built houses covered by racist murals and a police patrol stopping by; as soon as this action

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takes place, the camera cuts to a long-shot of the building site, revealing (through a change of focus, cinematography by Andrij Parekh) the fence separating these same houses from the adjacent street and neighbourhood. At the end of the following episode, despite further difficulties, we see the arrival, in east Yonkers, of the families going to live in the new public houses. The bus trip leading them to their new residences is accompanied by surprise and marvel as soon as they reach their destination; on the other side of the street, nonetheless, the ‘white natives’ are looking with suspect and despise at their new neighbours, with one of them adding ‘this is going to be a nightmare’, evoking, therefore, a perpetuation of the pre-existing racial divisions. A further reiteration of this pattern comes in the first section of the following and final episode; we see a public meeting during which the recipients of the new affordable houses are briefed about the appropriate conduct to be followed in order ‘to deserve’ the continuation of their current contracts. Apart from warnings against the consumption of drugs and the implication in criminal activities (worth the eviction from the new houses), these same subjects are lectured about how to manage their finances, properly close their trash bags, or carry out everyday operations in order to be accepted in their new neighbourhood. Furthermore, they are also informed about the fact that a residents’ watch-group has being formed and it will monitor their ‘integration’ in the community. Therefore, notwithstanding the completion of the housing programme, mechanisms of infantilisation and racial management of the minority population persist; as Doreen argues highlighting the inequality of such measures: ‘will the white folks have to learn how to be nice neighbours as well?’. Together with this aspect, ‘receiving welfare support’ is dialogically framed as a  moral debt. Robert Mayhawk  (Clarke Peters), assisting the process of integration through the Housing Education Relocation Enterprise (H.E.R.E.), adds (in this same sequence) that ‘everything has a cost, and every choice involves responsibilities’ and emphasises the need to accept these terms and mechanisms of subordination in exchange of a decent accommodation. The opportunity to rebalance a visible inequality is not experienced, therefore, as a right or a due political action but as an economic transaction, in reason of which the new residents have to accept the perpetration and continuation of their subordinate status. The incorporation of the racialised conflicts of the neoliberal era on the level of subjectivity is also something that dialogically defines the evolution of characters’ dynamics in Orange Is the New Black. Apart from

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highlighting how the penitentiary institution is mostly designed for the confinement and management of minorities, the series, since season two, sets out ways in which this same identitarian codification is reproduced by the inmates dividing themselves into competing groups. In season two, for instance (in particular, from episodes 2×07 to 2×13), we engage the development of a tireless fight between African American inmates, led by Vee (Lorraine Toussaint), against various members of the white community revolving around Red (Kate Mulgrew). Both ‘organisations’ find themselves structured as micro-fascist groups ruled by strong leaders and using racial belonging as backbone for their aggressive struggle to conquer the prison black market. These same economic operations are associated with the expression of a sort of moral cynicism (typical in particular of Red’s character speech across the various seasons) describing cooperation as an illness and cruel competitive egotism as the only way forward. The dialogical integration and entanglement between segregated and identitarian politics with a competitive free-market attitude, what is more, becomes structural in season three and four, as the Litchfield Correctional Institution becomes more and more a privatised and corporate-based enterprise (led by a conglomerate called MCC). Inmates are used as cheap labour for luxury lingerie companies or reduced to the state of explicit commodities. In episodes 3×04 (Makris 2015,  Finger in the Dyke) and 3×05 (Holofcener 2015, Fake It Till You Fake It Some More), we assist to the progressive reduction of the quality of services and support activities for inmates together with consistent staff’s cuts. Furthermore, the very number of inmates is exploited as resource to attract new public funding, and the already overwhelmed dorms are soon packed with new beds and convicts. As the action progresses, it becomes clear also how the policies adopted by the corporation are not meant to somehow implement the ‘efficiency’ of the prison, but to effectively use the institution as a mechanism for economic speculation. The financial bureaucratisation of the prison can be observed also in the process leading to the selection of convicts to become the previously mentioned cheap workforce. Initially, the opportunity for employment (whose nature still remains unknown to the prisoners) attracts many inmates who rush to apply for the positions available. Later on, however, apart from discovering the exploitative nature of these ‘corporate jobs’, we are informed by Danny Pearson (one of the managers appointed by the corporation) about the absolute arbitrariness of the selection process; indeed, this procedure is, using the latter character’s words, only meant to ‘make the inmates think there is an efficient

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system for judging them so that those failing to get the job feel bad about themselves for not having what it takes’. These choices, among others labelled as ‘valorisation of space’, end up radicalising even more the existing divisions between ethnic groups within the prison ecology. Initially, these tensions are expressed in Piper’s organising a fruitful clandestine activity selling online pieces of the underwear she produces as part of corporate prison labour; she does so by ruling her ‘company’ in strict hierarchical manner and providing very limited forms of payment to her ‘employees’, involved, therefore, in a double mechanism of exploitation. At the same time (in particular, with the beginning of season 4), the white community, feeling ‘threatened’ by the numbers of minority groups, reunites around supremacist and racist figures persecuting their ‘enemies’. This same racial hatred pushes for the conflicting organisation of other groups, in particular the Dominicans led by Maria Ruiz (Jessica Pimentel), who soon becomes their kingpin by finding effective ways to reciprocate the aggressions and to exert control over the prison businesses. This leads the latter character to engage in an open conflict with Piper when competing for the management of the underwear black market. In response to this change in the power balance, Piper will exploit Desi Piscatella’s (violent and authoritarian captain of the guards played by Brad William Henke) racism advocating ‘anti-gang’ policies, tightening the already existing discriminatory measures of control and punishment over non-white groups. The combination between the racial divisions and the incorporation of competitive behaviours we see enacted in these events of the series is connected with contemporary transformations of the penitentiary institution. As Saskia Sassen and Angela Davis demonstrated, incarceration and mass incarceration (a population of 2.3 million people behind bars in the USA), again, does not represent an outside to capitalist valorisation, but a quintessential characteristic of its current functioning (either for public or private penitentiary institutions)—a form of its internal expulsions (cf. Davis 2003, 98–99; Sassen 2014, 63–65). Indeed, the typical label, prison-­ industrial complex is used exactly to integrate this reality within a wider productive and economic context, inside which, as we can see from the events of Orange Is the New Black, the penitentiary realm continuously reforms itself in order to expand the reach of its extractive functions. Trying to increase the number of inmates (the raw material) becomes an essential component of the progressive transformation of prisons into enterprises, which, through this operation, obtain funding and, in turn,

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workforce to be sold to big corporations (see Davis 2003, 90–94; Sassen 2014, 68–74). The implementation of such ‘reforms’ is strongly connected with the intensification of sentences for small crimes or with the systemic criminalisation of phenomena such as drug addiction, economic indigency, or ‘non-normal’ behaviours. In the series this latter aspect is embodied in particular by the stories of Suzanne (Uzo Aduba) and Lolly (Lori Petty), who, apart from being punished essentially for their mental health condition, have to face the complete absence of mechanisms of care and support. Of course, what emerges more clearly from the series is the prison complex’s systemic racism and its unbroken correlation (in particular in the USA) with segregationist policies continued with the so-called War on Drugs (as examined in 13th by Ava DuVernay 2016; see also Davis 2003, 37, 108–109). The reduction of the inmates to pure commodities who internalise non-cooperative subjectivities, however, intersects also with what Angela Davis defined as the gendered structure of the prison (2003, 60–61). Across the various seasons, for instance, we familiarise with the various ways in which correction officers (Cos) use their authority to extort sexual favours or to indulge in abusive behaviours (for instance, the continuous invasive pelvic examinations and strip searches). A less violent but pervasive expression of such structure can be identified in the practices supposed to lead female inmates to rehabilitation: cooking, sewing, and other typical care-work activities are assigned to them as forms of appropriate re-education for inmates having to recover a normalised femininity (2003, 64). These processes can be put in relation with the long tradition of psychiatric management of non-standard femininities (and with the forms of punishment enforced on female slaves), where ‘deviances’ are associated with a form of hypersexualisation in turn giving a perverse rationality to the abuse the inmates undergo (2003, 66, 78–81). The series, one could argue, even exploits these dynamics by showing often the clandestine sexual encounters between the inmates and by focusing on the grotesque forms of toxic masculinity characterising many of the Cos (in particular, with George Mendez ‘Pornstache’ [Pablo Schreiber] in the first season). At the same time, the series also allows us to engage in such chronotopic components by revealing the systemic nature of these phenomena in connection with the transformations and functions of the prison institution. The dehumanisation of the inmates, indeed, is expanded to the management of migrants in the final season of the show, displaying the introduction of immigration centres within the penitentiary reality. The brutal

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legal illegalisation of movements across borders, as we have discussed, is an inherent component of the capitalism of operations, which identifies vulnerable people from the Global South, on one side, as open threats to the body of the nation and, on the other hand, exploits them as further raw material (cf. Davis 2003, 10, 103; Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 218–219; Sassen 2014, 68, 90). In the series, the ‘management’ of immigration centres is part of the latest business strategies adopted by MCC in order to expand its financial reach—a process that, in combination with the ‘spirit’ of the Trump presidency era, deprives these racially abused subjects even of the access to facilities and services provided to ‘regular’ inmates. In this context, we find Blanca (a central character of the series played by Laura Gòmez) now incarcerated as irregular migrant (her green card has been withdrawn) exactly after having served her time in the ‘normal’ prison. It is here that we engage the dialogical confrontation between her and Karla (Karina Arroyave), another ‘illegal subject’ with, however, no criminal record in her story (we meet her in episode 7×03  [Makris 2019] And Brown Is the New Orange). This latter figure initially blames on Blanca and on other ‘criminals like her’ the violence and persecution many ‘respectable’ migrants have to suffer. However, as the events unfold, the criminalisation of migration will appear more and more as an exclusively profitable business indifferent to parameters of morality and hierarchy of behaviours. In a Kafkaesque development, we will see special courtrooms for children being opened together with mechanisms of economic extraction to access phones or other everyday services, epitomising how ‘the invention of an illegal behaviour’ stands at the foundation of penitentiary economics. As Angela Davis put it, punishment is not a marginal component of the larger economy anymore, but operates as its main filed of experimentation renovating practices of confinement destined to financial valorisation and exploitation (2003, 88–91). Indeed, Karla’s resentment as respectable citizen against Blanca and other non-morally adequate migrants slowly fades away when realising the complete arbitrariness and indiscriminate cruelty setting her punishment purely on the basis of the minoritarian identity she embodies. On this same dialogical line, in the final episode of the series (7×13 [Burley 2019] Here’s Where We Get Off ), after being deported to El Salvador and separated from her children (now in foster care), Karla will find herself completely illegalised when trying to cross again the US border and (probably) fatally trapped in the desert because of a leg injury.

