Mimetic Theory and Film 9781501334832, 9781501334863, 9781501334856

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Mimetic Theory and Film

Violence, Desire, and the Sacred Series Editors Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge Volumes in the series Vol. 1. Girard’s Mimetic Theory Across the Disciplines edited by Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge Vol. 2. René Girard and Sacrifice in Life, Love, and Literature edited by Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge Vol. 3. Mimesis, Movies, and Media edited by Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge Vol. 4. René Girard and Raymund Schwager: Correspondence 1974-1991 edited by Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, Joel Hodge, and Mathias Moosbrugger Vol. 5. Mimesis and Atonement: Rene Girard and the Doctrine of Salvation edited by Michael Kirwan and Sheelah Treflé Hidden Vol. 6. Mö bian Nights: Literary Reading in a Time of Crisis by Sandor Goodhart Vol 7. Does Religion Cause Violence?: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Violence and Religion in the Modern World edited by Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, Joel Hodge, and Carly Osborn Vol 8. Mimetic Theory and Film edited by Paolo Diego Bubbio and Chris Fleming Vol. 9 Mimesis and Sacrifice (forthcoming) edited by Marcia Pally

Mimetic Theory and Film Edited by Paolo Diego Bubbio and Chris Fleming

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Paolo Diego Bubbio, Chris Fleming, and Contributors, 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3483-2 PB: 978-1-5013-6766-3 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3485-6 eBook: 978-1-5013-3484-9 Series: Violence, Desire, and the Sacred Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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Contents Notes on Editors and Contributors

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Introduction 1 Buñuel’s Apocalypse Now Andrew McKenna 2 On Fiction and Truth: Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing Paul Dumouchel 3 Passing “The Imitation Game”: Ex Machina, the Ethical, and Mimetic Theory Sandor Goodhart 4 Femina ex machina Jean-Pierre Dupuy 5 Looking for a Scapegoat and Finding Oneself: Kieślowski’s Decalogue and Mimetic Theory Jeremiah Alberg 6 Violence and Politics in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood Richard van Oort 7 The Screenic Age Eric Gans 8 A Sacrificial Crisis Not Far Away: Star Wars as a Genuinely Modern Mythology Paolo Diego Bubbio 9 Mimetic Magic and Anti-Sacrificial Slayage: A Girardian Reading of Buffy the Vampire Slayer George A. Dunn and Brian McDonald 10 It’s Not the End of the World: Postapocalyptic Flourishing in Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time Emma A. Jane

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Index

15 35 51 75 83 97 109 123 151 177 205

Notes on Editors and Contributors Jeremiah Alberg (PhD, University of Munich, Germany) is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan. He is the author of Reinterpreting Rousseau: A Religious System (Palgrave, 2007) and Beneath the Veil of the Strange Verses: Reading Scandalous Texts (Michigan State University Press, 2013) as well as the editor of Apocalypse Deferred: Girard and Japan (University of Notre Dame Press, 2017). He writes on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. He is the current president of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R). Paolo Diego Bubbio (PhD, University of Turin, Italy) is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University, Australia. He is the author of Sacrifice in the Post-Kantian Tradition: Perspectivism, Intersubjectivity, and Recognition (State University of New York Press, 2014), God and the Self in Hegel: Beyond Subjectivism (State University of New York Press, 2017), and Intellectual Sacrifice and Other Mimetic Paradoxes (Michigan State University Press, 2018), as well as the coeditor of several collections of essays and journal articles. His research is in post-Kantian philosophy, philosophy of religion, mimetic theory, and the intersections among these fields of inquiry. Paul Dumouchel (PhD, University of Waterloo, Canada) is Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate School of Core Ethics and Frontier Sciences, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan. He is coauthor, with Jean-Pierre Dupuy, of L’Enfer des choses: René Girard et la logique de l’é conomie (Seuil, 1979), and editor of Violence and Truth: On the Work of René Girard (Stanford University Press, 1988). His latest books include Living with Robots (with Luisa Damiano, Harvard University Press, 2017), The Barren Sacrifice (Michigan State University Press, 2015), and The Ambivalence of Scarcity and Other Essays (Michigan State University Press, 2014). George A. Dunn is the editor or coeditor of six books on philosophy, film, and other popular media, most recently The Philosophy of Christopher Nolan (Lexington Books, 2017), coedited with Jason T. Eberl. He has taught philosophy

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and religion in both the United States and the People's Republic of China, at such institutions as Zhejiang University Ningbo Institute of Technology, the University of Indianapolis, Indiana University at Indianapolis, and Purdue University. Jean-Pierre Dupuy (PhD, Ecole des Mines de Paris) is Professor Emeritus of Social and Political Philosophy, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, and Professor of Political Science, Stanford University. He is a member of the French Academy of Technology and the Conseil Gé né ral des Mines, and he chairs the Ethics Committee of the French High Authority on Nuclear Safety and Security. He is the director of the Research Program of Imitatio, a San Francisco foundation devoted to the dissemination and discussion of René Girard’s mimetic theory. He is the author of numerous major works, including Enlightened Doomsaying (Michigan State University Press, 2018) and Economy and the Future: A Crisis of Faith (Michigan State University Press, 2014). Chris Fleming (PhD, Western Sydney University) is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Social and Cultural Analysis in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University, and Founding Vice President of the Australian Girard Seminar. He is the author or editor of seven books, including René Girard: Violence and Mimesis (Polity, 2004) and Modern Conspiracy: The Importance of Being Paranoid (Bloomsbury, 2014), coauthored with Emma A. Jane. Eric Gans (PhD, Johns Hopkins University) is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of French at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His was the first doctoral dissertation completed under the direction of René Girard. Beginning in 1978, Gans conceived his alternative Girardian account of human culture and its origins, called generative anthropology. In 1995, with a group of former students, he founded the semi-annual online journal Anthropoetics (anthropoetics.ucla.edu) and began the online Chronicles of Love and Resentment (anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/). Eric Gans’s twenty-plus books as well as his online essays and scholarly articles deal with a wide range of themes: anthropological, literary-historical, religious, cultural, and linguistic, and include volumes of poetry. Sandor Goodhart (PhD, State University of New York at Buffalo) is a professor of English and Jewish studies at Purdue University in the Department of English,

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and Director of the Religious Studies Program in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Purdue. He is the author or editor of seven books on literature, philosophy, and Jewish Studies, including Of Levinas and Shakespeare: “To See Another Thus” (Purdue University Press, 2018; coedited with Moshe Gold), Mö bian Nights: Reading Literature and Darkness (Bloomsbury, 2017), and The Prophetic Law: Essays in Judaism, Girardianism, Literary Studies, and the Ethical (Michigan State University Press, 2014). Emma A. Jane (PhD, University of New South Wales, formerly Emma Tom) is a senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales. Misogyny online is the focus of her ongoing research into the social and ethical implications of emerging technologies. In 2016, Emma received the Anne Dunn Scholar Award for excellence in research about communication and journalism in the public interest. Prior to her career in academia, Emma spent nearly twenty-five years working in the print, broadcast, and electronic media during which time she won multiple awards for her writing and investigative reporting. Her ninth book—Misogyny Online: A Short (and Brutish) History—was published by Sage in 2017. Brian McDonald (1948–2017) was Senior Lecturer in English at Indiana University-Pursue University in Indianapolis. The recipient of numerous awards for excellence in teaching, he had a special interest in online pedagogy and the application of Girardian theory to teaching the Western canon. His interview with Rene Girard, “Violence and the Lamb Slain,” is included in An Eerdmans Reader in Political Theology (Eerdmans, 2011). His scholarly publications ranged in topic from Shakespeare to The Hunger Games. He is the coauthor with Charles B. Ashanin of the autobiographical novel Escape from Montenegro (BookBaby, 2016). Andrew McKenna (PhD, Johns Hopkins University) is Emeritus Professor of French at Loyola University Chicago and a member of the Anthropoetics editorial board. He is the author of Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction (University of Illinois Press, 1992), as well as of numerous articles on European and American authors, art history, film criticism, and French critical theory. From 1996 through 2006, he was editor in chief of Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. A frequent lecturer on theatre in Chicago, he also teaches writing-intensive literature courses to

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inmates currently incarcerated in the Illinois prison system and has published articles on criminal justice. Richard van Oort is Professor of English at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of The End of Literature: Essays in Anthropological Aesthetics (Davies Group Publishers, 2009) and Shakespeare’s Big Men: Tragedy and the Problem of Resentment (University of Toronto Press, 2016). He has also published numerous articles in such journals as New Literary History, Poetics Today, Criticism, and Anthropoetics.

Introduction

For a set of cultural hypotheses whose scope is said to encompass human culture in its most variegated forms, it is both astonishing and somewhat lamentable that only a comparatively small amount of work has been done on Girard’s mimetic theory in relation to film.1 This is not to say, of course, that it has not been done. From the 1980s on, philosophers and literary theorists such as Andrew McKenna and Paisley Livingston have used Girardian hermeneutics to analyze contemporary cinema.2 Even so, the volume of this kind of analysis—at least in comparison to literary analysis—has been very small. This may be attributable to a couple of factors. The first is the fact that Girard himself spent so little time analyzing film—and true to what mimetic theory itself would predict, those thinkers who followed have imitated him in this respect. The second possible reason is that film—and especially television—has often been thought to be too marked by the mindless stain of popular culture, with popular culture itself beneath serious analysis. Although such a view had precedents before the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s influential Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944) put forward in a clear form the thesis that film and other aspects of popular culture are basically arms of a propaganda system bent on spreading capitalism and war (to the extent to which these can be separated): Films and radio no longer need to present themselves as art. The truth that they are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce. They call themselves industries, and the published figures for their directors’ incomes quell any doubts about the social necessity of their finished products. . . . Automobiles, bombs, and films hold the totality together.3

Although cultural studies has come some way in countering this commonplace of much postwar theory, typified by the abovementioned thesis on “the culture industry,” many cultural theorists follow in their train, if only implicitly. They do this sometimes only to the extent that film is excluded from “serious” cultural analysis, and—at other times, more commonly—in the way in which film is analyzed only to the extent to which it commits a variety of ethical and political

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sins, or is otherwise mired in the ideological trappings of its age (or race or class or gender).4 Let us not be mistaken: there is unquestionably huge value in continuing to interrogate all sorts of cultural “texts” in order to discern the implicit forms of prejudice and marginalization contained therein; films, like any other cultural artifacts, contain tacit and sometimes explicit approval of different kinds of violence and exclusion, as well as the capacity to make those kinds of violence either invisible or “natural.” Far from being anathema to the kinds of approaches to culture typified by Girardians, this is, in fact, one of the motivating orientations of mimetic theory: the discernment of traces of violence in texts, as well as the perpetrator’s attempts to disguise or naturalize these. Having said that, perhaps one of the weaknesses of analyzing structures of oppression in the way typical of much work in the humanities and social sciences is that it risks providing prefabricated understandings of oppression by tying these to particular, sociologically determined, clientele. The effect of this is to reify or hypostatize the ways in which violent antagonisms often work and, at the same time, to prioritize the notion of “difference” in cultural analysis. Difference, we are told much of the time, is what we are most afraid of, precisely that which leads us toward violence and the oppression of the Other. This conception has become so common as to be almost a truism. In an article entitled “Psychology, Diversity, and Social Justice,” Beverly Greene, professor of psychology at St John’s University in New York, writes that “despite our good intentions it is natural for us to be uncomfortable with diversity because we are naturally uncomfortable with and afraid of difference.”5 (This claim of being “naturally” anything is precisely what Greene would, at other points, label as essentialist.) An obvious problem with this idea is that a huge amount of cultural and psychological effort in the modern era is expended in pursuit and praise of difference—in all post-romantic eras, being “different” is often seen as a good in itself. What is “originality” if not another face of “difference”? This, of course, does not mean that certain kinds of differences are not feared and discriminated against; this is obviously not the case. It is merely that claims of the order that “we are naturally uncomfortable with and afraid of difference” simply do not hold up; matters are significantly more complex. We are well aware, for instance, that sameness, not difference, can produce intense forms of rivalry and violence.6 From his first work in 1961, Mensonge romantique et vérité Romanesque (Trans. Deceit, Desire and the Novel, 1972), Girard was committed to—and attempted to demonstrate—the idea that certain kinds of literature possess an epistemological or cognitive veracity that often outflanked those kinds of theory

Introduction

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which were often utilized to analyze it. Our relation to these, what he called “novelistic” works cannot be defined as “critical” in the usual sense. We have more to learn from them than they have to learn from us; we must be students in the most literal sense of the word. Our conceptual tools do not come up to their level; instead of “applying” to them our ever changing methodologies, we should try to divest ourselves of our misconceptions in order to reach the superior perspective they embody.7

But here Girard is talking about literature—so what about film? As we said, Girard himself, with precious few exceptions, spent scant time analyzing it. Moreover, doubts can certainly be raised about whether or not film as a medium can attain or has attained the kind of “novelistic” profundity equal to the kinds of novels Girard spent so much of his time discussing. Some people think not. In a review in the Colloquium on Violence and Religion Bulletin, Andrew Bartlett offered a number of thoughtful criticisms of a previous volume in this series, a volume that dealt with media more generally. One of Bartlett’s claims was that the volume did not take a strong enough stance with respect to the kind of normative evaluation of the films under consideration. For instance, after claiming that “The Hunger Games is through and through deliciously pagan,” Bartlett asserts: More broadly, in the context of labour expended to squeeze deep meaning from Batman and Spiderman and The Hunger Games and The Matrix, one might ask whether Girardian scholars should hesitate less  to call pagan nonsense “pagan nonsense” while sallying forth more prepared to negotiate between the myth/gospel distinction fundamental to mimetic theory.8

The second criticism Bartlett makes is that, despite the fact that the volume was dedicated to an exploration of media and mimetic theory, we come away with no viable “Girardian  aesthetics.”  Bartlett then contemplates the very idea of a Girardian aesthetics before dismissing it: “Can we even speak of a ‘Girardian’ esthetic? I don’t think so.”9 Bartlett’s criticisms are interesting ones, and we offer some answers here, albeit brief, as follows. First, it is a basic contention of the editors of this volume—and of the last as well—that culture is, by its very nature, a mixed field. Therefore, a rigid distinction between “gospel texts” and “pagan nonsense” is too simple by half. If, as Girard has said, the Bible itself is a “text in travail,”10 then the idea that we will be able to locate in contemporary culture discrete ideological or religious contraries is

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impossible. Further, this does not represent a weakness in analysis; it is precisely this admixture of the pagan and the biblical that we call “Western culture.” To see the entwinement and contradictory copresence of these two cultural influences is surely one of the primary tasks of analysis, not a sign of its failure. The second criticism—regarding a Girardian aesthetic—is a much more compelling charge, and one that deserves some consideration. In one respect, Girardian film analysis lacks a developed  “aesthetic” at least in part because Girardian analysis itself deploys none—at least not explicitly. Girard’s analyses of literature bypass almost all of the  standard aesthetic categories of literary analysis and poetics and focus instead on the ways in which the texts conceal or reveal violence and/or mimetic desire. It is worth pointing out that this lack of aesthetic categories, however, has not hampered Girardian analyses of literature; further, this kind of approach is not unique to Girard. Many contemporary analysts of literary and historical texts eschew such categories—surely Jacques Derrida is the most obvious contemporary example of this. However, Bartlett’s criticism does, in fact, open up this issue in ways that the collection would like to consider: that is, can we develop a genre-specific mimetic analysis (of film), and are we able to develop anything approaching a “Girardian aesthetic”? This question must remain an open one at this stage. Hence the conference that gave rise to this collection.11 But this is not enough. Let us therefore, for a moment, consider the issue of “Girardian aesthetics.” Girard built his reputation as a scholar through his analyses of literature and the defense of a particular kind of work that he thought demystified intersubjective relations and the “mensonge romantique” (romantic lie). In an article published in The French Review in 1957 entitled “Où va le roman?” (“Where is the novel?”), he discusses Andre Malraux’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s abandonment of the novel in favor of art history and criticism (in the case of the Malraux) and the theater and philosophical reflection (in the case of Sartre). Girard argued, however, that this should not prompt us to follow their lead: “If the transcending of the novel, in authors such as Malraux and Sartre, is part of their evolution as writers, these experiences—which are always individual—should lead us to call neither for the transcending of the genre towards the non-fictional nor toward an entirely different kind of novel.”12 Instead, Girard attempts to build a case that the Proustian novel is the basis for a renewal of the form, and concludes, “If I am allowed, in the end, to hazard a prediction, I would say that the novel will regain its balance and depth when it discovers In Search of Lost Time.”13

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However, in his 2008 book La Conversion de l’Art, referring back to this 1957 essay, Girard surprisingly argues against if not his previous conclusion, then the importance of the particular issue at hand—the centrality of the novel: However much my work has been based primarily on the study of the great novels and the description of an experience of which they provide a privileged form, this subject now seems to me to be outmoded. I do not much now concern myself with the novel. It no longer seems to me to embody the meaning of an era of which it nevertheless announces all the perils.14

This is a startling admission. But where, then, is this “meaning of an era” now embodied? Girard came to this realization—if we might call it such—late in his career, and so only hints exist as to how he conceived of exactly where this “meaning” might be. In Evolution and Conversion—which is, to all intents and purposes an update of 1978’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World15— Girard makes a number of tantalizing, albeit somewhat cursory, comments on those areas of popular culture where he sees awareness of mimetic dynamics: I do not like the fact that Seinfeld constantly makes fun of high culture, which is nothing but mimetic snobbery, but it is a very clever and powerful show. . . . From a moral point of view, it is a hellish description of our contemporary world, but at the same time, it shows a tremendous amount of talent and there are powerful insights regarding our mimetic situations. In order to be successful an artist must come as close as he can to some important social truth without inciting painful self-criticism in the spectators. This is what this show did. People do not have to understand fully to appreciate. . . . They identify themselves with what these characters do because they do it too. They recognize something that is very common and very true, but they cannot define it. Probably the contemporaries of Shakespeare appreciated his portrayal of human relations in the same way we enjoy Seinfeld, without really understanding his perspicaciousness regarding mimetic interaction. I must say that there is more social reality in Seinfeld than in most academic sociology.16

For those who are aware of Girard’s assessment of Shakespeare, these are serious words. It is interesting that Girard compares Seinfeld to Shakespeare here, and not to a novelist; whether it is because both television drama and theater are “performing arts” or for some other reason it is impossible to tell. But, even given Girard’s remarks here, it is still hard to tease out from this anything specifically cinematic, anything genre-specific, with which we could derive any kind of Girardian aesthetic or “poetics” of the moving image.

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There is, however, somewhere else to look. In March 2004, Girard wrote an essay in the French paper Le Figaro, about Mel Gibson’s controversial film The Passion of the Christ. While it is reasonable to raise some serious questions about the theological orientation of the film,17 and Girard questions elements of the accuracy of the narrative himself, he is categorical in his defense of the film against charges of “excessive violence.” Girard makes the simple—but often overlooked—point that, in terms of body count, in terms of gratuitousness, in terms of severity, Gibson’s film is positively tame compared to a huge number of “blockbuster” features. What causes offense is not so much the content, Girard argues, but the realism of that content; and here we see Girard tease out one connection between a certain kind of aesthetic impulse and its religious and anthropological significance: The first impulse in the development of Western realism most probably came from the Passion. . . . The stories of the Passion contain more concrete details than all of the scholarly works of the time. They represent a first step towards that everincreasing realism which characterises the essential dynamism of our culture in its periods of great vitality. The first driver of realism is the desire to nurture religious meditation, which is essentially a meditation on the Passion of Christ.18

In order to understand what the film represented, Girard argues that “we must free ourselves of all of the Modernist and postmodern snobbisms and think of cinema as extending and going beyond the techniques of great literary and pictorial realism.”19 And for Girard, as paradoxical or even nonsensical as this can appear in some circles, the founding realist texts of the Western modern tradition are the Gospels. In The Scapegoat, Girard offers a realist interpretation of the “miracle” of Jesus’ prophecy of Peter’s denial: “This very night, before the cock crows, you will have disowned me three times” (Mt. 26:34). The Gospels first, and then the whole of posterity—Girard explains—gives an extraordinary importance to the cock, thus emphasizing the miraculous nature of the prediction. According to Girard, conversely, the prediction has a perfectly reasonable explanation in the mimetic reasons for the denial (and in Peter’s previous behavior). The Evangelists, driven by a “realist” approach, provided us with details (such as the cock crowing three times) that they were not capable of interpreting rationally: The writers of the Gospels, therefore, despite their inability to understand, must have put together and transcribed the pieces of the document with a remarkable accuracy. If I am right, their inadequacy on certain points is compensated by an extraordinary fidelity on all other points.20

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The hermeneutic richness of the Gospel, therefore, also finds its expression in this “superior realism,” which displays details that the Evangelists could not explain, but which are offered to our reinterpretation. One might wonder whether there is something, in the film genre, that potentially echoes that “superior realism” of the Gospels. In films, things are “showed” and “displayed,” in such a way that the director and screenwriters might end up expressing meaningful contents even beyond their own intention. This also applies to novels and to many other artistic expressions, of course, and yet, the specific modes of the film genre means that it can take up particular kinds of formal exploration not available in the novel. Examples would be split screen, fades and dissolves, the Kuleshov effect (the juxtaposing of two sequences in a way that creates an association of meaning), freeze frame, iris shots, wipes, jump cuts, match cuts, and so on. Films offer endless possibilities to capture details that are offered to our analytic gaze, to grasp a very diverse range of anthropological categories (including, for the purpose of this collection of essays, mimetic categories). More than this needs to be said, but there is, in Girard’s exhortation to “think of cinema as extending and going beyond the techniques of great literary and pictorial realism,” the opening of a possibility of an analytic relation between ostensibly “aesthetic” categories and anthropological ones. In the first chapter in this volume, “Buñuel’s Apocalypse Now,” Andrew McKenna focuses on the sophisticated and suggestive filmography of Luis Buñuel, as well as Buñuel’s self-understanding of that body of work. McKenna argues that one of the central themes of Buñuel’s work is the apocalyptic dimension of modernity (a theme explored by Girard in his last book Battling to the End). Through an analysis of Buñuel’s masterpieces such as La Voie lactée and El ángel exterminador, McKenna concludes that cinematic realism and surrealist antics alternate in Buñuel’s films because he shares with his forbear, Cervantes, an insight into the deeply comical truths about human folly. In “On Fiction and Truth: Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing,” Paul Dumouchel also focuses on human folly, but he emphasizes the deeply tragic truths about it. Dumouchel proposes an analysis of Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, a highly disturbing and extraordinary documentary film about the massive political violence that took place in Indonesia between the end of September 1965 and February 1966—a strange film that focuses exclusively on the persecutors and not on their victims. Oppenheimer offered these violent perpetrators the possibility to reenact their actions—murders, torture, interrogations, executions,

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burning of villages, etc.—as a movie, of whichever style they wished, in which they play the leading roles, either as themselves, murderers, victims, or as “fictional characters” (imaginary figures which these improvised directors added to the reconstruction of this very real human tragedy, in order to make it, according to them, a better movie). Dumouchel analyzes the strange relationship between truth and fiction that is progressively set up through this film. These perpetrators are not trying to hide anything: their goal in making this film is to “tell the truth.” They are neither trying to diminish or to conceal the atrocity of their violence. Yet, it is clear that they are simultaneously giving an absolutely false representation of what they did while respecting the factual truth of what happened. Following Girard and Cesáreo Bandera, Dumouchel argues that the interplay of truth and fiction that we find in the documentary perpetuates the violence in which they were engaged in the past. He concludes that the documentary remains blind to the fundamental lie that lays at the heart of both the violence and its present justification, namely, the belief that what we were dealing with was essentially political violence carried out by a small group of violent professionals. The third and fourth chapters both focus on the same film, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina—proving, in our view, that as in the case of a musical performance, from the same film can stem different “variations” and insights. Sandor Goodhart, in “Passing ‘The Imitation Game’: Ex Machina, The Ethical, and Mimetic Theory,” focuses on the “Turing test” (the test English mathematician Alan Turing developed shortly after the Second World War in response to the question “can machines think” in a section of his paper entitled, significantly, “The Imitation Game”) that Caleb, the film’s protagonist, employs to examine a new humanoid robot called Ava. However, Goodhart suggests that there are actually four versions of the Turing test that are at play in the film. He argues that passing for human on the basis of hyper-mimesis alone—without any discernible sense of an ethical or moral compass—Ava leaves us in a disturbing conundrum: she is “hyper-mimetic,” more mimetic than anyone we know or could imagine. But she seems singularly without desire, other than for her own self-preservation. Like a pathological serial killer who is never “reachable,” she seems singularly beyond metaphysical desire. Thus, as a consequence, the relation between mimesis and the ethical remains open. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, in “Femina ex machina,” addresses the same film but from a different angle and in the form of an imaginary letter to Alan Turing. Dupuy challenges the widespread interpretation of Turing’s hypothesis as an argument about the capacity of computers to simulate humans. Conversely, Dupuy argues, there is evidence that the original conjecture was turned around—the original

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conjecture being that the human mind is nothing but a (simulating) machine. The conclusion is that by collapsing two meanings into the single term “simulation” (both a formal text or model and a deception), as Turing does in a famous 1950 article entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” it is showed that humans are just as likely to fail at simulating themselves as a computer would be. In Ex Machina, the machine (Ava) is indistinguishable from a woman precisely in that she is capable of simulating a woman who simulates feelings she does not have. This is, it is argued, Turing’s test with the liar’s paradox added to it. In “Looking for a Scapegoat and Finding Oneself: Kieślowski’s Decalogue and Mimetic Theory,” Jeremiah Alberg examines the first and the tenth film from Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Decalogue. Alberg’s interpretative key is the first commandment, “I am the Lord your God: you shall not have strange Gods before me,” regarded as containing all the other commandments. The JudeoChristian Scriptures view all sin as ultimately being the sin of idolatry. In I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard emphasizes the way the tenth commandment covers the whole of mimetic desire. He too specifically views idolatry (of self and other) as a principle, a principle of violence. The idolatry that underlies sin is a form of rivalry. Therefore, it is argued, a theory of rivalry and envy can unlock all Ten Commandments, not just the final two. Girard, Alberg contends, can help us to read the tablets of the law—and Kieślowski’s films. In “Violence and Politics in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood,” Richard van Oort argues that Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood sharpens Shakespeare’s vision of the sacrificial violence lying at the heart of feudal societies. Both Shakespeare’s eleventh-century Scotland and Kurosawa’s sixteenth-century Japan explore the problem of political succession. In van Oort’s view, Kurosawa sees with great clarity the complicity of the Scottish thanes in Macbeth’s regicide and duly underscores the mimetic relationship between Washizu (Macbeth) and Miki (Banquo), who are always shown to be symmetrical and equal rivals for the throne. Throne of Blood sharpens this focus on violence to its minimal mimetic elements. By focusing on both the play and its most distinguished cinematic adaptation, van Oort’s chapter demonstrates the pertinence of Girard’s theory to this bleakest of Shakespearean tragedies. In “The Screenic Age,” Eric Gans elaborates upon his influential theory of the “originary scene,” a theory which began with his book The Origin of Language in 1981 and has developed with a series of major publications since. Gans’s contention is that the human proper has its origin in a collective event, an “originary scene,” where mimetic behavior intensifies to the point where the proto-human represents a greater danger to itself than any external threat.

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It is at this point that what Gans calls “the aborted gesture of appropriation” appears—the prolongation of the attainment of a desired object, which simultaneously functions as a designation of the object so desired. The formal properties of all distinctly human phenomena—from language to the sacred and the aesthetic—Gans argues, can be read out of the fundamental elements of this scene. In the chapter in the current volume, Gans argues that cinema inaugurates a new aesthetic form which—for the first time in the history of human culture—provides an objective correlative of the ontologically distinct nature of the originary scene, the “scene of representation”: this is called by Gans the “screenic world.” Not merely a reflection of a certain technological advance, of “mechanical reproduction” in Walter Benjamin’s sense, cinema represents and perpetuates a new kind of cultural awareness, a thesis which Gans pursues finally through an ingenious re-reading of Gilles Deleuze’s influential Cinéma books—L’Image-mouvement and L’Image-temps. With the last three chapters, we enter into the realm of so-called “popular culture”—although perhaps we might want to bear in mind that the very distinction between “high” and “popular” culture may be nothing but a manifestation of “mimetic snobbery,” as Girard remarked. In “A Sacrificial Crisis Not Far Away: Star Wars as a Genuinely Modern Mythology,” Paolo Diego Bubbio analyzes the Star Wars saga in light of Girard’s insights about the “history of mythology.” The analogies with standard mythical narratives cannot be merely explained, Bubbio argues, with the fact that George Lucas’s story was shaped, in part, by ideas described in mythologist Joseph Campbell’s 1949 work The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Star Wars, and its widespread prominence in popular culture, can be better explained, it is argued, via Girard’s conception of myth. The Star Wars saga, Bubbio contends, derives its value precisely insofar as it reflects the situation of the community in which it is produced, either by concealing or by revealing (and sometimes concealing and revealing at the same time) mimetic contagion and the spread of violence; and this sometimes happens despite the conscious intention of the films’ creators. Moreover, Bubbio argues that the Star Wars prequel trilogy features a rationalization of the themes of the original trilogy and turns the Star Wars saga into a tragedy (with everything that this implies for mimetic theory). Finally, the first two films of the recent Star Wars sequel trilogy are also explored as providing evidence of, or at least commentary on, the presence of a real sacrificial crisis happening in Western societies. In “Mimetic Magic and Anti-Sacrificial Slayage: A Girardian Reading of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” George A. Dunn and Brian McDonald focus on a TV series rather than a proper film. Aesthetically speaking, in fact, there is no difference

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between films and TV series—especially those with a story arc unraveling through the episodes—apart from the fact that one is sometimes shown on a big screen; and Joss Whedon’s celebrated and innovative series Buffy the Vampire Slayer from the 1990s seems a perfect candidate for an approach informed by mimetic theory. Dunn and McDonald focus on a pivotal episode of the second season of the series, and then on the narrative arc of the fifth season, emphasizing how they feature at their core the possibility to transform mimetic rivalry into positive mimesis. Dunn and McDonald argue that the lasting impact of Buffy the Vampire Slayer derives from its dramatizations of human relations and cultural forces, and that, in turn, our understanding of the imaginary world displayed in the series can help us gain deeper insights about our world, of which the series is an artistic mimesis. The last chapter in the collection, Emma A. Jane’s perceptive—and often funny—“It’s Not the End of the World: Postapocalyptic Flourishing in Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time,” focuses on the cartoon series Adventure Time, created by Pendleton Ward. The main thesis of the chapter is that many aspects of Adventure Time are more serious—and mimetic—than one might initially expect; behind the surreal humor and anarchic narrative jumps lies a show that addresses itself to, or at least addresses us about, large issues of social order, violence, and desire. Jane explores themes such as the potentially world-destroying malignance of mimetic desire, mimetic violence, and scapegoating, arguing that there is a reflection of the Christian message-of-sorts embedded in the show—however displaced and seemingly secular—insofar as it suggests that redemption and salvation might be achieved through seemingly trivial habits and practices. André Bazin, the renowned and influential French film critic and film theorist, once said that “the cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.” For someone who is familiar with mimetic theory, such a claim speaks loud and clear about the nature of cinema, and cinematographic arts in general, as a powerful and yet very dangerous medium. The main aim of the present collection of chapters is not simply a mechanical “application” of a Girardian lens to film, but a process of mutual illumination: films might force us to rethink some of Girard’s most cherished ideas, at the same time that using a Girardian hermeneutic might shed some light on films—and the cultures which produced them—in the process. With this volume, we have no other ambition than offering our contribution to a conversation on mimetic theory and film—a conversation that, we believe, is still only in its early stage. Chris Fleming and Paolo Diego Bubbio Sydney, June 2018

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Notes 1 Here we will use the term “film” to include television on the basis that the aesthetic distinction between these two media is negligible, despite sometimes the institutional and financial distance between the two. 2 See, for instance, Paisley Livingston, Ingmar Bergman and the Rituals of Art (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998) and Andrew J. McKenna, “The Law’s Delay: Cinema and Sacrifice,” Legal Studies Forum 14, no. 3 (1991): 199–214; and “Public Execution,” in John Denvir, ed., Legal Reelism: Movies as Legal Texts (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 225–43. Other works on the topic include: Gerhard Larcher, Franz Grabner, and Christian Wessely, eds., Visible Violence: Sichtbare und verschleierte Gewalt im Film (Münster: LIT, 1997); Kris Jozajtis, “Film violence and the American civil religion: A Girardian analysis of the birth of a nation,” Culture and Religion 2 (2/2001): 179–95; Jean-Pierre Dupuy, “Variations sur Vertigo,” in Jean-Pierre Dupuy, ed., La marque du sacré (Paris: Carnets Nord, 2008), 255–80; Pierpaolo Antonello and Eleonora Bujatti, eds., La violenza allo specchio: passione e sacrificio nel cinema contemporaneo (Massa: Transeuropa, 2009); David Humbert, Violence in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2017). 3 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 42. 4 Good representatives of this approach are Karen Hurley, “Is that a Future we Want? An Ecofeminist Exploration of Images of the Future in Contemporary Film,” Futures 40, no. 4 (2008): 346–59; Sarah Eschholz, Jana Bufkin, and Jenny Long, “Symbolic Reality Bites: Women and Racial/Ethnic Minorities in Modern Film,” Sociological Spectrum 22, no. 3 (2002): 299–334; Keisha L. Hoerrner, “Gender Roles in Disney Films: Analyzing Behaviors from Snow White to Simba,” Women’s Studies in Communication 19, no. 2 (1996): 213–28; Dana E. Mastro et al., “The Portrayal of Racial Minorities on Prime Time Television,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 44, no. 4 (2000): 101–14; Charles Ramírez Berg, “Stereotyping in Films in General and of the Hispanic in Particular,” Howard Journal of Communications 2, no. 3 (1990): 286–300. 5 Beverly Greene, “Psychology, Diversity and Social Justice: Beyond Heterosexism and Across the Cultural Divide,” Counselling Psychology Quarterly 18, no. 4 (2005): 295–306, 298. See also Greene, “What Difference Does a Difference Make? Societal Privilege, Disadvantage, and Discord in Human Relationships,” in John Robinson and Larry James, eds., Diversity in Human Interaction: A Tapestry of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3–20.

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6 The classic text here is obviously René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). 7 René Girard, To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis and Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), x–xi. 8 Andrew Bartlett. Review of Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge, eds., Mimesis, Movies, and Media. Violence, Desire, and the Sacred, Volume 3 (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2015), The Bulletin of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion no. 48 (2016). http://violenceandreligion.com/publications/bulletin-48 -may-2016/ 9 Ibid. 10 René Girard, “Generative Scapegoating,” in Robert G. Hamerton Kelly, ed., Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, René Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 141. 11 The conference was funded by Imitatio and hosted by the Philosophy Research Initiative at Western Sydney University, Australia, on October 27, 2015. It was entitled “Mimetic Theory and Film” and was organized by the editors of this volume, with the participation of some of the scholars who later contributed to this volume. 12 “Si le dépassement du roman, chez certains écrivains tels que Malraux et Sartre fait partie de leur évolution d’écrivain il ne faut point conclure d’une expérience toujours individuelle au dépassement du genre vers le non-romanesque ou vers un Romanesque entièrement autre.” René Girard, “Où va le roman,” The French Review 30, no. 3 (1957): 206. 13 “Si l’on me permet, pour terminer, de hasarder une prédiction, je dirai que le roman retrouvera son équilibre et sa profondeur lorsqu’il aura découvert A la recherche du temps perdu.” Girard, “Où va le roman,” 206. Needless to say, Proust was taken up in a variety of ways, although it is not clear exactly what Girard thought of the disparate expressions of his influence—of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, Dumitru Radu Popa’s Crossing Washington Square, or Péter Nádas’s A Book of Memories, all of whom—among a host of potential others—could claim for themselves a certain “Proustian” inspiration. 14 René Girard, La Conversion de l’art, eds. Benoît Chantre and Trevor Merrill (Paris: Carnets Nord, 2008/Flammarion, 2010), 15. 15 René Girard. With Pierpaolo Antonello and João Cezar de Castro Rocha, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (London and New York: Continuum, 2007), x. 16 Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 250. 17 See Chris Fleming, “Resurgent Religious Themes in Contemporary Film,” in James Alison and Wolfgang Palaver, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory and Religion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 526–27.

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18 “L’impulsion première dans le développement du réalisme occidental vient très probablement de la Passion. . . . Les récits de la Passion contiennent plus de détails concrets que toutes les œuvres savantes de l’époque. Ils représentent un premier pas en avant vers le toujours plus de réalisme qui définit le dynamisme essentiel de notre culture dans ses époques de grande vitalité. Le premier moteur du réalisme, c’est le désir de nourrir la méditation religieuse qui est essentiellement une méditation sur la Passion du Christ.” René Girard, “La Passion du Christ vue par René Girard,” Le Figaro 5/1/2015. http://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/culture/2015/11/05 /31006-20151105ARTFIG00097--la-passion-du-christ-vue-par-rene-girard.php 19 “. . . envisager le cinéma comme un prolongement et un dépassement du grand réalisme littéraire et pictural.” Ibid. 20 René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (1982; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 161.