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The complete absurdity and pervasive violence characterising the penitentiary institution in Orange Is the New Black is also reinforced by the presence of other two characters: Natalie Figueroa (Alysia Reiner) and Joe Caputo (Nick Sandow). Both figures operate as key middlemen in the management and direction of the Litchfield facility. Although having to assure the continuation and functioning of the institution, in their own ways, these flawed but ‘humane’ characters often attempt to provide inmates with instruments for rehabilitation or support. Nonetheless, we see that these two ‘decent’ subjects’ struggles are always doomed to fail, declaring the incapacity of the prison system to find a constructive and positive functionality. In this sense, the most explicit symbol of the injustice pervading the chronotope of the series is embodied in Tasha Jefferson’s (‘Taystee’ [Danielle Brookes] another key character) drama, since she will receive a life sentence on the wrong basis of being responsible for the homicide of Desi Piscatella (killed by the stormtroopers stopping the prison riot taking place across season five)—a verdict that is again enforced over her racial identity and criminal record. Notwithstanding the cruel and extremely expulsive dynamics the chronotopes of the two series put in place, resistance and the formation of a counterpower are not impossible within these ecologies. On the contrary, what both series dialogically enact are experiences of ‘institutional failures’ to be replaced by new forms of collective assemblage. In Show Me a Hero, for instance, we participate in the progressive detachment between city council politics, Wasicsko’s story, and the completion of the desegregation plan. By obsessively trying to reclaim back his political space and relevance and to be recognised as the leader who made public houses possible, Wasicsko will end ‘betraying’ friends and relatives and making reckless choices compromising his return to politics. Dialogically opposed to this affective collapse is the relationship between the two ‘opposites’ Mary and Doreen; at first ‘forced’ to encounter through association meetings, the two characters will form a bond of friendship and cooperation moving beyond intimate affectivity. Together, and in collaboration with members of both communities, they will find new ways to coexist, express their concerns, and construct solutions collectively, without being managed by higher institutions and systems of coercive control. The interaction and alliance between the two characters, if we look at the closing moments of the miniseries, is the element that, in fact, survives and is, in contrast, alternated to the intense images of Wasicsko’s funeral, thus expressing a

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political force that proliferates beyond the limits of an institutionalised and crystallised (though utilisable) structure of power. Likewise, the atomising and punitive nature of the penitentiary system does not involve a complete erasure of the ethical potential of the inmates. Apart from the moments of solidarity and affective connection that reoccur as instances of an unbounded ethical potential across the various episodes (for instance, the inmates helping illegal migrants in the final season), the entire fifth season is dedicated to the power of this collectivity to ‘occupy the prison’ and to autonomously organise. If, on one side, there is a quintessential dialogical element of resentment expressed in the action of many inmates ‘replacing’ and persecuting the Cos, the riot becomes a moment of experimentation. Common events and activities to remember dead friends are instituted, together with forms of entertainment and mutual assistance that reignite the consciousness of being a group. As Taystee’s brilliant capacity to negotiate the terms and conditions for the end of the riot demonstrates, the inmates possess the power to put in question a system designed to confine and oppress them on the line of ability/disability, race, gender, and class. They do not need to be represented or to find somebody speaking for them (as stressed in her speech in episode 5×05  [Abraham 2017] Sing It, White Effie); they need their demands to be heard and taken into account while autonomously rediscovering their capacity to experiment the strength of a social assemblage that is superior to the sum of hopeless solitudes.

References Abraham, Paul. Dir. 2017. Orange Is the New Black. Season 5, episode 5 “Sing It, White Effie”, June 9. Netflix. Alliez, Eric, and Maurizio Lazzarato. 2016. Wars and Capital. Trans. A. Hodges. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e). Burley, Mark A. Dir. 2019. Orange Is the New Black. Season 7, episode 13 “Here’s Where We Get Off”, July 26. Netflix. Davis, Angela. 2003. Are Prison Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 2005. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. and Foreword B.  Massumi. London: University of Minnesota Press. Dolan, Marc. 2012. Born in the U.S.A: ‘When the President Met the Boss. Salon. https://www.salon.com/2012/05/28/born_in_the_u_s_a_when_the_ president_met_the_boss/. DuVernay, Ava. 2016. 13th. Produced by Spencer Averick. Forward Movement, Netflix, et al. DVD, 100 mins.

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Guattari, Félix. 1995. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Trans. P. Bains and J. Pefanis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haggis, Paul, and David Simon. 2015. Show Me a Hero. Season 1, episodes 1–6. August 16–30, HBO. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2017. Assembly. New  York: Oxford University Press. Holofcener, Nicole. Dir. 2015. Orange Is the New Black. Season 3, episode 5 “Fake It Till You Fake It Some More”, June 11, Netflix. Luxemburg, Rosa. 2003. The Accumulation of Capital. Trans. A. Schwarzschild London: Routledge. Makris, Constantine. Dir. 2015. Orange Is the New Black. Season 3, episode 4. “Fingers in the Dyke”, June 11, Netflix. ———. 2019. Orange Is the New Black. Season 7, episode 3. “And Brown is the New Orange”, July 26, Netflix. Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Trans. S.  Corcoran. London: Duke University Press. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2019. The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism. London: Duke University Press. Sassen, Saskia. 2014. Expulsion: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Talbot, Joe. 2019. The Last Black Man in San Francisco. Produced by Dede Garner, Joe Talbot, et al. US: A24, Longshot Features, et al. DVD, 121 mins. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. 2019. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. https://uncpress.org/book/9781469653662/race-­for-­profit/.

CHAPTER 15

Expulsed Childhoods: A Ciambra and The Florida Project

Enclosures, borders, and imprisonment coexist perfectly with the ­circulation and accumulation of capital, generating, at the same time, ­particular environmental, social, and mental ecologies. In this chapter we are going to observe how ‘precarious forms of housing’ affect and inform the subjectivities of two young main characters, the fourteen-year-old Pio (Pio Amato) in A Ciambra (Carpignano 2017) and the six-year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) in The Florida Project (Sean Baker 2017). We are also going to discuss how exactly the unusual position and existential angle expressed by these two characters allows for particular dialogical and ethical elements to emerge and be put in critical relations with their ­contextual cinematic chronotopes. The first case study can be considered a sort of companion piece and sequel to Mediterranea, building upon the tale of Ayiva and other characters we have previously encountered. However, A Ciambra deals more specifically with the life of the small Romani community living at the border of Gioia Tauro. Ayiva remains a fundamental character, though the embodied fabula is constructed around a ‘close tailing’ (again, in a sort of Dardenne-like stalking style, the cinematography in this case is by Tim Curtin) of Pio1 (occasionally appearing in Mediterranea). Notwithstanding the change of focus, processes of ghettoisation and separation across the 1  In A Ciambra and The Florida Project, the casts are almost entirely composed by nonprofessional actors and, in the first case, recall their real-life experiences.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Sticchi, Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63261-8_15

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social body on the line of race remain fundamental. The ‘non-citizenship’ of the sub-Saharan community is, indeed, reinforced and reiterated showing a precarious status as constant normality for the previously encountered characters, now accepting aforementioned contested conditions of exclusion. Ayiva, indeed, does not appear to be involved in political activities and has completely embraced an entrepreneurial attitude through the management of a small black market circuit of household appliances with the purpose, once having collected enough material, to send a container to Burkina Faso. The Romani community in turn lives within a closed ecology with unique characteristics. The chronotopic dimension of Mediterranea was composed of shantytowns, squatted buildings, and described instances of movement, transformation, and instability (making the lives of the migrants even more explicitly precarious). The Ciambra’s (the name of the Romani ghetto) chronotopic enclosure appears as a more stable and defined urban unit; at the same time, this social reality, with its decaying architectures, is effectively separated from the rest of Gioia Tauro; as we see in the initial section of the film, when Pio goes on a ride with his brother Cosimo (Damiano Amato), and in every occasion Pio climbs up on the small hill nearby the Ciambra, this location is surrounded by illegal dumpsites and by other natural boundaries. The city centre, therefore, exists as a reference point for economic or occasional leisure activities, but does not constitute a conventional social space for Pio and the other members of his community. This same isolation (in a certain sense reiterating the peripheral chronotopes of Fish Tank, Don’t Be Bad, or Boys Cry) operates by making the Romani community a separated body, a very specific ethnic group distinguishable from others, such as the transnational community of migrants previously discussed. However, this same visible existential separation does not involve a complete parallel existence and the alienation from particular productive processes. As for the migrants, this position of destitution comes together with specific economic roles and positions in the social ladder. Early on, we witness—through Pio’s eyes—the arrival of a group of gangsters in the Ciambra, coming both to have Cosimo respond of an ‘unapproved’ car theft and to order the Romani men a new job (to steal in a house nearby). The gangsters’ arrival is associated with particular affective elements: on one side, they access the space with a visible level of confidence and ­carelessness, which also underlines the hostility of Italians towards this particular community; on the other hand, their appearance stops the cheerful and vivacious dinner Pio’s family was having (we see this shift in

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the mood, in particular, through Iolanda’s [Pio’s real and fictional mother, guide of this numerous group] worried close-up). These actions ­automatically reveal the subordination of the people of the Ciambra in relation to the local criminal ring (Ndrangheta), which uses the Romani as a sub-proletarian workforce having them committing small thefts and ­burglaries, and managing the illegal waste disposal in exchange of not being completely vulnerable to law enforcement. In this sense, their ­subordination is reiterated through the fact that the only ‘Italians’ we see accessing the Ciambra are either security forces or gangsters. In both cases, the Romani are involved in clear top-down economic and social relations reinforced very early in the narration by Cosimo and Pio’s father’s arrest (the direct consequence of the ‘job’ assigned by the local mob). Furthermore, as weak sign of recognition and symbolic repair for the imprisonment of two family members, additionally stressing the dynamics of power Pio’s family suffers, these same gangsters will bring to Iolanda, few moments after, some pastries and a bottle of champagne. Notwithstanding this clear subordination, the Romani do not think about themselves as sharing a condition similar to the one of the migrants, whom we have seen filling the ranks of a low-paid essential workforce. We observe Pio and his family talking about ‘eating like Italians’ to indicate a proper well-cooked meal and describing excessive drinking or abusive sexual behaviour as ‘African’ attitudes, or even using the word ‘black’ as an insult to demean one another (Hans 2018). As Cosimo emphatically argues, later on, in the prison environment, the Romani are respected and feared, whereas the ‘Africans’ are at everybody’s mercy. Thus, we see how the people of the Ciambra themselves appear to embody the social Darwinist and racist hierarchies they are submitted to, advocating a special space on the social ladder, separated from that of migrants or other minoritarian groups. The identitarian pride of this same community is reinforced through the prologue of the film, in which we see Pio’s grandfather as a young man travelling around the natural harmonic landscape of Calabria, an image returning later on in the tales of this same character, remembering to his grandson how they used to live as nomads. He states, ‘we were free, we had no bosses’ and admonishes Pio to never forget that ‘it’s us against the world’. This same dream of autonomy and uniqueness is dialogically reversed by the mechanisms of dependence we have just ­ highlighted—social relations that pervasively inform the lives of the ­ ­characters strictly inscribing them in pre-assigned productive roles. In this sense, it is possible to argue that the film reiterates a recurring theme of

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contemporary Italian cinema by constructing its main ecological dynamics on the divisions and hostility between the Romani and the ‘pure’ native community (O’Healy 2019, 217). As A Ciambra stresses the role of the homonymous ecology within a wider economic and social context, the chronotope of The Florida Project allows us to explore other facets and financial mechanisms of what we have previously indicated as the ‘war on poor’. The main setting of the action is a motel called The Magic Castle, located just nearby the global tourist attraction The Magic Kingdom theme park. However, this same renowned site is concealed from viewers’ participation (with the exception of the ending of the film) and even appears to be inaccessible for the main characters of the story. As for A Ciambra, this film reiterates the chronotopic pattern of a ‘centre’ (economic or civic) operating as a removed existential ground, not even emerging on the topographical horizon, opposed to an enclosed main location, where, as we soon begin travelling through it, it is possible to discover a variety of precarious inhabitants. People with low-­ paying jobs, incapable of affording the rent for a ‘proper’ home (as Ashley [Mela Murder], a single mother working as waitress), unemployed workers, and their children, all constellate this ecology bringing together different forms of social and economic destitution. The dialogical irony produced by the separation and coexistence between these opposed realms, as Brian Tallerico pointed out, automatically makes us notice the cheap motels, the gun stores, the tourist traps, and state of almost permanent precarity existing just near the ‘happiest place on Earth’ (2017). The very title of the film, indeed, ironically refers to the name of Walt Disney’s plans for the famous theme park (Porton 2017). One of the most comical and revealing moments in this sense shows a rich tourist couple on honeymoon having mistakenly booked a room at the above-mentioned motel expecting it to be part of Disneyland’s properties. As these two characters realise that the estate is a ‘welfare’ project (the woman even calls it a ‘gipsy’ motel), they desperately attempt to change their reservation as quickly as possible, while being mocked by the bystanders. The film, however, from the initial sequence, showing one of Moonee’s friends emphatically running and screaming to invite her and Scooty to play (forward tracking shot following the character, alternated with medium shots of Moonee and Scooty replying at every screams, the song Celebration by Kool & The Gang accompanies the images and the film titles), works constantly on a level of affective ambiguity. The difficulties and struggles of the people inhabiting this ecology always appear on the