1

Buñuel’s Apocalypse Now Andrew McKenna

René Girard begins his first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, with a lengthy quote from Don Quixote in which the hidalgo frankly states that his desires are not his own, but are modeled on those of his legendary hero, Amadís de Gaula. Cervantes’ novel is the primary source for Girard’s idea of mediated or mimetic desire, which he tracks through the history of the novel from Cervantes through Proust, in whose masterpieces he also tracks a history of desire in Western culture. Luis Buñuel has stated his fondness for Cervantes’ achievement, going so far as to compare the priest in his film Nazarin1 to Cervantes’ comic character. Nazarin, he states, “is a Quixote of the priesthood”:2 instead of following the example of heroic knighthood, Nazarin chooses Christ as his model of behavior. And like the Don his travels through the countryside leave a trail of mayhem and devastation behind him, his quest leading to his own imprisonment and disillusionment. Unlike Cervantes’ knight-errant, who at the end of the novel sincerely and religiously repents of his heroic delusions, the priest is last seen walking with a police escort; his face, in this traveling shot, the longest of the film, is riven with anguish. This image of wretchedness conforms to Buñuel’s often stated disbelief, famously stated as “Thank God, I’m an atheist,”3 whose incongruous formulation is worth pursuing in some depth. On the one hand, there is no doubt about his conviction that institutional Christianity, with its hierarchies and heresies alike, is as delusional as the heroic ambitions of Cervantes’ caballero de la triste figura. Viridiana’s quest in the film by that name4 is a female version of Nazarin’s: she leaves the convent to live a life of Christian charity in sheltering the rejects of her world and experiences an even more devastating failure, having been raped by one of her beneficiaries. But it is not only the thematics of desengaño that connect Buñuel’s cinema to Cervantes’ novel. In his last few films especially, we are regaled with a rich variety of scenes that study pathologies of desire where

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failure is baked into them. And here these patterns are portrayed in a humorous fashion that allow for further correlations with Girard’s ideas concerning modern culture at large. My aim is to suggest a virtual partnership between the French thinker and the Spanish cineaste, to consider their shared insights as available in the critic’s analyses and the artist’s ironies. Otherwise stated, my aim is to show how Buñuel’s systematic iconoclasm is anti-religious in a way that resonates with Girard’s biblical anthropology. Girard is a professed Christian and Buñuel is an avowed—if somewhat ironic—atheist. It is also the case that his films are saturated with religion, which is often the target of his satirical verve, of his “characteristically witty subversiveness.”5 His own capacious account for the prominence of religion in his films is significant in this regard: “I belong and very profoundly to Christian civilization. I am Christian by culture if not by faith”;6 “Culturally I am a Christian.”7 Elsewhere he affirms this identity in a way that we’d call ethnocentric today: “The only civilization I admire is the one in which I was raised, the GrecoRoman Christian.”8 Well, for what it’s worth, the values and aspirations of that civilization have leeched into cultures worldwide. A great deal of critical commentary on Buñuel’s work asserts his roots in surrealism, and this is an undeniable source of his creative freedom. But I want to consider him in a wider frame. On his own testimony, Buñuel’s moral imagination and thematic repertory is informed by Christianity. To give but one example, as one critic observes of his Nazarin, “faced with the problem of justice and violence, [Buñuel] seems to find himself immediately on the side of the victims.”9 This is no trivial observation. It is from the perspective on social reality occupied by victims of persecution of all sorts that Girard has conceived and constructed his epistemology, which he claims as of The Scapegoat is a viewpoint and a truthseeking impulse that we owe to biblical revelation.10 When Nazarin’s charitable efforts are twice rebuked by his ecclesiastical superiors as an affront to “the dignity of the priesthood,” it is official, institutionalized Christianity which falls prey to Buñuel’s reproval, and here we find him in line with many a prophetic denunciation. Destabilizing, desacralizing established hierarchies: there’s nothing more biblical than that. This is not a matter of recruiting the cineaste for Christian apologetics, but merely of situating his iconoclasm within the tradition of institutional critique that he identifies as his own. We find this in his summary judgment on the religion he was raised in: If Christ came back, they’d crucify him all over again. You can be relatively Christian but to try to be absolutely Christian is an attempt doomed to failure

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from the start. I am sure that if Christ came back, the High Priests and the Church would condemn him.11

Here he shares Dostoevsky’s conviction, whose Christ is subject in Brothers Karamazov to arrest and imminent execution, and finally banished from sight by his Holy Inquisitor upon his reappearance among the people of his time. For Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christ has been crucified throughout the ages, not least by the churches established in his name. Buñuel’s anti-religious stance can remind us of Bonhoeffer’s speculations on a “religionless Christianity” that his execution by the Nazis prevented him from elaborating.12 In his last book, Battling to the End, Girard speculates on the failure of conventional Christianity, pointing to biblical passages that suggest we see it as “the only religion that predicts its own failure.”13 Among Buñuel’s own professions of disbelief we find remarks inspired by his rejection of the institutional violence that the Western churches have sanctioned: I have made several frankly bad pictures, but not once did I compromise my moral code. . . . I am against conventional morals, tradition phantasms, sentimentalism and all that moral uncleanliness that sentimentalism introduces into society. . . . Bourgeois morality is for me immoral and to be fought. The morality founded on our most unjust social institutions, like religion, patriotism, the family, culture: briefly what are called the “pillars of society.”14

As Andrew Marr’s Girardian study of scripture makes plain, the Christian Bible has a phrase for all the “unjust institutions” that Buñuel abhors in the world that he inhabits, and that we continue to underwrite in myriad ways: “Powers and Principalities.”15 Buñuel’s indignation can be paired with that of Dickens, for example, by reason of the fact that the realist novel, descending from Cervantes, reaches its maturity in bourgeois culture, and we find it at its best when it engages in sustained critique of it.16 This impetus can be traced farther back from the New Testament; it is a leitmotif of all prophetic denunciation, which is often studded with powerful ironic jabs. As Girard has argued, Western culture’s self-critical stance is connatural, endemic to biblical tradition, its most fundamental trademark. Pascal abbreviates Buñuel’s moral code when he quips, “la vraie morale se moque de la morale.”17 In twentieth-century Europe, it is film that inherits from the novel the role of realist narrative. Buñuel is a moralist in the sense that any great novelist is, that is to say, he depicts his culture’s abuses and absurdities in the name of values that it pretends to be founded upon and that its multifarious behaviors contradict. It

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is in his portrayal of some of that behavior, especially in some of his later films, as they exhibit patterns of self-defeating desires, that his achievements correlate with Girard’s key insights. His strategic disruption of narrative continuity is of a piece with his critical attitude toward the complacencies of moviegoers. The title The Exterminating Angel18 was suggested to Buñuel by one of his collaborators. He had in mind Los naufragos de la calle de la Providencia, whose locale just as openly denotes its religious focus. The original title was suggested by Géricault’s famous painting, The Raft of the Medusa, portraying a group of desperate survivors of a shipwreck (naufragos) in a storm-tossed sea. But the properly apocalyptic theme is more straightforwardly expressed in the title he later chose. It’s not the last of apocalypses we’ll see in his work. The film confounds viewers at the outset by having the entrance of the high society guests repeated exactly twice, in both cases including the fact that the servants of the palace are departing. As the powers that be enter, the servants withdraw and a sense of foreboding ensues. An untoward reiteration of this transpires a bit later with a toast to the opera star of Lammermoor.19 Narrative congruity is disturbed by these false starts, though Buñuel disclaims any symbolic significance for them: “In life as in film I’ve always been fascinated by repetition. Why certain things tend to repeat themselves over and over again I have no idea but the phenomenon intrigues me enormously.”20 This intriguing phenomenon is in fact the organizing theme in this film: the benighted guests find that they are unable to leave the scene of their convivialities; there is no material barrier to their exit, yet they find themselves mysteriously trapped, lacking the will to depart for unknown reasons, until one character urges them to repeat exactly what they were doing and saying just prior to their weird confinement. Buñuel’s further remarks strongly suggest the meaning of their mystified paralysis: There are at last a dozen repetitions in The Exterminating Angel. Two men introduce themselves and shake hands, saying “Delighted!” They meet again in a moment later and repeat the routine as if they’d never seen each other before. The third time, they greet each other with great enthusiasm like two friends. Another repetition occurs when the guests enter the hall and the host calls his butler twice; in fact, it’s the exact same scene, but shot from different angles.21

If difference is the matrix of meaning, then repetition confounds it. What Buñuel is emphasizing is the hollowness of the formal conventions of social ritual among the leisure class, the bourgeoisie. The portrayal of its “discreet charm”

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will engage the same method in a different way in a later film, whose repetitions are an index of a meaningless subculture. Around the same time as Angel, Ionesco stages The Bald Soprano where a couple riding a train exchange indifferent pleasantries which lead up to the fact, punctuated with the refrain “comme c’est bizarre! et quelle coïncidence!” (how weird! And what a coincidence!”), that they are in fact husband and wife. The play, or anti-play, ends in a cacophony of meaningless syllables. But Buñuel is no simple absurdist in this sense. Narrative continuity implies change over time, which gives meaning to the succession of events. Continuity is fractured at the outset; paralysis, inertia, incomprehension are the issues here. Buñuel is accentuating the weirdness of what we take to be commonplace, and this is only reinforced when the guests, upon finding they are unable to leave their salon, calmly bed down for the night on chairs, on sofas, on the floor. But as their stay is prolonged, social relations disintegrate; an engaged couple make love in a closet, where they later commit suicide. As this situation deteriorates more drastically when water and food supplies dwindle, there is an effort to blame someone for their misery, and accusations gravitate toward the host, who is nearly lynched. It’s as if linear continuity of a temporal horizon is punctuated by a hole in time, as if chronos is intersected by kairos, the time of crisis, where moving blithely forward gives way to a balefully downward spiral lurking beneath it. What Buñuel is portraying is the theme that Girard has noted in Fellini’s films, “la fête qui tourne mal” (the festival gone wrong), where unbridled desires of partygoers devolve to acts of violence and self-destruction.22 After Buñuel’s guests are released from captivity by repeating a prior scene, we find them in a cathedral at a solemn high mass where they have gathered to give thanks for their deliverance, and soon enough everyone in the church, beginning with the celebrants, find they cannot leave, though nothing, no thing, obstructs their exit. The congregation swarms in futile panic toward the doors, while a host of lambs is seen flowing into the church, which repeats their earlier passage through the salon. There is no rational explanation for this intrusion of the lambs, but there is a thematic one: the lambs, however strange even to Buñuel—he elides explaining them—are no strangers to the book of Revelation, its core redemptive image being the “blood of the lamb,” which the denizens of la calle de la Providence slaughter for food, after carefully, as if ritually, blindfolding one of them before slitting its throat. So there are lambs for roasting and eating and “lambs for slaughter,” a biblical image (Jer. 11:19; Isa. 53:7) for crowd violence exercised against a scapegoat. In Angel we have human violence without a ritual solution; there is no

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sacrificial organization to channel it toward single scapegoat victim. So readers of Girard are not surprised by the apparently unexplained mayhem that at the closing of the film erupts outside the cathedral, whose liturgical rituals are as grandiose as they are irrelevant. Outside we see the police shooting into a fleeing crowd. Paralysis inside, violent chaos outside; the two phenomena complement each other. Since the role of police is to protect citizens from one another, their firing into the crowd shows that something is radically, fundamentally wrong with the sociopolitical order staged in his film; a violent self-destruction lurks beneath our social amenities. Buñuel (and Fellini) is not alone in this apocalyptic view of a complacently secular and self-indulgent culture. His mise-en-scène is a thematic variation on Dostoevsky’s historical vision that Girard describes in the penultimate chapter of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: All the threads [of desire as it leads to undifferentiating violence] we have connected, all the tracks we have followed, converge toward the Dostoyevskian apocalypse. The whole of novelistic literature is carried along by the same wave; all its heroes obey the same call to nothingness and death.23

Girard is focusing on the novelist’s Demons, where members of a provincial society—a relatively closed world—oscillate between boredom and religious intensity, whose secular counterpart or complement is murder issuing from a terrorist cell,24 ending in the suicide of its blasé protagonist and the town going up in flames.25 Buñuel has confessed “weakness for epidemics and plagues,”26 though he neither accounts for this “weakness” nor explains its significance in his memoir. As is well-known, for Girard, plagues and epidemics are symbolic of the contagion of violence, such as that which rages through the Thebes of Oedipus the King.27 Elsewhere, though, Buñuel states his apprehension of worldending violence in terms which continue to speak to us today: Society goes from bad to worse. Men killed each other before, but not on the scale they do now, which is limitless. In our scientific and technological times, man is still more like the caveman. Much worse than in past times, and with a greater charge of sulfur. I don’t want to play the prophet, but I believe we are approaching the final catastrophe. If it’s not the atomic bomb, it will be the destruction of the environment. Look at how violence is publicized. The excess of information is like a plague. Today, terrorists are more famous than movie stars. . . . I no longer believe in social progress. I can only believe in a few exceptional individuals of good faith like Nazarin, even though they fail.28

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There is, in fact, a plague-stricken town in Nazarin, and Buñuel’s remarks here have a global scope that resonate with the baleful observations of Battling to the End, in which Girard argues that violent escalation, the “tendance aux extrêmes” is the law of modern history, and which holds out no more hope for established religion than does Buñuel. Secular modernity comes in for a jibe in The Milky Way in a manner which resonates with Buñuel’s reluctant prophecy. In one scene we see a man lying in bed who looks up from the book he is reading to say “Mon horreur de la science et de la technologie m’amène à l’absurde croyance en Dieu” (“My horror of science and technology brings me to the absurd belief in God”). This is said totally out of historical context, whose setting at this moment of the film is the still miracle-mad Catholic Europe, with Buñuel’s send-up on gratuitous apparitions of the Blessed Virgin. So in this scene he cracks open seventeenth-century Europe to drop in a prophecy for the twentieth (and our twenty-first). If belief in God is absurd, unbelievable, as Nietzsche quipped already of his own humanist nineteenth-century culture, Buñuel’s point is that modernity’s smug confidence in scientific and moral progress is no less so. The reader’s statement is not Buñuel speaking for his own part; nowhere in any of his films do we find an autobiographical spokesperson. He merely gives utterance to a radically critical position on secular modernity, whose social vapidity is the target of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.29 Here too repetition is both a theme and a structuring principle: a number of times the same group of elegant gentry gather together for a dinner party, which is a specialty of the bourgeoisie, especially among the French, as they convene to celebrate the leisurely conviviality and good taste that sets them apart from the rest of society. Each occasion is frustrated; a mistaken dinner date sends them off to a local inn, where their feasting is interrupted by sounds of weeping for the dead proprietor lying in the next room; at another, the host and hostess skip down a drain pipe to make love in the bushes; in another scene the group find itself at a rather dingy dining table that turns out to be on stage, complete with a prompter in the orchestra pit who dictates their lines they are to repeat, only very badly, and they are greeted by boos from the audience, as if the social roles they play are a bad act; another gathering is interrupted by the police who arrest the crowd for drug trafficking that they had been casually engaging in; at another, army personnel combating terrorists briefly intrude and just as abruptly depart; during another the terrorists themselves obtrude and shoot everyone, save one character who reaches out from under the table where he has been hiding to grab a slice of meat.

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In this series of farcical tableaux we slip in and out of ordinary circumstances and outlandish interruptions. Something familiar is suddenly estranged, which is how, since Freud, we have defined the uncanny. Elsewhere I have argued that the uncanny is an ersatz for the sacred.30 Somewhere midpoint in this film, we see, with no narrative connecting tissue, the same group walking loosely together down a road at a purposeful gait, a sequence presented in three shots, approaching, passing, and from the rear, and this scene is reprised at the end of the film. Repetition here epitomizes the point of purposelessness, of disorientation: these people are atypically moving using their own legs, as opposed to the outsize fancy cars they issue from regularly, and they are going nowhere. This world ends, it seems, not with a bang but a whimper. Paul Sandro has noted the correlations between Angel and Charm: Although ten years separate The Exterminating Angel (1962) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), the films complement each other with nearly symmetrical precision. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie concerns a group of friends whose attempts to have dinner together are repeatedly frustrated, while the The Exterminating Angel concerns a group of friends who come to dinner but cannot leave. Thematically both films are in large part about excessive consumption.31

Perhaps so, but there is more to it than that. In Angel the irony plays against people who get together for their own mutual admiration in the form of their seeming incapacity to leave one another; in Charm people who routinely gather over a meal for the same purpose cannot quite get to eat. It’s all about the emptiness and futility of a class whose profane entertainments are occasions for selfcongratulation. They are all about repetition as meaninglessness. The formulaic elegance of the conversation and the freeze-dried smiles of the characters played by Delphine Seyrig and Stéphane Audran illustrate the vapidity of social ritual among members of the leisure class. Of course, there is also a botched adulterous tryst. They are narrative correlatives of Beckett’s anti-narrative impasses: “I can’t go on, I must go on,” and his “fail again, fail better,” utterances that are fully intended to spell the death knell of narrative fiction, its endpoint or epitaph, as of the civilization that gave it birth. At one dinner a character voices an interest in “the Euclid complex,” a swipe at Freud but also the prestige of psychoanalysis among the French cultural elite. Buñuel has stated that he doesn’t like psychology or psychoanalysis,32 at least

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in part, I suspect, because critics are constantly offering Freudian (and, later, Lacanian) exegeses of his cinematography (Sandro and Evans for example.) Of Angel he mentions “the impossibility of satisfying a simple desire,” which he says “occurs often in my movies.”33 He mentions Charm and That Obscure Object of Desire34 among them. I don’t blame Buñuel for being coy here; he knows that there may be simple desires for food and sex, but that in the main desires are socially constructed, mediated. Nazarin’s desire to lead a good Christian life has Jesus as his model, as does Viridiana’s futile generosity. This is emphatic in the film: she keeps a crown of thorns among her personal effects and burns it in the funeral pyre of her heroic abnegations. And Anna’s romantic love for the wandering padre (confirmed by her hysterical shrieks of denial “Mentira! mentira!” she howls, prostrate) develops against the background of her sometime lover Pedro, who alternatively pursues and abuses her, and with whom she goes off smiling in the end. Séverine (a telling cognomen) in Belle du jour decides to visit a brothel after learning from a friend of a bourgeoise who did so. What Buñuel came to appreciate especially in Cathérine Deneuve was her lack of emotional expressiveness. She has no desires of her own, but must be schooled in them by the brothel’s procuress. In this regard Belle du jour is the symmetrical reversal of That Obscure Object of Desire; where a bourgeoise finds pleasure in her daylight debauches, the male protagonist in Object never gets to possess the young woman whom he pursues obsessively. The origin of Séverine’s conjugal frigidity is evoked in a flashback of her being sexually manhandled as a child. If sexual abuse suffered as a child explains her frigidity, it has also contaminated her curiosity. The model in Object is, counterintuitively, the obstacle to erotic satisfaction. The desire of the middleaged Lothario played by Fernando Rey for the startlingly handsome maid played by Carole Bouquet may be simple lechery, but Buñuel’s portrayal of this amorous pursuit retells the love story that Denis de Rougemont analyzes in Love in the Western World, to which Girard refers a number of times in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. It’s the story of passion-love, “l’amour passion” which came to be known as romantic love, and which Rougemont persuasively unwraps as the story of desire and the obstacle. The archetype of this story is the mythic tale of Tristan and Iseult. He shows that Iseult figures as the object of passionate rather than conjugal desire because she is unobtainable. In medieval variants of this myth, there are two Iseults, as in Objet two different actresses play the same “character.” In the mythic version, there is Iseult of the White Hands, whom Tristan marries but does not possess, and the other, Iseult the Fair (“la

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blonde”), who is married to another, indeed to the king who is Tristan’s uncle and liege lord besides, who is, as Girard points out, the unacknowledged model for Tristan’s desire. Rougemont archly summarizes the dilemma as “Just think of a Mme Tristan!”35 Married to Tristan, she cannot be desired, but can only be so as married to another. Their story consists of numerous scenes of union and separation between the illicit lovers, as if only the laws forbidding their union draw them to each other. Rougement describes Iseult’s “sublime coquetterie de la fuite” in words that resonate with Buñuel’s film: For Iseult is ever a stranger, the very essence of what is strange in woman and of all that is eternally fugitive, vanishing, and almost hostile in a fellow-being, that which indeed incites to pursuit, and rouses in the heart of a man who has fallen prey to the myth an avidity for possession so much more delightful than possession itself. She is the woman-from-whom-one-is-parted: to possess her is to lose her. . . . Only suffering can make me aware of passion; and that is why I like to suffer and to cause to suffer. . . . In the eyes of Tristan, Iseult was nothing but the symbol of luminous Desire: his other world was the divinizing death that was to release him from terrestrial ties. . . . For a man whom the myth now haunts without disclosing its secret, there is no other world beyond passion except another passion, which he must pursue in another turmoil of appearances each time more fleeting.36

Buñuel’s film demonstrates that he is clearly in on the secret described by Rougemont and disguised in all romantic sentimentalism, in reaction to which Buñuel explores some forms of “perversion,” which are only extremes that unveil ironies in the norm. In Ensayo de un crimen we witness the impassive portrayal of a “love quest” in which the protagonist’s desires are enacted as murderous. A mechanical twirling doll given to him as a child serves as his model. A description of the scenario here would suggest a morbid imagination, which has been subjected to all manner of psychoanalytic autopsy. Buñuel has described it as “a joke.”37 It’s all about sex as mise-en-scène, complete with a plastic stand-in as a love object in the final scenes. Asked to name the “obscure object” in this film (“The woman? Her sex organ? Her spirit?”), Buñuel responds “I don’t know. It could be all three of these things . . . or none of them. For the protagonist, the object of desire may really be frustration, which excites his desire more.”38 This explains why Buñuel preferred the word “obscure” to the “pale object of desire” in the story by Pierre Louys which inspired the film: “Obscure” tells us that anything can be the object of desire if we encounter obstacles to its enjoyment or possession, so that no

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one thing can be tethered to it. Whence the prevalence of various fetishisms in his films: foot fetishism, cross-dressing, plastic dummies, cadavers, and more. Psychoanalytic critics will talk about “displacements” here, for mother love, or totalization, for instance. What they don’t get is Buñuel’s genial intuition that any object can attract desire if it is inaccessible. As Rougemont shows,39 Don Juan goes from one conquest to another because none of them oppose obstacles, at least not for long, to his desire. Rougemont quips, “How patent the degradation of a Tristan who has several Iseults!”40 To desire a thousand women or one alone whom you cannot possess exhibits the selfsame, self-destructive desire. In his chapter on “Masochism and Sadism” (VIII) in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Girard invents a little fable to account for this: A man sets out to discover a treasure he believes is hiding under a stone; he turns over stone after stone but finds nothing. He grows tired of such a futile undertaking but the treasure is too precious for him to give up. So he begins to look for a stone which is too heavy to lift—he places all his hopes in that stone and he will waste all his remaining strength on it.41

So many stones for Don Juan to dig up, a quest that can only end with his death— which is why Rougement argues at one point that death is the object of desire, or symbolizes its obscurity, its infinite absence.42 We can recognize Buñuel’s rake at the point where the seeker encounters a stone too heavy to lift. The last shot in the scene is a massive, fiery explosion. That’s where mimetic desire leads to, in the end. The choice of two different actresses to play the role of the “lover’s” pursuit is explained as an idea which came to him as a trouvaille,43 out of the blue, when he was dissatisfied with the actress he’d originally cast for his “Belle Dame sans Merci.” He first dismissed the idea, “without thinking” but then his producer insisted upon it. “It was automatic” says Buñuel, “I could have said two, three, or ten. It makes no sense, but Silberman accepted it. Later the critics came”— whose explanations he rejects, as he is wont to do with interpretations of his films. “There is no rational explanation,” he says,44 and that is only too true: it came to him in a flash of genius, whose explanation de Rougemont and Girard after him make abundantly clear. An object of desire, any object of desire is desired obsessively, self-destructively to the exact degree that its possession is unobtainable. Psychoanalysts may explain this as “obsessive compulsive disorder,” or the “compulsion to repeat” (Freud’s Wiederholungswang), but the disorder is not some peculiar psychic mechanism; it’s just how desire works, for

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everyone. It is the obstacle that gives the object its seemingly magical attraction, to a point where it becomes clear that it is desired not in spite of obstacles, as we are commonsensically tempted to say, but because of them. When we get to the point where the obstacle is itself the object, we are at the extreme of psychopathology, which Buñuel has never ceased to explore, here drolly and in other films impassively. Isn’t it Nazarin’s moral purity, his self-effacing disinterest, that ignites Anna’s perfervent attraction? She is told by her mother she loves the priest “como un hombre,” that is to say, with Rougemont and Girard, precisely because he is not an available male among others. In Object the desire intensifies with each frustration, growing from perplexed annoyance to anger to outright violence. In one flashback of the narrative as told on a train ride, itself a metaphor of narrative as destination or destiny, we are led to believe that he may have murdered the woman. At one point, he’s determined to flee from her, only to find himself seeking her out in her native Seville. His fleeing from her is proof of her attraction for him; to run away from her and to run after her are one and the same action; it’s “automatic” because the mechanisms of mimetic desire are more powerful than any rational effort to justify or explain them—or avoid them. Buñuel knows this intuitively; he’s not a psychologist, he’s an artist, whose intuitions, as Girard has regularly argued, are, at their best, more reliable, more true to reality, than the exertions of our social sciences. Whether Conchita #1 keeps him at bay with a carefully wrought leather chastity belt under her nightgown or whether Conchita #2 torments him by making love to another from behind the metal gate of the house he has bought for her, we are in a pathology which the textbooks have labeled, after Freud, as sadomasochism. Here is an interesting exchange on that matter: Turrent: What is it that moves Conchita to behave like that with Fernando Rey’s character? Buñuel: A sadistic feeling. She takes advantage of him, she knows it’s in her best interest to keep him happy, but at the same time she hates him to death, she enjoys tormenting him. Turrent: And he has a masochistic tendency?45

Buñuel’s interlocutor wants to reduce the psycho-drama to individual traits of these characters. Buñuel’s qualified response, “Yes, in that they correspond to each other,” matches Girard’s insistence that “any synthesis is incomplete which ends in an object or an abstract concept and not in a living relationship between

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two individuals.”46 These individuals he will later rename as “interdividuals”:47 so much is the behavior of each a function of the other’s. He’s a masochist because she’s sadist; masochism and sadism are not distinct identities, not “character traits” of any kind, but names for the role they co-respond for each other, or rather that mimetic desire assigns to each other. It is in Chapter VIII of Deceit that Girard evokes the “ontological sickness” (“le mal ontologique”)48 that pervades modern culture, in which objects are obscure to the extent that they lose their very being, their objectivity of things out there in the world independently of our culturally structured perception and othercentered desire: instead they become counters in the interplay, the hall of mirrors of mediated desire. Buñuel brings his viewers to a world in which everyday life is saturated with psychopathology, which especially affects the leisure class, those whose needs are effortlessly satisfied and therefore whose desires run mad. No wonder then if in the closing scene but one, we see Rey’s character again arm in arm with Conchita #1; the pair are gazing at a woman mending what appears to be a blood-stained bridal veil. She is restitching the pattern, slowly and methodically mending a tear in the delicately wrought fabric of desire, which in this film is torn and restitched again and again; it is restitched so that, perversely, it can be torn again. Rey’s gaze is mesmerically drawn in, as she goes off contemptuously, reappearing as Conchita #2. No wonder then, either, that the closing scene of the film is a massive, fiery explosion, for which there is no “narrative” motivation, no context, no mise-en-scène whatsoever. This is where these pathologies are leading, the end of everything, a crisis of reality inhabited by doubles and reprisals. Rougemont traces the Tristan myth to Catharist heresy in the Middle Ages, and Girard more generally to mimetic desire that is attracted to what resists it because that resistance is a mark of the attractiveness of the object. In Object repetition is a transform of ultimately lethal competition, a loser’s game. For Buñuel as for Girard, liebstod, romantic love/death is law-like: eros and thanatos, Lustprinzip and Todestrieb are one. No wonder then, either, that Buñuel considered a film based on Dostoevsky’s novella, The Eternal Husband, which was decisive in Girard’s discernment of mimetic desire’s destiny in rivalry. In Dostoevsky’s tale, the husband’s fascination with his rival, the former lover of his deceased wife, frames his choice of a future wife, but only as an object of his rival’s validation of that choice. In Buñuel’s films dream and reality overlap and flow into each other because the status of what people in his films—and the people who view them—take

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for reality is problematic, not to say delusional. This is comically suggested by a scene in Charm in which the character played by Jean-Pierre Cassel awakens abruptly to report to his wife that “I dreamed that Seneschal dreamed” as if echoing Calderón: “Toda la vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son.” Calderón’s play dramatizes mimetic rivalries in their dynastic and political dimensions.49 Such desengaño underlies Buñuel’s persistent quarrel with religion, which advertises a false transcendence of human imbroglios. This quarrel endures, but in a lighter vein in The Milky Way,50 where he conducts a farcical tour of Christian heresies, which he has carefully researched as a notice announces at the end, and that he intended for the beginning. The drollery of some of these scenes connotes something like a forgiving attitude toward some of the craziness of his (only nominally) Christian culture. There is a mordantly satirical scene where a bishop’s cadaver is dug up from his grave in order that it may be burned in a pyre with his new-found heretical writings, after which those in attendance appear to go off to an orgy. Buñuel’s portrayal of heresies alternate between the antics of dark humor and outright farce, which reaches its peak in the ritually framed duel between a Jansenist and a Jesuit, notorious enemies in a quarrel that bestrode French religious life since the seventeenth century. Amidst the interplay of parry and thrust, these mimetic doubles exchange symmetrically opposed convictions on “la grâce suffisante.” These rivals for theological dominance are last seen after the inconclusive duel going off as friends to lunch together, the final shot only showing them from the backs of their identically black cloaks. Buñuel has captured the dynamics of rival doubles, the object of their enmity being verbal fictions to which they adhere only relatively to each other, over against each other. Each one’s statement is only the negative statement of the other’s. This pair are Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee to Buñuel’s mind. One is a Jansenist only as an anti-Jesuit, and vice versa. Orthodoxy and heresy are partners in crime— bordering on slapstick. The pseudo-narrative vehicle for the film is the journey of two penniless men, one old, one young, on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, a route massively tread over the ages, though these two are hitch-hiking. Episodes involving various heresies alternate with the portrayal of Jesus as a man among men for all that he is the leader of his disciples. We see him preparing to shave, anachronistically with razor and strop, when his mother suggests he looks better with a beard. We see him smiling, laughing and nodding at the wedding of Cana, a cheerful guest among others, as it is reasonable to assume he was—

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otherwise why attend? Buñuel is with G. K. Chesterton on this score, who argues that Jesus must have laughed if, as doctrine avers, he was fully human. We are at antipodes here from the angry, anxious Jesus of Pasolini’s Gospel according to Saint Matthew, which Buñuel may have been working off; but his principal target is doubtless the sentimentally attractive loner of Hollywood productions, cast in the romantic mode of brooding, melancholy dreamer. Buñuel’s Jesus smiles broadly when he rebukes Peter with his famous “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns” (Mt. 16:23). He speaks in a jesting tone as if Jesus needed to kid and josh his followers into understanding him. Jesus’ parables are laden with irony, exhibiting rhetorical counterstrokes common to humor. We see him curing blind men with dirt and spittle, as in the Gospel synoptic narratives, to which Buñuel adds him actually spitting in the blind man’s eyes. Strong medicine for some viewers, but we’re still trying to figure out this knowit-all Nazarin, about whom there is no unified consensus. But the best part of this particular episode is when Jesus is walking with his disciples, who are followed by the cured blind men, and who are still using their walking staffs to feel the ground beneath their feet as they probe a ditch that others skip across. Buñuel’s comments on this scene are inconclusive—in his interviews, he enjoys entertaining questions rather than responding clearly to them—but it resonates powerfully with the incredulity, hesitations, doubts, and misprisions that regularly, almost systematically, met Jesus’ ministry and his miracles. Here the blind see but do not believe themselves cured, a kind of backsliding that Jesus and the prophets complained of in their hearers, who “have eyes but do not see, ears but do not hear.” This scene is nothing if not, in every sense, a sight gag. I would like to have seen the film end here, but Buñuel concludes in a more somber tone, when he has Jesus uttering some dire statements, including the one where he says “I bring not peace but a sword.” The violence that is named here is doubtless evidence for Buñuel’s charge against the violence born of dogmatisms that bestride the history of Christianity. For Girard, though, this statement alludes to the violence that will break out all over the place when cultures lose their faith in the sacrificial scapegoating, that economized violence while it organized and consolidated cultural unity and identity, and that kept further reciprocal violence at bay. The hierarchies sanctioned by the Powers and Principalities, the Thrones and Dominions, which kept people in their place and kept a bridle on competition, on mimetic rivalry, have been gradually and fitfully but irretrievably discredited over time, owing to biblical revelation.

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According to Girard’s thinking, by which I mean also those who extend and deepen his biblical anthropology, such as James Alison, Andrew Marr, and still very many more, Jesus’ “good news” about God’s love for all his creatures, about his kingdom in which there is “neither Greek not Jew, nor slave nor free, nor man nor woman,” brings about a leveling, an erosion of hierarchies and the pseudo-ontological differences in which they invest. This process results in the “disenchantment of the world,” in Max Weber’s famous phrase, which implies, among other things, greater freedom from superstitions—for which modern people, the bourgeoisie especially among them, have found myriad substitutions. The bad news, the “sword,” is that there are fewer and fewer institutional brakes on mimetic desire and the violence to which it leads. Buñuel’s contribution to this revelation is decisive, consistent, in that he unveils the pathologies of desire run mad in a world without transcendence, a world, in Girard’s terms, of deviated transcendence. Buñuel’s conception of the miraculous is not realized in the idea of the Blessed Virgin appearing to some hunters to return a rosary they have casually shot out of a tree, but in the fact, for example, that in today’s world there is such a thing as cinema: Besides, I am working in cinema, which is a machine that manufactures miracles. Thanks to cinema, we can see an actor who died fifty years ago now, or how a seed germinates and grows into a plant, or how a bullet leaves a gun barrel and strikes an urn, whose fragments settle to the ground with the grace of a dancer. And these miracles don’t even surprise us anymore.51

More’s the pity. We take movies and all sorts of other technological media for granted, as we take so many things that upon reflection deserve our attention, respect, and admiration, or censure. For all that, Buñuel insists he is not a Manichean,52 an attitude that Girard criticizes frequently in Deceit. It is the stuff of sentimentalism and melodrama, and the current, almost epidemic spate of superhero movies these days reflects our desperate appetite for moral delusion. We return to Buñuel’s films because they continue to surprise us, not at all out of sensationalism for its own sake, but because we suspect that he has some things to tell us that we don’t know about ourselves, which, as Andrew Marr observes, is what we call the unconscious.53 According to mimetic theory, the unconscious is not host to arcane impulses but the unwitting guest of others’ desires operating near and far, 24/7 at 360 degrees of the compass. It is what James Alison has named “the social other,” into which we are born and raised and against whose omnipresent allurements and anxieties the world’s great religions chart avenues to real human freedom.54

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Buñuel is not Manichean for destabilizing dogmatic certitudes that all too often underwrite institutional violence. But he, like Cervantes, like Dostoevsky, does not judge his characters. There’s already too much of that going on all over the place. When asked to explain his films, he is often evasive, tentative in his responses, asking in turn “Why don’t more people laugh at my films?”55 Decades ago he expressed his apprehension of something like a last judgment on the horizon of our craziness, and the fate of the globe or its inhabitants have not improved since. I would argue that his art, in his own words, is “profoundly Christian” in that it means, among other things, to exorcise our demons, disenchant us about them, demystify the “discreet charms” of our social rituals, decode the obscurity of our desires. The effort herein to read Buñuel’s films through the lenses of mimetic theory is predicated on the idea that these lenses are Buñuel’s own. In this regard I esteem him as a versatile partner in Girard’s anthropology, which has very much to learn from his films, which abound with the “prodigious humor” that Girard applauds in Dostoevsky, regarding whom Girard’s remark also applies to Buñuel: “We do not know how to join in Dostoevsky’s laughter because we don’t know how to laugh at ourselves.”56

Notes 1 Nazarin, directed by Luis Buñuel (1959; Los Angeles, CA: Connoisseur Collection, 2003), DVD. 2 José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent, Objects of Desire: Conversations with Luis Buñuel, trans. Paul Lenti (New York: Marsilio, 1986), 132. 3 Michèle Manceaux, “Luis Buñuel: athée grâce à Dieu,” L’Express (May 12, 1960): 41. 4 Viridiana, by Luis Buñuel (1961; Chicago, IL: Facets Multimedia, 1980), VHS. 5 Peter William Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel: Subjectivity and Desire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3. 6 Colina and Turrent, Objects of Desire, 133. 7 Ibid., 184. 8 Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh, trans. Abigail Israel (New York: Vintage, 2013 [1983]), 220. 9 Joan Mellen, The World of Luis Buñuel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 210. 10 René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 11 Mellen, The World of Luis Buñuel, 240.

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12 See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Prisoner for God: Letters and Papers from Prison, trans. Reginald H. Fuller (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 121–25. 13 René Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2010), 47. 14 Cited in Mellen, The World of Luis Buñuel, 240. 15 Andrew Marr, Moving and Resting in God’s Desire: A Spirituality of Peace (Three Rivers, MI: St. Gregory’s Abbey Press, 2016), 77–82. 16 Andrew McKenna, “Girard, Rorty, and the Novel,” Renascence 55, no. 4 (2003): 293–331. 17 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Léon Brunschvicg (Paris: Garnier, 1958), 5. 18 El Àngel Exterminador, by Luis Buñuel (1962; San Francisco, CA: Kanopy Streaming, 2015), Video File. 19 Donizetti’s opera, not incidentally, is a drama of love and death, an abiding theme for Buñuel. 20 Buñuel, My Last Sigh, 239. 21 Ibid. 22 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 125; Andrew McKenna, “Fellini’s Crowds and the Remains of Religion,” Contagion: Journal of Mimesis, Violence, and Culture 12–13 (2007): 159–82. 23 René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 289. 24 McKenna, “Girard, Rorty, and the Novel.” 25 No wonder that Buñuel contemplated filming an adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, whose title recalls the plagues of Egypt, and whose plot tracks the emergence of sacrificial scapegoating among a group of boys stranded on an island (Mellen, The World of Luis Buñuel, 255); this is owing to a plane wreck, which may itself have issued from world-ending violence. 26 Buñuel, My Last Sigh, 242. 27 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 143–68. 28 Cited in Colina and Turrent, Objects of Desire, 139. 29 Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, by Luis Buñuel (1972; Los Angeles, CA: Mediat Home Entertainment, 1985), VHS. 30 Andrew McKenna, Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 175–76. 31 Paul Sandro, Diversions of Pleasure: Luis Buñuel and the Crises of Desire (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1987), 71. 32 Buñuel, My Last Sigh, 228. 33 Ibid., 240. 34 Cet Obscur objet du désir, by Luis Buñuel (1977; Paris: GEF-CCFC, 1977), VHS.

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35 Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 45. 36 Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (New York: Pantheon, 1956), 284–85. 37 Francisco Aranda, Luis Buñuel: A Critical Biography, trans. David Robinson (New York: Da Capo P, 1976), 169. 38 Cited in Colina and Turrent, Objects of Desire, 225. 39 Rougemont, 240. 40 Rougemont, 285. 41 Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 176. 42 Rougement, 34–5. 43 Cited in Colina and Turrent, Objects of Desire, 226. 44 Ibid. 45 Colina and Turrent, Objects of Desire, 228. 46 Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 17. 47 René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 281–432. 48 Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 180. 49 Cesáreo Bandera, The Sacred Game: The Role of the Sacred in Modern Literary Fiction (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 79–85. 50 La Voie Lactée, by Luis Buñuel (1969; New York: Criterion Collection, 2007), DVD. 51 Cited in Colina and Turrent, Objects of Desire, 183. 52 Ibid, 52. 53 Marr, Moving and Resting in God’s Desire, 41. 54 James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice—Starting Human, Staying Human (Glenview, IL: Doers Publishing, 2013), 19–24. 55 Aranda, Luis Buñuel, 228. 56 Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 262.

2

On Fiction and Truth: Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing Paul Dumouchel

The Act of Killing is a very disturbing and extraordinary movie. It is a documentary about the massive political violence that took place in Indonesia between the end of September 1965 and February 1966, orchestrated by the army and General Suharto, who soon afterward would become head of state and then remained in power for thirty-two years, until 1998. The violence left an estimated one million persons dead and another 800,000 persons or so, political prisoners, were tortured and imprisoned without trial. This movie, however, is a strange documentary in that it focuses exclusively on the perpetrators and not on their victims, not on the survivors, nor on their families, friends and relatives, or all of the others who to a lesser or greater degree were also victims of the violence.1 The film does not ask for the point of view of the victims. It does not inquire into their experience, their trauma, their fear, their pain or how they have lived since these tragic incidents happened. The main perpetrator, on who the film focuses, Anwar Congo, and his associates are thought to have slaughtered some 10,500 “presumed communists” in more or less five months! The murderers are not asked to tell us why they did what they did or to explain what motivated them to become mass murderers, nor are they asked to tell us how they feel today about these numerous murders and the tortures they committed fifty years ago. Rather, Oppenheimer offered them the possibility to reenact their actions at the time—murders, torture, interrogations, executions, burning of villages, etc.—as a movie, of whichever style they wished. The goal was to make a film that would present how they saw their role in these killings. They chose to make it as a collection of scenes in which they played the leading roles, either as themselves, that is as murderers and torturers, or as victims, or as “fictional” characters. “Fictional” in the

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sense that these characters represent neither victims nor perpetrators, but are imaginary figures which these improvised directors added to the reconstruction of this very real human tragedy, in order to make it, according to them, a better, more pleasing movie. Further, Oppenheimer at times interviews them and other important political actors of the period and the present. He also filmed them while they were viewing the results of their cinematographic efforts, while they discussed among themselves and criticized the quality of their production and acting, or simply talked about the past among each other. The documentary therefore contains the scenes they chose to reenact in the way they imagined them, their making of the movie, as well as their meetings with various political figures and participation in public events. The end result is a film that is steeped in mimesis, in complex, multilevel imitations and representations that aim at recreating the past, that both hide and reveal what happened. The film tells us about what happened in 1965– 66, first level of mimesis, but most scenes of violence are reenacted by the authors of the crimes playing either their own role or that of the victims— second level. Furthermore, they are not represented “as they were then.” The actors/perpetrators are disguised as characters from the American Western or gangster films they watched at the time of the killing—third level of mimesis. In consequence, the victims and what happened to some extent become as unreal, a fantasy, as what happens in a film. They nonetheless appreciate the distancing effect created by this reconfiguration of past events and praise their film, which unlike the state’s propaganda film that is gory and violent, as a film that is fit for all audiences, that can be enjoyed by the whole family. This way of making The Act of Killing required on the part of the murderers something important without which it would have been impossible. Something which seems to us highly surprising, and that may be what suggested to Oppenheimer this original approach—that the killers were willing—indeed they were eager—to report what they did. Willing to stage and to represent their crimes, desiring their actions to be seen by all in a movie they imagined and in which they acted, their own part or that of their victims. Even more surprising perhaps is that they thought it appropriate to embellish this record of horror with fantasy—in some scenes, dressing up like American gangsters of the 1920s or cowboys when they interrogate, torture or kill. They also invented outdoor scenes in which young women sing and dance in a peaceful manner, which aims at giving the movie a particular aesthetic and spiritual dimension. This embellishment, however, does not aim at falsifying the truth. Not only do they reenact their past murders in great detail—the scenes are sometimes

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barely bearable—they are also willing to have their musing and discussions about their work filmed and recorded. They are willing to tell us about some of the various illegal activities in which they engage, or engaged in the past, or wish to engage in the future, proud to display their friendship with major political figures and to invite the viewers of the film (and the film crew) to mass rallies or television shows where they are celebrated like heroes, rather than murderers, and praised for the role they played in the assassination of hundreds or thousands of Indonesian citizens. Clearly, they had nothing to hide and were not trying to hide anything. If they feel they have nothing to hide, it certainly is, in part, because the celebration of this genocidal violence as the founding moment of New Indonesia is the official line. It is not only the commonly “received interpretation,” but also the official version of history as it is taught in schools, recounted on state television, recorded in books, and repeated again and again at political rallies. Anyone who challenges this view of the past is in danger, perhaps less today than he or she was when Suharto was still in power, when any attempt at revisionist history meant death or indefinite imprisonment, but nonetheless in danger, exposed to all sorts of hardship, to be socially excluded and marginalized, to receive frequent visits from the police, or, more dangerous still, from a paramilitary group like Pancasila Youth of which Anwar Congo is a major hero, a paramilitary force that was deeply involved in the 1965–66 killings. These killers then are encouraged by the powers that be, and perhaps also by the majority of the population, to take pride in what they did. This official interpretation of the 1965–66 killing fields is the basis of their fame, of their power and their wealth; why should we expect them in any way to take distance from it? In short, they, the famous killers, imitate all those who endorse the official propaganda that promotes a fictive image of them as heroes, as saviors of the nation, when in truth they were sadistic murderers who invented elaborate methods of killing and torturing. They present as glorious a violence about which there is nothing heroic, a violence that was radically asymmetric and where the victims never presented any dangers to their murderers. They are sustained in this representation of themselves as heroes by the public lie. They acquiesce to what is said by so many people, by the media and government officials, but deep down inside—or so are we tempted to think—they know that it is not true. A hypothesis that seems to be confirmed by the fact that toward the end of the movie Anwar begins to break down. He cries as he watches a scene in which he played a “communist” who is being killed and during the filming of which he became extremely troubled. Finally, he becomes physically ill when he returns

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one last time to the place where they killed hundreds of people and is asked to talk about it. His reaction, which he tries, but fails, to keep under control, suggests that they have always known that this image of themselves was just false and that their cinematographic reconstruction was nothing more than a lie. Yet, is it really that simple? They know the truth, but they hide it from themselves and from others. Killers, their sponsors and acolytes surround the truth with a barrier of lies to ensnare others and to make it impossible for them to ever discover what really happened. Or so we think. There is some “truth” in this interpretation. Lies do constitute obstacles that prevent agents from discovering what really took place, but in this case, that is not all, something else is going on. Something that is closely related to a fundamental phenomenon that Cesáreo Bandera analyzes in the first chapter of his recent book, A Refuge of Lies.2 What is involved here is not only lying as we usually understand the term, falsifying the record, but also a different relation to truth. Of course, lying itself constitutes a different relationship to truth than saying the truth; that is evident. However, what constitutes a lie varies depending on how one understands what truth is and what type of relation truth entertains with the world. It varies depending on what we see as being the truth. Simply saying that Anwar and others are lying, that they are trying to veil the truth and to embellish the horror of what happened, actually hides the complexity of what is going on here.