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side of us following the cheerful and joyous main characters exploring the world surrounding them (the camera is also mostly positioned at characters’ height level to emphasise this experiential connection [cinematography by Alexis Zabe]). Indeed, right after the first moments, we see Moonee and her friends running to a nearby motel and spit on a woman’s car and, few moments after that, ‘going after’ tourists and adults to sponge ice cream or shutting down electricity at The Magic Castle. The main characters’ constant and inventive tormenting of the neighbourhood is constructed as explicitly reminiscent of the tone of the famous Hal Roach’s series Our Gang (Porton 2017), describing in a cheerful way the adventures of poor ‘little rascals’ during the Great Depression years. This same affective mood is reinforced by the exuberant and vivacious colours pervading the architectures and spaces of the film: the bright purple walls of the motel, where most of the action is set, are met by the sun of the Floridian summer as well as by the various tacky designs of the shops and venues surrounding Disneyland. In this sense, we could argue that this film deviates from some of the affective patterns of depression of the peripheral chronotope because of its colourful and completely unbalanced architectures which are, in turn, connected with the unique habitus in mapping the filmic space (see Bruno 2002, 64–65) enacted by Moonee and her friends. Nonetheless, these repeated visual maps of play and cheerfulness c­ oexist with extremely disturbing revelations. In the initial part of the film, after having discovered that Halley (Moonee’s single mother [Bria Vinaite]) has not been chosen to wait where Ashley works, we see her discussing with a welfare officer motivating her necessity for subsidies or at least for public transportation passes. We jump to this conversation in medias res, with Halley explaining that she had lost her job as lap-dancer because she refused to do extra sex-work as her colleagues, and stressing that ­notwithstanding the numerous applications she is currently submitting, nobody is hiring her for a required thirty  hours job. Halley is on the ­foreground (close-up in profile) talking and reacting with animosity to the various refusals from the interlocutor (who remains off-screen) with Moonee, instead, in the background playing with dolls. The dialogical and affective continuity between these two elements operates by experientially normalising Halley’s humiliation. Seeing her mother fighting for ­economic support is not a cause for distress and melancholy, but part of everyday experience. Likewise, begging for ice cream and asking tourists for some change becomes a game. In an even more striking way, we see, in another

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early sequence, Bobby (the motel manager [Willem Dafoe]) asking a ­charity group distributing food to the local tenants to move to the back of the building in order to avoid the embarrassment of the property’s owner. While this dialogue takes place, Moonee arrives and pushily asks for ­pastries and bread (the camera cuts to her close-up, back to camera). Her confidence dialogically highlights the ordinariness of this action (a similar moment is repeated later on), since resorting to charity food has become an even enjoyable component of her routine. This same experiential pattern is reiterated in several occasions ­describing Moonee and Halley selling perfumes and cosmetic products bought in discount stores to wealthy tourists; as the director confirmed, these sequences were realised through a candid camera style, having the camera positioned at a certain distance from the actors (using telephoto lenses) to capture the spontaneity of the responses (Porton 2017). This same construction again functions in trivialising another component of their persistent precarity and even adds to it a comical nuance. In this sense, it is important to stress how Halley also plays a vital role in the ­experience by embodying an intrinsic dialogical complexity. She scrapes a living resorting to any necessary means and is compassionate and caring towards Moonee (there are many moving moments of deep intimacy between them); at the same time, Halley often indulges in questionable behaviours (watching television all day, not contributing to the education of her child, etc.) or has a very aggressive attitude even towards people, such as Bobby, trying to help her. Halley could be easily labelled as an ‘undeserving parent’ (another character sarcastically comments that it is no surprise that she ended in that situation); on the other hand, she has become a single mother at a very young age, has a criminal record, and is, therefore, unemployable, while having to pay her rent on a weekly basis. A series of incidents will also end up having her violently separating from Ashley and resorting to sex-work and small frauds in order to keep up with her payments, reiterating the combination between precarious motherhood/care-­work and sex-work we have seen with Katie in I, Daniel Blake (see also Federici 2020, 29–31). Dramatic moments of the film (again reinforcing the normality of the state of destitution of the c­ haracters) are also the repeated occasions in which Halley is hosting her clients in her room while forcing Moonee to do long baths. During these sequences the camera remains on Moonee playing alone (fixed medium shot, character in profile) with the diegetic high volume of the radio covering what ­happens in the room. Only in one occurrence we see a client going to the

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bathroom for few moments (the composition remains the same)  and encountering the surprised reaction of the child (the camera here cuts to a close-up); however, this same gloomy discovery does not end up building a particular intense scene or a crucial confrontation between the Moonee and her mother. Indeed, after Halley pushes her client out of the b ­ athroom, the camera cuts directly to another moment of the two playing together. In Halley and Moonee’s condition, dialogically combining childlike joyfulness and disturbing aspects of a marginal existence—as well as for all the other characters inhabiting the so-called budget motels—we experience the integration of economic indigency, precarious housing, together with constant forms of evaluations and extraction. The inhabitants of The Magic Castle are not provided with a residence to face a moment of difficulty; they, instead, act as tenants who, notwithstanding the lack of income, have to financially respond to the service they receive by demonstrating their economic reliability. In this instance, we see another example of policies forcing economically indigent people into an inescapable poverty (‘the dead fish of environmental ecology’ as defined by Felix Guattari when discussing parasitic real estate developers such as Donald Trump; see 2000, 43). These same institutional strategies involve the material death of cities through the constitution of endless megasuburbs opposed to always more tourists-dedicated centres (see Alliez and Lazzarato 2016, 322–323). The existential confinement of precarious people to new shantytowns and ghettos comes together with the implementation of what Saskia Sassen has also described as processes of violent dispossession and primitive accumulation; we see the use of housing, on the one hand, as a source for unfettered financial expansion (through mortgages becoming parts of speculative investments) and, on the other side, as a mechanism for the expulsion to the borders of the cities of the same groups being more vulnerable to these very dynamics (2014, 121–128; Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 159). In a certain sense, Moonee and Halley could be seen as direct victims of the 2007 mortgage crisis, quickly passing from ‘ownership’ to endless forms of homelessness and temporary accommodations, as for the characters of 99 Homes (Bahrani 2014), also tackling the impact of such events on low middle-class households. The progressive planetary gentrification of the cities comes out as a result of a pervasive ‘extraction of the common’, as parasitic destitution of communities forced out of particular contexts and used as living capital for what we could define as the precarious housing complex (Ciccarelli 2018, 169–171; Hardt and Negri 2017, 169; Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 146–147). The state of

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semi-­homelessness of the characters is inserted in a wider social context when we see Moonee and her friends getting out of the motel’s b ­ oundaries and accessing a nearby zone filled with empty and abandoned properties (probably material evidences of the mortgage crisis). The kids’ game includes acting as the rich owners of these houses (or smashing some of the objects left out) and dialogically underscores the absurdity of a precarious existence in contiguity with an entirely unoccupied residential area: a further revelation of the ‘political’ nature of such condition, impossible to be reduced to a matter of individual economic inefficiency. In this sense, a fundamental dialogical function is embodied by Bobby’s character’s speech; this figure finds himself in the unpleasant position of managing the motel and, therefore, to operate as economic and behavioural controller of the tenants. While performing the duties inscribed in his role, this same character always attempts to make the life of the people he supervises as dignified as possible; he tries to provide them with all the comforts he can arrange to find, is flexible on the payments, and even ends up acting as a sort protective father figure for many of them, in particular for Moonee and Halley. Bobby’s moving and tireless dedication is connected with his sharing, to same extent, the tenants’ condition, as he lives in the same site and experiences the impossibility to distinguish between work and ‘private’ emotional life. At the same time, his role is associated with a complete impotence in preventing the evictions, arrests, and reduction to complete homelessness some of the tenants have to face. Bobby’s inability to resist this structural disposability comes explicitly across in the final sequences of the film, during which, after being denounced for having had sex clients in her motel room, Halley is, at first, asked to respond of such accusations and, later on, separated from Moonee for the length of the investigations. In these moments, we see Bobby finding himself in the awkward situation of having to facilitate the police and social workers’ duties while reassuring the main characters; however, ‘I don’t know’, ‘we will figure something out’, ‘you’ll be fine’ are the only conciliating words he has to calm a distressed Moonee. Indeed, the conscious powerlessness of the character in preventing the family’s separation is emphasised by his resigned and melancholic moving away from the action to smoke a cigarette and finding a sort of partial consolation in promising another tenant that he will be repairing the public washing machine soon (his close-ups are alternated to images of Moonee and Halley fighting with the police and social workers). These dynamics further highlight the systemic nature of the characters’ predicament and, what is more, show how state-power

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(of course, intended as completely integrated with social and economic dynamics) for precarious people never manifests itself in the form of support or assistance, but only through instruments of evaluation and punishment. We have seen how, to some extent, the children’s play presents a ­dialogical opposition to the precarious ecology surrounding them. In a similar way, Pio’s coming of age is characterised by a path of rebellion against the contextual rules imposed on him. On one side, Pio’s ­restlessness is defined by his desire to be part of the family’s business, which is undermined by Cosimo relegating him to the less central economic ­ ­activities because of his age; when his brother and father are arrested, though, he becomes the family breadwinner, relying on Ayiva’s help to sell few stolen goods. In connection with this transformation, we can see Pio’s unease being associated with the aspiration to partially distance himself from the community. Indeed, the business partnership with Ayiva enacts a progressive blending in the migrants’ group, in a way that goes beyond the simple establishment of economic agreements. As demonstrated by the long party sequence (lasting four minutes and ten seconds), Pio finds or, at least, experiments a new sense of belonging by hybridising with the sub-­ Saharan group. This movement on the outside of the Ciambra ­constitutes also a relevant dialogical interruption in the pre-established dynamics of the film ecology; it constructs a moment of communal enjoyment and relief (for Pio and the migrants), while envisaging a ­ ­possibility for his recognition as adult, being praised for bringing good luck and indicated as proper partner in particular economic activities. In addition to this experiential diversion, another recurring dialogical element displaying the possibility of an outside is constituted by the ‘magical’ presence of a horse, appearing for the first time after a minor confrontation with Ayiva. Pio follows the horse through the streets at night and arrives to a fire where his grandfather as a young man stands and, afterwards, we see this same figure elegantly riding the animal in slow motion. The dream sequence, characterised also by aesthetic features differing from the dominant ‘realist’ style of the film (diegetic sound is muffled and replaced by the central role of the music theme), is directly correlated with the idealised image of the free nomad the stories of Pio’s grandfather refer to—a masterless figure ‘not having to answer to anyone’. It is not incidental, in fact, that another feature of Pio’s rebellious stance is ­ ­characterised by a certain resentment against the subordination to the Ndrangheta clan. Pio claims not to be afraid of the ‘Italians’ and decides

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to steal in the local boss’ house in order to show his autonomy from the rules all the other members of his family and group bow to. These same dialogical ruptures, however, reveal their fallacies and limits soon afterwards, when Pio is found by the same gangsters to be humiliated and beaten in front of his powerless family, which is asked to repay a large sum of money in order to remedy for the act of insubordination. The ‘young’ nomad and the horse are displayed once again—as Pio is thrown out of the house by his angry father—and finally disappear in the horizon, to be followed by a commando of gangsters setting one of the buildings of the Ciambra on fire in retaliation (thus destroying also the coach where Pio’s grandfather was born). The mechanisms of subordination affecting the members of the Ciambra are, therefore, reaffirmed and put in place in drastic terms, negating the previously imagined existential outside—a space of lost freedom dialogically constructed exactly as a dream fading away. As a consequence of this conflict with the local criminal ring, Pio’s family openly rejects him as legitimate member of the community, thus reiterating how inscribed within the very idea of a closed Romani group lies a profound acceptance of precise contextual dynamics of power. Furthermore, the solemnity pervading the sequence of the ­grandfather’s funeral (taking place shortly before the negative turning point in the events) contributes in relegating the nomadic lifestyle to an unrepeatable temporality, leaving only one option for Pio to make amend for his misdeeds: to help Cosimo in stealing from Ayiva’s garage. Replying to Pio’s initial reluctance to participate, his brother states, ‘We need to think about us and you’re worried about the African?’ and continues by arguing, ‘Don’t be a boy.’ Thus, the affective construction of the events, on one side, closes the main character’s opportunity to establish a new sense of belonging through his connection with Ayiva and the migrants. On the other hand, this same exchange reinforces the need for Pio to ‘grow up’, in the sense of accepting the rules of the game, identifying him within a particular racialised and segmented group. The coming of age of Pio takes place in the form of a traumatic separation, as he calls Ayiva, pushing him away from the garage and giving Cosimo the time to steal undisturbed. When Ayiva and Pio encounter, the young man cries, hugs his friend, and asks to be brought back home (the theme for piano and strings increases, while in cross-cutting we see the garage being emptied by Cosimo and his partner). In this moving and small exchange, we can observe how the betrayal, therefore, triggers the necessity for Pio to negate the relation of care, solidarity, and friendship established with Ayiva. Apart from being a

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fundamental business partner, the latter repeatedly acted as a ‘proper’ older brother providing Pio with shelter and protection. Therefore, the details of Pio’s hands hugging Ayiva on the ride back home are particularly significant since they display a last occasion to defend this relationship on the side of the main character. On the other hand, this negation is associated with the necessity to return to the Ciambra, to an established position, this time, however, as a grown man (as he declares to be soon afterwards). The final sequence, indeed, shows us Pio, the morning after, greeted by the women of the family with an unprecedented reverence and, after a short exchange with his mother, he is called upon to join the adults of the community. The very closing images (close-up of Pio back to camera, small left to right pan) display the main character looking, on one side, at the kids playing and, on the other, at the ‘men’ of the family discussing together, with Pio rapidly opting for the second group (shot reverse shot, the characters’ image goes slightly out of focus as he moves away from the camera). This composition reiterates the ending of Mediterranea, presenting the chronotopic blending of the main character within his ecology and, concurrently, the acceptance of its dynamics. For Ayiva, this involved a resignation to the status of precarious citizen, deprived of clear political agency; for Pio, in a similar way, this same process of acceptance, of growing up, signifies the crystallisation of a social ladder and division, together with the active embrace of the economic and productive roles entailed in it. If Pio’s affective path leads to an ethical disempowering acceptance of the status quo, which chronotopically reaffirms the closure and systemic expulsions (or differential inclusions) embedded in the film ecology, The Florida Project, instead, ends up on a rupture and dialogical conflict. In the final section of the film, as Moonee realises that she is to be separated from her mother, we see her escaping from the police officers and social workers trying to calm her and, then, running to Jancey’s (her best friend  [Valeria Cotto]) apartment. A moving exchange of close-ups between the young women enacts the saddening revelation that they may not see each other ever again. It is in this moment that Jancey takes Moonee’s hand and together they run away (diegetic sound is turned down in favour of a fantasy-like music theme) to reach the entrance of Disneyland, and the narration ends with the image of the iconic ‘magic castle’ emerging in the background. Apart from the decisive variation from the point of view of sound, we follow the two characters through (mostly) forward handheld camera movements (this scene is shot with an iPhone and anamorphic adapter against the 35  mm cameras Panavision

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lenses used throughout the film) entering in more direct contact with them. The cutting rate is increased and the action elliptically jumps from one location to the other, letting us rapidly access the famous theme park (the scene is one minute and twenty-three seconds long) and, in general, we assist to an interruption of the realist aesthetics so far characterising the experience. The synesthetic effect of this transformation is manifold. On one side, the dialogue preceding the final moments highlights the dramatic tension pervading the scene, allowing us to empathise with Moonee distressing realisation: when asked to describe what is going on by Jancey, she replies, crying, ‘I can’t say it,’ underlining the unbearable fierceness of what is happening to her. On the other hand, we have a neat jump to a fairy-tale chronotope associated with the possibility of entering Disneyland, of violating the chronotopic border separating the life of The Magic Castle from the glamorous and exciting tourist attraction close to it. We could argue that through this capsizing, the film reiterates the affective integration of joyful and playful elements with the disturbing and realist characteristics of precarious existence. However, this rupture allows us to experience the closeness between these two worlds and the porosity of the physical and ecological limits separating the theme park from its periphery. Jennifer Kirby argues that the film (considered together with American Honey) reveals the dystopian nature of contemporary neoliberal US society exactly by adopting and, we could add, dialogically reversing the utopian language typical of Hollywood productions (2019). Yet, to some extent, this same ironic overturning poses ‘the outside’ of capitalism dystopia only on the level of imagination and dreams, which, though offering a resistance to Disney’s monopolisation of fantasy, still confines the existential alternatives to the realm of impossibility (as for Pio’s idealisation of the free nomad; see also Kirby 2019). Although reaffirming the class divisions and separations characterising the film chronotope and limiting the space for alternatives, the ending of The Florida Project also reasserts the ‘diverse’ habitus of the children, a praxis capable of subverting contextual maps and of reframing an ecology so arbitrarily and cruelly divided. By rejecting and violating these borders, the kids’ games, differently from Pio’s coming of age, have the power to re-politicise the ‘question of precarious housing’ (to paraphrase the title of a famous inquiry by Friedrich Engels), revealing the centrality of this form of exploitation in contemporary economy. Their games show the interdependence between wealthy centres and segregated suburbs, and, to some extent, they enact the first moves of a different socialised mode of

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inhabiting the space. In other words, there is nothing more serious and ethically empowering than a child’s play.

References Alliez, Eric, and Maurizio Lazzarato. 2016. Wars and Capital. Trans. A. Hodges. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e). Bahrani, Ramin. 2014. 99 Homes. Produced by Ahosk Amritraj, Ramin Bahrani, et al. US: Braod Green Pictures, Hyde Park Entertainment, et al. DVD, 112 mins. Baker, Sean. 2017. The Florida Project. Produced by Chris Bergoch, Kevin Chinoy, et al. US: Cre Film, Freestyle Picture Company, et al. DVD, 111 mins. Bruno, Giuliana. 2002. Atlas of Emotions: Journey in Art, Architecture, and Film. London: Verso. Carpignano, Jonas. 2017. A Ciambra. Produced by Paolo Carpignano, Jon Coplon, et  al. Italy-Brazil-Germany-France-Sweden-US: Stayblack, RT Features, et al. DVD, 118 mins. Ciccarelli, Roberto. 2018. Forza Lavoro: Il Lato Oscuro della Rivoluzione Digitale. Roma: DeriveApprodi. Federici, Silvia. 2020. Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism. Oakland: PM Press. Guattari, Félix. 2000. The Three Ecologies. Trans. I. Pindar and P. Sutton. London: The Athlone Press. Hans, Simran. 2018. “A Ciambra Review—A Coming-of-Age Tale with Real Family at Heart. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/ jun/17/a-­ciambra-­review-­jonas-­carpignano-­coming-­of-­age-­real-­family. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2017. Assembly. New  York: Oxford University Press. Kirby, Jennifer. 2019. American Utopia: Socio-economic Critique and Utopia in American Honey and The Florida Project. Senses of Cinema, 92 (October). http://sensesofcinema.com/2019/feature-­articles/american-­utopia-­socio-­ economic-­critique-­and-­utopia-­in-­american-­honey-­and-­the-­florida-­project/. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2019. The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism. London: Duke University Press. O’Healy, Aine. 2019. Migrant Anxieties: Italian Cinema in a Translational Frame. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Porton, Richard. 2017. Life on the Margins: An Interview with Sean Baker. CINEASTE, Winter, 22–25. Sassen, Saskia. 2014. Expulsion: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tallerico, Brian. 2017. The Florida Project: Review. In RogerEbert.com. https:// www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-­florida-­project-­2017/.

CHAPTER 16

Cinematic Memories of an Infected Planet: Beasts of the Southern Wild

In this book, we have constantly tried to establish a dialogical and process-­ based interconnection between cinematic chronotopes and the bodies inhabiting and interacting with them. The analysis of the combination of the mental, social, and environmental level of audiovisual experience leads us, in this final chapter, to address probably the most urgent issue affecting our precarious reality: understanding the role of the ‘human’ within earth-­ ecology in the age of environmental crises. As previously stated, terms like Anthropocene indicate the critical impact of human activity on the planet, in particular, as it drastically affects the possibility for building and imagining a future for our species. The dramatic disappearance of a future temporality is associated with endless images of a catastrophic mode of relating to nature, with a constant acceleration of its exploitation and brutalisation. This is why it is possible to establish a clear conflicting connection between the social and productive system regulating our lives and the tenets of our existence as part of the world. Indeed, Jason W. Moore, among many scholars, prefers using the term Capitalocene to emphasise the need for a critical politicisation of the analysis of the current ecological crises, avoiding a too reductive and simplistic understanding of their features (cf. 2015, 173–176). On the one hand, in order to understand the anthropogenic drives of global warming and other natural disasters, it is necessary to point out how these same phenomena are connected with an intrinsic move separating and disentangling the ‘human’ from its ecology and drawing a clear differentiation © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Sticchi, Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63261-8_16

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between Nature and Society. The legacy of Cartesian dualist construction of reality on modernity (the world of the Anthropocene), however, is not fully grasped if disconnected with capital role in operating and putting forward such division. Exactly as a consequence of this binary segmentation of the real, placing the human and the individual as exceptional separated ‘substances’ (cf. Braidotti 2013, 50–52; Haraway 2016, 30–31; Moore 2015, 19), capitalism comes to existence as a mode of organising nature into the form of accumulable cheap commodity. In this sense, the management and enclosure of a ‘cheap nature’ configures the process of primitive accumulation that we have observed constituting the appropriation of labour power, the gendered and racialised divisions of roles, and, in general, the transmutation of the entire biosphere into instruments for value production (Moore 2015, 27, 71–73). Not grasping and addressing in critical and political terms, the crisis of anthropocentrism, therefore, leads us to incomplete analyses/practices, to ignore existing power relations or the modes in which particular ecological crises differently affect separated sectors of the global population (Braidotti 2013, 88; Moore 2015, 171–174). Again, we see in these extractive processes a continuation of the attack against social reproduction that the capitalist machine operates by triggering a brutalisation and deterioration of always more extensive parts of the living world or even building mechanisms to profit from such ecological catastrophes (cf. Guattari 2000, 41; Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 197–198; Sassen 2014, 62–63, 152–153). In this section we are going to jump to already catastrophically mutated film ecologies, which, in their radical and specific ways, generate chronotopes of expulsion/extinction, defining modes of extreme inhabitability within a hostile and ‘out of balance’ world. Main focus of the discussion will be Behn Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), associated with references to several recent sci-fi/dystopian films all set in near future scenarios or alternative present temporalities. The traumatic and striking forms of precarious existence characterising these case studies, apart from generating negative experiential and affective dynamics, allow also the enactment of an ethical rethinking and reconstruction of the human in relation to its ecology. To this purpose, we are going to take again advantage of a child’s mode of travelling and inhabiting the film chronotope by following and interacting with the young Hushpuppy (the ten-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis), the black female main character of Zeitlin’s first feature film. Beasts of the Southern Wild is set in the landscape of a post-Katrinaesque disaster

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Louisiana, more specifically in an isolated location called the Bathtub (in the Isle de Charles Doucet1); the film displays a community of survivors living in a state of climate apartheid, characterised by the constant risk of flood and displacement, outside the walled borders of the ‘dry world’. The action starts off with a prologue, during which we follow the main character in her precarious home environment made of waste material and surrounded by vegetation and a varied animal community living in it; in the meantime, Hushpuppy’s voice over (returning along the experience and particularly present in this initial section) emphatically describes the life in the Bathtub. Her first words refer to an endless heartbeat characterising every existing part of the world in an interconnected and enigmatic form (a sound she can perceive by putting her ear to the ground or close to every animal). The prologue moves on displaying a collective festivity and a celebration of the lifestyle of the Bathtub with references to freedom from work (‘we got more holidays than the rest of the world’), bravery in facing natural catastrophes and resistance against the ‘cages’ of civilised society. Wink (Dwight Henry), Hushpuppy’s father, while looking at the protected and industrialised sites appearing on the horizon, comments: ‘Ain’t that ugly over there? We got the prettiest place on Earth.’ Hushpuppy’s words even hint to a sort of fearless acceptance of death and human fragility when adding that at a certain point a storm will leave nothing but a ‘whole bunch of water’, an unavoidable end that must be recognised as intrinsic feature of the human condition (the people of the dry world are afraid of water as ‘babies’, she states). With this prologue, the film operates a clear contextualisation of issues related to environmental devastation, adopting as reference point one of the most marginalised and hit communities on the North American context. The connection with a Katrina scenario, which has accelerated mechanisms of ‘environmental racism’ and worsened the urban gentrification of New Orleans (see Alliez and Lazzarato 2016, 355, 361; Barnsley 2016)—exacerbating the segmentation of the local population on the line of race, gender, class, and ability/disability—automatically evokes particular political implications. Humanity is not equally affected by ecological disruptions; as for the heavy rains of Parasite, these same events reveal, underline, and increase the violence of already existing power relations. In the ecology of Beasts, this division is further emphasised by the presence of walls separating the Bathtub from the dry world and by the identification  Inspired by the Isle of Jean Charles existing southwest of New Orleans (Spoth 2015).