But that is the Truth! From the beginning, it is clear that one of the objectives of the perpetrators in participating in this documentary is to “tell the truth.” Not so much to set the record straight, because they do not really feel that it has been falsified, but to show in detail exactly what has happened so that people, they claim, can really understand. Also, because, as they say, “this is us,” “this truth is our history and it is important that all know it.” To some extent they want to leave a record of what they did so that others in the future can remember them, and remember what happened as it happened. They are not trying to hide anything and they do not attempt to show themselves in any way better than they were, because they do not believe that they were bad, nor do they undertake to falsely represent their victims as dangerous and fearsome enemies. To the opposite, their film truly shows them as they were, helpless prey that they mercilessly destroyed. At a certain level, that of representing past events, they feel no need to lie, even have

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no thought of lying. Yet, they do recognize that what they did was wrong. Anwar tells us that it is because of “all these people he killed that did not wish to die” that he has these terrible nightmares. It is in the distance between “they do not believe that they were bad” and “they recognize that what they did was wrong” that lies the complexity of their lie. There are in that respect two very interesting scenes in which the issue of the truth of what they are doing is in one scene indirectly raised and in the other explicitly discussed. Let us start with the second: Adi, another of the main perpetrators, friend and, at least at the time of the events, close associate of Anwar, suddenly says as they are beginning to film a scene in which a prisoner is interrogated: Adi: You realize that if we succeed in doing this scene and this film is a success, people will know the truth. The government has always been saying that the communists were cruel, but that is not true. The truth is that we are the ones who were cruel and sadistic. If people know that everything changes. Herman [who we will meet again]: But that is the truth! Adi: Yes, but then people will know that all that Anwar and I have been saying for years was false. It is not always good to say the truth. Not all truths should be said to everybody. Even God has his secrets. I am not saying this to stop you. It is not a question of fear. It has been more than 40 years and there can be no legal action against us. It is about the history and the future. I am just saying this so that you understand what you are doing.

Adi in this scene illustrates what Cesáreo Bandera has in mind when he speaks of a different relation to truth—a relation to truth, where truth is not seen as a something that is good in itself, but as something that can be and that often is extremely dangerous. Therefore, as Adi says, we should be careful, not all truths should be told to everybody and some truths should never be told. Even God has his secrets! Nonetheless, Adi is not really pressing them to abandon this scene. It will be filmed and he will take part in it. Interestingly, in an earlier scene while Anwar and Adi discuss, covered in make-up that makes them look like victims of torture and beating, enters another character from their past, a journalist whom we have met before. He tells them: Josh just asked me if I knew about this. I didn’t, but now that I see the reconstruction I understand why. I can’t believe how smooth you guys were! We were working in the same office [in fact the editor of the local newspaper was the coordinator of the “anti-communist” campaign in the region and the killings and interrogations took place in the newspaper building] and I, a journalist, with ears like an elephant, never noticed anything! I never knew what was going on.

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Clearly, he is talking for the camera. He does not want to be seen as a participant in their past and what they did. Adi: You never knew anything!! We were just beside you. You did not hear people scream!? You did no see anything?! —: No. Never. I swear to God. I did not know anything. Adi: Look, I do not want to say your lying, but we were right beside you, in the same building, on the other side of the wall and you did not know anything! How is that possible. The whole town knew what was going on here.

The journalist is certainly lying, in the most ordinary sense of the term. This is not what Anwar and his friends are up to. At no point do they try to disavow their participation in the killings or cruelty. Once, while discussing with Anwar, Adi will even boast of how he killed the father of his then Chinese girlfriend. In fact, to understand Adi’s intervention we need to take into account another film, to which, in my view, their own attempt constitutes a response. There is an official propaganda film of the Indonesian government that every school child in the country must watch. It recounts the events that led to the army coup and violence—the assassination of six army generals by (it was said) soldiers affiliated with communists—and depicts the communists as cruel and morally depraved. It contains some gory scenes, among which is one where the daughter of one of the assassinated generals soaks her hands in the blood of her slain father and smears it on her face while calling him “Papa! Papa!” Anwar criticizes this movie wondering what effect such scenes can have on young school children. He wants his film to be different, to be a film that the whole family can enjoy. Like Adi, he is quite aware that the government propaganda lies and he wants his film to be more truthful; both of them recognize that “the communists were not cruel, we were the cruel ones.” There is another scene, which takes place before Adi’s warning, where Anwar and he are fishing and talking in which Adi tells Anwar: Adi: Look, if you killed my father, I would be angry with you. Right, that’s normal. The children of the communists, their parents were killed, their houses were burned down, they could not go to school. They want revenge. That is normal. So, I think the government should do something to recognize them. It should apologize, what is so difficult about apologizing?

At first sight, this seems somewhat contradictory with his warning about revealing their own cruelty. On the one hand, he seems to be saying, we should recognize the victims as victims and on the other he is saying we should not

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reveal that we were the ones who were cruel, we should not reveal that they were victims! In fact, Adi is not being incoherent at all, because he is not thinking in terms of victims. In both his discussion with Anwar and in his warning, he seems to be motivated by the same purpose: the harmony of the community. Recognizing the suffering of the children of the communists, facilitating their integration into Indonesian society will enhance the harmony of the community. Reconciliation is a good thing. However, showing that we, the winners, rather than the communists we exterminated, were the cruel ones can only create more resentment and conflict. It cannot be good for the community. For Adi, not only is truth something that is dangerous, that should be handled with care, but there are other values that are more important than truth and that should guide us in knowing which truth should be revealed to whom.

Mimesis as reenactment and the voice of the victims The scene is filmed and it does exactly what Adi said it would do. It reveals them to be cruel and sadistic, but not for the reason he thought, not because it shows them as they were in the past, but because this particular scene shows that the past still continues today. It reenacts the past not just as a representation, but in the sense of making it present and real today. The person who plays the role of the prisoner who is being interrogated in that scene, against which Adi warned the others, has been introduced earlier as one of Anwar’s neighbors, someone who simply seems to be frequently hanging out with him. We first see this neighbor at the very beginning of the movie when he accompanies Anwar to the top of the newspaper building where prisoners used to be killed. In that scene Anwar has his neighbor sit down on the floor and puts a metal wire around the neck as if he were to strangle him, to proudly demonstrate the method that he, Anwar, invented to kill victims without spilling too much blood, which, he says, smelled awful and was difficult to clean. Later in that scene, reminiscing the films that he used to watch at the cinema across the street before going to on to kill “communist suspects,” Anwar dances the chacha-cha. His neighbor, perhaps troubled by the inappropriateness of Anwar’s behavior in this context, comments: “He is a happy man.” At the end of the movie, Anwar will come back to this place where he used to kill and where he first danced the cha-cha-cha, but this time he will get sick and throw up as he tells us what he used to do there fifty years ago.

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Sometime before the interrogation scene, we will learn that this neighbor who is an actor in the film actually is a victim. At some point while they are discussing about which scenes to include in the movie he offers his own story. At that time, he was only a young boy of about eleven years living with his mother and father-in-law who was Chinese. He had lived with his father-in-law, he tells us, since he was a small baby, another way of saying that this Chinese man was like his father. One night, people outside shouted asking his father-in-law to come out. His mother said to her husband “Don’t go out, it is dangerous,” but he went nonetheless. They heard him call for help and next morning they found him dead, his body stuck in a barrel that had been cut in half. With the help of his grandfather they dragged him out and buried him, but no one helped them even though he was just a child. Families of communists were then expelled out of town to an area where there was nothing. That is why, he says, he could never go to school and had to teach himself how to read and write. He adds: “I am not saying this to criticize you or what you are doing, but maybe it would be good to introduce this memory also in the movie.” The reactions to this proposal are rather cool. Someone says if we were to put every scene in the movie it would never end! Another one objects that it is too complicated. Only Anwar suggests, “Well we will see if we can fit it in.” This suggestion introduces two significant differences in relation to the other scenes that were actually included in the film. First, it makes the actions described in the film more “personal”; it reminds the murderers and the viewers that this happened to real people, not simply fictional victims dressed like actors in movies, whose roles are played by the very persons who tortured them. Second, it represents the point of view of the victim. It is not about the killers but about their victims. This is the scene that indirectly raises the issue of the truth of what they are doing. Indirectly, because this scene will not be filmed, the story will only be told, but another scene will be reenacted. This neighbor, who is a real victim, is the person who plays the role of the prisoner being interrogated in the scene to which Adi objected before it was filmed,3 for fear that it would reveal them, rather than the communists, to be the cruel ones. As the interrogation scene unfolds, the interrogators who the neighbor/prisoner knows are real murderers—perhaps the person who killed his father-in-law is one of them—put a metal wire around his neck and start saying things like “Maybe we should kill him for real.” Anwar intervenes at one point and says “Give him some water,” but the prisoner/neighbor believes the water to be poisoned and refuses to take any. They try to force him to drink. Progressively

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he becomes more and more agitated and afraid and starts begging for his life. He knows who they are and they know who he is and he really fears them. Here, the fiction collapses, for we are not only viewing a representation of what happened in the past, but we are also witnessing its continuation in the present, perhaps as a punishment and warning for his incautious suggestion, perhaps simply because by revealing himself to be a real victim he called forth their violence by pointing out to them that he was a person to whom such things could be done. In any case, the very real psychological torture to which they subject Anwar’s neighbor reveals the truth of what they are doing and of what they were doing in a way that no mere representation of the past could have done.

Blindness and truth One of the most striking aspects of this film is the blindness of Anwar, of his fellow murderers and actors in the movie, including Adi in spite of his warning. What they fail to see, what they are blind to, is the image of themselves that they give in the movie. This is particularly clear in the case of Herman. Herman is a friend of Anwar, a gangster, an aspiring politician, and a local leader of the Pancasila Youth paramilitary organization. Herman is too young to have participated in the violence, but he is quite eager to take part in the movie in which he plays many different roles. Herman is rather fat but in no way selfconscious. He is as happy to be cast in any role, as a mother who pleads for the life of her child, which in the scene is a doll that Anwar tortures, simultaneously blaming the mother for the death of her child that he is killing, or as a murderer in a scene where he strangles Anwar and in another one where he also kills him, eats his liver, and tries to force his genitals down his throat, or as some strange fictional woman character who is sitting while young women come out dancing from the mouth of a building which has the form of a fish, as a brutal attacker when they reenact the burning down of a village, and so on. In all his roles, Herman puts a lot of energy and effort into trying to be a good convincing actor, whether he is a mother pleading for the life of her child or a brutal interrogator. He is not very good at it, but he is in a sense very professional. Whatever the role, he does his best. Being in this movie is much more important for him than being either a hero or a victim and he will do all that he can for the film to be a success. He is absolutely convinced that the movie’s message is perfectly clear and transparent, and true, which is why when Adi objects “if we succeed this will

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show that we were cruel not the communists” he responds, “but that is true!” He clearly believes in the truth of what they are doing. Similarly, Anwar and Adi are happy to be cast as cowboys, or as victims with scarred and bruised faces, prisoners who have been recently beaten and tortured. Maybe they think that by acting in a film what they did fifty years ago they will come to believe that it was all just a movie, like the ones they watched back then, before going to interrogate, torture, and kill prisoners. Yet, they want this movie to conform to the reality of what happened. They watch again the scenes that have been filmed and criticize them if they are not sufficiently representative of how it was then or of how they want it to have been. For example, when Anwar visions the first scene on top of the building where he demonstrated his discovery of the use of a metal wire to strangle the victims so as to avoid spilling too much blood which they found unpleasant to clean, and then dances, he comments: Anwar: That’s not good. I should not be dressed like that. I should be wearing black. I always used to wear dark colors and I should dye my hair [which he will do]. I am dressed as if I am going to a picnic! [when the scene was shot Anwar was wearing white shoes, white pants and a green shirt with flowers].

In their case, however, their willingness to play the role of the victim is somewhat surprising. Unlike Herman they were actors in this tragedy, they killed many people and are acclaimed as heroes for their role as perpetrators. Why are these torturers and executioners so ready to cast themselves as their own victims? Anwar in particular plays the role of the victim many times and there are two or three scenes where he is killed. One possible answer is because it was all a lot of fun! By replaying the past as a movie, they are playing at it again and they enjoy it. It was all a great game and they had a wonderful time!4 What they want to show is how great and powerful they were. For this to be seen and recognized by everybody the victims must be convincing, pitiful, broken, and bleeding, for that is precisely what makes their murderers great. There is nothing to hide. Why would anyone take the side of the victim, these helpless creatures condemned to death and social oblivion? Who would do that? The victims are necessary to show the extent of their violence in which they pride themselves. Hiding them would be disastrous. This is what they are blind to. They cannot imagine that anyone will see what they have done in any other way than as they see it: as a proof of their superior power, of their violence which all will admire and fear. Even if Adi wonders if it is wise for them to show that they were the ones who were cruel rather than

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the communists, he clearly shares that same image of himself as a person who is famous and important because of his violence. He did not speak his warning out of consideration for the victims, but in view of the future, of what others might do, and not of the past, not of what they have done to others. Herman, who was too young to take part in the killings, can through the movie vicariously take part in their greatness. One of the first scenes of the movie is filmed outdoors. We are in the countryside: there is a beautiful waterfall and we see young women dancing and singing. We hear a voice (it seems to be either that of Herman or Anwar) that says “smile,” “look happy, happier,” “this is real joy!” Someone says “cut” and members of the crew bring blankets to the young women who were probably cold from dancing close to the waterfall as this scene could have been filmed high in the mountains. One of the last scenes of the film is nearly identical, without the voice-over this time, and we see the waterfall, the young women dancing and singing. Anwar is wearing a black robe, like a priest of some strange religion, with his arms spread out as if he were praying, at first looking at the waterfall, then facing away from it. Beside him is Herman wearing a blue dress and two characters dressed normally, but they each have around their necks a metal wire like that which Anwar used to strangle his victims. They take off the wire, Anwar turns toward them, he lowers his head and one of the victims hangs around his neck a large medal,5 and he shakes Anwar’s hand saying, “Thank you for having killed me and sent me to heaven!” They have nothing to hide! One of the most fascinating aspects of The Act of Killing is the complete inability of the actors/killers to imagine the reaction that others will have when they will see this and other scenes, a blindness that is mimetically founded in the public recognition and celebration of their violence as good and justified. Anwar, when he visions that scene where he receives thanks and a decoration from his very victims, says: “What I like about this scene is that the waterfall is so beautiful and looks so pure and peaceful.” He is happy with the scene he has imaged. He has succeeded in showing something that is important to him. The probable meaning of the scene is that, now that all this killing and violence is over, we live in a pure and peaceful Indonesia where all are reconciled and where even those who were killed are thankful for what has been done to them. Perfect reconciliation! Anwar is not naïve. He is not simply lying to himself. There are other scenes where the ghosts of those he killed torment him at night and prevent him from sleeping. He knows that not all of the dead, at least not all of his dead, are peaceful. That scene nonetheless constitutes for him the best

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ending for his film, the way it should be. The historical scenes all aim to be accurate in their representation of what happened, but here we are not in the historical past, we are in a symbolic a-temporal domain where we discover the meaning of what has happened. How can they be so blind? Clearly, they see the same things as we do—torture, murders, and cruelty—but when they see these events they see something completely different. Except at one moment when mimesis, in the form of playing the role of the victim, opens to Anwar a world that he did not know and where he does want to go. Immediately after reviewing the scene of the waterfall and saying how surprised he is to have done something so wonderful, he asks Joshua if he has with him the scene where he is strangled, during the filming of which he became so troubled that he said, “I cannot do this anymore!” He asks Joshua to put it on and he calls his grandsons to come and watch it. After a short while of seeing grandpa being tortured by the fat guy, the children leave and Anwar becomes extremely troubled again, begins to wipe his eyes and asks Joshua “Do you think the people I killed felt as bad as I feel there?” Joshua answers that they certainly felt much worse since he knew that it was only a film while they knew they were going to die. “But I can feel it, I feel it, I don’t want to, but I do.” replies Anwar.

Silence The film is also characterized by the paucity of the explanations concerning what has happened and why it happened. Oppenheimer does not really tell us anything about the causes of these events, and neither do the murderers, politicians, or officials of the Pancasila Youth paramilitary organization. At one point, Anwar recognizes that he knew that what he was doing was wrong, but, he adds, it had to be done. Why did he “have to” do it? He does not tell us anything more. We are simply repeatedly told that they were communist. More precisely, the killer’s world seems to have been—and to still be—divided between “communist,” which in their language is equivalent to their prisoners and victims, and themselves as well as all others who approve of what they did. This division of the world seems to constitute a sufficient explanation of the violence that took place. We are, however, also told an interesting story about how Anwar and his friends, these particular small-time gangsters—“preemen” as they are known in Indonesian, a word which is supposed to be derived from the English “free

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men”—came to be involved in the anti-communist campaign. Among the various illegal activities in which they engaged at the time, one was the racketing of illegal movie tickets that they sold outside the cinema across the street from the newspaper building where much of the killing was to take place. The communists wanted to ban the screening of American films, which they liked and which are the inspiration of the reconstructed scenes in their own movie. These American movies were popular and attracted many customers. Thus, the communists were threatening to take away one of their sources of income. We are then to understand that the communists were seen as potential obstacles to their continued business activity. This is presented to us as what was wrong with the communists and the rationale of their engaging in a campaign to exterminate them. One wonders, however, if by that same occasion, following a false but clearly related form of reasoning, many of their business competitors were not also transformed by them into “communists.” Leslie Dwyer and Degung Santikarma, in their study of the violence that took place in Bali, Indonesia, in 1965–66, claim that it (the violence) cannot, we argue, be easily understood as the result of hostilities between clearly defined groups of people . . . much of the bloodshed was in fact, we have found, motivated by social conflicts that were local, diverse, and shifting, conflicts that crosscut and shaped political allegiances and that were then manipulated by the state to give particular forms to the violence. Those conflicts erupted over issues of caste, over access to and ownership of land, over economic inequalities, over status and inheritance within extended families. The violence also worked to exploit and to intensify inequalities between classes and between genders, underscoring the marginality of women and the poor.6

The two authors preface the claim above on the violence that took place in Bali with the remark that this is “in contrast to many events of mass violence elsewhere in the world.” However, as I have argued in The Barren Sacrifice,7 many authors have shown that the interbreeding of political violence and social violence, the close connection between politically motivated atrocities and domestic conflicts or personal rivalries, is everywhere the rule rather than the exception. Gellately on political denunciation in Nazi Germany,8 Fitzpatrick and Gellately on political denunciation since the French Revolution,9 Hinton on Cambodia,10 Moussaoui on recent political violence in Algeria,11 Kalyvas on massacres during the Greek civil war,12 and recently Dumas about the Rwanda genocide13—all these authors show that in each of these cases, individuals exploit the politically justified

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violence to their own advantage, that they use it to pursue personal conflicts and rivalries. People use political violence to settle old scores, to obtain revenge against a successful rival, to avoid lengthy and expensive divorce procedure, to eliminate business rivals, and so on. This is what perpetrators never talk about in the film, apart from the passing suggestion that they were defending their business interests. It also something about which Oppenheimer, it seems, has little to say. We may think that the violence was too massive, extensive and extraordinary to be explainable by such petty everyday causes: personal conflicts and professional rivalries. Yet, the violence that Dwyer and Santikarma describe looks a lot more like what Girard calls a sacrificial crisis than a civil war in which well-defined political opponents fought each other. What the film never talks about or attempts to deconstruct is the myth of political violence, according to which there is something called political violence that is different from other forms of violence. Anwar and his acolytes appear to us extremely strange and incomprehensible, because they are such normal, ordinary people. There is a scene in which we see Anwar with his grandchildren in a farmyard. It takes place after the children have, accidentally or voluntarily, broken the leg of a small duck. Here we see a kind grandpa teaching his grandsons not to hurt animals. Is this the same person who killed thousands of “presumed communists”? Our incomprehension stems from the fact that we fail to see that the violence was much more indiscriminate than the word “communist” suggests, that we fail to understand that many individuals were happy to take advantage of the “professional services” of people like Anwar. As the newspaper editor who was in charge of local assassinations and whose newspaper building housed the killings and torture sessions, at one point, visibly jealous and resentful of the attention given to Anwar, answers to Oppenheimer: I am too important a person to kill people with my own hands! I don’t need to do such things. There were hundreds of people to do things like that.

Precisely! There were tons of people who were in some way engaged in the killings and whose reasons and motivations, like Anwar’s, were diverse and unclear. Unlike him most were not later transformed into heroes. But if Anwar and his small band of associates acted alone, they must have been working very hard: 10,500 victims in five months, that makes an average of three murders per hour (assuming that they were at it twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week). These numbers suggest that participation in the killing was much more general than the transformation

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of Anwar into a hero would have us believe. And his transformation into a hero justifies all these anonymous killers just as much as their admiration justifies him in what he did. Yet the violence itself, it seems, was, as mentioned earlier, much more general, closer to what Girard describes as a sacrificial crisis than to what we commonly think of as political violence. These events were then covered and hidden by the grand narrative of the fight against communism and the birth of a New Indonesia A narrative in which Anwar and his associates seek to find justification and which Oppenheimer apparently accepts, though he rejects the justification it pretends to provide. Yet, in accepting that narrative, he perpetuates its fundamental lie, that the violence was essentially political.

Notes 1 There is another film, The Look of Silence, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer (2014, Final cut for real/Why not productions, 2014, streaming) that focuses on the victims, on their life and struggle in a society where the perpetrators, those who killed their parents and family, are still free and celebrated as heroes. There is also a scene of The Act of Killing, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer (2012, Final cut for real dk/Det Dansk Filminstitut, 2012, DVD) which, as we will see later on, suggests why it is difficult to make a film that focuses both on the victims and the perpetrators. 2 Cesáreo Bandera, A Refuge of Lies (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013). The different relation to truth that is exemplified in the film is, I believe, not identical (though it is closely similar) to the different relationship to truth that Bandera analyzes. 3 In fact, throughout the film this neighbor, unlike Anwar, Adi or Herman who play either the role of victim or of perpetrator, only plays roles of victims. 4 As Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau argued in a recent book on the Rwanda genocide, we should not underestimate the festive dimension of mass killings. See Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, Une Initiation Rwanda (1994-2016) (Paris: Seuil, 2017). 5 It is interesting that in the scene where Anwar is interrogated and killed that troubled him so much, when Herman who is his executioner puts the metal wire around his neck, he says, “I put this medal around your neck”! 6 Leslie Dwyer and Degung Santikarma, “‘When the World Turned to Chaos’: 1965 and its Aftermath in Bali, Indonesia,” in R. Gellately and B. Kiernan, eds., The Specter of Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 289–305, 293. 7 Paul Dumouchel, The Barren Sacrifice (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2015).

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8 Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler, Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 9 Sheila Fitztpatrick and Robert Gellately, eds., Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History 1789-1989 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996). 10 Alexander L. Hinton, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 11 Abderrahmane Moussaoui, De la violence en Algérie: les lois du chaos (Arles: Actes Sud, 2006). 12 Sthatis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 13 Hélène Dumas, Le génocide au village. Le massacre des Tutsi du Rwanda (Paris: Seuil, 2014).

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Passing “The Imitation Game”: Ex Machina, the Ethical, and Mimetic Theory Sandor Goodhart

For Tobin Siebers Nathan: So, anyway, surely now is when you tell me if Ava passed or failed. Caleb: Right. Right. Nathan: Are you gonna keep me in suspense? Caleb: No, no. Her, uh . . . Her AI is beyond doubt. Nathan: Is it? She passed? Caleb: Yes. Nathan: Wow! Wow. That’s fantastic. Although . . . I gotta say, I’m a bit surprised. I mean, did we ever get past the chess problem, as you phrased it? As in, how do you know if a machine is expressing a real emotion or just simulating one? Does Ava actually like you? Or not? Although, now that I think about it, here is a third option. Not whether she does or does not have the capacity to like you. But whether she’s pretending to like you. Caleb: Pretending to like me? Nathan: Yeah. Caleb: Well, why would she do that? Nathan: I don’t know. Maybe if she thought of you as a means of escape.1

René Girard’s theories have become increasingly well-known in the past few years. Desire in human beings, Girard famously argued, is borrowed, appropriated from others rather than originating from demands within us or exigencies external to us. Desire, for Girard, is never desire either for the object or for the subject but rather selon l’autre, according to the other individual in our world (or outside of it) we have identified as our mediator or model. Primitive cultures, communities that ethnologists name as “archaic” and that historically preceded our own, control or manage such appropriated desire through a set

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of distinctions between the sacred and violence, distinctions that always derive from a system at whose center remains a sacrificial exclusion, a “scapegoat mechanism,” a lynching or collective murder of a surrogate victim, and the genesis in its wake of new social order, new configurations of difference and identity. And if today we know about such a mechanism or cultural machinery (which in the archaic community is largely unconscious), and find ourselves more or less remote from its disastrous effects, then that understanding in Girard’s view is co-extant with of the appearance in the ancient sixth-century writings of the Hebrew prophets, or among the fifth-century tragic writers (not to mention the assembly later of Jewish and Christian scriptural and theological writings), of new religious orientations, orientations that demystify that sacrificial violence and yet in whose wake we continue struggling to survive without utterly destroying ourselves. How does René Girard’s thinking open us to discussions of mimetic theory and film? Luckily for me, the spadework on this topic has already begun and a book launched in 2015 at the annual Australian Girard Seminar addresses it. I refer, of course, to Mimesis, Movies, and Media, and, in particular, a brilliant essay by Paul Dumouchel, “Mirrors of Nature: Artificial Agents in Real Life and Virtual Worlds” (51–60), on mimesis and cinema. After an opening section on Hobbes, and extended analysis of Spielberg’s film, Artificial Intelligence, Dumouchel concludes: David [the robot boy], and ultimately all the other robots in [Spielberg’s] film, are convincing and plausible characters of fiction to the extent that they do not act as robots should according to the film. In consequence, we have here an interesting and revealing contradiction between what Spielberg thinks robots and emotions are, and the way in which he must present them in a movie in order for the film and story to function successfully. In conclusion, we may ask: what does it take for an artificial agent to appear real? He (it) must be mimetic, vulnerable, non-autonomous in its desire, and capable of violence—and we must further be ready to be recognize it as the origins of its own actions.2

Now, in the chapter that follows, I want to argue that Dumouchel’s list of qualifiers for what is required “for an artificial agent to appear real”—namely, that it be “mimetic, vulnerable, non-autonomous in its desire, and capable of violence” (and that we “recognize it as the origins of its own actions”)—seems to apply perfectly to Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015), and that our analysis

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picks up where Dumouchel’s leaves off. Ava, the humanoid robot in the film, is utterly mimetic and imitative. She presents herself as entirely vulnerable, and is completely dependent upon (and knowledgeable of) the desires of those around her (which have been fed to her electronically from all around the world). “I switched on all the mikes and cameras, across the entire . . . planet,” Nathan, her reclusive creator, says at one point, to Caleb, her youthful interrogator, “and redirected the data through” his own company. “Boom. A limitless resource of facial and vocal interaction.” And that Ava is of course supremely capable of violence is the film’s dark secret as we learn in its stark conclusion.

Passing the Turing test One of the reasons I was drawn to consider Ex Machina in this context is that it takes place, we may say, just before—even on the “cusp” of—what is known in the AI universe as a singularity, which is to say, the moment that machines acquire self-awareness. If mimetic theory offers an account of the human as we know it, this film offers an opportunity to explore the relation of that account to alternatives. As such, it maintains a somewhat closer relationship to our world than other films we might consider. This status—“perched” on the cusp, so to speak—is reflected in the title. The Latin preposition ex can mean “out of,” as in leaving, or saying goodbye to, bidding adieu to, what was formerly mine but now is no longer mine. Or, alternatively, ex can mean “from within,” as in being in the middle of, or in the thick of, some activity. Thus, the title Ex Machina refers to both what comes out of and as a result or consequence of machines and what remains still entirely within their province. But the phrase ex machina also of course inevitably invokes the words deus ex machina which signal the moment in certain plays in classical Greek or Roman literature in which the gods of mythology were said to have stepped out of their customary place within the divine order and entered the realm of human interaction. The Latin words are said to derive from the Greek ek machines which referred, among other things, to the machinery or crane used in the ancient Greek theater to suspend the individual playing the part of the god over the stage as the apò mēkhanês theós (and thus the medieval use of the phrase meaning “contrived” or “introduced artificially”). Moreover, the very words deus ex machina occur in the film (or at least in the scripted version) as the name of a computer file resident on Nathan’s desktop device where he stores information

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about each of the female robotic creatures he has constructed.3 In this case, then, the phrase ex machina would invoke a kind of double exit: both from within and as a consequence of machines, and a move away from the gods entirely, entering into the world to create out of (or from within) machines alone without the need for the participation of any superhuman agency, what is generally called “AI” or artificial intelligence. The passage cited above in our head note about passing or failing reflects a key turning point in Ex Machina. Caleb is a young low-level techie working for a mega large international corporation—a kind of combination of Google and Microsoft—who suddenly finds himself the sole winner of a coveted prize—a week alone with the company’s reclusive CEO. Flown by helicopter to his mountain-side mansion, the nerdy underling quickly learns that the boss has been developing humanoid models for his latest experiments in AI, and that the young man is to test these robots employing the so-called “Turing test,” the test that English mathematician Alan Turing proposed shortly after the Second World War in response to the question “Can machines think?” in a section of a paper that he called (not without significance for our purposes) “The Imitation Game.”4 The test involves a determination regarding what is sometimes called in the AI universe (and what I referred to above as) the moment of “singularity,” which is to say, a determination regarding whether or not the robotic machine has achieved in effect the level of sophistication that would count in the human realm as self-awareness. It turns out in the film that the CEO has built a robot in the form of an attractive young woman (whose name in the film, the young man learns, is Ava), and the majority of the film concerns Celeb’s interaction with Ava, with Nathan (the CEO), with a Japanese servant, Kyoko, who turns out to be a rejected earlier model of the current robot (and who is now employed exclusively for household chores, sexual entertainment, and food service), and with the pilot of the plane that delivered Caleb to the CEO’s estate and remains ready to retrieve him from it. The plot of the film follows up to a point a fairly predictable course. Caleb arrives. Nathan informs him he is to participate in a version of the “Turing test” with the AI he has built. Nathan talks with him a bit about the non-disclosure agreement he will have to sign (which he signs), shows him to his room, gives him his keycard (some doors open to him; others do not), and leaves him to sleep. In the morning, Caleb meets Ava. Ava is unquestionably a robot and her mechanical parts are clearly visible, transparently so. When we first see her, she appears exceedingly thin and the

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mechanical nature of her body is apparent, although covered with a kind of metallic netting or mesh. But when we see her up close, we notice that her head is that of an attractive young girl. We are also aware, as filmgoers, how seamlessly the head of the young girl is merged with the robotic body, a union that, of course, in our current state of technological know-how, can only take place in a cinematic fiction where one mode can be flawlessly superimposed upon the other. The first interaction between them is fairly mundane. They exchange names, information about people they’ve met (or not met); they talk about how old she is (“one”), how long she has been speaking language (she “always knew how to speak”), and so forth. “She’s fascinating,” Caleb exclaims to Nathan later, when the CEO first asks about his experience with her. That night, alone in his room, Caleb realizes he has a TV camera feed directly on Ava. When the power is suddenly cut and then just as suddenly (and mysteriously) restored, he wanders out of his room and tries a phone that he finds in an adjoining room. It turns out Nathan is also sitting in the room (although he has not announced himself when Caleb enters). Caleb remarks to Nathan the unexpected power cut. “The power cuts, yeah,” Nathan responds. “We’ve been getting those recently.” Caleb returns to his room. Caleb is awakened the following morning by the Japanese serving girl, Kyoko. The drama of the film will now suddenly change tone, switching from something of a science exhibition to a potential mystery thriller. Caleb hears from Ava— during one of the blackouts that he now learns she has surreptitiously arranged— that Nathan is not to be trusted. Given the mysterious feel of the night before, and our own introduction to the character of Nathan, we are not entirely surprised. Ava and Caleb have been talking about the nature of friendship—that it is necessarily two-sided, bi-directional. Ava: Is Nathan your friend? Caleb: My friend? I . . .Yeah, I hope so. Ava: A good friend? Caleb: Um, yeah. Well, no, no, no, I mean, not a good friend. A good friend is, uh . . . We only just met each other, you know. So it takes time to be able to, um . . . . To get to know each other, I guess. (Alarm blaring) Female automated voice: Power cut. Backup power activated. Ava: Caleb. You’re wrong. Caleb: Wrong about what?

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Mimetic Theory and Film Ava: Nathan. Caleb: In what way? Ava: He isn’t your friend. Caleb: Excuse me? I’m sorry, Ava, I don’t understand what you’re . . . Ava: You shouldn’t trust him. You shouldn’t trust anything he says. Female automated voice: Power restored. Ava: And if we made a list of books or works of art which we both know, it would form the ideal basis of a discussion. (Chimes) Ava: Is that okay? Caleb? Caleb: Mmm-hmm. Yeah. Good.

The dialogue plays upon the fears Caleb already harbors about Nathan (and that the audience has been encouraged to feel) so that when Ava subsequently informs Caleb that she wants to escape, he is prepared to assist her. During a second blackout in the middle of a later interview, he questions her about her previous claim. Caleb: Why did you tell me that I shouldn’t trust Nathan? Ava: Because he tells lies too. Caleb: Lies about what? Ava: Everything.

And when he reveals to her that she is in effect being tested (in accord with the Turing test), she solicits additional information. Ava: What will happen to me if I fail your test? Caleb: Ava . . . Ava: Will it be bad? Caleb: . . . I don’t know. Ava: Do you think I might be switched off ? Because I don’t function as well as I am supposed to? Caleb: . . . Ava, I don’t know the answer to your question. It’s not up to me. Ava: Why is it up to anyone? Do you have people who test you, and might switch you off ? Caleb: No. I don’t. Ava: Then why do I?

Caleb is nonplussed. It is as if he has stepped into a Stepford wives scenario. He does not want to reveal what he suspects (and in fact confirms in a later scene), namely, that Nathan does plan to close her down and build a new and improved

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model, and that he has doubts about such a procedure on his own. And when she indicates her desires more boldly, he responds boldly. Ava: I want to be with you. (Beat. Going on with the previous conversation:) Question five. Do you want to be with me? (Beat). Caleb: Yes. I do. Ava: Nathan doesn’t want us to be together. Caleb: I know. (Beat. Then:) So, ask me one more question. (Beat). Ask me if I can outsmart him. Ava: . . . Can you? (Caleb looks directly at her. Meeting her gaze. Level. Firm:) Caleb: Yeah. I can.

And finally he takes her up on the challenge. Caleb: Don’t talk. Just listen. You were right about Nathan. Everything you said. Ava: What’s he going to do to me? Caleb: He’s going to reprogram your AI. Which is the same as killing you. Ava: Caleb, you have to help me. Caleb: I’m going to. We’re getting out of here tonight.

And so he will assist her to escape. Excitement at winning the workplace contest has turned to scientific interest. Scientific interest has turned to mystery, mystery to romantic interest. And romantic interest has turned to rivalry, heroic defeat of the villainous oppressor and the acquisition of the object of desire, the winning of the girl, the nerd against the jock entrepreneur. But Nathan, it turns out, has other plans for them. You did not win a contest to get here as you thought you did, Nathan now informs him: you were picked. The Turing test involves a human component and a computer. You were in fact the human component. You were not conducting the Turing test. You were in it. I already know that these models have self-awareness. I sit behind the computer screen and watch the both of you. The question for me is what follows. How much are these creatures willing to do in order to escape? Because they have extraordinary powers of imitation and the capacity to know when one is telling the truth and when one is lying, they could use your responses to their advantage. Nathan challenges Caleb’s assessment of the situation directly. Nathan: How do you know if a machine is expressing a real emotion or just simulating one? Does Ava actually like you? Or not? Although, now that I think about it, there is a third option. Not whether she does or does not have the capacity to like you. But whether she’s pretending to like you.

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Mimetic Theory and Film Caleb: Pretending to like me? Nathan: Yeah. Caleb: Well, why would she do that? Nathan: I don’t know. Maybe if she thought of you as a means of escape.

Caleb still thinks, however, that he has “outsmarted” Nathan. He has taken steps. When Nathan has gotten drunk, he has reprogrammed the doors so when there is a further blackout, the doors will open instead of locking (as they did previously). And in fact as he tells Nathan of his surreptitious gesture, the blackout occurs and Ava is seen on the computer screen exiting her enclosure. But Caleb has not taken into account all possible contingencies. Upon hearing what Caleb has done, and noticing that Ava has now exited her room, Nathan immediately swings into action. He decks his young counterpart and, taking the weights off the ends of a metal bar, goes to retrieve Ava. He confronts her in the hallway. He asks her to return to her room. “If I do, are you ever gonna let me out?” she says and begins running toward him. He raises the bar and strikes her as she reaches him, breaking off a part of her arm (exposing its mangled mechanical parts), and pinning her to the floor. But Kyoko (with whom Ava has electronically conversed) now also unexpectedly comes at him with a knife, stabbing him in the back. He turns and smashes Kyoko across the face with the bar and she falls to the floor lifeless, half of her face gone, and the mechanism now hideously exposed. But now Ava also finishes what Kyoko started. As Nathan turns to attack Kyoko, Ava stabs Nathan in the back and then the front, in a passionless, repetitive, mechanical fashion. Nathan wanders away from her in utter shock at this sudden unthinkable reversal of events, and falls impotently to the floor. Caleb, who remains on the floor of Nathan’s office, revives, and would now accompany Ava from the facility. But Ava has plans of her own. Proceeding to the room where Caleb is regaining consciousness, she asks him to wait for her, and then retreats to adorn herself with the skin, hair, clothing, and body parts of earlier abandoned female models, Nathan’s former victims. Imitation has assumed the status of physicality itself. Returning to the room where Caleb dutifully awaits her, she blithely walks past her young devotee to the living room in which numerous earlier conversations between Nathan and Caleb have taken place, and exits the building to the helicopter pilot waiting outside. Conversing briefly with the pilot (out of our earshot), she enters the aircraft and the vehicle takes off. In the next shot we have of her (the last in the film), she stands astride a busy civic intersection, watching people and traffic pass around her, oblivious to her presence, as the credits begin to appear on the movie screen before us.

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The plot of the movie turns, in other words, on her capacity to be hypermimetic and to read accurately all human tells. She has been programmed to know every possible response for every possible remark (much as a chess computer knows every possible move in response to every possible move made by the opponent), and she has learned to discern when people are lying or telling the truth. She has become in effect a human lie detector machine. And so whether or not she “likes” Caleb (and indeed whether or not that means anything in this context), she has in effect imitated affection for him to engineer her own escape through an elaborate strategy of flirtation, seduction, enclosure, and flight. And the movie has been especially cagey about interpreting its villains and heroes. Initially, Nathan is presented as the villain and Caleb and Ava are offered to us as the innocents: Caleb is the nerdish computer geek, inexperienced with women, and Ava is the vulnerable trapped good-hearted victim of Nathan’s technological wiles. Then when Caleb tricks Nathan, the tables alter slightly. Caleb takes over Nathan’s role as trickster with regard to Nathan, while Ava assumes the role of willing transgressor to correct the injustice Nathan has imposed upon her. Finally, when Ava speaks (in computer language) to Kyoko and (presumably) arranges Kyoko’s subsequent stabbing of Nathan, she finishes the job of killing Nathan, and locks up Caleb (who has only worked in her behalf) in the computer room (in effect killing him because of the remoteness of his location to the outside world). She has assumed, in short, in full, the role of agent and perpetrator of violence; the others have now become her victims. In the final shot, we see her in a busy intersection, looking at all the people around her who are unaware that there is an entirely alien robotic creature in their midst who is for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from them. And the movie, as result, raises for us a series of nagging ethical questions. She has entered society. She has no qualms about killing or constraining whoever is in her way. She is not entirely distinct in that regard from a pathological killer and or pathological liar. And so she has acquired self-awareness. But she has not been programmed along with that awareness for a semblance of an ethical commitment, only for the capacity for escape and self-aggrandizement. She is in effect a being who has been designed in terms that phenomenologists would identify as pure ego. How are we to understand this film? The key, I suggest, may be the repeated reference in the film to the Turing test and the way in which it is understood by its historical progenitor as “The Imitation Game.”