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of this main location as the recipient of the pollution and waste coming from the wealthy and protected part of society (as per the ‘real’ environmental and industrial threat hitting the Isle of Jean Charles; see Barnsley 2016). In the initial section of the film, not incidentally, the only images we have of the ‘other side’ are metonymically summarised in the emergence of an industrial site in the background emitting exhaust fumes. Similarly, climatic shocks, storms, hurricanes, and sea levels increases are not perceived as sudden disasters, but only as the intensification of a preexisting precarious condition, as we will see soon afterwards. Scholars have connected the characters’ status of inexorable ecological precarity with Rob Nixon’s notion of ‘slow violence’, emphasising exactly the progressive and unavoidable nature of the attack on the life of the community implied in situated neo-colonial and exploitative mechanisms (Spoth 2015; Barnsley 2016); the ordinariness of this brutalisation, therefore, makes even apocalyptic events appear as natural consequences of a preceding hardships. Indeed, after realising that a heavy storm is going to compromise the resilience of the Bathtub, we see many members of the community rapidly organising to escape and, similarly, Hushpuppy and Wink taking quick measures to face it by transforming their house into a makeshift boat. The almost automatic capacity to assemble a plan for survival on behalf of this sort of anarchic group, therefore, highlights the familiarity of such occurrence. However, the prologue of the film displays an unusual and carnivalesque dialogical structure reversing the tragic affects related to this ecological precarity. Instead of introducing the storyworld and its interethnic inhabitants through a dramatic mood emphasising their marginalisation, indeed, we have an unexpected celebration of this state of destitution and vulnerability. Even the music accompanying the images (The Bathtub by Dan Romer and Benh Zeitlin featuring the Last Bayou Ramblers) integrates a fairy-tale melody with typical Cajun compositions, thus stressing the festive tone of the initial moments. This reversal in what we could define as traditional expectations on a disaster narrative has several complex implications. For many scholars, indeed, the combination of these contradictory elements ends up reiterating a racialised and ‘animalised’ construction, in particular, of the ‘black Southerner’. The expulsed community of the film, which we see dedicated to heavy alcohol consumption and enjoying a sort of self-sufficient form of sociality, could be easily associated with an image ‘noble savagery’, a pre-social barbaric authenticity indicating the acceptance and even strenuous defence of this

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same marginality (Barnsley 2016; Lloyd 2016). The racialisation of the Bathtub’s community affects, more explicitly, the relationship between Hushpuppy and Wink. The latter appears as an abusive and extreme patriarchal figure, often beating her daughter and addressing all the inhabitants with a violent and misogynist language. As noticed by bell hooks, Wink embodies all the ‘hateful racist/sexist stereotypes that mass media projects on black masculinity’ by integrating the incapacity to control his ‘beastly’ drives with a concrete inability to express love and care for his daughter (2012; Spoth 2015). Wink often demands her daughter to behave in a ‘masculine’ way, repeatedly admonishing her to restrain her tears, to show strength and absence of fear in the face of every challenge life presents (an existence intended as a social Darwinist struggle for the survival of the fittest): ‘you are an animal,’ the father screams, celebrating Hushpuppy’s ability to fiercely break a crab in half with her bare hands and, then, suck the meat out. The depiction of the young woman as well carries with it controversial features, such as a disturbing eroticisation (she appears almost half naked for the entire narration) and animalisation associated with a sort of messianic function making her (who will become the leader of the community after Wink’s final death), on one side, an incredibly active agent. At the same time, this role can also be visibly connected with a stereotyped image of wild/uneducated wisdom putting in close correlation Hushpuppy with the ‘natural’ dimension, as emphasised exactly by her capacity to listen to the heartbeat of the universe (hooks 2012; Yeager 2013; Spoth 2015). In general, the idea of ‘femininity’ in Beasts seems to be constructed around completely irrational and sexualised categories, as demonstrated also by the tales about Hushpuppy’s legendary and absent mother: a woman so sexy that she could turn on stoves and make pots of water boil just by walking near them (hooks 2012). A further critical dialogical element can be found in the correlation between this savage and even brutal lifestyle (no crying is allowed during Bathtub’s funerals) with an immense identitarian pride which, in turn, describes the community as a closed and isolated one, incapable of accepting any aspect of industrialised existence; ‘they think we all going drown down here, but we ain’t going nowhere,’ Hushpuppy’s proud voice over comments during the prologue. Wink, in particular, embodies this crystallised and monolithic perception of his group advocating a total resistance against any form of compromise and transformation. Even when the fatal storm finally occurs, he will not be organising a plan to escape from the Bathtub, but actually arranging measures to remain in it, while

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reprimanding all the members of the group thinking about leaving the community. Thus, an extreme patriarchal and ‘uncivilised’ social organisation is associated with a primitivist and survivalist racial purity opposing the absurd weaknesses of the industrialised world (‘when an animal gets sick here, they plug it to the wall,’ Hushpuppy’s voice over ironically comments when finding herself in a ‘civilised’ hospital). The ‘savagery’ of the inhabitants of the Bathtub becomes even more problematic when we observe how this interethnic community, though incorporating elements of Cajun and Creole culture, does not include indigenous elements (the Biloxi-­Chitimacha-­Choctaw tribes), thus cutting off essential historical features related to the geographical setting of the film (Lloyd 2016). Christopher Lloyd (2016) has stressed how analysing Beasts as a subversive tale (specifically intended to demolish the tenets of ­ anthropocentrism) presents the risk of obfuscating the process of ­ dehumanisation and animalisation pertaining, more viciously, the ­ ­codification of Afro-descendent subjects (a mechanism addressed in s­ everal previous chapters of the book). However, I would argue that, ­notwithstanding the validity of all the critical elements reported above, the film operates a strong reversal of the very notion of human exceptionalism at the centre of the ecological crises discussed beforehand. The very first images of the film (after a master shot indicating Hushpuppy’s house) show the main character playing with the ground and building a nest for a bird. The connection between her and a visceral material dimension ­(reiterated in her capacity to hear the heartbeat of the world) is ­experientially stressed by the camerawork mostly characterised by handheld movements, remaining often on her height level, aimed at following Hushpuppy’s exploration of the storyworld (cinematography by Ben Richardson). This cinematic style enacts and reinforces the unbreakable continuity of Hushpuppy with the ecology she physically engages. This aesthetic feature results even more relevant if put in correlation with recurring close-ups of chaotic masses of still living seafood the main character often dips her hands in. It is not incidental that the first occurrence of this image directly follows the end of the prologue, bringing us to a lecture given by Miss Bathsheeba (educator of the community); the teacher mentions that all living beings are made out of meat and are part of the ‘buffet of the universe’, existing together under the threat of increasing climate ­ ­breakdown. Similarly, after having violently hit Wink and pushed him to the ground, Hushpuppy’s voice informs us that her father, who she ­supposed to be dead, could have turned into a tree or a bug without any

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clear possibility to know the new place occupied by him in the natural universe. This close relationship between the animal, the human, and, more in general, the entire sphere of the living, establishes a shared ‘fleshy ontology’ that shatters traditional dualist oppositions within allegedly separate existential levels and dynamically integrates these dimensions (cf. Haraway 2016, 103; Lloyd 2016). Where the members of the civilised world put ‘fish in plastic bags’, the Bathtubers share food with their dogs and immerse their bodies within the same mud and ground occupied by the animals on which their survival depends, implicitly recognising their place as part of an intraspecies universe. Furthermore, the film chronotope seems also to prevent a strict differentiation between the organic world and the technological and artificial one; waste materials composing the architecture of the Bathtub and debris of the industrialised civilisation chaotically coexist with vegetation and with an animal community building its own habitat within them. In this sense, exactly because of the impure and non-hierarchical features characterising its ecology, the film operates a dialogical reversal of the very concept of bios (with its clear taxonomy of the living) and substitutes it with a non-anthropocentric organising matter or zoe (see Braidotti 2013, 60). This is why Patricia Yeager indicates the Bathtub’s lifestyle as example of a ‘dirty ecology’, as alternative mode of existing based on surviving exactly through the objects and elements considered worthless for the inhabitants of the civilised world (2013). In a certain sense, these characters can be seen as followers of the practice of gleaning powerfully investigated in Agnès Varda’s famous documentary The Gleaners and I (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, 2000) because of their capacity to survive and reinvent the world surrounding them recuperating, reusing, and reassembling the waste of consumerist/capitalist society. In a way this dirty ecology emerges as a form animism, reiterated in Hushpuppy’s dialogue with nature, which involves a sensible materialist and transformative consciousness re-signifying the world at every turn and renouncing to a disentangled and disembodied exceptional subjectivity (a practice of worlding; see Haraway 2016, 88). The ecological awareness of the people of the Bathtub, however, is not to be associated with an idealised and unchangeable image of the community. On the contrary, the main drive of the embodied fabula of the film implies the necessity for this same group to find another shelter after the storm and the rise of salt-water definitely compromise the possibility to return to the Bathtub. This same traumatic separation from the previous

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home is also associated with a loss of balance in the order of the universe, and with the melting of glaciers liberating the aurochs, a fiery species threatening human survival and devastating the local vegetation with their violent passage (in reality this animal kind went extinct with the beginning of the industrial age). We hear in several occasions Hushpuppy’s voice reminding us that ‘the whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts … the entire universe will get busted’, emphasising the precarity of human condition within a chaotic reality and the need to find a place in an intricated web of natural relationships. Following this line of thought, a less central but still important dialogical function is to be found in Miss Bathsheeba’s speech. Often, this character is seen opposing Wink’s patriarchal model, contrasting his views and plans; for instance, while escaping from the flood, he claims to be able to reassemble the Bathtub as it was and recover the lost lifestyle, whereas the teacher, conscious of the irreparable damage to the site, argues for the need to find a new place. Likewise, soon after this conversation, we see her teaching the kids how to cure one of their sick friends arguing that the most important lesson for them to learn is to be able to take care of people smaller and sweeter than them (these same words are followed by images showing Bathsheeba demonstrating how to grow plants). Therefore, if Wink expresses a patriarchal and violent form of masculinity connected with the destructive love for the image of a pure marginalised community, on the other hand, we experience another nurturing model put forward exactly by the same character stressing the interconnection between humanity and nature. Soon afterwards, indeed, we experience the failure of Wink’s plan to fix the Bathtub and drain the water by making the walls segregating the community explode; although averting the flood, the plot, opposed by Bathsheeba, does not manage to restore the pre-existing ecological equilibrium since trees have already been destroyed by the salt-­ water and animals have abandoned the place as well. The impossibility to recover a past purity against an unavoidable wound (either ecological or existential) is, in fact, embodied by Wink himself, who, we will see, is affected by a blood disease leading him to a slow and unescapable death. As noticed by Yeager, this character exists as a sort of undying Fisher King (2013), incapable of healing and, thus, putting the entire kingdom in jeopardy for his incapacity to imagine an alternative future or even to acknowledge his weakness since he conceals the nature of his disease from the entire community. The rise of Hushpuppy as leader of the new Bathtub by the end of the film is, therefore, to be associated