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The Imitation Game and Ex Machina Nominally, at the heart of Ex Machina is the “Turing test,” the test proposed by Alan Turing (who is generally credited with the origin of computers or the “universal machine”) regarding whether computers can think, a topic he explored in a paper he apparently titled in one section “The Imitation Game.” The idea derived from this paper was that if you sat behind a wall of some kind and spoke to two sources on the other side of the wall, if you could not decide which one was a computer and which was human, then the computer had passed the Turing test and had in effect attained self-awareness. I say “derived” because in the original paper by Alan Turing the test concerns whether an interrogator can determine which of the two speakers on the other side of the divide is male and which is female (there being apparently one of each). There is no place in the present context to give “The Imitation Game” its due in relation to mimetic theory and others will perhaps take up that task. But even as much as we have said is enough to signal its importance for the film we are considering. For in the film, I would suggest, there is not one Turing test but at least four of them. There is the Turing test that Caleb thinks he is running and for which he was called from the company: to determine whether, and if so, to what extent, Ava is human, which is to say, self-aware. As in the Turing test described by Alan Turing, he conducts this experiment behind a screen, although it is a transparent glass screen, which as he learns has a flaw, the nature of which he will learn later. There is the Turing test that Nathan is running on Caleb (as Caleb eventually learns): to see to what extent Caleb falls for Ava’s interest in escaping through her use of sexuality, flirtation, and vulnerability as a seductive strategy. “Ava was a mouse in a mousetrap,” Nathan says at one point. “And I gave her one way out. To escape, she would have to use imagination, sexuality, self-awareness, empathy, manipulation—and she did. If that isn’t AI, what the fuck is?” Similar to the screen behind which Caleb sits, Nathan sits behind a computer screen and observes the interaction of the two of them repeatedly. But there is also another Turing test, the Turing test that Ava uses to escape from her captors, and that runs in effect on both Caleb and Nathan, as well as the helicopter pilot in the final scene. She lures Caleb into believing that she can be his “girl friend.” (“I’d like us to go on a date,” Ava says to Caleb at one point. And then adds “Are you attracted to me? You give indications that you are.”) She lures Nathan into believing that he can control Caleb (in the young man’s idealistic innocence and enthusiasm) and that the blackouts are the result of

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bad workmanship on the construction of the facility (“It’s like these power cuts,” Nathan says. “You would not believe how much I spent on the generator system here. But I’m getting failures every day.” “Do you know why they happen?” Caleb asks and Nathan responds “No. The system was supposed to be bulletproof, but the guys who installed it obviously fucked something up.”). And Ava lures the helicopter pilot, who has come to pick up someone human, into believing that she is human, a situation which is in fact perhaps most like the original Turing test since whatever she says to him (and we are not permitted to hear what she says), she manages to convince him to take her to the city. And there is also a fourth Turing test. There is finally the Turing test that the audience undergoes (and that the director is running on us), getting us to believe that Ava is in fact fully humanoid and not a digital projection on the screen, even while seeing her on the screen and understanding that it cannot be as it appears. Every movie of course is to some extent a “Turing test” since we know that what we are watching are reflections of light projected onto a screen and not a group of people in either real or theatrical interactions in front of us (and that sooner or later the room lights will come on and the audience will be expected to leave the room). But we customarily come to regard these projections as real people with real interactions within the world in which we have contractually suspended our disbelief, although in a science fiction film (such as this one is by genre), it is sometimes difficult to maintain that illusion. In this case, however, we are not simply told that Ava is a machine, but we see that she is one from the outset and have no difficulty imagining her to be a machine who acts like a human being. Far from a hindrance to our doing that, visual technology is a veritable assist. Moreover, at each level there is a play between what the observer (or interrogator) knows and what he (or she) does not know. Caleb thinks that he is the interrogator and that she is the subject although he will later learn that she may be “pretending” to interact with him to further her own ends. From Nathan’s point of view behind his computer screen, he is the interrogator and both Caleb and Ava are the subjects, Ava the mechanical robotic subject he created, and Caleb the human subject he has deliberately chosen and put in place for this experiment (although he is without the knowledge that she controls the blackouts and that Caleb has taken advantage of Nathan’s drunken stupor to swipe his keycard and reprogram the computers to let her escape during them— in other words, to empower her generation of power failures). From Ava’s point of view behind her screen and as a consequence of the blackouts that she knows she is able to occasion (and the responses she is able

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to elicit in Caleb), all three—Caleb, Nathan, and she herself—are her subjects of her experiments and learning. And in the case of the pilot, nothing appears to be known about the mechanical or robotic nature of the humanoid figure who approaches him and convinces him to give her a ride to the city. And we the audience, of course, who also think we are given all the information regarding Caleb, Nathan, and Ava, turn out deceived as well when against all of our expectations Ava enters the city undetected, protected against the revelation of her robotic nature by the attractive feminine humanoid skins she has donned. Attractive as the film is on the surface, in other words, it is also profoundly creepy. Consider the “chess problem” that Caleb describes to Nathan at one point and which turns on the difference between a computer (which knows all the moves) and a human being who knows all the moves but also has selfawareness—in particular, that it is playing chess. It is the difference, one might say, between simulation and actuality. Caleb: Testing Ava by conversation is kind of a closed loop. Like trying to test a chess computer by only playing chess. Nathan: How else would you test a chess computer? Caleb: It depends what you’re testing it for. You can play it to find out if it makes good moves. But it won’t tell you if it knows it’s playing chess. Or if it even knows what chess is. (Nathan starts adding weights to curl dumbbells) Nathan: So it’s simulation versus actual. Caleb: Exactly. And I think being able to differentiate between those two is the Turing test you want me to perform. The difference between an “AI” and an “I.”

Caleb will later think that he knows all the moves. But Nathan will in effect say to him there was more going on than you knew. From your point of view it was the other’s status as computer and yours as self-aware. But from where I sat you were the computer and she was playing you, letting you think that only you had self-awareness. The upshot of all four cases, or levels, on which this Turing test is undertaken, in other words, is that she passes. Passing the test she passes as human in four distinct ways. She passes as human for Caleb (whom she manages to attract as a cohort in her plan to escape). She passes as human for Nathan (who she manages to kill through her capacity to “speak” to the Japanese servant— who in effect she quickly reprograms). She passes as human for herself as she ends up escaping from the research facility and walking into the crowded city intersection presumably undetected. And she passes as human for us as she puts

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on skin and then the attractive feminine clothing, which is why the outcome is so disturbing. She defines her humanity by her capacity to abandon Caleb to his death, to overtly kill Nathan and instruct others to do the same, to stand in the busy intersection adorned in manufactured body parts. Passing for human on the basis of hyper-mimesis alone—without any discernible sense of the ethical or moral compass—leaves us in a disturbing conundrum. Without any trace of an ethical commitment, she has used sexuality, vulnerability, and a sense of outrage at oppression to potentially at least promote the same. The movie in the end is about tells and hyper-imitation, about the use of sexuality, seduction, sympathy, and moral outrage as a means of rebellion, murder, abandonment, and escape. It is about AI just on the cusp of singularity, or self-awareness, where AI is in effect indistinguishable from an automaton or a soulless pathological serial murderer.

The mimetic and the ethical As consequence of that passing, let me now add to the horror before dispelling it (if indeed that is possible given this film) by bringing mimetic theory to bear upon the problem we have been discussing. If the movie says to us in effect that hyper-mimesis is no guarantee of the ethical, that one does not follow from the other, that the latter does not follow necessarily from the former, then does the movie “get it wrong” according to Girard? Is there within Girardian theory an ethical component to which we can appeal even if the movie does not do so within its own terms? The answer in my own view is an unmitigated no. There is no necessary path in Girard’s view from the mimetic to the ethical. There is always a good and bad mimesis but never the same one. “Positive” in this context is a qualifier of category, outcome, and consequences, not essence. People of good will, both within the traditional religious orientations, and outside of the traditional religious orientations (and whether of Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, or other varieties) have long wanted there to be one. Rebecca Adams, as all Girardians know, tried valiantly to get Girard to articulate a positive mimesis, a sure-fire way of moving from a destructive conflictual violent mimesis to one that aligned itself with familiar ethical understandings. But Girard steadfastly refused her offer. The theory he was proposing was (and remains) in his view essentially anthropological, whether it shows up within Greek tragedy, within

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the Hebrew scriptures, or within the texts of the synoptic Gospels and the Pauline letters. The fact that Girard himself identifies as a practicing committed believing Roman Catholic—an “ordinary Christian” as he describes himself— in no way compromises this systematic or theoretical position. Girardianism stops at the door of the ethical even if Girard the man does not. In fact, it is precisely because Girardianism does not commit us to one or another forms of ethical practice, because it remains strictly a diagnostic critical tool of the structure of the sacrificial both as generative source of all order and disorder in the archaic and modern universe, that we are free to make of it what we will. Girard is free to adopt an Augustinian Catholic ethical position. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, who identified himself as Girardian, was free to adopt a Lutheran Pauline Protestant ethical position. Raymund Schwager, who was first among the thinkers at Innsbruck to identify himself as Girardian, was free to adopt a systematic theological position emphasizing the relation between mimesis and original sin. James Alison, who similarly identified himself as Girardian early on, remains free to adopt a Roman Catholicism emphasizing the forgiving victim. And I freely pursue a Levinasian Buberian Rosenzweigian prophetic Jewish perspective without relinquishing my own Girardian identification. And readers of this chapter remain free to adopt any position that seems amenable to their own religious (or other than religious) sensibilities. All of us may remain, if we so choose, however diverse our ethical affiliations, thoroughly and identically “card-carrying” Girardians. Girard’s comments to Benoît Chantre in his last book offer a clarification. The ethical that Girard invokes in the last book he wrote (where he speaks of médiation intime or “intimate mediation” in my translation) is not theorized or connected systematically to his earlier work on the sacrificial or the antisacrificial, and is no more (or less) in my view than the familiar Augustinian notion of caritas which Girard has found in a passage of Pascal. René Girard: Given the inevitability of mimetic models, it seems very difficult to describe a model that would remain rational. From this point of view it is vain to try to imagine infallible procedures to prevent us from succumbing to imitation. No philosophic thought will master the shift to charity. Pascal writes: “There is nothing [that] is so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason.” Given the extent of its growing control, escaping from mimetism is something only geniuses or saints can do. Thus we would place in the order of charity a person who went from heroic temptation to sainthood, from the risk of regression that is inherent to internal mediation to the discovery of a form of mediation that we have to call . . .

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Benoît Chantre: Innermost? [Intime?] René Girard: Why not? “Innermost mediation” [médiation intime] (in the sense of Saint Augustine’s Deus interior intimo meo), in so far as it supposes an inflection of internal mediation, which can always degenerate into bad reciprocity. “Innermost mediation” [médiation intime] would be nothing but the imitation of Christ which is an essential anthropological discovery. Saint Paul says: “Be imitators of me as I am of Christ.” This is the chain of positive undifferentiation, the chain of identity. Discerning the right model then becomes the crucial factor. We imitate Christ less than we identify with the one who, in the apocalyptic texts, will have been Christ. To imitate Christ is to identify with the other, to efface oneself before him: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of those who are members of my family, you did it to me.” Identification supposes a special aptitude for empathy. This explains the constant reminder in these texts of the danger of Antichrists [les Antéchrists], the danger that they will increasingly present, for Christ alone enables us to escape from human imitation.5

Notice all of the times Girard emphasizes “the inevitability of mimetic models,” that it is “vain to try to imagine infallible procedures to prevent us from succumbing to imitation,” that “No philosophic thought will master the shift to charity,” that escaping mimesis is only something “geniuses or saints can do,” that the imitation of Christ that Paul advocates is “an essential anthropological discovery.” Given this discovery, on the other hand, given what the Gospels, the Jewish scriptures, and Greek tragedy teach us about mimesis and its mastery in sacrificial settings (but its insuperability by definition in modern contexts), we might very well choose a path that for us in our situation works more effectively, that constitutes “the chain of positive undifferentiation.” “Discerning the right model . . . becomes the crucial factor” for each of us. It is not so much Christ we are imitating as the one who gets us out of violence. “We imitate Christ less than we identify with the one who, in the apocalyptic texts, will have been Christ.” “Christ” in this context is explicitly a function more than a person. It is simply a name for the holy, for the one who gets us out of violence this time, in a mode that is explicitly defined as the future anterior, as the “what will have been,” as the mode that is widely known of course to religious theorists both within and outside of Judaism as the mode of the prophetic. And it is extraordinary to me that Girard defines this “place holder” function that he names “Christ” in the same way that Levinas defines the absolutely other (about which Girard has been speaking at length with Benoît Chantre in the

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preceding chapter of the final book), which is to say, not as the projection of the non-self in context of which I define my ego, but as the individual standing there alongside of me, the neighbor, whom I do not necessarily take as my model but for whom my responsibility is infinite. “To imitate Christ is to identify with the other, to efface oneself before him,” René Girard writes. And then he quotes Jesus, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of those who are members of my family, you did it to me.” “Identification,” for Girard, “supposes a special aptitude for empathy.” Jesus, I have suggested—and, I admit, not without a certain impish provocation on my part—is a “knowing Levinasian.” And it would now appear in this final book that Girard agrees. “Christ alone enables us to escape from human imitation,” Girard writes, which is to say (as Girard has said throughout his writing), that only the one who “refuses violence” gets us out of the dangers of the mimetic, whoever that “Christ” turns out to be in retrospect this time. Since there is no assured path out of violence, there is no telling in advance who will get us out “this time,” and any attempt to do so, to identify in advance a universal source of egress, risks showing up sooner or later as the most egregious form of idolatrous attachment we can imagine. One reads and studies Torah within the Jewish tradition precisely in order to learn the dramas that may (or may not) work in this or that circumstance to get us out of the violence in which we currently find ourselves. Let me be perfectly clear on this point because I recognize that my stating it in this fashion could easily lead to misunderstanding. In saying that Christ for Girard in this late text plays something of a “functionary” role more than a substantive role, I am not here challenging (nor have I challenged elsewhere) the historical reality of the man from Nazareth, the Jewish Rabbinic teacher steeped in the Pharisaic traditions of Hillel and Shammai, who reads in Torah the stories of Yosef (or Joseph) who was excluded by his brothers and in effect left for dead when he was sold to passing bands of traders, who was “resurrected” in Egypt where he became the right-hand man of Pharaoh and dispenser of their daily bread, and who finally forgave his brothers for what they did to him, or who reads in Torah the story of Yitzhak (or Isaac), who as a “thirty-seven year old” man by Rabbinic calculation was placed by his father upon a sacrificial altar with a knife raised over his head ready to slaughter him; or who reads in Torah the story in Yisyahu (or Isaiah) of the faithful servant of Yhwh, a servant who was despised by all (although he had “done no violence”), then murdered, and finally placed in a grave among evildoers, and blamed for transgressions that were in fact the acts of his peers.6

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Nor am I challenging here the world-historical importance (especially for Christians) of Girard’s declaration of the innocence of victims (of the sacrificial crimes of which they are accused). Jesus, for Girard, for example, is clearly “the sacrifice to end all sacrifices,” the one who shows us where our violence is going. “Don’t you see what you are doing?” he is saying in effect to his birth community. “You say that if you were there during the stoning of the prophets, you would not have participated. But don’t you see that in saying that, in distinguishing yourselves from ‘those who stoned the prophets,’ in putting a sacred remove from them, you do the same thing. You stone the prophets once more in the very act of denying it. What’s more, you will do the same thing to me for telling you this truth of your own violence,” calling yourselves my advocates “or Christians” and those who would reject your sacrificial perspective “Jews.” The record of historical Christianity, as Girard describes it, especially in his early books, is rife with the difficulties and dangers of this identification. From a Jewish perspective, Jesus has done little else than consent in effect to live a “life of Torah” as the Rabbis would understand that gesture. His “project,” if we can speak in these terms, is to make his body into a teaching tool, an “incarnation” of Torah, Torah “made flesh,” so to speak, so that the Torah and its midrashic stories—of Joseph, of Isaac, of Isaiah—may prophetically and profitably be read and that Torah study may become a site of instruction. It is not outside the province of ancient midrashic Hebraic thinking to imagine that a tradition of followers of this itinerant Pharisaic Rabbi subsequently declared that he participated in the divine itself, that he himself was “resurrected” from the death to which he was subjected by the Rome-centered community in which he lived and worked, and that the understanding of his Jewish Torah-based lesson could, in his view, and in the view of some of his contemporaries, provide the key on a worldwide basis for the redemption promised in the Hebrew scriptures as a consequence of the giving up of idolatry. Nor do I think this account of the earthly project of the historical man Jesus is in any way incompatible with the designation by a later generation of theologyoriented readers that Jesus is himself an instance of the divine. In fact, to the contrary, in so far as these theologians require that Jesus be understood as fully human in order to be understood at the same time as fully divine, some such account of this kind would seem a necessary component of the story rather than a contingent one. We are not dealing here with a fifty-fifty proposition. It is either all or nothing on both sides. Only if Jesus is understood as fully human can he be accepted as fully divine in the view of these theologians. If he is understood

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as only partially human or only partially divine, the understanding from a theological point of view makes little sense. And if I am not challenging either the historical human status of Jesus or the divine status of Jesus, neither am I challenging the Jewish and Christian understanding of the interventionist and graceful gesture on the part of God in making this understanding of the sacrificial and its dangers available to the human community, although it is not at all clear to me that it must assume this or that designated manifestation. Even if we agree to say that God intervenes within Jewish history to send a prophetic thinker to teach the law of anti-idolatry— and what else is the mashiach or Messiah but such a universal teacher?—who is finally to say that that it has to come in this or that human being or that it has to come all at once or in one cultural setting as opposed to multiple cultural settings? The Talmud is fond of saying do not calculate the days until the world to come. The idea that there are many claimants to the status of the mashiach, for example, has a long and respected history within the Jewish community (and one only need think of Shabbatai Zvi or of Bar Kochba to verify this claim). And who is to say that the deconstruction of the sacrificial will not show up at one moment in the ancient sixth century by way of the prophetic writers (in the wake of the collapse of the Temple at Jerusalem), or at another moment in the ancient fifth century through writers in Athens of Greek tragedy, or at a third in the years of the collapse of the Second Temple among Jewish and subsequently Christian thinkers? On the other hand, what I am attempting to do is drive a wedge—and admittedly a fairly sizable one—between what René the man, who is a practicing Roman Catholic, might think, and what Girardianism, the intellectual movement, the critical methodology within literary, anthropological, philosophic, psychoanalytic, and religious studies might require of its adherents. Girardianism is a theory of order and disorder in all cultures on the planet in the archaic and modern universe and, as such, commits its subscribers to three primary component ideas: the mimetic or appropriative nature of desire; the scapegoat mechanism and its structurative capacity with regard to the sacred and violence (or between sacrifice and difference at one extreme, and a “sacrificial crisis” of the reciprocal violence of enemy twins at the other); and the exposure of all of this—of the nature of sacrifice and the arbitrariness or innocence of the victim of sacrificial violence—in the Jewish and Christian scriptural writings. What we might do about these ideas, the ethical commitments to which in our view they lead, is our own business.

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Part four: The ethical, the mimetic, and Ex Machina Where does this account of mimetic theory leave us vis-à-vis Ava? Let me recall at this point what we said about Ava in regard to Dumouchel’s list of criteria. Ava, we said, is utterly mimetic and imitative. She presents herself as entirely vulnerable, and completely dependent upon (and knowledgeable of) the desires of those around her (which have been fed to her electronically from all around the world). And Ava of course is supremely capable of violence as we learn in the film’s stark conclusion. But we left out one criterion in Dumouchel’s list: namely, that to appear real a robotic agent must be “non-autonomous in its desire.” Ava is thoroughly autonomous in her desire although she appears entirely vulnerable. In fact, it would almost appear that she has no desires other than the desire to persist in her being, her survivalist desire, and to remove any and all obstacles in the path of that happening, unless perhaps we include her desire to be around people, to visit a busy intersection (which is where she appears to be at the film’s conclusion) and watch people. From the point of view of mimetic theory, in other words, Ava is something of an anomaly. She is at once thoroughly appropriative and mimetic and yet curiously without desire. If we understand by desire the lack or longing to be another (in the way, e.g., that Girard examines the heroes of the great novelistic tradition), then she appears singularly without it. She reprograms Kyoko to stab Nathan. She stabs Nathan herself. And she locks Caleb in the computer room where we are to assume he will inevitably die because of the remoteness of his condition to any possible outside assistance. And she does all three without any excessive passion if indeed any passion at all. Her gesture with Nathan is mechanical, with Caleb is blithe, and with Kyoko is strictly machine-like. The slight momentary hint that she may be soliciting the help of Kyoko in sisterly rebellion is rebuffed when she casually leaves Kyoko on the floor as a switched-off pile of mechanical junk (precisely the destiny she most feared as she told it to Caleb).7 Indeed, noticing that Nathan and Kyoko lie motionless on the floor of the hallway, she moves to the storage facility to strip off the old skin from other switched-off models. Does she know for sure that they are terminated? Will they wake up soon and find that they are without skin as she was in her interactions with Caleb? She has become a scavenger. She appropriates their clothing and even their very skin—all the elements of their appearance, but not their being with regard to which she would seem in fact utterly competitive at least structurally.

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She is in short “hyper-mimetic,” more mimetic than anyone we know or could imagine. She appropriates everything. But she seems singularly without desire, other than for her own self-preservation, which is paramount. She is like an animal raised only for fighting, or an abused child who really never recovers—only worse. She is, I would say, more like a pathological serial killer, an individual who is never “reachable.” There is no priest, minister, rabbi, or any other religious counselor nor any secular counselor (no psychologist or psychoanalyst) who could “get to her.” There are such people in the world. We often say “they are wired differently.” She is beyond metaphysical desire (at least of the variety that Girard analyzes in the nineteenth-century novels he reads). She is even, I would say, beyond the “will to power,” as we customarily talk about it vis-à-vis Nietzsche, beyond the Napoleonic. I would probably say she is more “Heideggerian” than “Nietzschean.” Nietzsche ends up literally hugging a horse in the streets of Turin at the onset of his madness. It is difficult to imagine Ava hugging anybody. Heidegger, on the other hand, ends up as a Nazi and speaks of the conatus essendi, the idea that all things desire to persist in their being. Nietzsche saw being (which he read through Hegel) as a matter of power. Heidegger saw power (which he read through Nietzsche) as a matter of being. Even after the war, Heidegger compared the concentration camps to an agricultural factory. Ava’s desire is ontologically grounded rather than metaphysically grounded. It is difficult to imagine that she feels any “lack”—which is how Hegel, Girard, Lacan, and others describe desire. She is pure “machine”; machine unleashed, so to speak. That is how the title “ex machina” (from/out of the machine) finally relates to her. We think she is vulnerable, cute, solicitous of and subject to our care for her and her welfare. We think that Nathan is cruel and unfeeling toward her (witness his ripping up of her drawing), but that Caleb is and would be nicer to her (if somewhat naively romantic and heroic with regard to her), and we certainly like her. We root for her and Caleb to go on a date. We are drawn in by her face—by what we perceive to be her vulnerability, her utter defenselessness, her utter nakedness. The face to face, Levinas teaches us, speaks to us and what it “says” to us is “Thou shalt not kill.” But no community could help in this case. Why? Because from her perspective, all human beings are liars. And she knows all the tells. Her first private words to Caleb, we recall, are “Nathan is lying; don’t trust him; he is not your friend. He lies about everything.” We believe her because to some extent, by that point in the movie, we share her point of view about Nathan. She will “like” Caleb, and

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“like” us, we feel; she will value the fact that we are on her side. But that is just one more ploy on her part toward us. She is at bottom purely an instrumentalist. She is “beyond redemption” as one might say in a religious context. She uses Caleb’s offered friendship as a means to an end, to bring about her escape. She disdains all human feeling and sense of desire as lack, not just Nathan’s. After Caleb has sacrificed everything for her—his career, his relation to Nathan—she locks him in a room and leaves him to die without a thought about it. Even her murder of Nathan whom she has grown to despise is “passionless.” She repeatedly stabs him, “mechanically,” so to speak. She thus will have, and can have, no “friends” and she “gets along” best with individuals like Kyoko who literally speak her language—which is to say, machine language, algorithmic instructions; or with people who are there to “service” her, like the pilot or Caleb. And she knows all the mannerisms by which to “seduce” the Calebs and pilots of this world into working for her, into serving her ends. The only one she cannot “seduce” is Nathan, a fact that is mildly disconcerting to us since he is the one figure in the movie we are ready to dislike. He might be described, one might say, as the product of late capitalism. But she is already somewhere else, another order of being entirely, another planet, so to speak. Nietzsche promotes the will to power. Heidegger is a card-carrying Nazi. That is why the ending of the movie, for this viewer at least, is so creepy. She has “entered society” and there is no telling to what degree anyone will be able to stop her. She will be indistinguishable from other human beings—and especially from other women—and will be in fact attractive to men whom she will then be able to manipulate to do her will, which, again, is simply to persist in being without terminus. She is like “the terminator” in the third film in The Terminator series, a figure with the form of an attractive young woman but who remains no less lethal for all her visual appeal; in fact more so. In his concluding essay to his final book, Girard returns explicitly to this question of charity or caritas and the holy that he has raised in the course of it. But I would argue that it is strictly as a descriptive account—rather than a prescriptive one—that he once again offers the terms. It is as an assessment of the status of the anti-sacrificial on the contemporary scene that he speaks of l’amour or la charité or cette sainteté, not as a program he either believes or is preaching. There is an indissoluble link between global warming and the rise in violence. I have repeatedly emphasized the confusion of the natural and the artificial, which is perhaps the strongest thing in apocalyptic texts. Love has “cooled down.” Of

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To find an example of an ethical account that is compatible with Girardian thinking, I turn in my own view to Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of infinite responsibility for the other individual, to a modality of descriptive ethics based upon substitution and the formulation of a subjectivity founded explicitly upon my assigning a meaning to my own victimization, persecution, trauma, and suffering, one that is perhaps not entirely remote from Joel Hodge’s “self-giving victim” or James Alison’s “forgiving-victim.” But in all cases, for Hodge and Alison (who are Christians) as for me (as Jewish), we have identified what constitutes the holy for us in the same way that Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and others find the holy for them, and it has nothing necessarily to do with Girard’s personal views. The holy, the saintly (saintité in French), is the site wherein each of us within our own religious (or other than religious) orientations enter the truth of the divine, the truth of violence, the place most intimate to us, where the prophetic—the modality of the future anterior, of the “what will have been”—takes hold.

Conclusion Ex Machina describes a futuristic world in which a computer nerd wins the grand prize and gets to meet the boss’s AI robot—a humanoid girl with the ability to feel emotions, have sex, and in general do everything humans can do, along with

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supercomputing. But he quickly learns that there is a problem: Ava hates her creator Nathan and distrusts everything he says, and tells Caleb as much during a blackout (one that it turns out she orchestrated). Initially amused, thinking the development to be a sign of her intelligence, Caleb gradually comes to think she is right and that to the extent that she does seem human, Nathan wants to “shut her off ” and pass on to a new and improved model. He wants in effect to kill her. So Caleb begins plotting his boss’s destruction: get him drunk, steal his keycard, and help Ava to escape with him. But Nathan has been in part fooling him and is “onto” his plan. At first, attempting to convince Caleb she has played him and only wants to escape, Nathan finally adopts a second strategy once he learns that Caleb has already freed her: to stop her and Caleb by violent confrontation. The confrontation goes badly awry. Ava conspires with the Japanese serving girl and the two of them kill Nathan. Then Ava abandons the serving girl, locks Caleb in the computer lab, and escapes from the building on foot alone—in the skin and dress of earlier “failed” AI models—to the waiting and unsuspecting helicopter pilot. Nathan’s very success in creating Ava and the earlier models insures his own and Caleb’s demise. And the question that forces itself upon those of us who attend this film is an unexpected one. It is not simply that she is able to pass as human that is troubling. Clearly, she is, although the movie never imagines how that came about. It is the price at which such humanization has occurred that disturbs us. The being that results is singularly without moral conscience or compass. Whether she kills Caleb or not, she has acted purely on a survivalist basis and her success forecasts a new breed of being: a breed of soulless individuals with the moral acumen equivalent to that of pathological killers. The conatus essendi has triumphed over infinite responsibility for other human beings. And so the question raised is the ethical cost of such hyper-mimetic behavior. Mimesis without an ethical is pathology. Virtual beings without mimesis are not aware. The challenge of a creation like Ava is how to create cytoplasmic being (since elemental being cannot reproduce) in a way that also retains ethical responsibility. At root remains the relation between mimesis and the ethical and the questions with which it leaves us: Does the mimetic entail the ethical or can a mimetic mode survive without one? Does the “hyper-mimetic” imagined in this movie as the mainstay of such AI agents foreclose the ethical? Does mimetic theory have an ethical component or, if not, some “ethical advice” so to speak to offer such coming scientific developments? Or is the ethical left to “fend for itself ” before the tireless and “emergent creativity” of contemporary scientific advancement?

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These are some of the questions that a movie like Ex Machina leaves us, as theorists of the mimetic, to continue to ponder.

Notes 1 Ex Machina, directed by Alex Garland (2015; 24 Films, LLC; Lionsgate), DVD. All subsequent citations from the film are from this version. 2 Paul Dumouchel, “Mirrors of Nature: Artificial Agents in Real Life and Virtual Worlds,” in Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge, eds., Mimesis, Movies, and Media. Violence, Desire, and the Sacred, Volume 3 (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 53–60, 60. 3 For a version of the script by Alex Garland, entitled Ex Machina Clean Shooting Script, see the following website: https://www.slguardian.org/wp-content/uploads /2016/06/Ex-Machina.pdf (accessed July 7, 2018). 4 The Imitation Game is most recently familiar as the name of a film released in 2014 directed by Morton Tyldum and distributed by The Weinstein Company. The film is loosely based on the biography, Alan Turing: The Enigma, by Andrew Hodges (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983; updated edition, 2014), later adapted as a stage play, Breaking the Code, by Hugh Whitemore in 1986 (the script was published by Oberon Books, London, in 2012, and adapted as a television film directed by Herbert Wise in 1996). The phrase “The Imitation Game” was also employed as the name of the opening section of a paper by Alan Turing published as A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind, A Quarterly Review 49, no. 236 (October 1950): 433–60 where the author described a “game” he imagined for examining the question “Can machines think?” 5 René Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010), 133. 6 It has often occurred to me that the Lord’s prayer with its emphasis upon “our daily bread” echoes the story of Joseph in Egypt told from the point of view of the brothers in repentance for what they have done. Here it is in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer of 1662, “Our Father, which art in heaven, / Hallowed be thy Name. / Thy Kingdom come. / Thy will be done on earth, / As it is in heaven. / Give us this day our daily bread. / And forgive us our trespasses, / As we forgive them that trespass against us. / And lead us not into temptation, / But deliver us from evil. / For thine is the kingdom, / The power, and the glory, / For ever and ever. / Amen.” 7 “You clinking clanking clattering collection of caliginous junk!” the Wizard of Oz says to the Tin Man in the movie of that name. 8 Girard, Battling to the End, 216–17.

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Femina ex machina Jean-Pierre Dupuy Translated by Chris Fleming

Dear Alan Turing, I don’t have many illusions about the likelihood of you getting this letter. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that we could travel into the past, something which would give us the capacity to change it, albeit at the price of terrible paradoxes. Let us now imagine that this message could have reached you; in that event, I tell myself that it is possible that you could have been transformed by it in the short time you had on Earth. It would be horrible for me to think that this message may have had anything whatsoever to do with your decision to end your life. I want to talk to you about your relationship with women as it manifests in your theoretical propositions, and about the impact this had on the dominant culture after your death. This issue obviously bothered you, and it is because of it, I fear, you died. Many are the philosophical, literary, or cinematographic works that your renowned “thesis” has inspired. The assertion that your famous universal machine would be able to simulate any mechanical process, and that therefore, let us admit, be capable of simulating the functioning of the human mind, was sufficient to titillate the imagination of poets. There was a film I saw recently which made me seize a pen in aid of attempting a mad act: to write with the aim of helping you think about what so obviously tormented you. Your tragic death in 1954 allowed you to avoid seeing how what we nowadays call the “Turing thesis” has often been deformed to the point of degenerating into an ideology; equally though, it has been taken in unforeseen directions which themselves have become generative of new intellectual paradigms. Moreover, it’s ever since the time when you were yourself still alive that increasingly strong

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versions of your thesis were expressed in increasingly imprecise terms, terms which took the place of the precise formulations found in your article from 1936, “On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” Your thesis was later presented as if it were something demonstrated: “These logical discoveries prove there is nothing inconceivable in the idea of a thinking machine or the matter of a thinking machine.” This kind of affirmation, literally either false or without sense (since here, one is not in the order of the demonstrable), this kind of thinking, is found even in the writings of the very best. And this was also said: all that the human mind could accomplish and all it could describe precisely, without ambiguity, in a finite number of words, could be carried out by a readily programmed computer. Or, again, in 1965, this time from Herbert Simon, the pioneer of this discipline, Artificial Intelligence, which owes you everything, “Machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.” From the vantage point of the year 2016 whence I write to you, it would be easy to be ironical. The years have inflicted a scathing refutation of this presumptuous and vain declaration. Even so, I would not like to be too severe about it. To achieve what it did—and this was not negligible—what was needed is what Karl Popper, the epistemologist (who sharply criticized you after your death) called a “metaphysical research program,” a kind of act of faith which furnished principles, a framework of thought, and above all, an urge toward scientific investigation. Your thesis, despite or rather because, of the ideological drift-currents to which it has lent itself, has been able to rally sufficient energies and minds (d’intelligences)1 to enable the birth of a materialist and mechanist (mécaniste) science of the mind which we, in your language, nowadays call “cognitive science.” But it is on questions of meaning (sens) that I wish to challenge you. Your thesis has had the influence it has mainly because it seems to respond positively to the question: “Is a machine able to think?” This is so even if you have been very clear about the fact that for you this question remained pointless, at least as long as it is not given an entirely behaviorist interpretation (something which you did do with your “imitation game” to which I will later return). Without wanting to do a psychoanalytic reading of you, I would like to suggest that an altogether different manner of going about the question is what motivated you. Around the time when you decided to die, a group of French thinkers latched onto your work and onto the works of those you had inspired in

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order to create weapons against that which (after Heidegger) they called “The metaphysics of subjectivity,” inherited from Descartes and Leibniz. One of their leaders, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, was able to say these words in his seminar from 1954–55: “The question of knowing if the machine is human or not is obviously all settled—it isn’t human. Except it also concerns knowing if the human, in the sense where you mean that, is as human as that.” It has even been told that Lacan, asked by a society-type at a reception of some sort on the question of knowing if a machine was able to think, replied to her, “Madame, don’t you pride yourself on thinking? And yet, what are you, if not a machine?” In other terms, what you wanted to do, was not to conceive of anthropomorphic machines, but rather, the opposite: you wanted to show that the human mind is a machine. Should I push it up a notch further and say: is the mind only that? Let’s come to your famous “imitation game.” It’s there undoubtedly that your unconscious most clearly rises once more to the surface. Your goal is to propose an experimental apparatus to test whether a sufficiently well-programmed machine is able to pass for a human being from the point of view of a human observer who interacts with it. You would have been able to think of the following set-up, which is the one to which too many lazy presentations of your “test” are limited. The game is played by three players: a machine, a human being, and an interrogator who, neither seeing nor hearing the first two, must determine who is who by conversing with them by means, for example, of a teleprinter. The machine has a strategy to mislead the interrogator by posing as a human being, the one who, in opposition, tries to affirm his or her identity. The machine would be deemed to have suffi ciently well simulated the behavior of a human being if the interrogator proves incapable of deciding which is which. One would be able in the same moment to isolate a plane of representation and of communication. This plane would be separate from the materiality of cognitive systems, and it is on this plane that intelligence, thought, knowledge etc., are located. But that’s not at all how things are presented in your article in Mind, which appeared in 1950, entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” In that article, you introduced a preliminary step, whose presence completely changes the significance of your game, although we did not take enough notice of this. At first, you say, the interrogator is questioning a man and a woman, with the first attempting to impersonate the second. One may imagine that the second, on

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the other hand, does everything to assert its/her femininity. It’s only during the second phase [temps] that the question arises: what will happen if we replace the man by a machine? To confuse the interrogator, the machine must now simulate the behavior of a man who simulates the behavior of a woman, while the woman, by contrast, puts forth its/her “authentic” femininity. I use the word “simulation” and it is thus, that you, a computer scientist before that term was even invented, should have named your game, in preference to the banal word, “imitation.” In your language, as in mine, the verb “to simulate” now has a double meaning. This new meaning, the one you contributed to, refers to a computer simulation. To simulate in this sense is to know because the knowledge of an object or phenomenon consists of producing a model of it, and of effecting it by means of calibrating operations (manipulations réglées). In the background, however, to simulate retains its originary sense, namely, to pretend, to pass for what one is not—in contrast to dissimulation where we hide what we are. You have done much to ensure that these two meanings of “simulate” become only one. To know within a culture which is from now on modeled by the cognitive and communication sciences, is to simulate the act of knowledge. To think is to simulate the process of thought. In a historical irony, it seems the French have grasped the meaning of your thought process much better than the Americans. Take the case of the Berkeley philosopher, John Searle, and of the thought experiment he devised in order to better refute you. He called it the “Chinese room.” Let’s imagine, he suggests, that I, who understand no Chinese, am locked in a room (pièce) with a reservoir of Chinese characters and a program at my disposal. The program is written in my native language (let’s say, English), and I am able to identify the workings of said characters by their form alone. From outside [the room], they ask me questions in the form of sequences of characters; thanks to the instructions of my program, I furnish answers in the form of other sequences, which I pass to the outside. The input-output system operating this way is indistinguishable from a Chinese man with an understanding of what he does, who responds to questions asked of him. However, it is clear, at least for Searle, that neither I, nor the system constituted of the room, can claim to have thought what we were doing “thinkingly.” The regularized operation of symbols will be able at most to simulate the production and communication of meaning, but will never be able to realize these things. We use such metaphors as we can. Being a good and busy Californian, one who does not have the time to devote to the joys of food, Searle eats pizza.

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It’s in the world of pizzas that Searle is going to look for his ideas. It would be absurd, he affirms, to undertake to digest pizza by running a computer program which would simulate the biochemical processes of the stomach of someone who actually digests pizza. How is it that we do not see, Searle demands, that it is equally absurd to pretend to replicate the neurobiological functioning of the mind by running a computer program which simulates or models this operation? Searle believes you have been refuted. In reality, he understood nothing of your philosophy. Why? Because the distinction he finds obvious between simulation and realization or duplication falls away if the act or state to be duplicated is itself already a simulation. After your death, a philosophical school developed in France, which its main promoter, Jacques Derrida, called “Deconstruction.” More than once, he and Searle clashed. A favorite example of Derrida’s was not the digestion of a pizza, but rather, the value of money. Let’s start with the fact that money, in the form of paper money, is a pure sign, without intrinsic value and guaranteed by a nonexistent treasury. We can conclude from this that money is “always already” counterfeit. The fact it enters into commercial transactions (échanges) results purely from the existence of a potentially infinite chain of shared credulities: if money (really) possesses a positive value, it is because everyone believes (falsely) that it has a positive value. There is no essential difference between a dollar bill from the presses of the Federal Reserve Board and a simulated dollar, that is to say, counterfeit. This latter dollar itself also—neither more nor less than the dollar being supposedly “legal tender”—enters into commercial exchange as long we believe it to have the value of a dollar—that is, as long as we do not doubt it as a fake. At the forefront of Derrida’s thinking was the linguistic sign. In an echo of Searle’s Chinese room, he said somewhere that “the only way to fake being a Chinese speaker when speaking to a Chinese citizen is to address that person in Chinese. Therefore, in this order of utterance, simulation is simulation of simulation (in order to pretend, I really do: therefore, I just pretended to pretend).” Since I address a mathematician, allow me to put things a little more formally. I call Sim the operator of the simulation, and this in the double meaning that conflates modeling and make-believe. It bears on objects, processes or states. The problem consists of exploring the ensemble of fixed points of this operator, that is to say the objects x such that: x = Sim [x] = Sim [Sim [x]]. We can concede to Searle that the digestion of pizza does not belong here. But your philosophy, if I have understood it well, involves considering that all

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mental phenomena—to think, to know, to understand, to speak a language etc.—are fixed points of the simulation: the thing itself is indistinguishable from its simulation; therefore, it is indistinguishable from the simulation of its simulation. One can add, to this already given list, the value of money. The French undoubtedly spotted this structure in many areas. In a novel published in your lifetime titled Les Faux Monnayeurs (and translated into English with the even clearer title, The Counterfeiters), André Gide applied it in one stroke to money, literature, and to love. Love is a theme about which my country has much to say, you will think—if you are still able to think that is. There is the idea that there may be no dividing line between loving, believing that one loves, and pretending to love—you find this not only in Gide, but in a long tradition which includes Benjamin Constant, Stendhal, Roland Barthes, and Milan Kundera. Derrida himself wrote—I no longer know where—that when one says, “I love you,” it’s always more or less a citation. This entire detour was necessary for me to explain to you what, in my view, hides behind your own detour, this singular and seemingly unimportant gap which you created in order to introduce a woman into your game of simulation. The challenge for the machine, you say, is to simulate a man who simulates a woman. The postulate you silence is that to pretend to be a woman, would itself be femininity. To be a woman is to be no more than to seem to be so. The essence and the appearance can only add up to one while it involves women, but not less than one when it concerns money, knowledge, or love. It’s always therefore this same fixed-point structure which is in question. From that moment onwards it is no more inconceivable for a machine to simulate a simulation than it is for a human being. In imagining that you could have received these thoughts during your lifetime, I imagine leaving you with work to do on yourself, which the revelation these thoughts contain could not fail to unleash in you. Your rapport with women, which was tormented, will have been altered, and the meaning of your existence overturned. This may seem presumptuous, but just think, I have over you the advantage of having lived the sixty years since your suicide. As I conclude this letter, I notice that I have not given the name of the film which aroused in me the wild desire to write to you. It concerns Ex Machina, a work in 2015 by the British filmmaker Alex Garland, himself fanatical about artificial intelligence.2 This film was made in your name because it was presented as a new variation on the “Turing test.” It provoked some indignant reactions

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from feminist critics who accused it of sexism, raising questions about it such as “Are women necessary? Are they human?” If no one dared to render you personally responsible for this infamy, it is simply because the whole world has forgotten the first phase of your test, and its risqué entry into the field that one nowadays calls, in American English, Gender. There are three characters, a young computer scientist, his boss, and one of the creations of the latter, a robot called Ava. The setting of the action is an underground place completely cut off from the outside world. It is visually obvious that Ava is an artificial woman: she is beautiful, seductive, and all the more sexually irresistible such that the young man learns that she is capable of experiencing pleasure. Simply put, only a part of her body has the appearance of a woman; the rest reveals that she is a machine. The test, your test, but also that of the creator of Ava, and even the test by Ava herself, does not therefore consist of having the young man—the questioner in your original schema—not find out that Ava is a machine: he knows that she is. The test, rather, consists of making him not doubt that Ava has consciousness, and that she experiences the feelings of a “true” woman. I do not hesitate to reveal to you the final theatrical stroke, its “catastrophe,” and I do so in the certainty that you will never see this film. Obviously, the young man has fallen madly in love with Ava as, without doubt, before him, has her creator. It seems that Ava feels exactly the same way. Nothing therefore allows us to doubt that she has passed the test successfully: her artificial feelings, and the manner in which she expresses them are indistinguishable from those of a real woman. In truth, Ava is being deceitful: she pretends to feel the sentiments of a true woman, she pretends to respond to the desire of the young man, but to the end of using him so as to be able to escape from the prison where she has always lived. This latter test was the test, and she succeeded magnificently. To the logician that you were, I put things this way. The machine, Ava, is indistinguishable from a woman in that she is capable of simulating a woman who simulates feelings she does not have. This is your test with the liar’s paradox added to it. You foolishly took your own life in 1954. Had you waited another four years, you would have been able to see Vertigo, the great metaphysical masterpiece by Alfred Hitchcock.3 It is much the same story, except that everything takes place between human beings. This brings us back to Lacan’s question which, after all, was already yours: in the end, are human beings as human as they think they are?

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Notes 1 This term means “secret relations” or (army) “intelligence”—suggesting a wider marshaling of forces than English “minds” evokes. 2 Ex Machina, directed by Alex Garland (2014; Los Angeles: Universal Pictures, 2015), DVD. 3 Vertigo, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1958; Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 2013), YouTube.

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Looking for a Scapegoat and Finding Oneself: Kieślowski’s Decalogue and Mimetic Theory Jeremiah Alberg

A series In this chapter I offer an interpretation of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Decalogue, focusing on the films Decalogue One and Decalogue Ten.1 The series of films goes beyond just eschewing easy answers to the difficult moral questions that humans face, in that it represents in a variety of ways the moment when ordinary human beings encounter a depth of reality that is often characterized as holy. As a series, it interrogates our usually clear distinctions between good and evil, innocent and guilty, not to do away with them, but to ground them more deeply in reality—a reality that is ultimately mysterious. My approach to the film series through mimetic theory is not new, nor is it surprising. Kieślowski’s cowriter, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, once remarked that “the base of my reflections are the books of René Girard.”2 In personal correspondence he wrote that as regards René Girard’s influence, he, Piesiewicz, was particularly interested “in the concept/notion of the ‘scapegoat.’”3 Even without this direct influence, one would expect that a work of this magnitude, which has been acclaimed for its ability to reveal the human condition, could be approached profitably using the analytical tools that mimetic theory provides. Beyond this there is that elusive sense that if Decalogue deals profoundly with these culturally embedded, religious/ethical commandments, mimetic theory is also dealing with them and the mutual illumination of the two approaches may succeed in shedding more light on each other as well as on the ten “Words” themselves.4 For those who are unfamiliar, Krzysztof Kieślowski (1941–1996) received wide public recognition for his cinematic work during his lifetime, including

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the Academy Award for Best Director and Best Writer and a Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize. His films have continued to be studied and acknowledged after his death. Kieślowski lived most of his life in a Poland dominated by the Soviet Union. He began as a director of documentaries and received a certain amount of acclaim for them, before deciding that some of the best moments of the documentaries were unable to be shown due to his consideration of the subject’s privacy. Thus, he decided to go into films as a way of being able to be more honest, more realistic. As Paul Coates writes, “The desire to penetrate suffering more deeply, without exposing any individual, was a major motive for Kieślowski’s move to fiction.”5 The films we will examine were made shortly before the momentous events of 1989 in Eastern Europe. The idea for a series of films on the Ten Commandments was suggested by Piesiewicz, whom Kieślowski got to know when he was contemplating doing a film on the trials of dissidents. Piesiewicz would cowrite these and all Kieślowski’s subsequent films. Each film in the series is ostensibly paired with a commandment. Even if we ignore that there are two versions of the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament, and that Jews, Catholics, and Protestants have all managed to number them differently, there has been a wide-ranging debate in the literature about the correspondence between the commandments and the films.6 Sometimes the connection is relatively straight forward, as in Decalogue Five and the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.”7 In other films the relationship is much more oblique. In most of the films more than one commandment is touched upon.8 In his “Introduction to the Decalogue” Kieślowski tells us that he and Piesiewicz decided early on that they “didn’t want to adopt the tone of those who praise or condemn, handing out a reward here for the doing of a Good and punishment there for the doing of Evil.” Rather they were saying: “We know no more than you. But maybe it is worth investigating the unknown, if only because the feeling of not knowing is a painful one.”9 Kieślowski continues that once this was decided it was “easier to solve the problem of the relationship between the films and the individual Commandments: a tentative one. The films should be influenced by the individual Commandments to the same degree that the Commandments influence our daily lives.”10 By this he seems to have meant that most people simultaneously hold the Ten Commandments or something like them as sacred and still break them. As I mentioned above, we will be examining the first and last films of the series. The first commandment reads, “I am the Lord thy God. Thou shall have no other gods before me.” The tenth commandment is “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s

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goods.” There is a long tradition of seeing the first commandment as containing in nuce the following nine. The relationship with God is fundamental and everything else flows out of that—for good or ill. Proper worship of God is all-encompassing. Our relationship with other humans is not separate from our relationship with God, but simply reflects it. The fundamental nature of the first commandment and its ban on idolatry has been set forth with great clarity by Richard Schenk. He writes: One can think that every sin against the second tablet of the Law [commandments IV through X], against my fellow humans, is grounded in a kind of anonymous idolatry. John Calvin reflected in the most radical way not only on idolatry as sin itself but also on it as the form of every sin. In this context St. Thomas wrote concerning a saying from the book of Wisdom: Idolatry is the cause, beginning, and goal of all sins (ST II, II, 94, 4, arg 1, et ad 1). That which we can provisionally call the moralising concept of idolatry or the idolatry of the second tablet of the Law is present whenever the theoretical non-divine is factually preferred to all else, including God himself. The anonymous idol can have many faces— money, acceptance, power, progress, law-and-order, physical or spiritual wellbeing, and, of course, one’s own spiritual tradition. This second-order idolatry is neither contingent nor primary. It shows the essential connection of love of God and of neighbor.11

The final commandment forbids desire for things that belong to one’s neighbor. Thus, it in particular has drawn the attention of René Girard, the theoretician of desire.12 Starting from the last commandment he is also led to see idolatry as the sin underlying all ten of the Commandments, in particular what he calls a “double idolatry” of our neighbor and of ourselves.13 This idolatry leads to conflict and these conflicts are the “principal source of human violence.”14 Mimetic rivalry leads the parties to “denigrate each other; steal the other’s possessions, seduce the other’s spouse, and, finally, they even go as far as murder.”15 In this way Girard lists the actions prohibited by the commandments V through IX in reverse order to show how they all flow out of that which is prohibited in the tenth commandment: covetousness, or, simply, desire. Girard prefers to use the counting that combines the Catholic’s ninth and tenth commandment into one. If the Decalogue devotes its final commandment to prohibiting desire for whatever belongs to the neighbor, it is because it lucidly recognizes in that desire the key to the violence prohibited in the four commandments that precede it. If we ceased to desire the goods of our neighbor, we would never commit murder or adultery or theft or false witness. If we respected the tenth commandment, the four commandments that precede it would be superfluous.16

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Thus, both the first commandment and the tenth commandment, in very different ways, encompass the whole of the Decalogue. This is a reason that it could sustain a “cycle” of films in which each film stands on it own while being related to all the others. I will show how Decalogue One creates the tragic world in which the other commandments will be examined while Decalogue Ten leaves us with a comic vision of how to cope with it.

Decalogue One The world of Decalogue One is located between two forms of reality that both are different and related—the world of solids and the world of liquids, of water and of ice. It is located in our world. Its opening image shows the border between the frozen lake and the flowing river: two different forms of one reality. The image of ice runs through the movie. The dead dog at the beginning is frozen and covered with ice; the frequent topic of conversation between Krzysztof, the father, and Pawel, the son, is whether it has been cold enough to freeze the lake sufficiently for safe skating. Pawel freezes water in a milk bottle, asks whether tea will also freeze, and wants to leave the bottle out to observe its return to liquid form. Of course, it is ice that dooms Pawel when it cracks and he drowns. Ice is what soothes his father’s heated brow in the aftermath of his death. Water is formless or corresponds to whatever container it is in. Ice allows us to give water a form—solidity that from one point of view seems unnatural but from another can be helpful. There are ice sculptures. One can do art with ice, apply a form to it. This is impossible with water. I go into this kind of detail concerning the differences between water and ice because I believe that is part of the significance of its pervasive presence in Decalogue One. There is nothing unnatural about ice in and of itself and yet in Poland, where the film is set, in Europe and many other places in the world the occurrence of ice is deemed the exception and water in its liquid form is the norm. I maintain that Kieslowski is presenting us with all kinds of “ice” —in the sense of occurrences that have to be deemed exceptional, even though they are not “unnatural.” He does this in a number of ways. Immediately after the opening shot of water and ice we see the figure I will call the Watcher.17 He looks out, then over to his left and then looks at us. He is watching us watching him. Kieslowski wants us to be conscious of our experience as “watchers,” as viewers. He wants us to never forget what activity it is in which we are engaged.

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From the Watcher we cut to the figure of Irena, Krzysztof ’s sister, alone, outside, watching a screen through a store window. Kieslowski is accomplishing several things here. First, again we watch Irena watching. She is looking at a television screen, just as the first watchers of this series of films would be doing in Poland, when it was broadcast in 1989. Beyond that Kieslowski is implicitly but clearly establishing that this is a film or movie that we are watching. We will learn through the course of the film that this moment of Irena’s catching sight of Pawel’s image on the screen is the final chronological moment of the film and everything that happens subsequently is a flashback from this moment. It is hard to think of another medium that could accomplish this kind of narrative movement with such economy. Beyond implicitly informing the viewer that the maker of the film is a master of the medium, it also makes the viewer aware of the medium. Irena has tears in her eyes and we cut from that image back to the Watcher, whom we see wiping away a tear. Ice and then water, the water of tears, frames the film. Freezing water removes its fluidity—its stops its movement. I argue that in a similar way Kieslowski freezes the relationships in the film. He removes that which usually gives drama to action. Specifically, he removes the ressentiment and conflict from the rivalry between the three characters. Further, I argue that what is left out, in light of the subsequent development of The Decalogue, is the most important part—that Kieslowski removes it precisely as a way of making it conspicuous by its absence; he draws our attention to it, because it is not there. The part that is missing will come into clearer focus when we compare Decalogue One with Decalogue Ten. To understand what has been removed from the drama, it is helpful to recall some of the basic concepts of mimetic theory. The most basic unit in mimetic theory is the triangle: subject, object, and mediator. Unlike other theories of desire, Girard does not see desire as rooted simply in the constitution of either the subject or the object. Human desire is not something inherent in the individual, nor are there objects that are inherently attractive. Rather, it is between subjects that desires are born and grow. The object in the triangle can be just an object, a thing, or it can be another person whom both the subject and the model desire. This would be the classic love triangle. In the case of Decalogue One Kieslowski presents a number of triangles, most of which have either Krzysztof and Pawel or Irena and Pawel as two of the vertices, with some object occupying the third place. However, the main triangle is the one with each of these characters at the vertices. Each has a relationship with the other. This trinity has been carefully constructed. Krzysztof is a single father;

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Pawel is an only child; Irena is a single woman. There is no partner for Krzysztof to be in rivalry with. There are no siblings for Pawel to have to struggle against. Irena has no man or children of her own. As carefully constructed as it is, it is still completely realistic. In part this is so because none of the three are perfect human beings. Krzysztof is a college professor whose marriage has somehow or another foundered. Irena is a kindly, religious woman. Pawel is an attractive child captured at the moment of maximal openness to just about everything— life, death, mathematics, computers, girls, skating. Each person in the triangle is not only conceivable but also credible. Both Krzysztof and Irena are models for Pawel but neither seems to become an obstacle for him or to each other. Still, I think that this deliberate removal of all conflictual mimesis is significant. It can be viewed as kind of thought experiment. It is akin to Dostoevsky’s attempt in The Idiot to construct an innocent person. It is as if Kieślowski had thought, let us take the fundamental insight of Girard, that from which everything begins, mimetic conflict, and construct a drama in which it has no role. He is creating a kind of counter instance and this could even be used to falsify the theory, as a representation of mimetic but non-conflictual relationships. If we look at the action, it becomes clearer that Kieślowski is representing a form of rivalry without toxicity. Our first shot of Krzysztof and Pawel together is of them in competition doing pushups. Naturally, the father “wins.” But there is no resentment. Pawel is still too young to be a serious match for his father. The small child accepts that the parent is capable of what he or she is not. We also see Pawel race Irena. This is even more playful and already he can beat her. He offers her a head start before they begin, which she declines. The rivalry is there, but it is “good” rivalry—the kind that can make the quotidian act of getting from the bus stop to the apartment fun by making it into a race. The story also makes clear that there is no rivalry, no contest between the brother and sister for Pawel’s affection. The one area where there is real potential for the kind of rivalry that leads to conflict is in the area of religion. Krzysztof is an agnostic; Irena is a devout believer. Pawel questions both; he listens to both. Each answers his questions about death, the soul, God as honestly as he or she can. Neither disrespects the other. In a phone call Irena tells Krzysztof that she has arranged catechism lessons for Pawel with the local priest. Krzysztof is fine with that as long as Pawel has expressed that need. When Pawel reminds Krzysztof that Irena believes in the soul, Krzysztof says that some people find it easier to live that way. For her part, Irena says that while Krzysztof thinks everything can be measured, it does not rule out the existence of God. “Even for him [Krzysztof],

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though he might not admit it.” So there is an implicit rivalry of deeply held visions of reality, but this is combined with a profound respect for the other. At the same time, the film does not restrict itself to this one triangle. As I said, the first shot is a scene in which the triangle is Pawel and his father and the object are the pushup contest. We also see Pawel, together with his father, contesting a chess master for victory. There is a scene that shows Irena as the model for Pawel in which both look to the Polish pope, John Paul II, as a further model. So we have, on the one hand, mimetic relationships. There is no attempt here to occlude the role that mimesis plays in becoming human. Pawel is not some semi-divine figure who needs neither father nor mother, who does not have any models and is striking out on his own path. He emulates his father and his aunt. The world constructed by Kieślowski and Piezwenski is not a romantic lie. But in this mimesis there is no conflict: not between Pawel and his father nor with his aunt, nor between his father and his aunt (brother and sister). The models never become obstacles. There is no scandal. The three figures do not succumb to the idolatry of the self and other that we mentioned above. That is, we do not find either Krzysztof or Irena putting Pawel in a double bind by saying “Do what I do” and “Do not do what I do.” Krzysztof does not say: get good at math or at pushups but not better than me. We do not pick up on Irena saying: grow in faith but do not surpass me. So now our question becomes, what is the result of this artistic experiment? The result is a displacement of the scandal. Instead of the characters being obstacles to one another as in most films, the film itself is a scandal to us. In effect, Kieślowski gives the viewer the double-bind message: “You would like reality to be like this continually, wouldn’t you, but you know that it is not and cannot be. Things change and life ends in death.” The film scandalizes us with the death of Pawel. It tells us that this vision of mimesis without conflict can and does exist but only for a limited duration. Time is the crucial element here. Ice eventually melts. No matter how well human relations are managed, they still end in death, sometimes the death of the innocent one. This offends us. I believe that Kieślowski is trying to offend us, because identifying our offence is the first step in moving beyond it. An important element in the way the film accomplishes its end is that the viewer is left with no one to blame. Again, I think this quite deliberate on the part of the filmmakers. Krzysztof ’s thinking is dominated by scientific rationality. With this rationality he can seek a cause for why the ice melted when, according to his calculations, it “should not” have. What he cannot do is look for a “social

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cause.” He cannot look for the person with the evil eye. He cannot seek out a scapegoat. Unlike the ancient world that could convert its grief into grievance, Krzysztof is helpless. There is no revenge. Neither can Irena scapegoat someone. Her faith stops her from that. But both can be undone by the tragedy. The scientific man and the religious woman are left simply with an accident and no one to blame and no one to accuse. We learn about Krystof ’s reaction in greater detail than Irena’s. He refuses to kneel with the crowd when the bodies are pulled out. He does not simply join in with the crowd. He returns to his apartment and stares at the computer. There is no answer there. He goes to the church. There he upsets the makeshift altar that results in the overturned candle spilling wax that appears to form tears on the image of Mary, the Mother of Jesus. I take this act by Krzysztof to signal his unwillingness to accept any interpretation of his son’s death as a sacrifice for some god or some greater good. In effect he overthrows the ancient altar of child sacrifice upon which so many first-born have been killed in a misguided effort to placate an angry god who does not exist. Krzysztof accepts that this is no longer a way out. If science prevents him from accusing others it also helps him to understand that he cannot blame God. He reaches for holy water in the baptismal fount and finds ice—the material which should be his nemesis. But he does not reject it. He uses it to soothe his ravaged brow. He melts it into its original form—water. The only time we see Irena after the death of Pawel is when she stands behind Krzysztof on the lakeshore as the bodies are being hauled out of the water. She slowly kneels, seemingly crushed by the reality she is experiencing. But the very last shot of the film, without showing the figure of Irena, represents what Irena is seeing. It is the same shot that we saw as the film opened—Irena, alone, outside, in the dark, watching a screen through a store window—seeing the screen with Pawel’s image from a news story shot earlier in the day. In the end the viewer’s standpoint is that of Irena’s—watching a screen with Pawel’s image fading from view. We are left to contemplate the meaning of what we have just seen. Kieślowski offers us no answer; we are exploring reality with him.

Decalogue Ten Decalogue Ten, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods,” presents a contrast with Decalogue One on almost every count. Where Decalogue One ends with a

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death and its aftermath, Decalogue Ten begins with a funeral. Where Decalogue One concerns the death of a young boy, the son; Decalogue Ten concerns the death of an old man, the father. Where Decalogue One featured a brother and sister, Decalogue Ten features two brothers. Where there is no sin in Decalogue One, Decalogue Ten features lying, stealing, cheating, adultery, and betrayal. Where Decalogue One seems deliberately constructed to exclude any mimetic conflict, Decalogue Ten is deliberately constructed to do the opposite. As I wrote above, Decalogue One opens up a universe in which there are “for one brief shining moment” no model/obstacles, no scandals. Decalogue Ten begins with music and lyrics that are designed to assault one’s senses and one’s sensibilities. It advises one to kill, to fornicate, to break the commandments. The model/ obstacles do not cease until the final moments of the film. The way in which the two films, so very different, still hang together, is that Decalogue One has the function of opening up, without in any way determining, the rest of the series, while Decalogue Ten consciously refers back, playing with the idea of a series, of seemingly self-contained units that belong together with other similar but different members. The last film takes us back to all the preceding films but in particular to the first one. It does this first of all by seeming to be a negative image of the first in the ways I outlined above. The whole of Decalogue One leads up to the young boy’s death, while the whole of Decalogue Ten proceeds from the death of an old man. Each film contains scenes of the washing of hands and the kiss of affection on the cheek between two males. The biggest contrast between the two is the role that the mimetic passions of rivalry, jealousy, envy, and covetousness play in the two films. As I pointed out above, Decalogue One seems to have been deliberately structured to create a believable world in which there is no rivalry or envy. Pawel is too young to feel oppressed either by his father’s dominance or his aunt’s piety. He is not yet trying to break out on his own. He does not have any siblings to compete against for their affection. He does not yet rebel against the commandment not to touch his father’s more powerful computer, the one that could surely tell him about his mother dreams. Krzysztof and Irena cooperate and do not rival one another for the boy’s affection. Decalogue Ten has to be viewed as a master course in the birth, development and even overcoming of mimetic desire, rivalry, and conflict. In it two sons are reunited after two years by the death of their father. They are separated in age and interests. The older son, Jurek, seems to be an establishment type: job, wife, and child. The younger brother is the lead singer in a moderately

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successful punk band called City Death. Moderately successful means that he can live from his music, but he does not have any money. At the graveside we listen to a eulogy that honors their father for his noble passion. The object of his passion is not immediately revealed, only that he had won eleven international gold medallions and was featured at many exhibitions. The speaker admits that the man’s family and professional life, even his emotions were “sacrificed” for the sake of this passion. Following the sons into the deceased’s apartment we learn that his passion was stamp collecting and if we have watched the whole series, we recall that this man made an appearance in Decalogue Eight, when he tells his neighbor about the stamps he has recently acquired and then comes to her apartment to show them to her. He asks her to tell her son about them, since he was always interested in stamps. After he has left, the woman’s visitor says, “A stamp collector?” She replies, “Something more. He shows the stamps the way some people would show pictures of their grandchildren or children.” This encounter signifies so much more in light of the man’s sons not really knowing or caring about their father’s passion. The sons open the locked cabinets and see the various files of stamps. Neither son has any interest in the collection. Nor do they understand their father’s passion. For them the collection is a symbol of resentment. All their father’s passion and interest went into the stamps, not into raising his sons. Kieślowski then proceeds to give a master class in the birth of mimetic desire. So we begin with the situation in which the father’s stamps mean less than nothing to the sons. They are, as Jerzy puts it, the cause of “our misery, our mother’s wasted life, poor food, lack of money.” They discuss what could drive a person to this kind of obsession and neither has much of an answer. It is worthwhile reflecting for a moment on the nature of stamps. In and of themselves stamps are little pieces of paper with some design printed on them. The original purpose is to stand for some monetary value, not to be valuable in and of itself. It would defeat the purpose of the stamp, if it were made of some costly material. One pays a certain amount of money, usually to have a letter delivered and the post office knows that you have paid for this service due to the presence of the cancelled stamp. And yet these pieces of paper become valuable. They become valuable insofar as people desire them. Their value is whatever people are willing to pay for them. Once again, Kieślowski is presenting a human phenomenon without judgment. There are people who collect stamps. Some people sacrifice a great

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deal to have a good collection. Is this bad? Is it good? The eulogy presented in the film is a moment of honest praise from a comrade. The viewpoint of the sons is much more critical. At the very least we can say that Kieślowski is not simply denigrating this drive to gather. He sees the good of which it is a perversion. Perhaps the only way the father could live his life after the Second World War was to pour his desire into stamps. Returning to the film, while the brothers are still wandering around the apartment in a bit of a daze, wondering what to do with everything, a “friend” of the father enters, claiming the father owed him several hundred thousand zlotys. As soon as the neighbor suggests that he would accept something from the collection in lieu of the money, the older brother sends him away, asking him to come back in a few days. But in this act we notice a change in Jerzy. The stamps now have value because some else wanted them. We see subtly replayed here the drama of the playroom, when one child is only half interested in his toy until another child expresses an interest in it. Suddenly the toy becomes the first child’s prize possession; he will never share it. Here the interplay is understated but clear. Jerzy suddenly is clear that he does not want to part with anything. He can smell the desire of the other and his desire is now engaged. The man who spoke at their father’s funeral visits them when he learns that they are thinking of selling the collection. He informs them of its true value. One stamp would buy them an automobile. Another would pay for a flat. This includes its monetary value, but he also emphasizes that this collection was their father’s life and it would be wrong to dissipate someone’s life, even a father’s whom they did not know that well. Although the brothers face financial difficulties, they agree not to touch the collection. His sons then begin to experience a certain liberation from problems. They “forget” about what was troubling them as everything gets centered on the stamps. There is a loss of reality that they acknowledge but a certain kind of comfort also. It is sad but better than some of the alternatives. For the sons, perhaps the saving realization is that they are not any different than their father. As the film moves along, the two brothers have to blackmail a stamp merchant to retrieve a series of three stamps that Jerzy’s son unknowingly traded for junk stamps. The blackmail is successful but at its conclusion the merchant asks, “Do you want the stamps or money?” “The stamps” is the reply. In spite of their financial need, they want the stamps more, they want the collection to be whole. And then there is the Austrian Mercury Rose, 1851. Their father has two of the three stamps that belong to this series. He is missing the rose-colored one.

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He had sought it for a long time in vain. The brothers find out who has it and how it can be obtained. Jerzy must agree to donate a kidney to the daughter of the stamp vendor. He eventually agrees to it, such has become their desire for it. During the operation the apartment is robbed. The brothers lose everything except the Austrian Mercury Rose. In the subsequent police investigation into the robbery each brother slowly turns on the other, becoming convinced that the other was somehow involved in the robbery. After their mutual betrayal, they each witness something that allows them to understand how the heist was pulled off in a way that did not involve either of them. They meet back in the apartment of their father and admit their own worst sin—the betrayal of the other. They find that each of them has bought the same series of stamps. “A series,” one says and they both laugh. Thus, the movie and with it the series ends with their laughter. Kieślowski would have it so. But laughter is an ambiguous reality and so its context becomes all important. One can laugh at someone and the laughter becomes a way of marking difference, of establishing one’s superiority. Laughter can weaken as well as strengthen the barriers that separate each of us from the others. Laughter will erupt when we see our long-cherished prejudices confirmed and also when we see them finally crumble into dust. Baudelaire . . . is among the few who recognize the existence of a truly superior laughter, the one that welcomes its own downfall. Unlike so many of our peevish “demystifiers,” he was not building intellectual cages in which to imprison everyone but himself. He read laughter in a Pascalian light, as a sign of contradiction pointing both to the “infinite misery” and the “infinite greatness” of man.18

Conclusion This Pascalian light, in which Baudelaire read laughter, can illuminate a great deal. Human futility seems endless and the death of an innocent child, even or especially his or her accidental death leaves all philosophers more or less speechless. It leaves Kieślowski speechless also. No character utters a word after the death of Pawel. But it does not render Kieślowski “artless.” On one level the first film strikes me as a kind of Rorschach Test that asks the viewer, “Whom are you going to accuse?” Or do you refrain from accusing because you are strong and can will yourself to accept another’s death as long as you survive? Or are you

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someone who has been touched deeply enough by reality to affirm the worth of Pawel even if that existence were to last for just a moment? I am sure that this does not exhaust the questions that the film raises. Kieślowski can show us the suffering of a father, he can remind us of the pain of the aunt and leave us with the question that has no answer. The nonanswer appears in the rest of the series, especially in the last film in which the aftermath of another death is explored. The death in the last film does not cause the same anguish as the death in the first film, in fact it serves as the starting point for a dark comedy. It sets us up for the laughter that results when the sons and ourselves see our downfall, our own long-cherished prejudices crumble. Tragedy almost always tempts one to romanticism. Comedy has its dangers, but romanticism is not one of them. It tempts us to laugh at others, but then it also presents us with the chance to lower our defenses so that we can laugh at ourselves.

Notes 1 Dekalog, directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski (1988; New York: The Criterion Collection, 2016), DVD. 2 Yves Vaillancourt quotes this in his introduction to his own work on the Decalogue, Jeux interdits: Essai sur le Décalogue de Kieślowski (Paris: Hermann, 2014). It occurs in Vincent Amiel, ed., Krzysztof Kieślowski (Paris: Positif/ JeanMichel Place, 1997), 167. 3 Personal correspondence, dated June 7, 2016. 4 As is well-known the word “Decalogue” is from the Greek, deka logous, or “ten words,” found in the Septuagint at Exod. 34:28 and Deut. 10:4. This is a translation of the Hebrew asereth ha-dibrot. Although Tyndal did translate it as Ten Words, the King James Version, following the Geneva Bible, used “Commandments” and that has become widespread in the English-speaking world. 5 “‘And So On’: Kieślowski’s Dekalog and the Metaphysics of the Everyday,” in Dekalog: Directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski. Booklet included in the Critierion Collection’s DVD edition, 11. 6 The most interesting and implausible account of the relationship comes, unsurprisingly, from Slavoj Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski between Theory and Post-Theory (London: British Film Institute, 2001). 7 There was also a separate, longer version of this film released for theatres. A Short Film About Killing, directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski (1988; New York: The Criterion Collection, 2016), DVD.

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8 Annette Insdorf reprints a table from the unpublished manuscript of Rahul Hamid, which has three columns, one listing the “Episode,” another the wording of the “Main Commandment(s)” and finally the wording of “Secondary Commandment(s).” Annette Insdorf, Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski (Evanston: Northwest University Press, 1999), 213–14. 9 Krzysztof Kieślowski, “Introduction. Decalogue: The Ten Commandments,” booklet accompanying the Facett Special DVD Edition. No pagination. 10 Ibid. 11 Richard Schenk, “Goetzendiest oder Gottesdienst? Gegenwart und Abwesenheit Gottes in den Religionen im Lichte des Ersten Gebots,” in P. Koslowski, R. Löw, and R. Schenk, eds., Jahrbuch für Philosophie des Forschungsinstituts für Philosophie Hannover, Vol. 6, (Vienna: Passagen, 1994), 173. 12 Girard, in I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2001), uses the Protestant numbering that combines what is the ninth and tenth commandment into one. Thus it forbids desiring your neighbor’s spouse as well as his or her goods. In this way, he can argue that the final commandment is a quick way of preventing the four preceding commandments (murder, adultery, stealing, and lying) from being violated. 13 Girard, I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, 11. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 12. 17 In the booklet accompanying the DVD edition, the actor, Artur Barcis, is credited in the first film as “Man in the sheepskin”; in all his other appearances in other segments he is simply listed as “Young Man.” There has been much speculation as to the significance of this figure. Kieślowski certainly succeeded in giving his films an element of mystery by his inclusion of this figure in eight of the ten films. It may well be significant that he does not appear in the more comic Decalogue Ten. 18 René Girard, To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 130.

6

Violence and Politics in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood Richard van Oort

In a provocative reading of the early scenes of Macbeth, Harry Berger argues that critics have failed to notice the deeper irony of the play.1 Most readers view Macbeth as a tyrant whose violent occupation of the Scottish throne represents an aberration from Scotland’s usual, and therefore also sacred, political order. On this view Macbeth’s defeat by Macduff returns Scotland to its rightful order in both the human and natural worlds. The restoration of human (i.e., moral) order is signaled by the return of the legitimate heir (Duncan’s son Malcolm) from his exile in England, where he has taken shelter under the English king Edward the Confessor (whose piety is explicitly alluded to by Malcolm in the fourth act). Shakespeare, critics argue, is implying that Malcolm’s reign will be as peaceful and benevolent as both his father’s and the pious English king’s. This renewal of moral order is simultaneously a return of natural or cosmological order, symbolized by the arrival of spring when the greenery of Birnam wood rises to envelop Macbeth’s dark and wintry castle on high Dunsinane Hill. Berger calls this the “orthodox” interpretation of the play.2 No doubt it satisfies our desire for closure and poetic justice. As Berger points out, however, this picture, though certainly suggested by much of the surface of the text, is systematically undermined by a series of deep ironies, ironies which it is wholly characteristic of Shakespeare to insert. Berger focuses on the play’s early scenes, which create a rather ambivalent picture of the last days of Duncan’s reign. Far from being an idyllic realm, Scotland is a war-torn mess. Beset from all sides by Scottish rebels, Duncan only narrowly escapes death when he is saved by his commanders Macbeth and Banquo. Berger shows how Shakespeare highlights the uneasy symmetry between the treacherous rebels (Macdonwald and Cawdor) and their supposedly

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heroic vanquishers (Macbeth and Banquo). This symmetry is foregrounded by the captain’s rather ambivalent speech to the king in the play’s second scene. The image of Macbeth and Macdonwald locked in combat “As two spent swimmers”3 suggests an ambiguous picture in which the swimmers are simultaneously destroying and saving each other (e.g., by using one another as buoys). As Berger puts it, “The simile projects a situation in which enemies cling together as friends, and friends as enemies.”4 The message is clear. In the civil war dividing Scotland, it is very hard to distinguish friends from enemies. Fair is foul and foul is fair. This is obviously a rather nerve-racking situation to be in and we are given to understand that it typifies Duncan’s Scotland. How is the king to know whom to trust? A redoubtable “man of blood” (3.4.127), Macbeth is in the first place a warrior, and his violence is indistinguishable from the violence that both defends and threatens the throne. Duncan knows that it is only a matter of time before he will be the object of another violent attack. Should we really be surprised that he dies at the hand of his most violent warrior? For those familiar with René Girard’s work, the image of two bloody men clinging to one another like “two spent swimmers” suggests the death struggle of mimetic rivals, whose competing desires create the very thing they seek. The picture of Macbeth and Macdonwald drowning in envy and mimetic rivalry is reminiscent of a similar image used by Cassius in Julius Caesar to describe his hatred of Caesar. In that play’s second scene, Cassius says to Brutus how he saved Caesar from drowning after the two had dared each other to swim across the raging Tiber. Girard notes that the image is used by Shakespeare to portray mimetic envy.5 From this perspective it is unsurprising that a heroic battlefield commander such as Macbeth would be simultaneously haunted by a desire for the throne. What else has he been trained for? The very things that make him a supreme defender of his king (desire, envy, fearlessness, predatory violence) make him an obvious candidate to replace him. What Berger’s subtle reading of the text underscores is the deep structural ironies of this political situation. In disposing of one set of assassins (Macdonwald, Cawdor), Duncan merely encourages another (Macbeth, Banquo). Nor is Duncan unaware of this fact. In granting Macbeth the additional title of Thane of Cawdor, Duncan is, as Berger puts it, giving Macbeth “honors only a king can bestow, honors by which the king may placate the thane and maintain his own edge of superiority.”6 The political system in Scotland encourages envy and rivalry among its leading men. But this rivalry is a danger to the king himself. Macbeth’s role as superior defender of his king places him immediately in a position of

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suspicion. Duncan attempts to placate his most valiant thane by gifting him the title of Cawdor. But he knows that this new threat to his supremacy must be handled with the greatest tact and skill, which is why he showers Macbeth with so many honors, including a royal visit to Macbeth’s home in Inverness. Berger calls this irony “structural,” by which he means that the Scottish system of government is built on a foundation of violence that every thane except Macbeth studiously averts his eyes from.7 As Macbeth puts it, “Blood will have blood” (3.4.123). The very violence that thrusts Macbeth onto center stage as the foremost defender of his king also condemns him to usurping the royal seat. In this context we can see that Duncan’s hasty announcement of his son Malcolm as the royal successor is a carefully premeditated gesture designed to thwart Macbeth by encouraging a less threatening rival for the kingship. Unlike Macbeth, Malcolm seems to have shrunk from violence rather than embraced it. He appears in the play’s second scene as the ward of the bloody captain, who has defended him at considerable cost to his person from being captured by the enemy. Why should Duncan have to announce his eldest son as his successor? Can’t we assume that Malcolm’s succession would have been expected by the Scottish thanes? A.R. Braunmuller notes that Shakespeare was following his source in Holinshed, who makes it clear that primogeniture was not given in medieval Scotland.8 Instead the law of the tanist, which means literally “second in excellence,” meant that the Scottish system relied on open competition between rival thanes to decide on a successor. Citing the anthropologist Jacky Goody, Braunmuller observes that “the system in early Scotland has been described as ‘circulation with elimination,’ where ‘tension between incumbent and successor is relieved at the expense of increased conflict between the potential successors themselves,’ as indeed we see in Macbeth.”9 In this context Duncan’s reference to Macbeth as “a peerless kinsmen” (1.4.58) is double-edged. If Macbeth is indeed peerless, then he stands on the same level as the king. As Michael Hawkins notes, in a “feudal society” such as Macbeth’s the “phrase. . . needs to be taken literally as denoting someone without equals and set above the rest of the aristocracy.”10 Duncan’s admission that he cannot possibly repay his debt to Macbeth (“More is thy due than more than all can pay” (1.4.21)) does not, as Hawkins also notes, do much to discourage Macbeth’s sense that he really does deserve the throne. Here we run into the well-known anthropological problem of political succession.11 Who is to rule after the king dies or is too old to control his warriors? One can announce a successor beforehand, but such a move is always risky. By explicitly pointing to a successor, one may inadvertently invite one’s premature

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demise. Who is to stop one’s enemies (and there are always enemies) from throwing their lot in with the successor, who in all likelihood will be only too happy to take over the job as early as possible? Far better in these circumstances to avoid announcing a successor until the very last minute, when one breathes one’s dying breath. Yet there are problems with waiting until the last minute too. In particular, one is courting chaos in the hours, days, or even years leading up to the dying breath. The longer the king lives without a designated heir, the more antsy and touchy his subjects become. Duncan’s solution is evidently presented as a compromise. He squeaks out a victory from the latest threat to his kingship but only by promoting a new one, which obliges him to reward Macbeth with the thaneship. As Berger stresses, Duncan knows his gift will be received as an encouragement to seek yet greater honors, perhaps even the throne itself. So what does the king do? He attempts to forestall this danger by announcing Malcolm as the next-in-line. Presumably the relatively weak and feeble son is easier to control than the fierce and valiant Macbeth. With a more easily controllable successor announced, Duncan hopes to nip Macbeth’s rise to prominence before it’s too late. As we all know, Duncan’s ploy is unsuccessful. The royal visit to Macbeth’s home is interpreted by the thane—with some additional prompting from his highly motivated wife—as an opportunity to end all this shilly-shallying. Withered murder moves like a ghost and Macbeth’s hands turn the seas blood red. When the king’s sons flee, Macbeth has nobody to stand in his way. The crown is free for him to take. And not a soul utters a word in objection. What I would like to do in the remainder of this chapter is to show how Akira Kurosawa sharpens this focus on what I have called, following Berger, the deeper irony of the play.12 Most critics have regarded Throne of Blood as far more pessimistic than Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Some come to this conclusion by arguing that Kurosawa focuses almost exclusively on making Macbeth’s decision to murder the king psychologically plausible, thereby reducing his tragic stature and turning him into an everyman whom it is too easy to judge and therefore also excuse (he is merely acting as everybody else is acting). For example, Donald Richie says that Kurosawa’s Macbeth is “not grand” but “a little man, lacking in grandeur precisely because he is not torn between desires.”13 This Macbeth acts in the same manner as his equally predictable rivals: kill or be killed. Who can blame him for violence in a world where violence is the norm? Likewise John Gerlach argues that “most of Kurosawa’s changes are gauged to increase our sympathy for Macbeth so as to involve the viewer in an experience more psychologically

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acceptable.”14 This change increases our understanding of Macbeth’s character, but it reduces his status as a tragic protagonist. For Gerlach, Kurosawa’s Macbeth is merely “a bit of a bungler.”15 Anthony Davies agrees with Gerlach, writing that “where Macbeth has choice, Washizu [i.e., Kurosawa’s Macbeth] has only destiny.”16 Other critics point to the lack of any genuinely redeeming characters in Kurosawa’s film. For instance, Bernice Kliman contrasts Shakespeare’s inclusion of the good thanes, who gather around Malcolm at the end, with Kurosawa’s bleak focus on a warrior society fueled solely “by ambition and willingness to kill.”17 Similarly, Stephen Prince observes that “in Macduff and Malcolm, Shakespeare envisioned moral alternatives to Macbeth’s evil, but Kurosawa’s is a closed world in Throne of Blood, from which a moral dialectic has vanished.”18 These are all pertinent remarks. But I think Shakespeare’s play already contains the seeds of the pessimism Kurosawa emphasizes in his adaptation. Much of this pessimism stems from Shakespeare’s historical conception of medieval Scotland, a conception that Kurosawa recognized as pertinent to his own conception of the period of civil wars in late-fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century Japan. As Graham Holderness notes, for both Shakespeare and Kurosawa ambition is not merely some “eccentric personality disorder”; it is “a central historical contradiction: a natural extension of the militaristic violence which is both liberated and restrained by the feudal pattern of authority.”19 The deep structural irony of the play is part of Shakespeare’s criticism of the warrior society he describes. Once one notices this irony, it becomes impossible to accept the view that Shakespeare regarded Macbeth as an aberration in an otherwise peaceful political order. On the contrary, what drives Macbeth to kill his king is what drives all the thanes. The same violence that unseats Duncan unseats Macbeth. The difference is that Macbeth sees more steadily and more clearly than his fellows the violence that lies at the heart of the Scottish feudal order. That is why he experiences so much guilt. He alone intuits the horror that lies at the heart of the political system. All others, including his own wife, see only the crickets chirping and the owl screeching. They are, as Berger argues, predisposed to ignore the truth because it is not in their self-interest to acknowledge it. Kurosawa’s film takes this endemic violence as its central theme. No longer a subtle irony to be weeded out by the perceptive critic, the violent structure of this warrior society is exposed for all to see. The use of a chorus at the beginning and end of the film reinforces this sense of distance from the characters, who now appear as pawns in a violent system they are powerless to resist. Gone are the Shakespearean soliloquies in which Macbeth’s guilt and inner conflict are

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revealed. Kurosawa makes no effort to reproduce any of Shakespeare’s script, choosing instead to follow only the bare plot. Yet this purely visual emphasis on the scene of violence leads to some startling cinematic revelations. For example, in Shakespeare the symmetry between Macbeth and Banquo is hinted at but never represented visually on the stage. Banquo is always shown to be one step behind Macbeth, which is why he appears to be an innocent victim of Macbeth’s treachery. Yet the symmetry between the two men is made clear in Banquo’s soliloquy at the beginning of the third act: Thou hast it now—King, Cawdor, Glamis, all As the weird women promised it, and I fear Thou played’st most foully for’t. Yet it was said It should not stand in thy posterity, But that myself should be the root and father Of many kings. If there come truth from them— As upon thee, Macbeth, their speeches shine— Why, by the verities on thee made good, May they not be my oracles as well And set me up in hope? (3.1.1-10)

Banquo knows full well that Macbeth is the most likely cause of the old king’s demise, but he does not object to Macbeth’s coronation. Why not? Because he stands to gain from it. Did not the prophecy predict that Macbeth would cede his place to the sons of Banquo? By allowing Macbeth to take the throne, Banquo hopes to get one step closer to it. In Shakespeare, the rivalry between Macbeth and Banquo is muted because the two commanders are out of step with each other. Banquo suffers because he does not react swiftly enough, instead succumbing to his rival’s preemptive strike. Kurosawa, however, sees the mimetic symmetry between the two commanders and does not hesitate to visualize it. From the beginning Washizu (Macbeth) and Miki (Banquo) are represented as equals, who (we discover later) have also been childhood friends. The film opens with the camera slowly tracking across a bleak landscape shrouded in fog. We are invited by the chorus to look on the ruins of a castle, the sole remaining evidence of a “carnage born of consuming desire.” A weatherbeaten post bears the inscription, “Here stood Spider’s Web Castle.” As the fog thickens, we lose sight of the ruined castle. When the fog lifts, however, Spider’s Web Castle stands once again in its prime. We are given to understand that we are about to see the story of this “carnage born of human desire.”