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with a general dialogical refusal of the model embodied by Wink to be substituted with a new subjectivity. It may be possible to argue that ‘the passage of the baton’ between the father and the daughter occurs in a very classical and even mythological form (cf. Yaeger 2013) with the dying monarch finally recognising the strength and value of his heir in his deathbed. We see Wink again asking Hushpuppy not to cry while watching him die and his final departure being enacted in the form of a warrior funeral (he is burned on a pyre)—all elements that indicate continuity and celebration instead of a proper reversal and reinvention. On the other hand, the new ‘leadership’ of Hushpuppy is explicitly put in place as an alternative against the identitarian model expressed by Wink. The progressive realisation of this passage is enacted through a series of acts of care: bringing her father whose blood, quite metaphorically, is eating itself, back to the Bathtub where he wants to die. After that, we follow Hushpuppy and her friends through a trip to find her legendary mother, who would allegedly be the perfect new leader. What awaits them is a visit to the club/ brothel Elysian Fields, where these young women find a community of temporary loving mothers offering a moment of tenderness and comprehension (they all dance together on the notes of Fats Waller’s ballad Until the New Thing Comes Along). Nonetheless, this particular section operates nothing more than a diversion from the central affective path of the narrative (the name of the club, indeed, evokes a heavenly dimension); this differential status is experientially emphasised by rhythm of the action being suddenly relaxed while diegetic sound is muffled in favour of the music. Yeager discusses this change as a transition from the mythopoietic tone pervading the experience to a more realist one reducing the centrality of Hushpuppy’s imagination and ecological interaction (2013). The emergence of these new ‘mothers’, what is more, does not envisage the expected substitution of previous patriarchal rule with a new mythological parenthood. What Hushpuppy realises—at this juncture—is that being hugged and lifted (receiving acts of care) is her ‘favourite thing’ and also that there is no other dimension where to find refuge and shelter beyond the borders of a precarious ecology; thus, she decides to go back to her father with a new spirit. Then, we see her facing the mighty giant aurochs arrived to destroy the Bathtub once and for all, but this same final encounter is not associated with a binary clash. ‘You’re my friend, kind of,’ Hushpuppy tells the mythical animals kneeling in front of her and argues that now she has to take care of her community.

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The racialised struggle for survival of Wink is, as we can see, substituted with a model of care and generation of relationships, cross-species kinships Donna Haraway would argue (2016, 106), which does not base itself on mythical images and outer existential dimensions, but aims, instead, at reconfiguring and ‘fixing’ the place of the human in the world. The main character’s voice earlier on, in fact, expanding on the recognition of being part of one integrated universe, remembers also that, if we manage to fix the broken pieces of a system, maybe we can find ways to rebuild a harmony. Nonetheless, the very final images of Beasts, showing us the main character leading the remaining group of the Bathtub going back to their homeplace, do not display an already restored ecology and actually close on an open dimension as the characters are walking on a runaway surrounded by the sea (backward tracking shot). Therefore, the embodied fabula does not provide us with assured future temporalities or clear paths for the reconstruction of a world devastated by ecological catastrophes, a closure that we may also link with a sense of ethical and political impotence. On this note, it is possible to relate Beasts to science-fiction films like Okja (Bong Joon-ho 2017), Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller 2015), and Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve 2017). All these films share a context of already happened ecological crises: the first film introduces us to a world where a shady and powerful food corporation called Mirando (clearly evoking the notorious Monsanto) led by the two twin sisters Lucy and Nancy (played by Tilda Swinton) has secretly produced a new species of superpigs (among which the character giving name to the film) to ‘resolve’ and capitalise on the food crisis threatening human survival. In Mad Max: Fury Road, a dry wasteland has substituted all the previous ‘green places’ (the name of an ideal oasis that, we will find out, has turned into a swamp). The only known big source of water is under the control of a fascist organisation led by Immortan, an overtly patriarchal ruler, who stands as general of a kamikaze army of street warriors, imposes his monopoly over reproduction by coercing young women and drinks solely maternal milk. Likewise, the world of Blade Runner 2049, apart from the few cities perennially wrapped in darkness and toxic fogs, is an inhabitable dump of digital and electronic waste. The replicants produced by Niander Wallace (leader of the homonymous corporation) and, in particular, their capacity to autonomously reproduce, stand as the only hopes and extractive mechanisms for the continuation of the economic system and the aggressive colonisation of space, while walls in all the spheres of existence strictly separate the different species and kinds.

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The main characters inhabiting these film ecologies (Mija [Seo-hyun Ahn] in Okja, Furiosa [Charlize Theron] in Mad Max: Fury Road, and the replicant K in Blade Runner 2049), as Hushpuppy, all find themselves coping with the idea of a negated future and, at the same time, live under clear class-divided, patriarchal, racialised, and speciesist social structures. Similarly, the paths undertaken by these figures do not lead them to the simple rebellion against particular power dynamics, but, in different forms, to a renewed understanding of their own reality. In Okja, the friendship between the young farmer Mija and the superpig she is commissioned to breed, will drive her to challenge the rule of Mirando, unmasking the weak operation of greenwashing put forward by Lucy, who desperately attempts to cover and legitimise what is actually a biogenetic transformation of life into value (the capitalisation of living life; see Braidotti 2013, 61, 96). At the same time, what emerges from her fight and wish to reunite with Okja is also the envisioning of friendship and kinship beyond the close borders of species-belonging, and even of the artificial/organic divide; a reconfiguration similar to the existential continuum expressed by Hushpuppy, one that puts forward the centrality of zoe, of a living and transforming collective matter opposing all sorts of ontological dualisms. Capital can understand and enclose life only as a resource, as cheap material, but the model of kinship embodied by Hushpuppy and Mija does not entail the simple recognition of another living being to which it is possible to attribute a differential status with varying degrees of existential dignity; it implies the acknowledgement and mutual construction of a sympoietic link uniting in a complex, ‘responsa-able’, and tentacular way the entire planetary ecology (cf. Haraway 2016, 33–36). It involves a process of transformation and experimentation through connection between species and beings instead of the defence of an existential stasis and equilibrium: a mode of reframing the very notion of the human and to build up a dirty, impure, and infected ecology.2 Generating links and relationships is also what the replicant K does while travelling around his destroyed world and trying to find the truth about his own identity (‘interlinked’ is the word at the centre of K’s personality tests, measuring his levels of obedience); interacting and moving around an ecology that is already posthuman allows him, and us viewers accompanying his wanderings, to enact and construct a thinking-together 2  The COVID-19 pandemic, in this sense, is a manifestation of how interconnected, mixed, and chaotic is the composition of living matter on the planet.

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of different and allegedly divided portions of the real. The digital and electronic wasteland and the territories consumed for raw materials’ extraction coexist with the walled Los Angeles and, in particular, with the sanitised and ultra-minimalist kingdom of the Wallace corporation where a ‘blind’ CEO still nurtures archaic colonial dreams of human expansion (based on the very classical exploitation of female androids reproductive labour). Similarly, the slave-based physical and cognitive labour placed at the peripheries of the world (but operated in different forms by all living beings) is the visceral engine of the metropolitan digital cyberspace. All the human and non-human surfaces and kinds moving through the film ecology, no matter how much divided, share and express an emotional and affective power, and are composed by textural and material fabrics that make them tied together (the capacity of Joy, the hologram-lover of K to ‘feel’ the rain, for instance). Their integration, concurrently, forces us to reconsider every dream of exceptional and unique status as K will do by reprocessing his identity first as cold blade runner and, then, as chosen one of a new species of born replicants. The processual hybridisation and sympoietic belonging of what we can label as zoe-sphere, the egalitarian and anti-hierarchical integration between organic and inorganic matter (cf. Braidotti 2013, 88–89), is not to be confused with an undifferentiated and non-conflictual harmonic unity. On the contrary, the awareness of such symbiosis takes place within cinematic chronotopes that exacerbate the destructive and extractive dynamics entailed in particular power relations and stress the various modes in which existing beings are differentially exploited. It is a radical and total fight, therefore, the one enacted by the female warriors of Mad Max: Fury Road against the mephitic and suicidal heteropatriarchal rule imposed on them, a struggle capable of recasting ‘nature’ as a feminist space (as Michelle Yates has highlighted; see 2017). The real path of liberation and affirmation for the brides escaping from Immortan (led by Furiosa and helped by the silent and less relevant ‘mad’ Max), once they discover that the pure ‘green place’ is no more, does not entail the construction of a new idyllic unity between nature and humanity. Their fight rejects the environmental nostalgia (which we may find in Wink) aimed at rebuilding or preserving a crystallised Garden of Eden that never was (cf. Yates 2017); it is a struggle for environmental justice directed against the Citadel ruled by the above-mentioned authoritarian group and requires the overturning of the power relations and the management of the resources at its core. Therefore, Furiosa’s revolution is also addressing

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alleged natural gendered roles and reveals, again, the political and constructed nature of contingent social assemblages while looking for a new world to envision and build. Though all these films express an ethical potential in making us embody and enact new ways of relating to our ecological and interspecies nature, it is also true that their embodied fabulas feature open and uncertain closures similar to that of Beasts. In the end, Mija and Okja return home, and we see members of the ecologist organisation that helped the main characters throughout the film getting out of prison conscious that their fight has just started: Mirando’s rule has been left untouched, and nothing has been dramatically transformed. With the destruction of Immortan’s army, Furiosa becomes the new leader of the Citadel and distributes water to all its citizens; however, we will not see the implementation of a new social model. Likewise, the rotten social reality of Blade Runner 2049 does not experience any significant change, and K’s adventure ends up in a collection of failures and with a final sacrificial act of kindness showing his partial agency in rejecting preconstructed identity narratives. In reason of their uncertain and open chronotopic compositions, these films operate what Donna Haraway has defined as speculative science fiction/fabulation re-enacting the reality in which we are immersed in a process of ‘terraforming’, of a differential and decentralised production of subjectivity (2016, 12, 101). These speculative and dialogical re-­ enactments are not meant to restore hopes for better futures; they entail the desire of ethically re-inhabiting the ‘present’, of ‘staying with the troubles’ of an infected world while imagining modes of collaborative/sympoietic and revolutionary becoming within it. As the ‘dirty Vitruvian’ image of Hushpuppy on the film poster of Beasts (see Yeager 2013) remembers, we need to learn to walk again in this precarious reality in order to start re-inhabiting it collectively, and there is nothing more powerful than cinema’s affective storytelling in teaching us how to do it.

References Alliez, Eric, and Maurizio Lazzarato. 2016. Wars and Capital. Trans. A. Hodges. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e). Barnsley, Veronica. 2016. The Postcolonial Child in Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild. In Journal of Commonwealth Literature 51 (2): 240–255. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989415626206. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Guattari, Félix. 2000. The Three Ecologies. Trans. I. Pindar and P. Sutton. London: The Athlone Press. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. London: Duke University Press. hooks, bell. 2012. No Love in the Wild. NewBlackMan (in Exile). https://www. newblackmaninexile.net/2012/09/bell-­hooks-­no-­love-­in-­wild.html. Joon-ho, Bong. 2017. Okja. Produced by Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, et al. South Korea-US: Kate Street Picture Company, Lewis Pictures, et  al. DVD, 120 mins. Lloyd, Christopher. 2016. Creaturely, Throwaway Life After Katrina: Salvage the Bones and Beasts of the Southern Wild. South: A Scholarly Journal 48 (2): 246–264. https://doi.org/10.1353/slj.2016.0022. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2019. The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism. London: Duke University Press. Miller, George. 2015. Mad Marx: Fury Road. Produced by George Miller, Doug Mitchell, et  al. Australia-US-South Africa: Warner Bros., Village Roadshow Pictures, et al. DVD, 120 mins. Moore, Jason. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso. Sassen, Saskia. 2014. Expulsion: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Spoth, Daniel. 2015. Slow Violence and the (Post)Southern Disaster Narrative in Hurston, Faulkner, and Beasts of the Southern Wild. The Mississippi Quarterly 68 (1/2): 145–166. Varda, Agnès. 2000. Les glaneurs et la glaneuse. Produced by Agnès Varda. France: Ciné-tamaris. DVD, 82 mins. Villeneuve, Denis. 2017. Blade Runner 2049. Produced by Andrew A.  Kosove, Broderick Johnson et al. US: Alcon Entertainment, Columbia Pictures et al. DVD, 164 mins. Yates, Michelle. 2017. Re-casting nature as feminist space in Mad Max: Fury Road. Science Fiction Film and Television 10 (3): 353–370. https://doi.org/10.3828/ sfftv.2017.24. Yeager, Patricia. 2013. Beasts of the Southern Wild and Dirty Ecology. Southern Spaces. https://southernspaces.org/2013/beasts-­southern-­wild-­and-­dirty-­ ecology/. Zeitlin, Behn. 2012. Beasts of the Southern Wild. Produced by Michael Gottwald, Nathan Harrison, et al. US: Cinereach, Department of Motion Pictures, et al. DVD, 93 mins.

CHAPTER 17

Conclusions

The recent dystopian miniseries Years and Years (Davies 2019) follows the struggle of a British family in adapting to the challenges of an increasingly precarious reality: ecological catastrophes are intersected with extreme forms of racialisation of the social body, combined, in turn, with accelerating methods of platform capitalism exploitation, whereas fascist leaders emerge around the globe contributing to the authoritarian management of a desperate present. One of the recurring chronotopic patterns of the series features montage sequences expressing a rapid and incontrollable succession of events marked by new year’s and anniversaries’ celebrations. As these annual occurrences take place, the world, one of the characters states, ‘gets madder and hotter’, thus emphasising the affective powerlessness of the protagonists to respond to such a quick and traumatic succession of crises. A world out of balance, where precarity affects every sphere of the living, makes the characters, and viewers with them, long for a lost more manageable and comprehensible ‘normality’ (the very source of the crises of the present), leaving the acceptance of the everyday horror and the effort to cope with it as the only remaining existential paths. The film and TV series discussed in this book seem to follow this direction, enacting various precarious ecologies with their intersected intimate stories of marginalisation, exploitation, and loneliness, which may confirm and stress the melancholic and passive nostalgia for less troubling past times (that never were). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Sticchi, Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63261-8_17

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We have observed affective and experiential mechanisms of anxiety ­ ervading the life of characters desperately trying to fit in, to find their p subjectivity recognised and accepted. Sometimes, as in the case of Daniel and Thierry, we have analysed subjects facing the difficulty to embrace changing social circumstances and economic dynamics and, consequently, even their clash with these same structures. With Mia, Lacie, Cash, Sumida, and Chizawa (and others), we have observed both the effort, on behalf of precarious individuals, to conform to specific social expectations, or the active embrace of a competitive morality. We have discussed how these characters participate in their own segmentation and enslavement exactly because of their impossibility to think of themselves as nothing but living human capitals; they become atomised enterprises craving for possible economic affirmation and, sometimes, fighting for their mere social survival through the endless reproduction of ‘financially efficient’ behaviours. However, this same existential path presents for them processes of self-­ annihilation, mortification, or failure, leaving either a space for new solidarity to emerge or the effort to negotiate the results of an unsuccessful life-investment. Several economic and extractive mechanisms were discussed in accordance with each character, addressing the multiple and ever-changing nature of contemporary capitalism, varying from the dark facets of the digital economy to the commodification of youth and education. Likewise, the chronotopes determining these precarious lives have shown limited and anguishing spaces, a sense of endless urgency and constant threat, or have displayed impossible bureaucratic mazes punctuating a frantic and unsettling experiential rhythm. The endless tension of chronotopes of anxiety has been replaced, in the second part of the book, with a focus on a different temporality and affectivity; one of depression, of already-happened social and emotional failures leaving to marginalised subjectivities limited existential options, often directed to find a personal way to deal with an unavoidable state of precarity. Open spaces, instead of being associated with ideas of freedom and autonomy, show us an unchanging horizon, defining separated environments submitted to absent and unreachable economic centres. The periphery, as chronotope of inevitable precarity, therefore, turns criminal life into a good investment, directed to the self-destructive enjoyment of some limited consumerist pleasures and, thus, further normalising a state of destitution. In the films of Kelly Reichardt, incommunicability and alienation, associated with specific work and gender dynamics, are the determining factors in separating the characters of Certain Women or in highlighting

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desperate acts as only available choices. Similarly, the exhaustion of affective and relational life connected with particular modes of unstable employment seems to add another layer to a condition of absolute disempowerment and exacerbates psychosocial mechanisms of guilt and individual dejection. What is more, Eve and Cleo’s socially reproductive labour, expressed in different forms of care-work, puts at the centre how these activities constitute core elements of capitalist extraction. At the same time, this same exploitation of emotional labour removes from the characters spaces and choices for an autonomous re-direction of such affective power. In some cases, chronotopes of depression display subjects caught in an endless cycle of displacement or trapped within the walls of hostile/alien ecologies they have no power to modify. Such incapacity to act assumes a wider temporal framing in the films of Jia Zhangke, featuring precarious figures having to accept and respond to colossal historical transformations, often embarking on paths leading to emotional and literal suicide. These latter emotional and affective patterns have found a more explicit and violent materialisation in chronotopes of expulsion/extinction. In the case studies discussed in the final section of the book, we have noticed, on one side, the extremisation of specific dynamics of precarity. Competitive and gladiatorial moralities in Parasite, for instance, arrive to the point of turning familial bonds into small companies involved in slaughtering games against other precarious microsocial assemblages. This brutal regime of social relations, furthermore, negates the imagination of any possible political and ethical alternative, even in the face of its own catastrophic failure. On the other hand, we have examined the evolution and expansion of extractive mechanisms with the creation of excluded non-­ citizens. Prison institutions, ghettos, shantytowns for migrants, and other forms of open-air enclosures constellate and define the facets of the global market, showing us the integration and interdependence between various apartheids and the ‘free’ circulation of capital. It is, indeed, the absolute absence of political and social power of characters like Ayiva, Pio, Hailey, Moonee, or of the inmates of Orange Is the New Black, which turns them into good investments for another speculation, a further step in the subsumption of life to capital. We have discussed this progressive commodification of the world as a necropolitical process, establishing opportunities for financial reproduction exactly through the worsening and consumption of the entire sphere of the living. In this sense, notions such as Anthropocene and Capitalocene emerge exactly to describe an endless

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attack against the biosphere, an ontological precarisation shattering the boundaries between the human and the animal, the organic and inorganic. The analysis of these terrifying cinematic chronotopes, however, beyond presenting a collection of individual precarities, has also helped us in mapping the power relations, the dynamics of control and governance pervading our existential space. By doing so, each of these case studies enacts and allows for a subversive dialogical relation between their storyworlds and situated social ecologies. What is more, we have highlighted how travelling into precarious film maps and interacting with the subjectivities inhabiting them has meant more than simply recognising the pain of the characters and establishing with them detached and compassionate relations of sympathy. We have examined these cinematic experiences, instead, as experiments, as occasions for an affirmative and creative ethical production using negative and extreme affects as source and drives for the re-­ politicisation of these individual sufferings. In such way it was possible to highlight the political power and centrality of care, conflict, to underscore the features of our collective existence as ecological beings within a posthuman redefinition of labour and, thus, to trace paths of resistance and affirmation. In our discussion, the film image, therefore, has operated not so much as a source of close signification, as a crystallised semiotic structure, but as a potential, as a line of dialogical tension through which it was possible to build a cinematic imaginative and experiential counterpower. Building relations of care and empathy with the characters, likewise, has implied a transformative operation meant to shatter the limits of our own structured identities through the encounters of new modes of inhabiting the world. Generating links of solidarity with them has not meant, therefore, rediscovering a unitary and homogenous ‘class consciousness’, summarising the struggles and conflicts of a universally precarious globe. The process of becoming-class is a creative one, a bond of solidarity through which we can violate and reconfigure current compositions of our subjectivities (including the ones built on majoritarian/fixed images of a specific community) and embrace their undisclosed collective, multiple, and ecological nature. With this work, I do not claim to have established or indicated a ­highway for the examination of the dialogical and subversive power of contemporary audiovisual media: too many case studies and productive contexts have been left out of the analysis to even advance such proposal. Central aim of this book has always been that of mapping, of building links and putting together spaces and forms of life, showing how films and TV

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series do not constitute only abstract outputs of particular situated social dynamics, but dialogically relate to them, autonomously enacting ­unprecedented ethical practices. Experiencing and re-enacting these cinematic chronotopes means embodying their affective complexity, experimenting our capacity to creatively relate to them, and engendering dialogical processes capable of establishing new relations and of reimagining the world—a practice that resides exactly in our capacity to get out of the strict borders of individualised existence, to challenge the territories of everyday experience, and, as Arundhati Roy beautifully put it, to change these spaces by becoming with them. To conclude with her words: ‘How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything’ (2017, 436).

References Davies, Russell T. 2019. Years and Years. Season 1, episodes 1–6. May 14–June 18, BBC One. Roy, Arundhati. 2017. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. London: Penguin.

Index1

A Ahmed, Sara, 119 Albarrán-Torres, César, 152, 156, 160 Alliez, Eric, 15, 17, 150, 210, 211, 227, 237 American Honey (Andrea Arnold 2016), 67, 232 Amore Tossico (Claudio Caligari 1983), 122 And Brown Is the New Orange (Constantine Makris 2019), 217 Animalisation, 44, 46, 239, 240 Anthropocene, 14, 29, 235, 236, 251 Apartheid, climate apartheid, 187, 202, 203, 210, 237, 251 Arábia (João Dumans and Affonso Uchoa 2017), 140 Architextures, 40 Arrighi, Giovanni, 164n1 Aruzza, Cinzia, 159

Ash is Purest White (Jiang hu er nü, Jia Zhangke 2018), 163–166, 170, 172, 173 Auctoratus, 12 B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 4–7, 9, 10, 26, 45, 55, 63, 88, 102 Balhorn, Max, 180 Bande de Filles (Celine Sciamma 2014), 73 Bardan, Alice, 18 Barnsley, Veronica, 237–239 Bateson, Gregory, 9, 146 Bayman, Louis, 67, 68, 84, 85, 87, 179 Beasts of the Southern Wild (Behn Zeitlin 2012), 235–247 Becoming-class, 252

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. Sticchi, Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63261-8

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INDEX

Bergamaschi, Matteo, 91 Berlant, Laurent, 18, 37, 77, 108, 179 A Better Tomorrow (John Woo 1986), 165 Bhattacharya, Tithi, 159 The Big Short (Adam Mckay 2015), 24 Bio-cognitive capitalism, 10, 12 Bios, 14, 44, 194, 241 Black Lives Matter, 25n6 Black Mirror (Charlie Brooker 2011-ongoing), 28, 91–102 Blackness, 194 The Black Panthers Party, 40 Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve 2017), 102, 244, 245, 247 Bradshaw, Peter, 115 Braidotti, Rosi, 14, 15, 44, 47, 67, 82, 88, 101, 102, 119, 194, 236, 241, 245, 246 Brayton, Sean, 86 Bretton Woods, 10 Brown, William, 3, 7, 121 Bruno, Giuliana, 7, 19, 26, 40, 65, 84, 86, 125, 164, 225 Burgoyne, Robert, 24 Butler, Judith, 29 C Cai, Shensen, 163, 168 Capitalocene, 14, 235, 251 Care-work, 28, 51, 57, 149–160, 186, 216, 226, 251 Celis Bueno, Claudio, 13, 91, 97, 98 Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt 2016), 107, 108, 114, 116, 117, 151, 250 Chinese Opera, 163, 169 Chomsky, Noam, 88 A Ciambra (Jonas Carpignano 2017), 29, 221–233