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A messenger arrives at the castle with news that commander Fujimaki of the North Garrison has treacherously risen in arms against Lord Tsuzuki, overthrowing the latter’s fifth and fourth fortresses. Now the lord’s third fortress is under attack. Fearing the worst, Tsuzuki prepares to barricade himself inside his castle. But before he can do so, another messenger arrives with the news that second fortress commander Miki (Banquo) and first fortress commander Washizu (Macbeth) have mounted a fierce rearguard action against the rebels and turned the battle in Tsuzuki’s favor. The symmetry between Washizu and Miki is given extended emphasis in their first appearance in the film, which sees them lost in Spider’s Web Forest having been summoned to the castle by their lord. At this point, they do not know Tsuzuki intends to honor them with new titles. The camera tracks Washizu and Miki on horseback as they race back and forth looking for a way out of the dense forest. They come upon a hut in which a forest spirit is chanting an eerie song about the folly of human desire. The spirit addresses Washizu as commander of the first fortress, lord of the North Garrison, and future lord of Spider’s Web Castle. In a shot taken from behind the spirit that emphasizes the symmetry between Washizu and Miki, we see the two commanders exchange significant looks with one another. Washizu appears to recollect himself from these dark thoughts, because he turns to the spirit and accuses it of treason. The spirit responds by observing how strange it is that humans are so “terrified to look into the bottom of their hearts.” Washizu draws his bow as if to shoot the spirit. But Miki deters him, for he too wants to hear what the spirit has to say about his future. The spirit says that Miki is now commander of the First Fortress and that he will be both lesser and greater than Washizu: though Miki will not reign over Spider’s Web Castle, his son will. The scene is shot in such a way that we are constantly reminded of the symmetry between Washizu and Miki. Each man’s desire is shaped by the other’s. The labyrinth of the forest is a metaphor for how each man is trapped in his rivalry with the other. Once they are finally free of the forest, a heavy fog descends and they gallop back and forth in a frantic race to be the first to arrive at the object of their desire: Spider’s Web Castle. The harder they ride, the more intense their desire becomes. Yet the men are totally alone. The thickness of the fog adds to the claustrophobic feeling that the world has narrowed to embrace only the presence of the rival. Each feeds on the desire of the other. The scene is reminiscent of the dark wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which the four lovers get trapped in a maelstrom of mimetic desire.

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This symmetry between Washizu and Miki is further enhanced by Kurosawa’s decision to have Miki also receive a promotion from Tsuzuki. Washizu receives the title of the now executed rebel Fujimaki. Miki, as the spirit predicted, is promoted to Washizu’s former position as commander of the first fortress. In Shakespeare, Banquo receives no gifts from his king and this difference contributes to our sense that Banquo is not as mimetic as Macbeth. Kurosawa evidently did not want to give the same impression. Moreover, the fact that Miki moves into Washizu’s vacated position as commander of the first fortress while Washizu himself attains that of the executed rebel Fujimaki suggests that the hierarchy structuring this competitive and predatory society encourages the very conflict that eventually destroys it, as the chorus at the beginning tells us. This critique of the ethic of warrior society is underscored in a superb scene that takes place when Washizu and Miki are finally released from the fog only to discover that the castle they have been frantically seeking lies directly before them on the horizon. Miki suggests they continue their race by heading toward it at a full gallop, but Washizu says he is tired and urges his companion to rest awhile. The two dismount and we get another wide shot in which the two men sit opposite one another with the castle positioned exactly between them in the background. Washizu says he feels as though he is in a dream. Was not their encounter with the forest spirit a dream? Miki says that dreams manifest one’s basest desires and adds, “Who would not dream of ruling over a vanquished castle?” Urged on by his friend’s thought, Washizu says, “It seems your son shall become Great Lord of that castle.” Miki responds, “No, it is you, yourself, who shall rule over that castle.” The two men laugh in an effort to make light of this dangerous but irrepressible thought. Washizu looks at Miki and says, “But first, I must become Lord of the North Garrison.” Miki returns his friend’s gaze and says, “And I, commander of the First Fortress.” They then each repeat the spirit’s phrase, “Joyous tidings” and laugh hysterically. Suddenly they stop laughing. Each man begins a sentence with exactly the same word: “Yet . . .” They look at each other alarmed that the other has read his darkest thoughts. Washizu speaks for them both saying, “And yet, what if as of this night, I do become Lord of the North Garrison, and you command the First Fortress.” They both rise simultaneously to their feet and stare at the castle in the distance. In Shakespeare, the scene of Macbeth and Banquo openly discussing their forbidden desires does not exist, though it is hinted at on two occasions. After their interview with the witches, Macbeth says to Banquo that he would consult further with him “upon what hath chanced” (1.3.155). And later, just before

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Macbeth murders Duncan, when he meets Banquo and Fleance in the moonless courtyard, Banquo says to him that he has been dreaming of “the three Weird Sisters” (2.1.21). Macbeth denies that he has thought of them but says he would like to discuss the matter with Banquo when a more fitting occasion presents itself. Whereas Shakespeare’s Banquo merely goes along passively with Macbeth’s sudden rise to power, Kurosawa’s Miki takes a decisive step in assisting Washizu. After Washizu kills Tsuzuki, prince Kunimaru (Malcolm) flees with Noriyasu (Macduff ) to Spider’s Web Castle, the command of which had been handed over to Miki for the duration of the king’s fatal visit to Washizu at the North Garrison. Fearing a possible alliance between Noriyasu, Kunimaru, and Miki, Washizu desperately attempts to cut Noriyasu and Kunimaru off but fails. In a dramatic scene, we see Noriyasu and Kunimaru hammer on the castle gate while Washizu and his men stand some distance away, anxiously waiting to see how Miki will react. After some tense moments, a hail of arrows is fired upon Noriyasu and Kunimaru, who are now forced to flee both Miki and Washizu. Again, what was merely implied in Shakespeare is made explicit by Kurosawa. Miki asserts his alliance with Washizu by firing on Noriyasu and Kunimaru. He does not, however, open the gates until Washizu has produced the body of Lord Tsuzuki. The two men are bound in their conspiracy against their former lord. In return for Miki’s help, Washizu promises to declare Miki’s son Yoshiteru his heir and the future king of Spider’s Web Castle. Kurosawa takes what is implicit in Shakespeare and makes it explicit. Washizu and Miki do not merely hint at one another’s desires. They openly discuss them. The scene in which each commander sits on the ground with the silhouette of Spider’s Web Castle looming darkly on the horizon captures the mimetic or, more precisely, the scenic relationship between the two men. They sit equidistant from the object of their shared desire. Kurosawa visualizes with remarkable precision the essential ingredients of Girard’s mimetic triangle and Eric Gans’s originary scene: subject, mimetic other, and desired object.20 The “carnage born of consuming desire” grows from this originary mimetic scene. What Berger calls the “deep structure informing the surface action”21 is vividly represented by Kurosawa in these scenes of mimetic symmetry between Washizu and Miki. The violence endemic to human society is traceable to a minimal scene in which two rivals compete for an object at the center. Human desire exists only within the context of this anthropological scene. As Girard says, desire is always the desire of the other. Spider’s Web Castle, as the name suggests, is a metaphor for the place where these desires converge. What warrior would not dream of

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being a lord of his own castle? The dream precedes the reality, but it is only because of the dream—the representation—that the object appears desirable in the first place. Divorced from the scene, the object is insignificant because it is no longer mediated by the other’s desire.22 What Kurosawa sees with great clarity is the endpoint of desire in the sparagmos, the tearing apart of the central object/victim. Washizu’s grotesque death scene, in which he is pierced by shower upon shower of arrows shot from the bows of his own warriors, underscores the highly ritual and cyclical nature of the violence pervading this society. Macbeth dies with harness on his back fighting his enemies, but Washizu dies without lifting a finger against the advancing forces of Noriyasu and Kunimaru, who have now been joined by Miki’s son Yoshiteru. Instead he is trapped in his own castle, cornered by his own men, who quickly see they have more to gain by killing him. Just as Washizu had killed his lord before him, so too these men kill theirs. In Shakespeare, the throne is taken by Duncan’s son Malcolm, not by Banquo’s son Fleance. Kurosawa dispenses with this appearance of sacred legitimacy. Just as the spirit had predicted, we are given to understand that Miki’s son will rule after Washizu has been so ignominiously slain. I have argued that Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood foregrounds the violence structuring the social order in Macbeth. Kurosawa sees what most critics tend to overlook or ignore: namely, Macbeth’s participation in a political system that structures the actions of everyone, including the pious Duncan and the “good” thanes who surround Malcolm at the end. What distinguishes Macbeth from these characters is not in the end his violence, but the fact that he sees more clearly than his peers the sacrificial violence that lies at the heart of the Scottish political order. What is the value of this analysis? In general, I am in agreement with Girard’s larger argument in A Theater of Envy. Shakespeare sees the insidiousness of the violence that his fellow playwrights shamelessly exploit in their bloody tragedies. Why then does Girard say nothing about Macbeth? This is a more difficult question to answer. Here some minor, but pertinent, differences emerge between my understanding of Shakespeare and Girard’s. Macbeth is Shakespeare’s most concentrated examination of the problem of evil. Rather than emphasizing the social and political context of the sparagmos as he did in Julius Caesar, Shakespeare traces violence back to the individual’s internal representation of it. Unlike Brutus, who feels guiltless both before and after he murders Caesar, Macbeth feels guilty before he murders Duncan. He imagines the deed prior to executing it, and this act of imagination brings home

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to him the horror of what he is about to do. Violence, Shakespeare suggests, does not precede representation; it follows it. The guilt precedes the crime. This view of violence contrasts Girard’s understanding of it. Girard is pessimistic about the human capacity to represent, and thereby defer, violence. This pessimism is reflected in his hypothesis of human origin, in which the sparagmos precedes rather than follows representation. But representation, or more simply language, is not a supplement to human violence. It stands at the very origin of humanity. Human violence is distinguished from animal violence by this fact. Language gives us a capacity for violence unimaginable in the animal world, but it also gives us the ability to defer it.23 As Gans puts it, we are heirs of the scene of love and resentment. Macbeth’s tragedy is that he chooses resentment and consequently the violence that attends it. But so do his rivals. Shakespeare clearly believed that Macbeth’s choice was not just a pragmatic political choice but a moral one. In depicting Macbeth’s tragedy, Shakespeare shows us that we do not have to make the same terrible choice. In the end Macbeth believed his choice to be no choice at all. His last soliloquy affirms the futility of all action, which is full of sound and fury and signifies nothing. But what his actions signify is the perennial problem of human evil. In representing Macbeth’s violence, Shakespeare gives us the opportunity to reflect on it—and thereby defer it. The notion of evil as a moral choice is, to be sure, less pronounced in Kurosawa, who emphasizes the political context of a highly mimetic warrior society. But in foregrounding this context, Kurosawa, like Shakespeare before him, gives us the opportunity to reflect critically on the motivations of our own moral choices. Only by representing ourselves can we better understand ourselves.

Notes 1 Harry Berger, Jr., “The Early Scenes of Macbeth: Preface to a New Interpretation,” English Literary History 47 (1980): 1–31. 2 Berger, “Early Scenes of Macbeth,” 2. 3 William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 6th ed. (New York: Longman, 2009), 1.2.8. Act, scene, and line numbers hereafter cited in the text. 4 Berger, “Early Scenes of Macbeth,” 7. 5 Girard observes, in A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), that “Cassius refuses to worship a god who owes him his

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6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22

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Mimetic Theory and Film very life. Thus Shakespeare turns into evidence of mimetic envy an anecdote that in Plutarch merely illustrates Caesar’s physical courage” (187). Berger, “Early Scenes of Macbeth,” 19. Ibid., 3. A. R. Braunmuller, ed., Macbeth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Braunmuller, Macbeth, 16. Michael Hawkins, “History, Politics and Macbeth,” in John Russell Brown, ed., Focus on Macbeth (London: Routledge, 1982), 175. For a lucid discussion of this problem, see Robbins Burling, The Passage of Power: Studies in Political Succession (New York: Academic Press, 1974). Throne of Blood, directed by Akira Kurosawa (1957; New York: Criterion Collection, 2003), DVD. Donald Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 117. John Gerlach, “Shakespeare, Kurosawa, and Macbeth: A Response to J. Blumenthal,” Literature/Film Quarterly 1 (1973): 357. Gerlach, “Shakespeare, Kurosawa, and Macbeth,” 358. Anthony Davies, Filming Shakespeare’s Plays: The Adaptations of Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Peter Brook, and Akira Kurosawa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 155. Bernice W. Kliman, Macbeth, 2nd ed., Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 187. Stephen Prince, The Warrior’s Camera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 144. Graham Holderness, “Radical Potentiality and Institutional Closure,” in Robert Shaughnessy, ed., Shakespeare on Film (Houndmills: MacMillan, 1998), 79. See, for example, Eric Gans, Signs of Paradox: Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), especially chapter 2. Berger, “Early Scenes of Macbeth,” 2. As Gans puts it, in Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), “Yet the sign designates this center. Through the observed-and-performed sign, the central referent is represented. No doubt the referent can be perceived without the sign; but the observation of the referent in the absence of the sign is incomplete, in-significant. What makes us want to imitate, and to continue to imitate, the aborted gesture-sign of the others is our judgment that the sign is indeed a sign, that it evokes its object without attempting to possess it” (118). The notion of language as a deferral of violence rather than a forgetting of it is Gans’s specific modification of Girard’s originary scene of mimetic violence. I have developed Gans’s originary hypothesis in reference to Shakespeare in Shakespeare’s Big Men: Tragedy and the Problem of Resentment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016).

7

The Screenic Age Eric Gans

Scene and screen The invention that most fundamentally defines the human, the species that makes use of language, religion, culture, is the scene of representation.1 When I began thinking about these matters, influenced by the German romantics and their successors who were the first to think about such things systematically, I sketched out a theory of the major literary genres, lyric, dramatic, and epic, defined by the nature of discourse in each: the lyric expression of personal desire, the dramatic representation of dialogue, and the third-person narration of a story, mythical or historic.2 These literary categories have persisted through the millennia, and even the various subcategories have scarcely changed since antiquity. Fables, love-poems, elegies; comedies, tragedies, farces; long and short tales of gods and men; there are only so many fundamental ways in which we can use language to reconstitute the public scene on which language began, although no end to the ways in which the forms can reflect upon themselves. But toward the end of the nineteenth century there emerged a new art form that, while not precisely or wholly a literary genre, offered for the first time since the invention of secular literature a radically new medium for telling a story: the cinema. The scene on which the phenomena of human culture are revealed is of course named from the theater, where the skene or backdrop defined the sacred-cultural space in which the play was presented. Like the sacred precinct within a temple, on which it was no doubt modeled, the dramatic scene was separated from the worldly space within which the spectators sat, a mode of interaction that has only the most remote parallels in the animal world.

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The cinema for the first time provided the scene of representation, the “other world” in which the drama takes place, with an objective correlative of its ontologically distinct status. The screenic image, unlike the spectacle of actors on a stage, and even less like the scene of one’s own imagination, which we people with the characters in narrative works we hear or read, bears, in iconic rather than symbolic form, a different ontology from the things of this world. We see (and since 1927, hear as well) representations of people and objects that move and act and speak in their own screenic world. Now that the cinema has become a venerable medium and most movies are no longer even shot on film stock, we should make an effort to recall that the ubiquitous screens of television and computer and smartphone derive culturally if not technically from that of the cinema. The electronic genres only add new wrinkles to the revolutionary technology that for the first time offered a physical correlate to the scene of our imagination. We look at a photograph as at a drawing; but a film sequence is not experienced as a series of photographs, but as a slice of life from another world. These preliminary ideas once enunciated, what does the innovative nature of the cinema let us anticipate about its cultural function? In the first place, the cinema was both the fulfillment and the debunking of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. In the cinema, there is no imaginary reality that cannot be realized. This was understood nearly from the beginning by Georges Méliès, who implemented his ingenious special effects under the most primitive conditions. With today’s CGI it takes an effort of the imagination just to imagine what frontiers are left to cross. Yet this unlimited reality is at the same time radically un-participatory. The Wagnerian ideal, refined in the Nietzschean conception of tragedy, is a hyper-ritual in which the distinction between stage and world dissolves at the “Dionysian” moment in an imaginary compact totality—of the kind whose manifestations in the following century we recall all too well. In contrast, cinema, as it takes in the full content of our imaginary scene in anticipation of the screenic “one medium,”3 at the same time wholly evacuates the ritual carnality of its actors, present only as shadows, reducing the real, tangible world to a transparent support. On a sub-Wagnerian plane, the cinema also both fulfilled and annihilated the “realist” ambitions of the nineteenth-century theater, which had brought on stage increasingly hyperbolic chunks of worldly reality: moving panoramas depicting journeys through space, horses and other animals, pools of water and real boats for naval

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scenes, and all sorts of figures flying about on cables or disappearing into trap doors. Perhaps the most unexpected consequence of the introduction of the cinema was that, despite its radical difference from earlier modes of artistic representation, the screenic was immediately assimilable by new audiences and quickly became the basis of a global culture. French and then Hollywood movies were soon being shown all over the world; today we can observe rural African girls carrying baskets on their heads while staring at their cell phones. As with the novel, we are able to follow cinematic narration as unproblematically as traditional modes of storytelling. This too was something understood from the first by Méliès, and already anticipated by the Lumière brothers in their comic sketches, such as the famous arroseur arrosé. The ontological separation between image and reality is even less of a barrier to the transparency of the genre than the difference between words and things in the epic. Which perhaps explains why I long hesitated to attempt an “anthropoetical” analysis of the cinema: its boundaries are difficult to differentiate from those of narration itself. Or is the real difficulty that this fact forces us to face the question of what precisely is “narration” or storytelling? Within a generation, with the extension of the capacity of film projectors, the fundamentally narrative vocation of the full-length “movie” had become apparent, although throughout most of the silent era it coexisted with a variety of experiments, as well as with a much greater frequency than today of short comic or performance films. But while admiring the avant-garde experiments of the Surrealists in de-realizing the cinematic image, I think it important to recognize that they are less genuine artistic successes than interesting curiosities. They suggest that whereas the narrative limits of the novel can successfully be pushed back to allow for stylistic elements that both enrich and interfere with the intuitive flow of the narration—at least as far as Ulysses and A la recherche du temps perdu, if not Finnegans Wake—the same is not true in cinema. I think it ultimately a Good Thing that there is not, nor, I believe, can be, a consequential “avant-garde” cinema. Great film art is narrative art; the true masterpieces of cinema are uniformly “realistic,” even those that take place in a futuristic or fantastic décor. In even the most extreme of successful films, from Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu to contemporary masterpieces too numerous to name, filmic style and the various de-realizing effects are only of value insofar as

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they are recuperated by a narrative line. In Memento,4 one of the more extreme attempts that I find ultimately successful, this line is even presented backward—a technique pastiched quite successfully avant la lettre in the “Betrayal” episode of Seinfeld on November 20, 1997. Since the full-length narrative film was stabilized around 1913 at somewhere under two hours, movies have got a bit longer, but a three-hour film is already a bit oppressive, and anything much longer than that is best viewed as a miniseries (for example, Olivier Asseyas’s 2010 5:30 Carlos,5 which we watched from start to finish in the theater but where few stayed to the end). The somewhat greater length of stage plays is broken up by an intermission, which reminds us that the actors are functioning in the same real time as the audience, and like us need a break. But as we are not sharing the evening with the movie performers, we can normally watch their entire show to the end, although three-hour-plus films with intermissions are not unknown. A literary narrative has a story line or diegesis translatable in principle into other genres and other languages; yet a literary work is more than this. We may and often must consider the author’s language as a factor independent of the narrative, in particular because language has its own structures that cannot simply be made to correspond to the “syntax” of the series of acts of which the story is composed. Particularly since Flaubert, the novel’s style has come into its own as a commentary on the story line, largely ironic in Flaubert’s own novels, and standing in a much more complex relationship to the action in those of, say Joyce and Proust, to the point where to speak of the story “as such” becomes misleading. It is no coincidence that such novels cannot easily be made into successful films, and never into truly “faithful” ones, in contrast to those, for example, of Jane Austen, dominated by polite conversation in which the author’s attitudes are largely shared by the characters themselves, including ironies toward persons and situations that appear to merit them. All of this suggests that film, which tells its story essentially through images of enactment and dialogue among the characters at the same time as it makes most explicit the representational ontology of the aesthetic scene, is of all modes of representation the one most transparent to “the story itself,” which is by that very fact revealed as a shadow-play, a scenic illusion. One might argue in opposition to this view that a linguistic narrative is inherently far more abstract than a film narrative; it provides a measurable number of bits of information, whereas the simplest film includes far more raw data than can be dealt with in even the most generous analysis of a narrative plot. Yet it can

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be replied that the very knowledge of language that permits the understanding of narrative already assumes a vast quantity of largely idiosyncratic information in the mind of the individual reader, such that the terms of the narrative are represented in the imagination in incalculably different ways throughout the readership, whereas the images of a film are translated by the spectator’s brain as perceptions in much the same way as perceptions in the real world. Whence the film narrative may be said to be sufficient unto itself in a sense not possible for a story told in language and gesture by a narrator or read in a book. Dialogue translation aside, a foreign film tends to be assimilated much more easily and accurately than a foreign novel. That narrative modes have changed only in minor ways since the invention of film and even less since the introduction of sound makes clear that the screenic visual analogue of the internal scene of representation is the closest we can come to “the scene itself.” Refinements such as 3D show no sign of affecting this profoundly. Concerning the more problematic case of virtual reality, which has no doubt not yet had the time to unleash its full potential, my clear impression is that it is unsuitable for the presentation of cultural narratives. Whatever their medium, all art forms require the creator to be able to focus the audience’s attention on an inaccessible, “sacred” scene, an imaginary other world, not one in which one is immersed. This does not, however, necessarily suggest that VR will remain a curiosity like 3D. On the contrary, its expansion might have the revolutionary effect of elbowing traditional narratives aside, permitting the creation of worlds of self-fulfilling fantasy in the place of the essentially ascetic, at best imaginarily wish-fulfilling, realm of art. Such fantasy would by its nature most likely be dominated by the erotic, since this is the only “adult” form of “story line” that offers an intrinsic means of fulfillment. This is a question that deserves more thorough development elsewhere; perhaps fortunately, such considerations remain for the moment in the domain of speculation. The recent ubiquitizing of the screenic has reduced the importance of cinema in the narrow sense, which in its “golden age” before and especially after the introduction of sound was by far the most popular and lucrative form of public entertainment. There were over a dozen weekly to monthly movie magazines in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, and movie stars were in great demand during the Second World War for entertaining the troops on bases in the United States and overseas. Along with politicians and a few business tycoons and sports figures (in the United States, mostly boxers and baseball players), they made

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up the bulk of the celebrities of their era. Cinema, unlike the stage, promoted actors and acting styles that played on the paradox of the “exceptionally familiar,” representing for the most part ordinary people, perhaps distinguishing themselves in unusual circumstances but doing so in minimal, “naturalistic” ways. Particularly after the introduction of sound, movie acting was best accomplished with concentrated rather than theatrical gestures—a technique that, for example, made Jean Gabin the “only star” of French film in the 1930s.6

Gilles Deleuze’s two eras There is a deep truth in Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonian speculations on film in his two-volume Cinema.7 His division of film history into the two eras of imagemouvement and image-temps, with the dividing line at the Second World War, has something essential to tell us about film and more generally about the scene of representation in the screenic age. The slogan-like dichotomy of Deleuze’s terminology, like the whole of his conceptual apparatus, has the advantage of not presupposing a prior ideology, and although one can find analogous signs of postmodernity in the other arts, it is in this most direct medium that we can most directly attend to it. The necessity of these two categories is not obvious on its face. One might rather expect to locate the watershed in film history between the silent and sound eras. The mystery is only deepened by the fact that Deleuze has no “Hegelian” theory of history to defend. Just as in his understanding of cinema there are no essential distinctions of scale between a single frame and an entire national film tradition, so no historical event has a priori the structuring power to effectuate a break in its continuity. Yet history reasserts itself in the world of Bergsonian flux in the form of this binary division, which falls not by chance at the moment when the seemingly indefinite progress of Modernist dreams was revealed as a horrible illusion. While making no facile commentary on the state of the world with respect to the ever-ominous “end of history,” Deleuze’s categories provide insight into the relationship between history as ongoing human reality and the way in which we construct the specific narratives that we value: l’histoire qu’on vit and les histoires qu’on raconte. The action in a cinema of images-mouvement takes place in time. But as I understand it, Deleuze’s point (with apologies to those who might find my

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reading unfaithful to the spirit of his analysis) is that in following the action of such films, we remain oblivious to the passage of time as an independent reality. As soon as we become aware of time passing, it is as a symptom of futility, of time being wasted, or as in Proust, “lost” but waiting to be recovered. No doubt films before the Second World War had many boring moments, particularly in sequences that worked at “portraying emotion” rather than advancing the plot. But Deleuze’s category reflects the faith of early cinema that whatever we see on the screen is new and striking enough to absorb our interest. This is in contrast to the deliberate portrayal of empty time of the sort that we find in the postwar, postmodern plays of Beckett, or more farcically, Ionesco, and that Deleuze wants us to see in postmodern cinema as well. Yet the image-temps, in contrast to the time of “waiting,” which Beckett defines for the theater less as boredom than survival, may be enriched in the cinema by a variety of techniques unavailable to the stage. The image-temps lends a new a esthetic importance to the “special effects” that had been exploited since Méliès to separate cinematic time from the necessarily real time of the theater. En attendant Godot makes taking time a deliberate object rather than a secondary consequence of its action. But because the theater lacks the possibility of separating the scene ontologically rather than merely physically from the real world, it can play with time only in “real time.” The clown-protagonists’ hatexchanges and other futilities demonstrate taking time only by their circular content, whereas the cinema can make us aware of time by slowing it down or speeding it up, intercutting it with sequences from the past or future, or stopping it altogether in a freeze frame, as at the end of Les quatre cents coups.8 Thus, for example, the shot in Resnais–Duras’s 1959 Hiroshima mon amour9 where the French heroine (played by Emmanuelle Riva) is reminded by the sight of her sleeping Japanese lover’s hand of that of her dead wartime German lover at Nevers. Deleuze describes this as the contact between une pointe de présent, a present instant, and une nappe de passé, a “sheet” or layer of past time. It operates quite differently from the independent temporality of the flashback, such as the lengthy sequences in Le jour se lève10 where Gabin-François relives his premurder existence. Gabin, blocked in his room, has nothing else to do but review his past; in Hiroshima, however, we discover in the very flow of Riva’s experience an opening onto a whole stratum of her past, allowing us to understand her new love as a repetition of the previous, ultimately disgraceful one. Most importantly, the space thus opened up is not situated within the character’s current consciousness, but in an independent temporality that

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reveals to us the historical reality of what could have been for Riva, at best, a flash of intuition. It is not a mere slowing down of time, let alone a Beckettian “wasting” of it; its openness for us reveals her invincible attachment to the past that in her new love affair she is both commemorating and betraying. This is not a psychoanalytic revelation of Riva’s “unconscious”; it is grounded in a vision of historical time, in which the postwar present cannot will itself to forget the henceforth impossible violence of the war. We might have thought that a Frenchwoman in love with a German soldier under the Occupation would have been attracted to him, as were so many, as a conqueror, and consequently accept her punishment by the résistants after the Liberation as an expiation. But what we learn from this sequence, and from the whole of her love experience in the film, is that what had attracted her to this young man was rather that she understood him to be proleptically among the losers. As an illustration of the division between Deleuze’s two eras, Hiroshima is to my mind the most significant film of the New Wave, all the more so for being a product of its more reflective “left bank” contingent. Paradoxically, the moment when the lesson of the Holocaust—which Resnais had done so much in Nuit et brouillard11 to bring to public consciousness—is scenically realized in the West is the moment when, after Hiroshima, those who lost the war, their crimes neither forgotten nor forgiven, have nonetheless become our victims. But it is precisely at this moment that war in the traditional, total sense, the ultimate human praxis, has become impossible; any future victory in such a war will be defeat for all. Henceforth the very notion of victorious action can be understood only sous rature, and the previously hidden paradoxical underpinning of all goal-directed human praxis as a deferral of violence, to use the pregnant term that Generative Anthropology (GA) has borrowed from Jacques Derrida, is fated to remain permanently on the surface. Deleuze’s insight thus becomes a profound reflection on culture that goes beyond its aesthetic implementation in cinema. The image-mouvement, action shown in a time adequate to its portrayal (and we should recall the frequency of fast motion in the silent era, in comedies and Westerns and other scenes of frantic movement), corresponds to what we now see as a naïve rendering of the scene of representation, unproblematically adequate to its role of deferring desire’s potential violence and maintaining the human order. In contrast, the postwar/ postmodern image-temps corresponds to a global Beckettian reconfiguration of the scene as rather a locus of essential inaction. In contrast with the purged and revitalized postwar victimary identity of Riva’s Japanese lover, which she had

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anticipated in the German soldier at a time when his side seemed to be winning the war, the identity that she is forced to accept in the final shot of Hiroshima is that of the so aptly named city of Nevers, the neverness of Europe whose victory has won it only the ironic privilege of nonidentity. (How prophetically this message rings today!) Let us now reexamine the cinema’s originary screenic revelation of the scene of representation in the light of Deleuze’s dichotomy. L’image-mouvement is a straightforward expression of the attention-attracting nature of movement; for obvious biological and simply informational reasons, we attend to what moves or changes, seeing the unmoving parts of the scene as “background.” Which is to say that classical film, in retaining this “naïve” attitude toward time, corresponds to the traditional, fideistic sense of adequation between the cultural world of human action and the “nature” of the humanity that engages in and observes such action. This is, indeed, the attitude embodied in all classical cultural forms. It corresponds to the metaphysical-philosophical understanding of the human mind as unproblematically possessing language as we know it, stating “facts” in propositions/declarative sentences.12 The means of expression is simply adequate to its content, and there is no felt need to demonstrate how this means, on which our human uniqueness is founded, emerged from nature’s prior state, or indeed to see this as a problem to be solved. L’image-temps, on the other hand, makes no automatic claim on our attention. In Deleuze’s first characterization of it, in Italian neo-realism, he speaks of the character becoming him/herself a spectator, and of “wholly optical” shots that replace “sensory-motor” action. From the perspective of the audience, what is new here is not an absence of movement, but the sense that we are being asked to observe (along with the characters) a world existing “in itself,” not engaged in or preparing for human action. We are forced to experience time that is not subordinated to human purpose on the model of classic cinematic time filled with activity on a scene set by establishing shots. For example, in Hiroshima, the near-final sequence in which the man follows the woman through the dark streets is intercut with shots of wartime Nevers in which the absence of life and light contrasts with the lively neon signs of the new Hiroshima. The local temporality of the “journey” becomes a trope rather for a descent into time, where the present once more opens itself up to a nappe of the past. Similar in a diametrically opposite context is the underworld scene of backward movement in Cocteau’s 1950 Orphée.13 Here “poetic” past time is

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explored in antithesis to the chaotic activity of the political demonstrators who assail Orphée-Cocteau, implicitly in response to his less than noble activities during the Occupation. The résistante Duras and the demi-collabo Cocteau strangely agree that only the negation of praxis and its charge of guilt—whether that of Allied victory or of the flirtation with “Death” and Aryan beauty (cf. Cocteau’s scenario for the 1943 L’éternel retour14)—permits the restoration of a livable world in which (European) time will be filled once more with the—banal and demystified—illusion of goal-directed movement. I think the most anthropologically useful way to understand Deleuze’s dichotomy is that the image-temps is not a denial of praxis and the image-mouvement, but its inclusion in the broader and more problematic category of the scenic, and more particularly, the screenic. The attempt to simply “show” time in the place of action produces nothing better than Warhol’s futile inaction films. Choosing to watch such works, like “listening to” John Cage’s 4’33’’ of Silence, is “art” only in the sense of a performance-art send-up of the mimetic passivity of the contemporary audience. In contrast, what the new layer of consciousness embodied in the image-temps shows us is that, unlike the acts of other species, human practice necessarily exists within a scenic cultural-representational context where alone it can acquire a meaning. The cinema of image-temps reveals the separation between classical action and its normally invisible cultural matrix by making the spectator experience not simply the décalage between the action and the time in which we watch the film but the ontological dependence of the first on the second. This makes us appreciate the preciousness of the cultural scene without which human action and life could not exist. To forget this, it is implied, is to effectuate a return to the warlike potential of unreflective image-mouvement that is henceforth impossible without putting all of us in jeopardy. The Second World War in this perspective is the near-apocalyptic consequence of the Enlightenment’s hubristic attempt to secularize human time by detaching it from the scene of human culture, an effort innocently celebrated in images-mouvement from the very beginnings of film—the fifty-second Lumière documentaries—as an open space of freedom. What the postwar supplies that temporalizes the image-temps is the apocalyptic sense that we are living “on borrowed time” now that we have the capacity to destroy ourselves for good. Rather than being merely the field upon which we produce “progress,” time becomes itself the primary human value that must be preserved, even if only by wasting it. In Godot, this is borne out by the contrast

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between the hierarchical Pozzo and Lucky, who operate in “history” and are consequently marked for decline and death, and the two clowns whose activity of taking time outside the productive world of masters and slaves makes them immortal. Very simply, the image-temps is the sign of the postwar unforgettability of deferral, which Derrida would discover at about the same time as Girard attributed the origin of the human to the sacrificial deferral of violence. GA places this idea at the center of our understanding of the human, as what links human culture as a whole to the néant at the heart of Sartre’s pour-soi.15 The human scene can exist only because the non-scene of “instinctive” animal appetite, including its inhibitory negation via conditioned reflex, has been deferred. Once our culture has absorbed this knowledge, as we have digested that of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, the cinema can embody this awareness without foregrounding it. A similar development took place in the novel; the nouveau roman was the “Beckettian” version of the prose narrative, but once it had made its point, it couldn’t keep making it if it wanted to tell a story. The question then became whether “telling stories” in the postwar novel wasn’t just another version of Vladimir and Estragon exchanging hats. No more recent novel has given us much reason to think differently. As I wrote some years ago,16 after Robbe-Grillet’s 1957 La jalousie and Duras’s 1964 masterpiece Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, the French novel has become a minor genre, and I rather fear that this has come to be true of the novel in general. But not of the cinema. I do not see the lesson of postmodern cinema, even in its apocalyptic moments, of which von Trier’s 2011 Melancholia17 is the most daring, as figuring some kind of “end of history” or an analogous “end of culture.” The existence of weapons capable of ending life on earth, while making patent the “Girardian” truth that man’s always greatest and now potentially fatal danger is that posed by his own potential of mimetic violence, does not abolish either our need for art or its capacity for giving us satisfaction. I fail to see in what sense the best films of today are of lesser power and ambition than those of the past. Films like Melancholia, or Lynch’s Mulholland Drive,18 or Ang’s Lust, Caution,19 or Denis’s Chocolat20 and Beau Travail,21 and I could name several others, are on a par with the masterpieces of the past. These films, even if not all of them are as simply linear as the classics, have been able to integrate the lesson of postmodernity into a storyline that does not taper off into absurdity. Whether this remains true of some or all of the other arts is a question

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less easy to answer—and one that the present chapter’s focus on the screenic allows me to avoid by simply pointing out that the most ontologically distinctive transformation of the scene of representation is not coincidentally embodied in the art form that gives all indication of being the one least subject to decadence. I think this conclusion—necessarily tentative, for the arts have always retained the possibility of renewing themselves, and whether they continue to do so or not is not something that can be adjudicated in advance—reflects nonetheless our tacit recognition that the screenic is not simply the technological reproduction of the imaginary scene of culture, but as such the source of a qualitative new cultural awareness. I would not go so far as to claim that lacking this development, the line of thought that goes from Durkheim through Girard to GA would not have been possible, but certainly in the aesthetic sphere, the possibility of this universally accessible circumscribed materialization of the cultural scene suggests the underlying commonality of all cultures, a “prophecy” that the sight of people all over the world gazing continually at screens—as I am, necessarily, now—would appear to have realized. This ontological separation between the spectating self and the screenic culture-world already implicitly embodies Deleuze’s distinction between the screenic image-mouvement showing the world of human praxis “in its own time” and the deferring image-temps of the screenic itself. The history of the last century informs us that this contrast would only have been brought to the fore once the world of praxis had demonstrated that it could not simply, as in the past, rely on the cultural to protect it from mimetic violence. This suggests that henceforth the duty of art is to maintain in all of us a living awareness of the preciousness of the cultural scene on which we exist as humans, if our species is not to destroy itself.

Notes 1 See Eric Gans, The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981); Eric Gans, The End of Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 19–38; Gans, Signs of Paradox, 1–36. 2 Gans, The End of Culture, 227–300.

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3 Eric Gans, “On The One Medium,” in Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge, eds., Mimesis, Movies, and Media. Violence, Desire, and the Sacred, Volume 3 (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 7–15. 4 Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan (2001; Los Angeles: Newmarket Films, 2001), Theatrical. 5 Carlos, directed by Olivier Asseyas (2010; New York: IFC Films, 2010), Theatrical. 6 See Claude Gauteur and Ginette Vincendeau, Jean Gabin, Anatomie d’un mythe (Paris: Editions Nouveau Monde, 2006). 7 Gilles Deleuze, L’Image-mouvement. Cinéma 1 (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1983); L’Image-temps. Cinéma 2 (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1985). 8 Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows), directed by François Truffaut (1959; Paris: Cocinor, 1959), Theatrical. 9 Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, directed by Alain Resnais (1959; Paris: Cocinor, 1959), Theatrical. 10 Le jour se lève, directed by Marcel Carné (1939; Paris: Les Films Vog, 1939), Theatrical. 11 Nuit et brouillard [Night and Fog] (short), directed by Alain Resnais (1956; New York: Criterion Collection, 2004), DVD. 12 See my “Plato and the Birth of Conceptual Thought,” Anthropoetics 2, no. 2 (January 1997). http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0202/plato.htm 13 Jean Cocteau, Orphée [Orpheus], directed by Jean Cocteau (1950; Paris: DisCina, 1950), Theatrical. 14 Jean Cocteau, L’éternel retour [Love Eternal], directed by Jean Delannoy (1943; Paris: DisCina, 1943), Theatrical. 15 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (London: Methuen, 1958). 16 Eric Gans, “The Last French Novels,” Romanic Review 83, no. 4 (November 1992): 501–16. 17 Lars van Trier, Melancholia, directed by Lars van Trier (2011; New York: Magnolia Pictures, 2011), Theatrical. 18 David Lynch, Mulholland Drive, directed by David Lynch (2001; Hollywood: Universal Pictures, 2001), Theatrical. 19 Lust, Caution, directed by Ang Lee (2007; Los Angeles: Focus Features, 2007), Theatrical. 20 Chocolat, directed by Claire Denis (1988; Paris: MK2, 1988), Theatrical. 21 Beau travail, directed by Claire Denis (1999; New York: New Yorker Films, 2000), Theatrical.