Ciccarelli, Roberto, 11–13, 15, 22, 24–26, 36, 40, 51, 54, 80, 81, 84, 95, 96, 99, 102, 113, 136, 138, 149, 227 Cinematic chronotope of anxiety, 19, 27 depression, 28 expulsion/extinction, 28, 179 Cirucci, Angela M., 91 Climate grief, 116 Coin, Francesca, vi, 11, 190 Continuing education, 50 COVID-19, 11n1, 245n2 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, vi Cruel optimism, 37, 179 Cuori Puri (Roberto De Paolis 2017), 122 D Dardot, Pierre, 12, 16, 23, 25, 36, 67, 132, 167 Davis, Angela, 47, 215–217 De Pascalis, Ilaria, 52, 109 Del Río, Elena, 8 Deleuze, Gilles, 4–6, 11, 15–17, 21, 24, 25, 27, 30, 50, 54, 81–83, 91, 93, 95–97, 174, 190, 193, 194, 201, 210 Deux Jours, Une Nuit (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne 2014), 143 Dialogical materialism, 5 Dialogism, 4–6 Division of labour, 10, 15, 28, 39, 51, 81, 109, 193 Dogman (Matteo Garrone 2018), 122 Dolan, Marc, 211 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 26 E Elsaesser, Thomas, 9 Embodied Cognitive Theory, 7

 INDEX 

Embodied fabula, 7, 71, 83, 88, 115, 122, 132, 138, 141, 142, 145, 164, 172, 185, 187, 196, 208, 221, 241, 244, 247 E-movere, 19 End of labour, 96 Engels, Friedrich, 232 En Guerre (Stéphanee Brizé 2018), 55 Erakat, Noura, 203 Eugeni, Ruggero, 95, 97 F Fake It Till You Fake It Some More (Nicole Hofcener 2017), 214 Fanon, Frantz, 26, 205 FED, 10 Federici, Silvia, 58, 149–151, 159, 160, 226 Feminisation, 51, 149 Fifteen Millions Merits (Euros Lyn 2011), 96 Film-Ethics, 3 Film-Philosophy, 3–30 Financial drama, 24 Fingers in the Dyke (Constantine Makris 2015), 214 Fiore (Claudio Giovannesi 2016), 122 Firmin, Jeff, 202n2 Fisher, Mark, 11, 25, 41, 54, 77, 80, 144, 145 Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold 2009), 27, 63–74, 85, 121, 195, 222 Fleming, David, 8 The Florida Project (Sean Baker 2017), 29, 221–233 Foucault, Michel, 11, 23, 23n5, 53, 93, 109 Fraser, Nancy, 159 Free indirect discourse, 5 Fukushima disaster, 81 The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo 1997), 52

257

Fumagalli, Andrea, 10, 12, 13, 23, 42, 95, 96 Fusco, Katherine, 107, 108, 115–117 G Garofalo, Damiano, 91 General Intellect, 13, 99 Gibbs, Jacqueline, 56, 60 Gig-economy, v, 11, 67, 136–139, 141 Gilbert, Sophie, 92 Giuliani, Alfonso, 11, 51 Gomorra (Matteo Garrone 2008), 128, 129 Gomorrah (Stefano Sollima 2014-ongoing), 122 Gone Girl (David Fincher 2014), 86–88 Good Time (Ben and Josh Safdie 2017), 65 Graeber, David, 54 Grant, Catherine, 74 Guattari, Felix, 5, 9, 15–17, 21, 24, 25, 82, 83, 96, 97, 115, 145, 193, 194, 201, 210, 211, 227, 236 H Habitus, 8, 225, 232 Hall, Stuart, 23 Hans, Simran, 149, 223 Haraway, Donna, 14, 236, 241, 244, 245, 247 Hardt, Michael, 11, 14, 16, 20, 22, 24, 26, 42, 54, 58, 81, 92, 95, 96, 98, 99, 150, 204, 210, 211, 227 Hee Im, Seo, 179, 186 Here's Where We Get Off (Mark Burley 2019), 217 Hesselberth, Pepita, 6, 7, 65, 143, 195 Heteroglossia, 4

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INDEX

Himizu (Sono Sion 2011), 28, 77–88 Holtmeier, Matthew, 10, 27, 115, 174 hooks, bell, 239 Human capital, 11, 36, 39, 41, 46, 54, 59, 88, 143, 198, 250 Hven, Steffen, 7 I Iordanova, Dina, 121 I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach 2016), 27, 49–61, 80, 135, 137, 151, 226 Ince, Kate, 63, 68, 69, 71 Integrated World Capitalism (IWC), 16 I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie 2017), 67 J Jianghu, 165, 170, 173 Joker (Todd Phillips 2019), 190 Jordan-Haladyn, Miriam, 5–7, 102 Junction 48 (Udi Aloni 2016), 28, 193–205, 210 K Kafka, Franz, 22 Keynesian-Fordist model/ compromise, 10, 23n4 Kirby, Jennifer, 232 L Labour power, 13, 24, 25, 44, 99, 102, 150, 236 La Camarista (Lila Avilés 2018), 149 La Classe Operaia Va in Paradiso (Elio Petri 1971), v Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig 2017), 67 Lagerwey, Jorie, 67, 151 La Loi du Marché (Stéphan Brizé 2015), 49

La Paranza dei Bambini (Claudio Giovannesi 2019), 131n1 The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Joe Talbot 2019), 211 The Last Dragon (Michael Schultz 1985), 43 La Terra dell’Abbastanza (Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo 2018), 122, 127 Laval, Christian, 12, 16, 23, 25, 36, 67, 132, 167 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 11, 14, 15, 17, 22, 23, 26, 44, 53, 55, 67, 81, 95, 97, 150, 210, 211, 227, 237 Learning society, 113 Lee, Jonhatan, 116 Lehtonen, Aura, 56, 60 Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (Agnès Varda 2000), 241 Levi, Primo, 196 Leyda, Julian, 151 Littman, Sam, 107 Lloyd, Christopher, 239–241 L’Ordine delle Cose (Andrea Segre 2017), 196n1 Lübecker, Nikolaj, 8 Lucarelli, Stefano, 12, 23 Luxemburg, Rosa, 150, 210 Lyttelton, Oliver, 80 M Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller 2015), 244–246 Majeed, Haris, 116 Marazzi, Christian, 10 Martin Jones, David, 121 Marx, Karl, 13, 117, 149 Mazzucato, Mariana, 13n2 Mbembe, Achille, 14, 44, 193, 194, 198, 202, 203, 205, 207, 211 McGrath, Declan, 164 McRobbie, Angela, 66, 109

 INDEX 

259

Mediterranea (Jonas Carpignano 2015), 28, 193–205, 221, 222, 231 Mellino, Miguel, 58 Men Against Fire (Jakob Verbruggen 2016), 98 Meritocracy, 54 Metropolis (Fritz Lang 1927), v Mezzadra, Sandro, 15–17, 22, 23, 39, 40, 44, 66, 138, 188, 193, 197, 207, 211, 217, 227, 236 Micro-fascism, 82 Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin 1936), v Moore, Jason, 15, 235, 236

Nosedive (Joe Wright 2016), 28, 91–102

N Nakba, 203 Nas, 72 Nature and Society, 236 Nature-Culture, 3 Negative space-affect, 65 Negra, Diane, 67, 151 Negri, Toni, 11, 14, 16, 20, 22, 24, 26, 42, 54, 58, 81, 92, 95, 96, 98, 99, 150, 204, 210, 211, 227 Neilson, Brett, 15–17, 22, 39, 40, 44, 66, 138, 188, 193, 197, 207, 211, 217, 227, 236 Nelson Schultz, Corey Kai, 164 New Deal, 23 Newton, Huey, 41 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 22, 190 Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy 2014), 84 Night Moves (Kelly Reichardt 2013), 107, 114, 118 99 Homes (Ramin Bahrani 2014), 227 NiUnaMenos, 25n6 Non-citizenship/precarious citizens, 194, 201–203, 205, 222, 231 Non Essere Cattivo (Claudio Caligari 2015), 122

P Panopticon, 93 Parasite (Bong Joon-ho 2019), 28, 179–191, 237, 251 Pasquinelli, Matteo, 13 Pieranni, Simone, 98 Pinochet, Augusto, 22 Pisters, Patricia, 8 Plantinga, Carl, 36, 78 Platform capitalism, 95, 249 Polyphony, 5, 45, 59 Porton, Richard, 224–226 Posthuman, 14, 21, 91, 102, 245, 252 Post-Workerist, 10 Poulaki, Maria, 128 Primitive accumulation, 17, 149, 150, 152, 160, 193, 202, 210, 227, 236

O O’Falt, Chris, 181, 182 O’Healy, Aine, 195, 198–200, 204, 224 Okja (Bong Joon-ho 2017), 244, 245 Orange Is the New Black (Jenji Kohan 2013–2019), 29, 207–219, 251 Orlando, Matilde, 93 O’Shaughnessy, Martin, 27, 135, 142, 143, 145 Oxfam report, 15

R Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too (Anne Sewitsky 2019), 98 Racialisation, 39, 44, 197, 210, 239, 249 Raimo, Christian, 123

260 

INDEX

Rancière, Jacques, 27 Rayns, Tony, 163, 166, 169, 174 Roma (Alfonso Cuarón 2018), 28, 149–160, 193 Rose, Steve, 179 Rosetta (Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne 1999), 65 Rottenberg, Charlotte, 109, 110, 159 Roy, Arundhati, 253 S Sassen, Saskia, 13–15, 66, 121, 138, 188, 194, 197, 211, 215–217, 227, 236 Scher, Avichai, 116 Sex-work, 57, 58, 171, 197, 225, 226 Seymour, Nicole, 107, 108, 115–117 Shakespeare, William, 22 Sharp, Hasana, 67 Show Me a Hero (David Simon and Paul Haggis 2015), 29, 207–219 Shut Up and Dance (James Watkins 2016), 93 Sing It, White Effie (Paul Abraham 2017), 219 Sinnerbrink, Robert, 3, 8 Situatedness, 7, 9, 154 Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho 2013), 187, 190 The Social Network (David Fincher 2010), 86–88 Social reproduction, 28, 149–160, 236 Solidarity, 29, 35, 45–47, 56, 60, 79, 88, 137, 140, 144–146, 157, 174, 184, 199, 212, 219, 230, 250, 252 Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley 2018), 27, 35–47, 88 Sorry We Missed You (Ken Loach 2019), 28, 135–146

Spencerism-Malthusianism, 25 Spinoza, Baruch, 9, 25 Spoth, Daniel, 237n1, 238, 239 Standing, Guy, 11, 51, 52, 81 Steyerl, Hito, 12, 27 Stone, Oliver, 24 Suburra (Stefano Sollima 2015), 122 Suburra (Stefano Sollima 2017-ongoing), 122 Szeto, Kin-Yan, 163 T Tallerico, Brian, 115, 224 Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, 210 Thatcher, Margaret, 17, 85 13th (Ava DuVernay 2016), 216 Thoma, Pamela, 67, 151 Topographical map, 7, 55, 66, 84, 86, 88, 128 A Touch of Sin (Tian zhu ding, Jia Zhangke 2013), 163–166, 169, 171, 173, 174 Turchiano, Danielle, 94 Tutta La Vita Davanti (Paolo Virzí 2007), 38 V Vacker, Barry, 91 Van Hoeji, Boyd, 124 Vercellone, Carlo, 11, 51 Vidal, Belén, 121 Villani, Daniele, 54 Visagitè, 96 W Wang, Yanjie, 172 Watkins, Robert E., 116 Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt 2008), 107, 116

 INDEX 

Wheeler, Wendy, 6, 102 White Bear (Carl Tibbets 2013), 93 White Christmas (Carl Tibbets 2014), 98 Whiteness, 39, 194, 210 Wind River (Taylor Sheridan 2017), 28, 193–205, 210 The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese 2013), 24 Wollaston, Sam, 92 Workerist, 10 Workfare, 27, 49–61, 136 Work on the self, 11, 36, 44, 46, 53, 101, 183 Wuxia, 163, 169

X Xiaoping, Deng, 164 Y Yaeger, Patricia, 243 Yates, Michelle, 246 Years and Years (Russell T. Davies, 2019), 249 Young, Deborah, 80 Young, Michael, 54 Z Zoe, 44, 46, 241, 245

261