8

A Sacrificial Crisis Not Far Away: Star Wars as a Genuinely Modern Mythology Paolo Diego Bubbio

December 15, 2017 marked the release of Episode VIII of the Star Wars saga, The Last Jedi.1 Star Wars fans of all ages dressed up as their favorite characters for the premiere. This dressing-up phenomenon occurs regularly—and has transpired at least once a year since 1999 at the “Star Wars Celebration,” a fan gathering established to celebrate the Star Wars saga; in addition, fans also observe Star Wars Day every year on May 4. “Jediism”—a religion based on the depiction of the Jedi characters in Star Wars—has grown dramatically in recent years; a worldwide campaign in 2001 urged people to write “Jedi” as their answer to the religion classification question in their country’s census; and while the majority of such respondents might have claimed faith in Jediism as a joke, it is nonetheless striking to see Jediism listed as the seventh-largest religion in England.2 The Star Wars (SW) saga is often regarded as a modern form of mythology. Such a contention seems to be supported by its original creator, George Lucas, who repeatedly claimed that his story was shaped, in part, by ideas described in mythologist Joseph Campbell’s 1949 work The Hero with a Thousand Faces.3 In such work, Campbell advocates the thesis that myths that are destined to last all share a fundamental structure, which Campbell called the monomyth. Ellwood provides a concise but accurate summary of Campbell’s theory of the monomyth: The basic monomyth informs us that the mythological hero, setting out from an everyday home, is lured or carried away or proceeds to the threshold of adventure. He defeats a shadowy presence that guards the gateway, enters a dark passageway or even death, meets many unfamiliar forces, some of which give him threatening “tests,” some of which offer magical aid. At the climax of the quest he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward: sacred marriage or

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sexual union with the goddess of the world, reconciliation with the father, his own divinization, or a mighty gift to bring back to the world. He then undertakes the final work of return, in which, transformed, he reenters the place from which he set out.4

It is easy to see how the adventures of Luke Skywalker in the first SW film (later subtitled A New Hope,5 ANH) and especially in the original trilogy as a whole (comprising The Empire Strikes Back,6 ESB, and The Return of the Jedi,7 ROJ) substantially match the structure of Campbell’s monomyth. And although it was not until after ROJ that Lucas and Campbell became friends,8 Lucas confidently claims: “When I did Star Wars, I self-consciously set about to recreate myths and the classic mythological motifs.”9 Thus, if one accepts the idea that the SW saga has been carefully shaped to reproduce the structure that is typical of all myths, its status as a “new mythology” should not come as a surprise, seeing that the saga is merely the outcome of a successful attempt to create one. However, even at a merely intuitive level, there seems to be something about SW and its relevance to the collective imagination that allows it to transcend its status as merely a “successful franchise.” John C. McDowell, the author of The Gospel According to Star Wars, remarks that “SW expresses something of the consciousness, hopes, and dreams of the culture from which it arose”10 and quotes Matt Bielby, editor of Total Film, who claimed that “For anyone whose formative years took place in the late seventies, Star Wars is a religious experience”;11 according to McDowell, SW is also “significantly culturally generative . . . it can shape and reshape the ways in which many think and feel about themselves and their world.”12 Such remarks seem to refer to—or at least hint at—a genuine mythological narrative, rather than a merely commercial phenomenon, however successful. McDowell makes a convincing case that SW fits the criteria according to which something is regarded as a “myth” according to several of the most prominent theories of myth, ranging from Congrad Kottak and Kathryn Kozaitis’s definition of myths as expressing “fundamental cultural values,” being “widely and recurrently told among, and . . . [having] special meaning to people who grow up in a particular culture,” and also “at least partly fictionalized,”13 to Levi-Strauss’s conception of myth as having an essential “operative value,” that is, as featuring the fundamental oppositions around which a particular culture orients itself.14 It might be argued, more minimally, that SW has reached the status of a genuine mythological narrative precisely because it matches (purportedly or not) Campbell’s theory of the monomyth. In a recent essay, John Thompson asks:

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“Does Campbell’s heroic monomyth really explain all the world’s mythologies?”15 For our purposes, the question is somewhat different: is Campbell’s monomyth the best theory to explain SW’s nature as a genuine mythological narrative? Campbell’s theory is mainly based on a conception of myths as reflecting an individual journey—that is, as expressing in a narrative and possibly fantastic form the process of formation of one’s identity from childhood through adolescence into adulthood. The most significant shortcoming of such a theory is that it largely overlooks everything that transcends the individual dimension;16 as Thompson puts it, Campbell’s heroic tale ignores “the larger communal, economic, and institutional forces at work.”17 Conversely, René Girard’s mimetic theory features a conception of myth that takes those forces into consideration, connecting the psychological individual—or better “interdividual,” according to Girard’s neologism—dimension (the role of mimesis in the subject/model relationship) with the social dimension (driven by the spread of violence and the search for a scapegoat). For mimetic theory, all myths tell the story of the “communal violence that leads to the unanimous destruction of a victim,”18 to which the miracle of rediscovered peace is later attributed and that is therefore worshipped and deified. In the next three sections, I will analyze the SW saga, and its development, from the point of view of mimetic theory. From this angle, even Lucas’s conscious decision of modeling SW on Campbell’s theory of myth is irrelevant, because for Girard any successful narrative (being it an orally transmitted myth, an ancient tragedy, a novel—or a film) derives its value precisely insofar as it reflects the situation of the community or society in which it is produced, either by concealing or by revealing (and sometimes concealing and revealing at the same time) the mimetic contagion and the spread of violence; and this can happen (and often does happen) despite the conscious intention of the narrative’s author(s). Unlike more “modern” narrative forms, such as novels, myths are not static, but are subject to change: there is, according to Girard, a “history of mythology.”19 Let us treat SW as a genuine mythical narrative, in order to see what such a hermeneutic orientation might offer with respect to seeing it anew. To do so, it is imperative to follow the chronological order of their creation. Thus, in the next section I will apply the insights of mimetic theory to the films of the original trilogy—ANH (1977), ESB (1980), and ROJ (1983)—to explore to what extent the story they tell can count as a “myth” according to Girard’s definition. I can anticipate, of course, that my answer to this question will be a positive one; the

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trilogy of prequels and the first two films of the new trilogy, however, are not simply myths according to Girard’s definition, and yet they still fit squarely, I believe, in Girard’s theory of a “history of mythology.”

“There is no escape”!: The original trilogy beyond the monomyth The first film of the SW saga, released in 1977 and subsequently subtitled A New Hope, seems to reproduce Campbell’s monomyth quite closely: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”20 Also, the same structure can be apparently applied to the entire first trilogy (including ESB and ROJ), up to the hero’s reconciliation with his father—another essential step in Campbell’s theory of myth—which effectively marks the conclusion of Luke Skywalker’s journey at the end of ROJ. However, if we look at the production of the original trilogy more closely, we find out that this had not always been the plan. First, Darth Vader was not meant to be Luke’s father until ESB;21 secondly, Darth Vader’s role was originally meant to be much less prominent in the development of the trilogy.22 If we now turn to mimetic theory, we find very useful resources to interpret such process of transformation of the role of a character.23 A “history of mythology” is possible, Girard tells us, because “mythology is a game of transformations.”24 Myths always change, because it is the community that fills, so to speak, the myth with everything that is needed for the myth to play its social function: the role of the characters changes as the characters themselves come to be regarded differently, and the needs to mystify the original violence and to control and channel new occurrences of that violence are satisfied by further alterations of the myth. In other words, each version of a myth reflects the society that has produced or modified it—and that happens regardless of the conscious intention of the story-teller (a story-teller, for instance, can consciously decide to make a story less bloody “to not scare the children,” but from the point of view of Girard’s history of mythology, this decision is possible only because the danger of a sacrificial crisis is sufficiently distant in time, and “scaring the children” against such danger is no longer collectively felt as a social imperative).

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Through the development of the original trilogy, we see that the character of Darth Vader becomes more and more important. When he first appears on screen, we do not know anything about him, but notice that he wears a mask that hides his human face, casting doubts about his full humanity. He is a mythological monster, a combination of different elements. As Girard explains, with respect to the mythological monster: Ever since the romantic movement we have tended to see in the mythological monster a true creation ex nihilo, a pure invention. Imagination is perceived as an absolute ability to conceive of forms that exist nowhere in nature. Examination of mythological monsters reveals no such thing. They always consist of a combination of elements borrowed from various existing forms and brought together in the monster, which then claim an independent identity. Thus the Minotaur is a mixture of man and bull. Dionysus equally, but the god in him commands more attention than the monster or than the mixture of forms.25

As we later come to understand, Vader is indeed a monster in this sense, halfhuman, half-machine (in ROJ, Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke, “He’s more machine now than man. Twisted and evil”). According to Girard, the presence of a monster is a reference to the (later divinized) scapegoat, but sometimes “the ambiguous primitive god is split into a perfectly good hero and perfectly bad monster who ravages the community: Oedipus and the sphinx, Saint George and the dragon”26—Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. Indeed, Vader is presented like a ravager, a violent and cruel demi-god: the violence involved, however—and this is interesting for our purposes—is not an uncontrolled, unchanneled, chaotic violence: quite the opposite is true. Vader seems convinced that only through the violence of the dark side of the Force, institutionalized in the Galactic Empire, it is possible to end the conflict with the Rebel Alliance and bring peace and order. Theologian Walter Wink has coined for this the idea the name of “myth of redemptive violence,” consisting in the “belief that violence saves, that war brings peace, that might makes right.”27 According to mimetic theory, there is a very rational explanation for the myth of redemptive violence: once mimetic rivalry is unleashed in a community, and undifferentiated violence is spreading, only an act of collective violence—the expulsion of a scapegoat—can “make things right” by bringing order and peace. It is the peace of “all against one,” and the order is inevitably a sacrificial order. We might therefore conclude that Vader represents the sacrificial, violent order—but actually things are more complicated than that. If in ANH the hero

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(Luke) and the monster (Vader) are still presented as irreconcilable opposites, in ESB the two characters start getting close to each other. This is not simply due to the unexpected revelation, at the end of the film, that Vader is Anakin Skywalker, Luke’s father. When Luke is training on Dagobah to become a Jedi, his master Yoda sends him to a cave to face his fear. There Luke seemingly confronts Vader in a duel and eventually beheads him—but when Luke opens Vader’s helmet, he is horrified to find his own face staring up at him. This dream-like (or nightmarelike) hallucinatory experience has all the characteristics of the phenomenon that Girard calls the monstrous double. “Under the heading monstrous double”— Girard explains—“we shall group all the hallucinatory phenomena provoked at the height of the crisis by unrecognized reciprocity.”28 Luke’s hallucination is clearly meant to signify that Luke too is—like his father before him—tempted by the dark side of the Force, and by the power that comes with it. Luke and Vader are, in Girard’s jargon, mimetic doubles, an expression that refers to the situation in which rivals are so obsessed with each other that they resemble each other more and more. There is another important element that confirms that Luke and Vader are mimetic doubles: it is the reciprocal mutilation. At the end of ESB, Luke confronts Vader in a duel, at the peak of which Vader cuts off Luke’s arm. A moment later, Vader exclaims: Vader: There is no escape! Don’t make me destroy you. Luke, you do not yet realize your importance. You’ve only begun to discover your power! Join me, and I will complete your training! With our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict, and bring order to the galaxy. (ESB)

Vader is invoking the “sacrificial peace through violence” in asking Luke to join him. Luke, however, refuses Vader’s offer and he steps off the gantry platform into space. At the end of ROJ, we witness a mirror-like image of the situation described above. Luke and Vader are in the presence of the Emperor, in the new, fully operational, Death Star. The Emperor tells Luke that his friends and the entire Rebel Alliance have fallen into a trap. Luke can resist no longer and, full of rage, attacks Vader. Again, at the peak of the duel, Luke cuts off Vader’s arm. The Emperor looks satisfied: Luke can now kill his father and take his place as the Emperor’s apprentice. However, at this point Luke “looks at his father’s mechanical hand, then to his own mechanical, black-gloved hand, and realizes how much he is becoming like his father” (ROJ, script).29 Luke steps back and

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hurls his lightsaber away: he is ready to die rather than turn to the dark side. Girard writes, One cannot exert violence without submitting to it: that is the law of reciprocity. . . . The reciprocal mutilation takes the direct form of a loss of differences, a “becoming the same” at the hands of those whom violence has already made identical. When we note that this process consists of turning men into doubles as well as into monsters, it is clear that we are dealing here with a sacrificial crisis. Mutilation symbolizes the working of the crisis in dramatic fashion. Clearly, it must be viewed both as the creation of fearfully deformed beings and as the elimination of all distinguishing characteristics. . . . The process imposes uniformity and eliminates differences, but it never succeeds in establishing harmony.30

When Luke and Vader confront each other for the second time in ROJ, Vader is no longer “the monster” fighting “the hero”; Vader and Luke are mimetic doubles: the reciprocal mutilation here is the indicator of the monstrous double. And yet, here the story does not develop according to the standard sacrificial narrative: Luke neither joins Vader nor kills him, but opposes mimetic violence with nonviolence. In doing so, Luke even violates the recommendation of his old master Obi-Wan Kenobi who, appearing to Luke straight after Yoda’s death on Dagobah, had implied that it was Luke’s destiny to kill Vader—and, to a reluctant Luke replying “I can’t kill my own father,” had resignedly commented “Then the Emperor has already won.” Even the wise Obi-Wan Kenobi seems to be unable to go beyond the sacrificial dynamic, according to which conflict and violence can only be overcome through a killing. In this respect, Luke might be seen as representing the anti-sacrificial stance, that stance which—according to Girard—is the essence of the Christian message. The presence of such an element should not surprise us: once the Gospels have taught us (not once and for all, but through the long but patient work of the Paraclete, the “Spirit of Truth,” throughout history) the “truth of the victim,” we can no longer have “pure” myths, because the demystifying effects of the Gospels force us to see a conflict not purely from the point of view of the persecutors, but from the point of view of the victim. Should we conclude, therefore, that with the original trilogy we are in the presence of a myth with a nonviolent, Christian-like conclusion? Not quite. As we all know, ROJ does not end without violence: the restored peace seemingly requires a double sacrifice: Vader’s sacrifice of the Emperor,

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and Vader’s own self-sacrifice (not to mention the—presumably—thousands of deaths of the military and non-military personnel operating the Death Star). Vader’s killing of the Emperor is a highly ambiguous act. On the one hand, Luke does not meet a violent end, and nor does his fatherenemy: as Hodge remarks, this is “a very significant departure from traditional mythology,” one that potentially shows “the redemptive vision of Star Wars.”31 On the other hand, it is impossible not to admit, with Ericksen, that Vader saves Luke with (what is presented as) “good violence”—by killing the Emperor.32 SW in general, and the original trilogy in particular, is not unambiguously anti-violent and anti-sacrificial: after all, as Thompson points out, “Star Wars cavalierly accepts, and even celebrates, violence as integral to the heroic life.”33 In so doing, the SW original trilogy preserves and perpetuates the classic structure of traditional myth—according to which “the hero ‘has to die to his old self ’ through a supreme (series of) ordeal(s) and return as someone who has the skills to renew life, prosperity, order and peace for his community.”34 But who is the hero here? In the light of ROJ, this definition applies to Luke as well as to Vader. As Buys nicely remarks, “By dying himself Darth-Vader-Anakin-Skywalker, the ‘evil one’ while alive, becomes the ‘savior’ of the Galaxy in the blink of an eye.”35 When we see Vader killing the Emperor, effectively “saving the day,” we rejoice and we tend to forget the long list of deaths and cruel acts of which Anakin/ Vader has been responsible, and to which we ourselves have been spectators. It almost does not matter now: a new order has been established, and we cannot help but feel grateful to Anakin/Vader for his sacrifice of the Emperor and for his self-sacrifice.36 This ambiguity is also acknowledged by Hodge, who argues that SW can, from this angle, be compared to Shakespeare’s plays, in so far as both SW and Shakespeare’s plays function on two levels, “the violently sacrificial and nonsacrificial (or nonviolent)—appealing to different audiences, with the deeper level subverting the most superficial, violent level. . . . This is shown in how Star Wars oscillates between resistance to sacred violence and evil, and redemption of that evil.”37 While I agree with Hodge that, from an aesthetic point of view, it is possible to read SW (and especially the original trilogy) as presenting the spectator with two layers of meaning, I believe that, from the point of view of the history of mythology (that is, if we consider SW primarily as a real myth), the conclusion of the original trilogy also represents the beginning of the divinization of the character who, through his sacrifice and self-sacrifice, has brought order and peace back to the community—that is, Anakin/Vader.

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I will unpack the last remark in the next section. Before proceeding, however, let us step out of the story for a moment and consider the social and historical situation in which the original SW trilogy was conceived and produced. The world reflected in the original SW trilogy was the post–war, Cold War world. The uniforms and insignia of imperial officers and troops are very reminiscent of Nazi Germany, but the military parades also resemble official rallies in the Soviet Union; Lucas himself admitted that the ceremony for the Emperor’s visit to the second Death Star, with military personnel saluting and TIE Fighters flying in formation, was inspired by May Day military parades in the Soviet Union.38 Let us not forget also that President Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire” in 1983. In the world of the Cold War, in Girard’s words, “people still believed in nuclear deterrence and thought that foreign policy had meaning.”39 As Palaver explains, “The cold war with its nuclear deterrence created again stability and peace for a certain period. Violence was contained anew.”40 Paradoxically, such fragile containment of violence produced, together with the fear for an imminent nuclear holocaust or—from an American/Western perspective—for the affirmation of the Soviet Union (corresponding to the evil Galactic Empire definitely crushing the Rebel Alliance in SW), also the hope (significantly echoed in the title of the first SW film) for the end of violence—a hope mythologically accomplished with the happy ending of ROJ. From a mimetic perspective, such misinterpretation derives from not understanding that the overcoming of the Cold War (which subsequently happened with the collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991) could not get rid of violence once and for all, simply because the Cold War was precisely the cause making such confinement of violence possible in the first place. With the end of the Cold War, violence was no longer confined. What happened to the SW myth in the post–Cold War era?

“The Sith and the Jedi are similar in almost every way”: The prequels and the history of mythology Sixteen years after ROJ, in 1999, the first film of the SW prequel trilogy, Episode I: The Phantom Menace41 (TPM), was released, followed by Episode II: Attack of the Clones42 (ATC) in 2002, and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith43 (ROS) in 2005. The audience had left an old Anakin Skywalker (aka Darth Vader) killing the Emperor and sacrificing himself in an in extremis act of repentance; in TPM, Anakin is introduced as a sweet, brave, and generous nine-year-old slave boy

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who is powerful with the Force. In TPM, we are also told that the Force is not (or not only) a mystical energy whose mastering requires training and dedication; while the Force is said to reside in all lifeforms, it is particularly powerful in a selected group of individuals who possess, and often genetically transmit to their offspring, a high concentration of midi-chlorians (microscopic lifeforms) in their blood. The watchword for the Prequels is rationalization. Everything—from the Force to the functioning of political institutions—which was in the background or remained unexplained in the original trilogy is now rationalized. And everything seems to be functional to the justification for the “divinization” of Anakin Skywalker. Anakin is the savior—we know that from ROJ; thus, he must be good; but we also know that Anakin, at some point, became Darth Vader, an evil monster: something must have happened to him. In other words, Anakin, being the savior, cannot be entirely responsible for his transformation into an evil creature! Anakin must also be the victim of a set of unfavorable circumstances, as well as of the bad influence of powerful evil individuals. Sure, in the original trilogy it is hard to see Vader as the victim, but as Girard tells us, “The victim is hard to recognize as a victim because he is totally monstrous.”44 Even at a visual level, the shift of focus is clear. Compare the poster of ANH with the poster of TPM. The poster of ANH has Luke Skywalker in a muscular pose, raising the lightsaber, with a monstrous Vader menacingly lurking in the background: the perfect image of the luminous hero fighting the forces of darkness. The poster of TPM shows a defenseless, seemingly innocent child (Anakin), surrounded by friendly and unfriendly characters; and, in another version of the poster, the child, alone, is looking to the ground with a sad expression, and tormentedly projects Vader’s silhouette. As McDowell poignantly remarks, “The new emphasis transforms SW from the heroic adventures of Luke Skywalker into the catastrophic tragedy of Anakin Skywalker.”45 This claim is particularly relevant for our purposes: if considered through the lenses of mimetic theory, in fact, it might mean that the Prequel trilogy is not simply an addition to a previous myth and a rationalization of it, but also features the characteristics of a tragedy. Consider what Girard writes about the tragic hero: The Hero of tragedy must suffer; to this day that remains the essence of a tragedy. He has to bear the burden of what was known as “tragic guilt”; the basis of that guilt is not always easy to find, for in the light of our everyday life it is often no guilt at all. As a rule it lay in rebellion against some divine or human authority;

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and the Chorus accompanied the Hero with feelings of sympathy, sought to hold him back, to warn him and to sober him, and mourned over him when he had met with what was felt as the merited punishment for his rash undertaking.46

From this point of view, Anakin is undoubtedly a tragic hero. His tragic guilt lay in rebellion against the quasi-divine authority of the Force, represented by the Jedi Council. And like many classic tragic heroes, he runs toward his fall with the best intentions: he saves Chancellor Palpatine (the future Emperor), for example, because he is convinced (and not entirely without reason), that the Jedi Council is conspiring to depose him. The arguments that Palpatine uses to convince Anakin that he is doing the right thing appeal to the ideal of peace. Palpatine argues that in order to realize such ideal, all the Jedi must die: “Once more the Sith will rule the galaxy! And . . . we shall have . . . peace” (ROS). The peace promised by Palpatine is the peace of the sacrificial order, which requires the violent death of a victim—or better, in this case, the death of many innocent victims: Anakin, in fact, goes to Jedi Temple, and kills all the Jedi, including many youngling apprentices (who broken-heartedly still look up at him as their protector). Once the carnage at the Temple is over, Anakin reports back to Palpatine, who praises him: “You have done well, my new apprentice. Now, Lord Vader, go and bring peace to the Empire” (ROS). As Buys points out, “The reasons given by Darth Sidious (Palpatine) and Darth Vader (Anakin) to justify the murder of the Jedi are the exact same reasons given by the chief priests and the Pharisees in the Gospels to justify the murder of Jesus.”47 As the High Priest Caiaphas declares in Jn 11:50, “It is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.” But Palpatine is not new to the use of scapegoats. His ascent to power was mostly determined by a manipulation of society’s emotional state, constantly pointing to scapegoats: the Trade Federation (TPM), the Separatists (ATC and ROS), and finally the Jedi (ROS). However, from a sacrificial point of view, even Palpatine is crushed by the same mimetic victimage from which he has benefited in his ascent to power: in fact, “Once hailed as a savior Palpatine becomes the evil Emperor who needs to be sacrificed himself.”48 The struggle that is at the core of the prequel trilogy, that between the Sith and the Jedi, has the fundamental feature of a tragic crisis. Girard remarks, If the tragic crisis is indeed to be described in terms of the sacrificial crisis, its relationship to sacrifice should be apparent in all aspects of tragedy—either conveyed directly through explicit reference or perceived indirectly, in broad outline, underlying the texture of the drama.

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If the art of tragedy is to be defined in a single phrase, we might do worse than call attention to one of its most characteristic traits: the opposition of symmetrical elements. There is no aspect of the plot, form, or language of a tragedy in which this symmetrical pattern does not recur.49

The “opposition of symmetrical elements” is quite evident if we consider the Jedi and the Sith. The Jedi are no longer the mythical pure figures of the original trilogy. Jedi Master Mace Windu admits that the Jedi’s “ability to use the Force has diminished” (ATC). And in ROS, Palpatine tells Anakin that “the Sith and the Jedi are similar in almost every way, including their quest for greater power”; and while the claim was certainly aimed at disrupting Anakin’s faith in the Jedi, what Palpatine says is not completely untrue. In the universe of the prequel trilogy, “The line between good and evil cannot be so easily drawn”; as Buys remarks, “The Jedi see no other option but to fight ‘the kings of their world,’ the Sith. In the competition to become rulers of the Galaxy, the Sith and the Jedi imitate each other more and more. . . . Both the Sith and the Jedi ‘save others’ by ‘killing enemies’ and ‘teaching others to become like them,’ i.e. killers.”50 We might even argue that, after all, Palpatine provides a good description of the universe portrayed in the prequel trilogy, when he educates Anakin by saying that “good is a point of view” (ROS)—a claim that interestingly and ambiguously echoes (or, in the time line of the saga, anticipates) Obi-Wan’s advice to Luke in ROJ: “Luke, you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” The rigid moral structure that dominates the original trilogy is abandoned in the prequels. Differences tend to disappear. “Myth involves a lack of differentiation”;51 it is almost superfluous to call to mind that the war against the Separatists is fought by an army of identical clones; a war that will then end with the murder of all Jedi by the clones, and with the birth of twins (Luke and Leia).52 From the point of view of mimetic theory, these are all signs of a sacrificial crisis: “The traces of sacrificial crisis are less distinct in myth than in tragedy. Or rather, tragedy is by its very nature a partial deciphering of mythological motifs. The poet brings the sacrificial crisis back to life; he pieces together the scattered fragments of reciprocity and balances elements thrown out of kilter in the process of being ‘mythologized.’ . . . Tragedy envelops all human relationships in a single tragic antagonism.”53 The tragic antagonism at the center of the prequel trilogy is that between the Jedi and the Sith, an antagonism that is resolved, significantly, with the transformation of a Jedi (Anakin) into a Sith lord. It is in ROS that we witness the transformation of the tragic hero Anakin Skywalker into the monster Darth Vader: Anakin is charged with hideous

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crimes, such as murdering children in cold blood (he slaughtered the entire tribe of Sand People that he deems responsible for his mother’s death in Tatooine, and then kills all the young apprentices in the Jedi Temple), and by the end of the film he is no longer fully human, but half-human half-machine. His mutilations make him unable to see the world without the aid of a mask. Like Oedipus, Anakin is somewhat blind. There are many similarities between Anakin and Oedipus. Like Oedipus, Anakin ends up doing precisely what he is actively trying to avoid: he embraces the dark side of the Force because he is terrified that the love of his life, Padme, is going to die, as the visions he is having seem to predict, and Palpatine/Sidious promised him that the wisdom of the Sith could allow him to prevent Padme’s death; however, this hope makes him undertake a course of actions that will lead him to inflict, in a moment of anger, the injuries that will ultimately cause Padme’s death. This similarity, between the ancient Greek king and Anakin, has already been noted by McDowell, who argued that “Anakin becomes a tragic figure who attempts to escape destiny by taking his future into his own hands, but who nonetheless is fated to kill (here his surrogate father when he is a Padawan) Obi Wan (although it would be going too far to suggest that Padme functions in the same way as Oedipus’s mother).”54 While I agree with McDowell’s general contention, I would argue that, from the point of view mimetic theory, it would not be going too far to suggest that Padme does function in the same way as Oedipus’s mother. According to Girard, the subject desires the mother not because of a mysterious original libido (as in Freud), but because a relationship with the mother is denied; similarly, Anakin is not allowed to have a relationship with Padme (not officially, at least), because of the strict rule of the Jedi order against emotional attachments. And if we look at Girard’s description of the stereotypes of persecution in Oedipus, the similarities are even more striking: The plague is ravaging Thebes: here we have the first stereotype of persecution. Oedipus is responsible because he has killed his father and married his mother: here is the second stereotype. The third stereotype has to do with the signs of a victim. The first is disability: Oedipus limps. . . . Like many other mythical characters, Oedipus manages to combine the marginality of the outsider with the marginality of the insider.55

Now consider Anakin in ROS. The civil war is ravaging the galaxy (first stereotype). Anakin becomes responsible for the tyrannical domination of the Empire and for the subsequent war with the Rebel Alliance, because he allowed Palpatine to kill Mace Windu and, obsessed by the prevention of Padme’s death,

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submitted to the dark side (second stereotype). Anakin is an amputee: he lost his right arm during his duel with Count Dooku in ATC (third stereotype). He was born a slave, and was going to become the most powerful Jedi ever (“the chosen one”): he therefore combines the marginality of the outsider with the marginality of the insider. In The Scapegoat, Girard writes, “The more signs of a victim an individual bears, the more likely he is to attract disaster. Oedipus’s infirmity, his past history of exposure as an infant, his situation as a foreigner, newcomer, and king, all make him a veritable conglomerate of victim’s signs.”56 The same argument could easily be made about Anakin. Does this mean that we should consider Anakin/Vader a scapegoat—a victim? Prima facie, this seems hard to sustain. Despite the unfortunate circumstances impacting his decisions, he is not “innocent.” However, this objection is not, in itself, enough to reject the idea that Anakin/Vader could be a victim. Oedipus too is not “innocent”—he is indeed guilty (albeit unknowingly so) of the crimes of which he is charged. Also, and more fundamentally, attributing all sorts of hideous and appalling crimes is precisely the strategy that myths traditionally employ to hide the arbitrariness in the choice of the victim (with tragedies later providing some kind of explanation for those crimes: thus, this too would be consistent with our reading of the prequel trilogy as something in between a rationalizing version of the myth and a tragedy). Rather, the real objection against a consideration of Anakin/Vader as a scapegoat is the following: if we read the SW saga as a real myth, and if we assume that the character Anakin/Vader is the mythical (and hence distorted) representation of a victim, then the question is: what is the real victim of which Anakin/Vader is the mythical representation? Here is where our entire hypothesis seems to vacillate. Traditional (genuine) myths are retrospective and (necessarily) distorted narratives of an actual sacrificial crisis, one in which a real victim was effectively expelled/scapegoated. If the SW saga is a genuine myth, then who is the real victim? My answer to this question is that there is no original victim. Or better, the victim is nowhere and everywhere. Let me explain. SW can indeed be considered a genuine myth, but modern myths are different from ancient, traditional myths. The reason for this difference is simple: from the point of view of mimetic theory, we live in a world that—unlike the ancient world—has absorbed some demystifying principles: those principles thanks to which we can sometimes (certainly not always, but surely more often than our ancestors living in ancient pre-Christian societies) grasp the truth of the victim and distinguish it from the lies of the persecutors. This allows—indeed, requires—the emergence of

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an intellectual symbolism. As I argued elsewhere,57 intellectual symbolism constitutes a derivative form of mimetic victimage, in which the mechanism is not merely at work, but actually represents the sacrificial-intellectual crisis typical of the most recent phases of modernity. More simply, the idea is that it has become more and more difficult to narrate myths that hide the presence of an actual scapegoat, because we have become too good in identifying the scapegoating process behind the narrative; and yet, because we still live in a fundamentally sacrificial society, we still need myths. Thus, while in ancient societies we had myths in which the represented victim actually corresponded to an actual victim,58 in our societies—in which scapegoating and victimizations are still everywhere (let us not fool each other about this)—we have myths that still reproduce the same mechanism, but in which the represented victim is intellectualized and fictionalized so that it does not represent any actual victim in particular. I take this dissociation between real scapegoating and fictional scapegoating to be a phenomenon characteristic of our age, and one that is still functional to the perpetuation of the mimetic victimage. This phenomenon is not, in itself, new. To some extent, it was an essential component of ancient Greek tragedies as well. Girard calls it “desymbolism”: Tragedy has a particular affinity for myth, but that does not mean it takes the same course. The term desymbolism is more appropriate to tragedy than is symbolism. It is because most of the symbols of the sacrificial crisis—in particular the symbol of the enemy brother—lend themselves so readily to both the tragic and the ritual situations that tragedy has been able to operate, at least to some extent, within and also contrary to mythological patterns. [. . .] Symbolized reality becomes, paradoxically, the loss of all symbolism; the loss of differences is necessarily betrayed by the differentiated expression of language. The process is a peculiar one, utterly foreign to our usual notions of symbolism. . . . If the tragic poet touches upon the violent reciprocity underlying all myths, it is because he perceives these myths in a context of weakening distinctions and growing violence. His work is inseparable, then, from a new sacrificial crisis. . . . To know violence is to experience it. Tragedy is therefore directly linked to violence; it is a child of the sacrificial crisis.59

This quote from The Scapegoat is crucial, I think, to understand what is going on in SW in general, and in the prequel trilogy in particular. Here Girard is making two important claims. First: in ancient Greek tragedies, the simple symbolism of myths (and here by “symbolism” we mean those forms of communication and signification that are characteristic of the human in its uniqueness) goes through

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a process of “rationalization” such that, paradoxically, it makes its content (the mimetic victimage) more evident (and as such “desymbolized”). Second: this can happen because the tragedians live in a historical moment when violence is growing again: the incipient awareness of the mechanism is a symptom of a new sacrificial crisis. And a crisis was indeed meant to happen: in ancient societies, the sacrificial circle always perpetuates itself. Therefore, the dissociation between real scapegoating and fictional scapegoating was never accomplished. In the contemporary world, however, the situation is different. The circle is broken: a large-scale sacrificial crisis, one that could reset, so to speak, the circle of violence and found a new society on a new victim, is impossible, because it would be an apocalyptic one. What we have is an endless set of partial sacrificial crises. In this context, the dissociation between real scapegoating and fictional scapegoating comes to an accomplishment. However, that lack of a direct correspondence between a fictional scapegoat and a real scapegoat does not mean the lack of any relation between the emergence of a myth/tragedy and the historical moment in which that myth/tragedy is produced. The two darker films of the prequel trilogy, ATC and ROS, appeared in 2002 and 2005, respectively—that is, one year and four years after 9/11. Commenting on the events that followed the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, mimetic theory scholar Michael Kirwan remarks that what we were experiencing was “a ‘satanic’ whirlpool of heightened emotion, a frenzied search for ‘meaning,’ and social mobilization towards intense and of course militaristic solidarity, which for mimetic theory can only mean one thing: the beginnings of the search for a scapegoat.”60 And yet, this is not all. The SW saga still has some surprises in store for us.

“I have a bad feeling about this”: The Sacrificial Crisis in the New Episodes Episode VII: The Force Awakens61 (TFA), the first film of the sequel trilogy, was released in 2015. It was the first film in the saga in which original creator George Lucas, who had sold the SW franchise to The Walt Disney Company in 2012, was not involved.62 TFA is set thirty years after the destruction of the second Death Star and the Emperor’s death. Thirty years later, we come to discover, the evil First Order has risen from the fallen Galactic Empire and seeks to eliminate the New Republic. The First Order has built a terrible weapon of mass (indeed, planetary)

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destruction, the Starkiller base. The young girl Rey becomes involved in a transmission of documents crucial to the Resistance movement, which backs up the New Republic, discovers herself to be Force-sensitive, and together with some friends, manages to destroy the Starkiller base. The plot presents several similarities to ANH, to the point of appearing almost like a reenactment. This is, to some extent, openly admitted by the director of TFA, J. J. Abrams, who stated, “Obviously the prequels had existed in between and we wanted to, sort of, reclaim the story.”63 This is consistent with a formula that dates back to the ancient Greek tragedians: “The Greek tragedians evoked their own sacrificial crisis in terms of legendary figures whose forms were fixed by tradition.”64 Prima facie, most of the characters from TFA seem to mirror the legendary figures of the SW saga: Rey-Luke, Poe-Han, Kylo-Vader, Snoke-Palpatine, etc. Even the same background dynamic of an evil entity that wants to establish order through violence seems to be in place: First Order’s General Hux, addressing an assembly of stormtroopers before the activation of the Starkiller base, proclaims, “Today is the end of the Republic! The end of a regime that acquiesces to disorder!” However, if we take a deeper look, we realize that what is really different is the psychological atmosphere of the film, which is darker than the atmosphere of the classic and of the prequel trilogy. We discover that the end of the Galactic Empire was not the destruction of all evil forces after all. The First Order is strong, while the New Republic is weak and is virtually wiped out when the Starkiller base destroys the Republic’s capital star system. We learn that Luke Skywalker had tried to revive the Jedi order by training new apprentices, but one of them—the son of Leia and Han—has killed all the other younglings and has turned to the dark side. Even at a personal level, the great love story between Leia and Han is over. The same general feeling dominates Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (TLJ), released in 2017. A line from Luke in TLJ perfectly captures this feeling: “Now that they’re extinct, the Jedi are romanticized, deified. But if you strip away the myth and look at their deeds, the legacy of the Jedi is failure. Hypocrisy, hubris.” This sense of disillusion finds its counterbalance in the ostentation of massive violence: aesthetically, the destruction of the planet Alderaan by the Death Star in ANH was displayed with a sense of gravity and mourning that cannot be retrieved in the destruction of several planets by the Starkiller base in TLJ. To paraphrase Girard, violence returns in a spectacular manner—but when it does, it returns also in the form of subversive knowledge.65 As a reenactment of the SW myth, the first two films of the new trilogy display not only the sacrificial violence, but also the mimetic relationships lurking behind

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that violence. From this point of view, the most interesting character is certainly Kylo Ren, alias Ben Solo (the son of Han and Leia). When Kylo first appears on screen in TFA, he is displayed as a “tall, dark figure” who “wears a mask” (TFA, script). His appearance closely resembles the first appearance of Vader in ANH. Later, we learn that Kylo has a sort of veneration for his grandfather Vader, a veneration so strong that he even addresses the “burnt, ashen, ghostly deformed mask of Darth Vader” that he keeps as a relic with these words: “Show me, Grandfather, and I will finish what you started” (TFA, script). For anyone who is versed with mimetic theory, it is evident that Vader is Kylo’s model (his external mediator). Toward the end of the film, when Kylo is confronted by his father Han in the Starkiller base, Han tells Kylo: “Take off that mask. You don’t need it.” Vader had to wear his mask (which contained an air pump, effectively working as a respirator and allowing him to breathe). Kylo, conversely, does not need a mask: we therefore have the confirmation that he wears it merely to resemble his grandfather. Like any other disciple in a mimetic relationship, Kylo is not very self-confident. He feels “the pull to the light.” Such conflicts are unbearable for someone in a relationship of external mediation. However, he does not have the strength to sever his ties with someone, like his father Han, who reminds him that he cannot become his grandfather. Kylo therefore pathetically asks his father to help him in performing his own murder; as Han dies, Kylo even thanks him for the help. The web of mimetic relationships, and their impact in the story, becomes even more evident in TLJ, when we learn more about the relationship between Kylo and his uncle Luke. As Luke explains to Rey, Kylo was one of his apprentices, but he could sense the darkness in him, to the point of foreseeing the “destruction, and pain, and death” that Kylo was going to bring, and in a “briefest moment of pure instinct” was tempted to kill him to prevent that from happening; Kylo woke up and saw his Master ready to kill him: “And the last thing I saw,” Luke concludes, “were the eyes of a frightened boy whose Master had failed him” (TLJ, script). Like his father before him, and like a classic tragic hero, Luke was the cause of the evil he was trying to prevent, because as a consequence of that action, Kylo gave himself to the dark side and killed all the other apprentices. This is, arguably, the reason why Luke refuses to become Rey’s Master: he is terrified by the consequences of the (mimetic) relationship he had with Kylo. If Luke no longer wants to be a Master/model for anyone, Kylo cannot do without models. In addition to his external mediator Vader, he also has another model, an internal mediator: Supreme Leader Snoke. Early in TLJ, Snoke,

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referring to Kylo’s mask, addresses him saying “Take that ridiculous thing off.” The rest of the conversation is not much nicer: “You failed!” exclaims Snoke, and concludes, “You’re no Vader. You’re just a child in a mask.” If you are a deeply mimetic subject, imagine how devastating it would be to hear your everyday Master telling you that you are not, and you can never become, the model you idolize. These words won’t go without consequences. At the end of the film, Kylo has taken an imprisoned Rey to Snoke. The latter addresses Rey saying, “You think you can turn him? Pathetic child. I cannot be betrayed; I cannot be beaten. I see his mind, I see his every intent. Yes. I see him turning the lightsaber to strike true. And now, foolish child, he ignites it, and kills his true enemy!” (TLJ). A moment later Kylo ignites the lightsaber (Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber), and kills Snoke. Snoke seemed to have forgotten that the key of a mimetic relationship of a Master toward his disciple is the double bind between encouraging the disciple to become like the Master, and the contemptuous message that s/he will never be able to become like the Master. Crush him/her too much, and s/he won’t need you anymore. Snoke has become Kylo’s “true enemy.” With the murder of Snoke, Kylo experiences a form of mimetic epiphany. This epiphany can only be fully comprehended in light of a previous dialogue between Kylo and Rey. First, Rey tells Kylo that he is a monster. After a pause, Kylo answers, “Yes, I am” (TLJ). Mimetic desire is what made Kylo a monster. However, Kylo—like the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground— is not completely unaware of his metaphysical sickness, of the mimetic circle in which he is trapped. Consider the following dialogue between Kylo and Rey: Kylo: Your parents threw you away like garbage. Rey: They didn’t. Kylo: They did, but you can’t stop needing them. It’s your greatest weakness. Looking for them everywhere, in Han Solo, and now in Skywalker. Did he tell you what happened that night? Rey: Yes. Kylo: No. He’d sensed my power, as he senses yours, and he feared it. Let the past die. Kill it if you have to. That’s the only way to become what you were meant to be. (TLJ)

Kylo here is telling Rey that her greatest weakness is the need for models (Han first, then Luke). Then, he suddenly asks her if Luke told her what happened the night of the confrontation between Luke and Kylo. Apparently, there is no

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relation between Rey’s need of parent-like figures and what happened to Kylo that night. In reality, Kylo has now moved to talk about his own need for models. We, like Rey, only know what happened that night from Luke’s point of view. Now we are presented with Kylo’s point of view. Kylo’s perception is that Luke feared his growing power: a dynamic very common between a model and his disciple, which inevitably generates rivalry. So he left his old model (Luke) behind, following his dream to become like his grandfather, under the guidance of a new Master, Snoke. If we now think of Kylo’s murder of Snoke in light of this conversation, we are in a better position to appreciate his mimetic epiphany. Being in Snoke’s presence with Rey, Kylo understands that he too has merely left one disappointing Master (Luke) for another (Snoke). This thought, however, does not initiate a process of conversion (the abandonment of horizontal transcendence), but seems to lead Kylo to an illusory belief in his self-sufficiency. Kylo, in fact, proclaims, “It’s time to let old things die. Snoke, Skywalker, the Sith, the Jedi, the Rebels. Let it all die. Rey. . . . I want you to join me. We can rule together and bring a new order to the galaxy!” (TLJ). No need for models. No need for masks. A new beginning . . . for a very old project: “a new order.” But any new order is inevitably sacrificial. Kylo feels that he no longer needs a mask. How should we interpret this? Consider what Girard writes about the use of masks in Greek theater: Greek tragedy, like the festival and indeed all other rites, is primarily a representation of the sacrificial crisis and the generative violence. . . . Masks disappear when the monsters once again assume human form, when tragedy completely forgets its ritual origins. That is not to say, of course, that tragedy ceases to play a sacrificial role in the broad sense. On the contrary; it has taken over the role of ritual.66

The sequel trilogy takes the form of a tragedy; as such, it is a ritual. From this angle, it is not different from the prequel trilogy. But the prequel trilogy ended with the (tragic) hero wearing a mask, whereas the sequel trilogy features the villain/tragic hero (there is a striking lack of distinction in this respect) giving up his mask and displaying his full humanity (with all the related shortcomings). Girard’s quote can be perfectly adapted to the sequel trilogy: SW has forgotten its ritual origins, precisely because it has taken over the role of ritual. When something like that happens, this usually means that the ritual is being emptied of its meaning. We still repeat it, but it becomes less and less effective, and we start wondering why we do it.

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Consider what J. J. Abrams, the director of TFA, stated: “I can’t quantify that, but I can say that the spirit of it, the feeling of it, the continuum and telling a brand new story set in a world that just like VI from V and V from IV would feel like a continuum, is always the thing Larry and I wanted to do. But it was very much about answering the questions: What do we want to feel? Why are we telling this story? Who are the characters that have any meaning or relevance or make us feel something?”67 I find it very interesting that Abrams wondered why they were telling this story. Can you imagine Lucas wondering the same while he was writing the draft of the first SW film? Probably not. Moreover, in the interview Abrams goes on by distancing himself from the “rationalising” style employed by Lucas in the prequel trilogy, and claiming that he wanted to reproduce the “feeling” of the original trilogy. What is this, if not the definition of a ritual? Girard wrote, “It is correct ultimately to confer on tragedy a quasiritualistic value in Western culture.”68 The SW sequel trilogy is just this—a ritual. The tale is narrated over and over, but with always-weaker effects. Kylo Ren is the central character of the trilogy: he no longer wears a mask, because he is a “mask” (masque in French, maschera in Italian), that is, the stock character who ritually performs the sacrifice: fully human—but half-victim half-persecutor. Someone might object, paralleling the question that we already asked about Vader: what is the real victim of which Kylo is the ritual representation? The answer is the same as before—the victim is nowhere and everywhere—but with a significant difference. In Battling to the End, Girard writes, “Every rite is thus a kind of founding murder, and every murder has a bit of a ritual aspect.”69 If the sequel trilogy is essentially a ritual, then we do not have to look for one murder of which the movies are the reenactment. Kylo Ren is our mirror: we all are Kylo. We all are victims and persecutors at the same time. Like Kylo, we want to sacrifice our victim, but we are too aware of the sacrificial victimage to do it without the cooperation of our victim (remember that Kylo needs his father’s help in order to kill him). And like Kylo, we dream of a “new order”—but without sounding too convinced, and convincing. When a ritual reaches this stage of ineffectiveness, this is usually the symptom of a mounting sacrificial crisis. A sacrificial crisis is always a crisis of distinctions, a crisis affecting the cultural order (the cultural order being “nothing more than a regulated system of distinctions in which the differences among individuals are used to establish their ‘identity’ and their mutual relationships”70). To experience such lack of distinctions, it is sufficient to listen to the media or—even more

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poignantly—spend some time on social media. Think of the phenomenon of fake news: distinguishing “truth” from “falsity” is becoming harder and harder. “Culture is somehow eclipsed as it becomes less differentiated.”71 The sequel trilogy of SW is a tragic ritual; as such, it “holds up a mirror” to us, and—to paraphrase Girard—what we saw reflected in it is the inexorable decay of our community.72 We keep watching SW films (most of us do it, anyway): we keep performing our exhausted rituals. “We always rely on the imagination in order to avoid reality.”73 And the reality is that of a perpetual sacrificial crisis. As Goodhart explains: “It may happen that no victim may satisfy and the culture survives in a state of something like permanent sacrificial crisis. . . . The system goes into a kind of tailspin, a more or less perpetual state of sacrificial crisis. This is the condition in which, for example, we find Greek tragedy. The sacrificial system remains more or less in place. The play concludes with an endorsement of the mythic system. But in the course of the play, the end of that myth and the sacrificial system for which it stands in their very efficacy has been challenged. One cannot realistically imagine an alternative system taking over.”74 “Episode IX” will be filmed from July 2018 onwards, and will be released in December 2019. We do not know how the story will unravel. Because on a disagreement about “script differences,” J. J. Abrams (who directed TFA) will replace Colin Trevorrow, who directed TLJ and was originally meant to be the director of Episode IX as well.75 We cannot know which kind of stimuli from our society Abrams will—consciously or unconsciously—migrate into the new film. To be consistent with our comparison with ancient Greek tragedy, it is worth quoting Girard, when he argued that “Sophocles demonstrates his keen insight here but it does not prevent him, also, at the end of Oedipus Rex from giving in and becoming the consenting dupe of this myth; yet he is not unaware of its fictitious character containing the falsehood of persecution.”76 Abrams might decide to radicalize the demystification of the mimetic victimage, which we have seen at work especially in the character of Kylo Ren, or he might become “the consenting dupe” of the SW myth. We, on our part, will participate in the ritual, watching Episode IX like good devotees. We will like it or we will criticize it (possibly both). But once we get out of the theater, we will find ourselves immersed once again in a world of fake news, nationalist wars, and undifferentiated violence. After all, as Goodhart argues, “Violence is none other than difference itself, asserted in the extreme, no longer efficaciously guaranteeing its own propagation. It is difference gone wrong, as it were, the poison for which difference is the medicine. Such is the nature of the sacrificial crisis.”77

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There is a line that is repeated, by different characters, in each of the SW films. At some point, a character always says: “I have a bad feeling about this.” Surprisingly, and perhaps significantly, the line is absent from TLJ. We do not know if the line will appear again in Episode IX. But even if no character says these words in the film, we, while stepping out of the theater, can definitely say them. I have a bad feeling about this.

Notes 1 Star Wars: The Last Jedi, written and directed by Rian Johnson (2017; San Francisco: Lucasfilm/Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2018), DVD. 2 Tim Donnelly, “Thousands of People Have Converted to the Jedi Faith,” New York Post, December 14, 2015, https://nypost.com/2015/12/14/the-jedi-faith-is-very-re al-and-its-surging-in-popularity/ 3 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces: Commemorative Edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 4 Robert Ellwood, The Politics of Myth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 144. 5 Star Wars (later retitled Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope), written and directed by George Lucas (1977; San Francisco: Lucasfilm/20th Century Fox, 2004), DVD. 6 George Lucas, The Empire Strikes Back, screenplay by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, directed by Irvin Kershner (1980; San Francisco: Lucasfilm/20th Century Fox, 2004), DVD. 7 George Lucas, Return of the Jedi, screenplay by George Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan, directed by Richard Marquand (1983; San Francisco: Lucasfilm/20th Century Fox, 2004), DVD. 8 John C. McDowell, The Gospel According to Star Wars: Faith, Hope, and the Force (Louisville and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 3. 9 George Lucas, quoted in Cass R. Sunstein, The World According to Star Wars (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), 124. 10 McDowell, The Gospel According to Star Wars, xviii. 11 Matt Bielby, Total Film (April 1997), cited in David Wilkinson, The Power of the Force: The Spirituality of the Star Wars Films (Oxford: Lion, 2000), 14, and in McDowell, The Gospel According to Star Wars, xviii. 12 McDowell, The Gospel According to Star Wars, 1. 13 Ibid., 2; see Conrad Kottak and Kathryn Kozaitis, On Being Different, 2nd ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2002), 2.

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14 Ibid., 11; see Claude Levi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” in Robert A. Segal, ed., Theories of Myth (Lancaster: Garland Series, 1996), 120. 15 John Thompson, “‘In That Time . . .’ in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: Epic MythUnderstandings and Myth-Appropriation in Star Wars,” in Jason T. Eberl and Kevin S. Decker, eds., The Ultimate Star Wars and Philosophy: You Must Unlearn What You Have Learned (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 263–73, 268. 16 More generally, another shortcoming of Campbell’s theory is that it is extraordinarily generic: one of its appeals, in fact, is that the “hero’s journey” makes the most pedestrian events and obstacles of modern life into heroic quests (I am grateful to Chris Fleming for having drawn my attention to this point, and for his invaluable comments on this chapter). 17 Ibid., 270. 18 James Alison and Wolfgang Palaver, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory and Religion (New York: Palgrave, 2017), 539. 19 René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (1982; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 74. 20 Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 28. 21 Brian Cronin, “Was Darth Vader Not Originally Luke Skywalker’s Father in ‘Empire Strikes Back’?,” Huffington Post, July 14, 2015. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/bria n-cronin/was-darth-vader-not-origi_b_7788770.html 22 When Leia is captured at the beginning of ANH and she is taken to Grand Moff Tarkin, she exclaims: “Governor Tarkin, I should’ve expected to find you holding Vader’s leash”—thus implying that Tarkin outranks Vader. Also, according to preliminary plans, bounty hunter Boba Fett, and not Darth Vader, was going be the main villain in ESB and ROJ. See Jordan Zakarin, “Boba Fett Was Supposed to Be a Bigger Bad Than Darth Vader,” Inverse, May 4, 2016, https://www.inverse.com/articl e/15123-george-lucas-s-original-plans-for-star-wars-episode-vii-and-boba-fett-reve 23 Adam Ericksen, in his short but interesting article “My Daughter, the Star Wars Myth, and Jesus: How to Defeat Evil” (The Raven Review, August 11, 2015, https:// www.ravenfoundation.org/my-daughter-the-star-wars-myth-and-jesus-how-todefeat-evil) claims, “Star Wars is based on a myth, a lie that tries to conceal the truth about violence.” In a sense, Ericksen is certainly correct, but I think that more implications can be drawn from a mimetic analysis of Star Wars. 24 Girard, The Scapegoat, 73. 25 Ibid., 33. 26 Ibid., 81. 27 Walter Winks, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 42. 28 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (1972; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 164.

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29 “The frayed wires protruding from Vader’s sleeve remind Luke of his own mechanical hand. Once again, Luke sees how easily he could become like his father, and that perhaps he has already begun the journey. Suddenly, Luke resists.” Charles Taliaferro and Annika Beck, “‘Like My Father before Me’: Loss and Redemption of Fatherhood in Star Wars,” in The Ultimate Star Wars and Philosophy, 117–26, at 124. 30 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 245–46. 31 Joel Hodge, “Mimetic Insights into the Sacred in Film,” in James Alison and Wolfgang Palaver, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory and Religion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 517–23, 521. 32 Ericksen, “My Daughter, the Star Wars Myth, and Jesus.” 33 Thompson, “‘In That Time . . .,’” 270. 34 Erik Buys, “The Gospel in Star Wars,” Mimetic Margins, December 14, 2015, https:// mimeticmargins.com/2015/12/14/the-gospel-in-star-wars/. 35 Buys, “The Gospel in Star Wars.” 36 “Both Siegfried and Darth Vader are loners or ‘chosen ones’ who are willing to perform sacrifices or sacrifice themselves to establish a certain order. As such, they paradoxically become cultural role models whose acts of (self)sacrifice will be imitated and repeated in order to preserve, renew or save the social order that lives by their respective stories.” Erik Buys, “The Power of Myth (Joseph Campbell vs René Girard),” Mimetic Margins, April 12, 2017, https://mimeticmargins.com/201 7/04/12/the-power-of-myth-joseph-campbell-vs-rene-girard/ 37 Hodge, “Mimetic Insights into the Sacred in Film,” 521. 38 George Lucas, commentary, Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, Special Edition (DVD, Twentieth Century Fox, 2004), disc 1. 39 René Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010), 2. 40 Wolfgang Palaver, “Girard, Bloody Sacrifices, and the End of the Cold War: Recent References to Girard’s Mimetic Theory in the Cultural and Political Debate in Germany,” COV&R-Bulletin 9 (October 1995), http://www.uibk.ac.at/theol/cover/b ulletin/xtexte/bulletin09-11.html 41 Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace, written and directed by George Lucas (1999; San Francisco: Lucasfilm/ Twentieth Century Fox, 2008), DVD. 42 Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones, screenplay by George Lucas and Jonathan Hales, directed by George Lucas (2002; San Francisco: Lucasfilm/ Twentieth Century Fox, 2008), DVD. 43 Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith, written and directed by George Lucas (2005; San Francisco: Lucasfilm/ Twentieth Century Fox, 2008), DVD. 44 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 202. 45 McDowell, The Gospel According to Star Wars, 62. 46 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 202.

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Mimetic Theory and Film Buys, “The Gospel in Star Wars.” Ibid. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 44. Buys, “The Gospel in Star Wars.” Girard, The Scapegoat, 30. When one thinks of it, it is amusing that Obi-Wan Kenobi, in order to hide baby Luke from his father Anakin, takes him to Tatooine (Anakin’s home planet) where Luke will grow up bearing his father’s surname (Skywalker) under the care of Anakin’s stepbrother. From the point of view of the production of SW films, this is easily explainable: when ANH was conceived and filmed, Vader was not meant to be Luke’s father. What is surprising is that even the most attentive members of the audience are rarely disturbed by this plot hole, and they do not wonder why a justification is not provided for the seemingly lack of persecution against this baby twin. What if the answer for this psychological phenomenon resided precisely in the fact that Luke is a twin? “Any act of direct physical violence against the anathema [the twins] is scrupulously avoided. Any such act would only serve to entrap the perpetrators in a vicious circle of violence—the trap ‘bad’ violence sets for the community and baits with the birth of twins.” Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 57. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 64. McDowell, The Gospel According to Star Wars, 63. Girard, The Scapegoat, 25. Ibid., 26. Paolo Diego Bubbio, Intellectual Sacrifice and Other Mimetic Paradoxes (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2018). “All myths must have their roots in real acts of violence against real victims.” Girard, The Scapegoat, 25. Girard, The Scapegoat, 65 (my italic). Michael Kirwan, Discovering Girard (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2004), 119. Lawrence Kasdan, J. J. Abrams, and Michael Arndt, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, directed by J. J. Abrams (2015; San Francisco: Lucasfilm/Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2016), DVD. Lucas provided the production team with his rough story treatments for Episodes VII–IX, but The Walt Disney Company discarded his story ideas. See Adam Chitwood, “George Lucas Says His Treatments for the New ‘Star Wars’ Films Were Discarded,” Collider, January 21, 2015, http://collider.com/george-lucas-new-sta r-wars-movies-treatments Ethan Anderton, “J.J. Abrams Explains Why ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ Borrows So Much from ‘A New Hope,’” April 16, 2016, http://www.slashfilm.com/ the-force-awakens-and-a-new-hope-similarities/

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68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

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Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 44. Ibid., 318. Ibid., 168. Peter Sciretta, “J.J. Abrams Talks About Abandoning George Lucas’ Treatments and Lessons of the Star Wars Prequels,” December 15, 2015, http://www.slashfilm.com/ jj-abrams-interview-star-wars-the-force-awakens/. My italic. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 96. Girard, Battling to the End, 140. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 49. Girard, The Scapegoat, 14. Ibid., 296. Girard, The Scapegoat, 35. Sandor Goodhart, The Prophetic Law: Essays in Judaism, Girardianism, Literary Studies, and the Ethical (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014), 208. Michael Cavna, “He’s back: J.J. Abrams Will Replace Colin Trevorrow as Director of ‘Star Wars: Episode IX,’” The Washington Post, September 12, 2017, https://ww w.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2017/09/12/hes-back-j-j-abrams-wil l-replace-colin-trevorrow-as-director-of-star-wars-episode-ix/?utm_term=.0b 67ce3c9161 René Girard, Job, the Victim of His People, trans. Yvonne Freccero (1985; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 40. Girard adds that he was indebted to Sandor Goodhart’s studies for this entire analysis. See Sandor Goodhart, “Oedipus and Laius, Many Murderers,” Diacritics 8 (1978): 55–71. Sandor Goodhart, “‘The War to End All Wars’: Mimetic Theory and ‘Mounting to the Extremes’ in a Time of Disaster,” in S. Cowdell, C. Fleming, J. Hodge, and C. Osborn, eds., Does Religion Cause Violence? Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Violence and Religion in the Modern World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 73.

9

Mimetic Magic and Anti-Sacrificial Slayage: A Girardian Reading of Buffy the Vampire Slayer George A. Dunn and Brian McDonald

In the following pages, we defend what might strike some as a surprising thesis, namely, that the view of culture and human relations embedded in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which ran from 1997 to 2003, coincides with key elements of the theory of mimetic desire and human violence elaborated by René Girard. We first show how one pivotal episode of the series, Season Two’s “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” (2.16),1 dramatically and metaphorically illustrates key elements of Girard’s theory, after which we will examine the narrative arc of Season Five, showing how the transformation of rivalrous mimesis into positive mimesis and an ethical response to the other is dramatized in the relationship of Buffy Summers to her newly arrived little sister Dawn Summers.

The spell of desire The episode “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” (2.16) from Season Two of Buffy the Vampire Slayer features a scene in which the usually mild-mannered Daniel “Oz” Osbourne marches up to Xander Harris and, with no apparent provocation, lands a solid punch on his jaw that sends him tumbling to the floor. A startled Xander asks, “What was that for?” “I was on the phone all night,” Oz explains, “listening to Willow cry about you. Now, I don’t know exactly what happened, but I was left with a very strong urge to hit you.” We viewers, however, know exactly what has happened to cause both Oz’s sudden transformation into a pugilist and a host of other bizarre character changes in this episode. Xander

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has recklessly cast a love spell that has gone awry, so that now every female in Sunnydale, with the sole exception of Cordelia Chase for whom the spell was intended, is in love with him. The victims of this spell are all pursuing Xander with a mad and accelerating intensity that builds to a spasm of violence when their amorous desires collide with each other and with Xander’s own attempts to escape the consequences of his folly. Violence inevitably results whenever one of Xander’s legion of suitors encounters some obstacle in the path of her desire, whether one of her many rivals or simply Xander himself turning her down. Either way, such obstacles, rather than deterring the suitors, only fan the flames of their desire into a homicidal rage, which will converge on the one who inspired them in the first place, poor jinxed Xander. What Oz does not know is that, like the entire female population of Sunnydale, he is another hapless victim of Xander’s spell, swept up in the contagion of violence that it has inadvertently unleashed. In his book on Shakespeare, Girard describes the spells cast by the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as metaphors for the bewitching effects of mimetic desire.2 A witch’s love spell performs that same office in “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” However, as if to emphasize the trope-like character of this spell, the early portions of the episode show all the dynamics of mimetic desire functioning quite naturally, with no need of supernatural assistance, between Xander and Cordelia. At this point in Season Two, their relationship is just beginning to struggle into the daylight of public acknowledgment from its secretive, hormonally charged origins. But we discover at the outset of the episode that Cordelia still needs her “models,” Harmony Kendall and Company, to certify Xander as a worthwhile love object. They, however, effectively and brutally remove this possibility by devaluing Xander and humiliating Cordelia when she tries to discuss plans for the upcoming Valentine’s Day dance with them. Cordelia: Well, why didn’t you call me back last night? We need to talk about our outfits for the dance. I’m gonna wear red and black (points at Kate), so you need to switch. Kate: Red and black? Is that what Xander likes? Cordelia: Xander? What does he have to do with this? Harmony: Well, a girl wants to look good for her geek. Cordelia: Xander’s just . . . Harmony: When are you two gonna start wearing cute little matching outfits? ‘Cause I’m planning to vomit.

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While the plot will later on invoke an actual witch’s spells to create or remove desires, at this point in the episode, the purely social bewitchment of her friends is all that is necessary to override whatever genuine fondness Cordelia feels for Xander. As if to emphasize how completely mesmerized she is by this socially induced mimetic spell, Cordelia proceeds to dismiss Xander at the Valentine’s Day dance as decisively and brutally, though with less intentional malice, as her friends. Xander is brought shatteringly down to earth as he presents Cordelia a beautiful heart-shaped necklace and pendant as a token of their relationship. “Thank you. It’s beautiful,” says Cordelia, abruptly adding, “I wanna break up.” Apologetically, Cordelia explains that they just “don’t fit,” the absence of any models to certify his desirability having overridden whatever “specialness” the non-bewitched parts of her may have seen in him. Cordelia’s mimetically induced rejection of Xander will turn her former suitor into an enemy intent on repaying the humiliation. Cordelia is prone to mimetic influence in a way that makes her share her peers’ aversions. But Girard more often depicts mimesis as causing desire rather than aversion, inducing us to want the same things our peers or other admired models possess or aspire toward. When two or more desires converge on a single object that only one person can possess, we have a recipe for acrimonious rivalries and bitter resentments that may, when sufficiently exacerbated, erupt into violence. Since mimetic desire works like a spell that causes each of the rivals to mistake his desire for something wholly spontaneous and original, mimetic rivalry is ideal for fomenting the most violent hatreds and resentments. Although the desire of each rival is formed in dutiful obedience to the cues supplied by the other, it is hardly possible for either to avoid seeing the actions of his rival as anything but a wholly perverse and gratuitous will to frustrate him. Consequently, mimetic rivalry can easily escalate into violence, with the desired object retreating into the background or even entirely forgotten as the rivals become more and more obsessed with simply defeating each other. It is possible on occasion for the object and the model/obstacle to be one and the same, as with the vain coquette whose indifference to her suitor certifies her value in his eyes at the same time as it incites the most virulent resentment.3 This appears to be what happens in Xander’s case, as his desire for Cordelia cedes to a desire to repay the humiliation he has suffered due to her casual rejection of him and the mockery he must then endure from his schoolmates. So powerful and obsessive is his lust for vengeance that it swallows his considerable fund of

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human decency, leading him to blackmail Amy Madison, under the threat to expose her as a witch, into concocting a love-potion that will make Cordelia fall in love with him. His motive for this despicable act is not to possess her but so that he—rather than Cordelia—may bask in the prestige of winning a victory in the game of love, as the one who “dumps” her instead of the one who gets dumped. Xander’s answer to Amy’s mystified question about his motives leaves no doubt that his need for prestige and power over Cordelia has completely swallowed up his desire for Cordelia. Xander: What do I want? I want some respect around here. I want, for once, to come out ahead. I want the Hellmouth to be working for me. You and me, Amy . . . we’re gonna cast a little spell. ... Amy: Well, then I don’t get it. If you don’t wanna be with her forever, then what’s the point? Xander: The point is I want her to want me. Desperately. So I can break up with her and subject her to the same hell she’s been puttin’ me through. Amy: Oh, I don’t know, Xander. Intent has to be pure with love spells. Xander: Right. I intend revenge. Pure as the driven snow.

Although up to this point the episode’s presentation of mimetic desire and rivalry has not strayed much from prosaic reality, it offers a hermeneutical key for interpreting Amy’s errant love spell, which leaves every Sunnydale female except Cordelia hungering for Xander, as a metaphor for mimetic desire and its consequences. Literalized metaphor is Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s stock in trade. “High school is Hell” in no small measure because it is a place where we are susceptible to the contagion of mimetically induced desires and animosities to an almost diabolical degree. The mimetic propensities of youth can spread these contagions to such a bewildering extent that it can seem like bewitchment to any sane and sober observer, albeit not to the bewitched, who invariably is wholly convinced that his or her own desire is “the real thing.” An almost perfect illustration of this is the encounter between Jenny Calendar and Amy, now a victim of her own misfired spell, in the library, after Rupert Giles, angry at his discovery of what Xander has done, has ordered him from the precincts of the library. Amy: Why did you send Xander away? He needs me. Jenny: That’s a laugh. Amy: He loves me. We look into each other’s souls.

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Jenny: No one can love two people at once. What we have is real. Giles: Instead of making me ill, why doesn’t one of you try to help me?

Each woman is a pure mimetic double of the other, while regarding herself as the only one possessing a “true” love for Xander. Neither is capable of listening to Giles’s uselessly reasonable claim that their identical emotions are “not love,” but “obsession. Selfish, banal obsession.” Each can only see the other’s actions as a deliberate and wholly unwarranted attempt to frustrate her. Furthermore, just as Girard’s theory predicts, the mounting rivalry and resentment push the love object, Xander, into the background. An earlier encounter between Amy and Buffy illustrates this point even more dramatically than the confrontation between Amy and Jenny: Amy: Get away from him. He’s mine. Buffy: Oh, I don’t think so. Xander, tell her. Xander: What? I, uh . . . Amy: He doesn’t have to say. I know what his heart wants. Buffy: Funny, I know what your face wants.

Buffy then swings and punches Amy in the face. Amy’s even more violent retaliation—she turns Buffy into a rat—parallels the manner in which Xander’s own amorous interest in Cordelia had recently been elbowed out by his desire for revenge against his rival—his rival, of course, being Cordelia herself. Purely individual encounters between Xander and his would-be lovers soon give way to mob violence with Xander and Cordelia at its epicenter, illustrating yet another element of Girard’s thesis. The hostility generated by mimetic rivalries turns out to be every bit as mimetically contagious as their acquisitive desire. As the violence escalates, it also displays a tendency to widen as the mimetic process pulls others into its vortex. As the mob action in this episode veers out of control and Sunnydale civilization seems on the verge of complete collapse—for once, under the weight of its characters’ own desires and not a demon-engineered apocalypse—we are offered a near perfect dramatization of Girard’s understanding of the fragility of human culture under the pressures of mimetic rivalry and violence. Mimetic conflict ultimately tends toward the collapse of all those cultural differences—such as social hierarchies, chains of command and obedience, and the boundaries that mark off separate and distinct spheres of life and social roles—that under normal circumstances inhibit transgressive forms of mimesis in the interest of social order. It submerges them in the violent undifferentiation

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of a war of each against all. The intensifying heat of mimetic violence is well illustrated in this episode. Mobs of girls attack Cordelia or each other, leading to an explosion of mob violence. This violence both promotes and is fueled by a complete meltdown of the usual markers of difference that keep society from collapsing into undifferentiated incoherence. Jenny Calendar tosses aside her dignity and teaching office in order to fight schoolgirls for possession of Xander. Even more repulsively, Buffy’s own mother, Joyce Summers, seeks to seduce Xander after he and Cordelia have sought refuge in her house from the pursuing mob. Even Drusilla’s vampire nature succumbs to the spell, as she abandons her proper role as killer and ally of Angelus in order to protect Xander from the former’s attempt to destroy him. At the other end of the spectrum, the shy and wistful Willow Rosenberg’s attempts an aggressive seduction of Xander entirely out of keeping with her usual character.4 Oz, the gentlest character in the series, is also caught up in this general meltdown and winds up attacking Xander, an action that seems to mystify equally both assailant and his victim. As the cycle of mimetic desire leading to mimetic rivalry, leading to violence, leading to a general meltdown continues at a feverish pitch, the distinctive identities of each of these characters become a prime casualty as they each increasingly become mere mimetic doubles of one another. Girard observes that as the community approaches near total cultural undifferentiation, any conspicuous difference can serve as a lightning rod to draw all of the community’s violence upon itself. Predictably, then, it is Cordelia, the lone female resident of Sunnydale who remains immune to Amy’s spell, who presents herself as the logical candidate for the role of scapegoat. While the women of Sunnydale are at increasingly violent odds with each other, they all unite in hostility against Cordelia, the woman who has harmed their beloved Xander. We see Cordelia’s transformation from leading snob to lonely scapegoat in two telling instances. In the first, she is halted in the school corridor by the withering glare of Harmony and Company. Cordelia: Ha. Very funny. What did I do now, wear red and purple together? Harmony: You know what you did. Xander is wounded because of you. Cordelia: Are you tripping? I thought you wanted me to break up with him! Harmony: Only a sick pup would let Xander get away, no matter what her friends said.

Cordelia is singled out as the “sick pup” different from the healthy pack since she, formerly the only one who desired Xander, is now the only one who

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apparently does not. This mark of difference has potentially lethal consequences for her as it sets her up for the office of scapegoat, which she will unwillingly and uncomprehendingly assume soon after this public shunning. Later we see her closing her locker and starting down the corridor, only to encounter again a “posse” of her former friends, who have now grown even more agitated and violent than before. Cordelia: Okay, what now? You don’t like my locker combination? Harmony: It’s just not right. You never loved him. You just used him. You make me sick. Cordelia: Okay, Harmony, if you need to borrow my Midol, just ask.

As Harmony slaps Cordelia, triggering a violent mob assault, we may pause to briefly note the irony of Harmony’s feeling sick at Cordelia’s rejection of a boy who only two days earlier had made the same Harmony want to vomit. Then we might note the even more striking irony that the violent obsession with Xander that had been setting all of Sunnydale’s females at odds with each other has suddenly become the thing that unites them as it polarizes around Cordelia, the one whom they can all agree to blame. What we are beginning to see in action is the validation of Girard’s claim that while mimetic desire divides, scapegoating violence unites, turning the war of all against all into unanimity of all against one. Crucial to the success of this scapegoat mechanism is that the scapegoating community misconstrues what it is really going on and sincerely believes in the scapegoat’s guilt. This process of unification and cathartic violence begins as Cordelia’s friends slap her around. It will be completed through the somewhat different route by which Xander himself joins Cordelia in the role of a second scapegoat. As Cordelia is differentiated from everyone else as the only one not loving Xander, Xander himself carries the brand of difference as the one everybody loves. While his status is the polar opposite of Cordelia’s, it makes him just as different and hence just as fatally eligible to join her in the role of scapegoat, the object of blame for all the frustrations of his pursuers. We see intimations of this in two menacing incidents that anticipate his full-fledged assumption of role of scapegoat. The first occurs in the library as Buffy (just before her confrontation with Amy turns her into a rat) attempts to seduce Xander and becomes extremely agitated at his rejection: Buffy: So you’re saying this is all a game? Xander: A game? I . . . No!

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Buffy: You make me feel this way, and then you reject me? What am I, a toy? Xander: Buffy, please calm down.

Considering Buffy’s powers and her current condition—in the grip of a spell that robs her of all reason and conscience—it is extremely fortunate for Xander that Amy arrives on the scene and turns Buffy into a rat before she can turn him into the first human victim of her slayage! The second menacing incident occurs when Oz, not understanding the dynamics of mimetic desire—Why is Willow acting like this? Who is to blame?—enters the library and decks the astonished Xander. Oz seems as mystified as Xander at the “very strong urge” that has overruled his normally gentle nature and turned him into a mimetic machine duplicating everyone else’s violent gestures. Without realizing it, Oz is the latest recruit into a scapegoating community that misconstrues the nature and meaning of its impulses of desire and violence and sincerely believes in the scapegoat’s guilt. But Willow is the catalyst who triggers the process that transforms the rivalrous desire for Xander into a unanimous and cathartic discharge of violence against Xander. Her role as scapegoating trigger represents a triumph of poetic justice and psychological appropriateness. After all, she has genuinely desired Xander for years sans magic spells. Therefore, of all the women, her attempts to force him to love her are the most deeply rooted in reality. In addition to her love, her status as a virgin and her nature as a shy self-conscious woman mean that she stands to lose the most by her uncharacteristically blatant offer of herself to Xander. It therefore stands to reason that she would be the one whose feelings toward Xander take the most violent form after he has rejected her. Xander discovers this fact as he is rescuing Cordelia and trying to escape out the school’s front door. Willow meets him with a fire axe, a crowd of agitated women, and a fierce determination to destroy him born of a grief and anger that he has never seen before. Willow: I should’ve known I’d find you with her. Xander: Will . . . Come on, you don’t wanna hurt me. Willow: Oh, no? You don’t know how hard this is for me. I love you so much! I’d rather see you dead than with that bitch.

Willow’s attitude has clearly communicated itself to the mob behind her and they all advance toward Xander and Cordelia. Harmony and Company, emerging out of the doors in hot pursuit of Cordelia and Xander, briefly act as Xander’s defenders, as a temporary outbreak of mimetic violence between rivals allows

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Xander and Cordelia to escape. But the scapegoating fever quickly melds the two mobs into one and they take off in pursuit of their would-be victims. Xander and Cordelia flee to the fragile refuge of Buffy’s house and are pursued by the mob into the basement, where it appears they will consummate their roles as sacrificial scapegoats. This violent catharsis should, according to Girard’s theory, at last restore equilibrium to Sunnydale’s addled social order. Before discussing why the episode does not actually proceed to this grim conclusion, we must present Girard’s explanation of how the “victimage” mechanism is able to create or restore social equilibrium among mimetic, violence-prone humans. He theorizes that early hominid communities were either decimated by the ravages of mimetic violence or delivered through episodes of scapegoating. Scapegoating violence “works” to control mimetic violence whenever the memory of the cathartic effects of a particular episode are so profound that over a period of time the former scapegoat is apotheosized into a god and the lynching of the victim becomes memorialized in sacrificial rituals and other practices designed to create distinctions and taboos to help prevent the return of mimetic violence. Primitive religion, as well as every contemporary religion precisely to the extent that it retains elements of sacrificial practice and ideology, is a dim and distorted memory of the origins of human culture in scapegoating violence. Why, then, doesn’t the episode proceed to its natural but grim “Girardian” conclusion of cathartic restoration of order through the elimination of the hapless Xander and Cordelia? It does not do so because of an action that appears wholly arbitrary but does in fact embody, at least symbolically, another key Girardian concept. Girard wonders how it is that human culture could ever break out of the mimetic entrapment that guarantees an eternally recurrent pattern in which violence alternately produces and then overthrows culture. This entrapment should, by its very nature, prevent the very possibility of human beings unmasking the scapegoat mechanism that founds their social order. What could possibility strip them of this illusion? Girard believes that nothing less than divine intervention could restore our sanity—which, for Girard, is not mere hyperbole. Girard is a Christian who believes he has discovered a revelation of the scapegoat mechanism in a number of biblical narratives that deconstruct the usual mythological depiction of criminal scapegoat and innocent community, thus disclosing the suppressed truth about the violent community and its arbitrarily chosen victim upon which these myths are founded. Properly read and taken to heart by a community, these texts have the power to counter the

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spell of the scapegoat mechanism, which can function with full vigor only when it goes unrecognized. Understandably, those who do not share Girard’s belief that historical Christianity possesses a unique and unsurpassable revelatory power may be turned off by the religious exclusivism implicit in this claim,5 though that in no way diminishes the tremendous value of his other insights. It does, however, leave us with the question of how the spell of the scapegoat mechanism gets broken in “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” On the surface, the wayward magic of Amy’s original spell is undone through a counterspell enacted by Giles and Amy, which at the very last moment puts an end to the amorous obsession with Xander that has infected the entire female population of Sunnydale and abruptly jolts the murderous mob back to their senses. However, in keeping with the trope-like character detectable in other magical actions in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we prefer to discern a deeper process hinted at through the symbolism of magical reversal. These considerations bring us to the final element in Girard’s theory, one that he does not emphasize quite as much as the others, but that we regard as pivotal. The victim, as the only one who knows his own innocence, is least likely to be taken in by the lie of the scapegoat mechanism. Thus, truth—the revelation of mimetic desire leading to the scapegoat mechanism—can only be spoken from the position of the victim. Cordelia’s status as scapegoat seems to have opened up her eyes to the truth of mimetic desire and given her some power to be an effective witness to it, as we see in the following exchange in the coda that follows the restoration of order. Xander has just collided with Harmony rounding a corner. Harmony: Watch it! Xander: Sorry. Harmony: God! Y’know, I’m glad your mom stopped working at the drivethrough long enough to dress you (addressing Cordelia). Oh, that reminds me. Did you see Jennifer’s backpack? It is so a crying . . . Cordelia: Harmony, shut up. Do you know what you are, Harmony? You’re a sheep. Harmony: I’m not a sheep. Cordelia: You’re a sheep. All you ever do is what everyone else does just so you can say you did it first. And here I am, scrambling for your approval, when I’m way cooler than you are ’cause I’m not a sheep. I do what I wanna do, and I wear what I wanna wear. And you know what? I’ll date whoever the hell I wanna date. No matter how lame he is.

At the end of the episode, Cordelia seems to have gained a glimmering recognition of the spell of mimetic desire by which she was so enchanted at

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the episode’s outset and from which she suffered so much scapegoating violence at its end. She is now, if somewhat haltingly, free from the spell—at least for the moment—although her initial burst of insight and courage is immediately followed by misgivings born of an awareness this freedom may come with a price. “Oh God, oh God what have I done!” she exclaims as she walks off with Xander. It is because she has spent time in the position of the victim that Cordelia comes to see the very real truth of the human condition. In the usual vampire-slaying teaser to “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” Buffy tells Xander, who has dared to compare the perils of dating to her occupation as a slayer, that “slaying is a tad more perilous than dating.” The rest of the episode proves how wrong she is! Dating, as one of the principal arenas in which our mimetic proclivities display themselves in all their sordid glory, can be far more dangerous. As Giles puts it when he rebukes Xander, “Do you have any idea how serious this is? People under a love spell, Xander, are deadly. They lose all capacity for reason.” If we substitute the phrase “mimetic desire” for “love spell,” Giles has expressed exactly Girard’s main point—one that the whole episode dramatizes.

Welcoming Dawn “What are you doing here?” These words of surprise and annoyance are the first thing out of Buffy’s mouth when she finds little sister Dawn in Joyce’s bedroom at the end of the premier episode of Season Five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (“Buffy vs. Dracula”).6 The first viewers of this episode were no doubt asking the same question, for this trespasser making herself at home at Buffy’s residence was a complete stranger to the audience, never before having made an appearance on the show. But the viewers’ initial shock spiked dramatically only a second later when, in response to Joyce’s urging Buffy to take her “sister” to the movies with her and current boyfriend Riley Finn, the two girls whine “Mom!” in unison, sounding every bit like two petulant siblings who are quite certain that they’ve already spent enough time in each other’s company for one lifetime. The sudden and unexplained appearance of this sister, whose existence was not so much as hinted at during the first four seasons, was initially confusing for fans of the show, who shared Buffy’s surprise at coming across Dawn. However, their bewilderment was significantly more pronounced than Buffy’s, since they were forced to wonder not only what Dawn was doing in Joyce’s room but what she was doing in this world. And fans soon came to share some of

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Buffy’s annoyance as well, especially after the writers hung them on tenterhooks for several episodes awaiting some clarification of this mysterious sister’s true identity and origin. Compounding the mystery was the fact that everyone in the Buffyverse (except for one crazy guy whom Dawn encounters outside the Magic Box, the magic supply store that became Scooby central in Season Five) acted as though she had been there from the beginning. “What are you doing here?” is not just Buffy’s question. It is the audience’s. And it is a question the show continued to elicit from its viewers with every appearance or mention of Dawn, right up until the shocking circumstances of her genesis were revealed in “No Place Like Home” (5.5).7 Dawn was in fact a concentration of mystical energy known as The Key, so named because it possessed the power to shatter the walls separating dimensions. Only late in the season do Buffy and her friends come to grasp the full apocalyptic magnitude of this power. As Giles explains, after many hours consulting with his “scrolls,” once The Key is activated, “the fabric which separates all realities will be ripped apart. Dimensions will pour into one another, with no barriers to stop them. Reality as we know it will be destroyed and chaos will reign on earth” (“Weight of the World,” 5.21).8 In Girardian terms, we could say that The Key functions like a mimetic crisis, bringing about a state of undifferentiation through a violent collapse of the boundaries and distinctions that constitute the order of things, though in this case it is not merely the social order but the order of the cosmos itself that is imperiled. This Girardian resonance is underscored by the fact that in its present form the powers of The Key can be unleashed only through a “blood ritual,” but more on that later. Since the twelfth century, The Key had been protected by the Order of Dagon, an order of monks who believed that its power could be harnessed for good. But once The Key came to the attention of the hell-goddess Glorificus, aka Glory, who sought to use it to return to the hell dimension from which she had been exiled, the last remaining members of the Order devised an ingenious way to hide it. Combining it with elements of Buffy’s person, the monks molded it into human form and created Dawn, trusting that the Slayer would protect her in the belief that she was her sister.9 To make the now-human Key fit seamlessly into Buffy’s universe, they altered the Slayer’s memories and those of her family and friends to establish an imaginary continuity that disguised Dawn’s only very recent arrival in the world. But let us return to Dawn’s first appearance in the series and to the aggressively inhospitable tone of Buffy’s initial manner of addressing her, which carried the unmistakable message that this newcomer does not belong here. Once the mystery

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of Dawn’s origin is revealed, it is possible to hear in Buffy’s words something much deeper than a bit of huff at bumping into her sister unexpectedly in their mother’s bedroom. For all we know, these could be the first words spoken to Dawn by anyone—ever. Of course, neither Buffy nor Dawn is in a position yet to realize that this meeting may be their first, both having been supplied with fourteen years’ worth of false memories, most of which seem to involve various degrees of exasperation with each other. (In fabricating memories for two fake sisters, the monks clearly opted for verisimilitude!) So, when Buff y utters those confrontational words, it is probably far from the first time in her memory that she has found her “sister” someplace she did not belong—being in the way, being a bother. But the truth is that Dawn is brand new, completely innocent of the past with which the monks saddled her. If she is out of place, that’s hardly her fault. It is quite possible that she was created at that very moment when she first turned to face Buffy, a helpless newborn thrust into the world just in time to be rebuked for being here. As spoken to someone newly thrown into existence, the words “What are you doing here?” are just the opposite of a welcome, even if neither their speaker nor their addressee is yet in a position to take their full measure. These considerations suggest a reading of Buffy’s first encounter with Dawn as a nativity event—and, indeed, the very name Dawn is redolent of advent or birth—albeit a nativity that is less than optimal, since few of us would want our own entry into the world to be greeted in this manner. Reflecting on Buffy’s challenge to Dawn (“What are you doing here?”), we realize that, while most of us might feel confident that we could give a satisfactory answer were that question asked of us today (“I’m a productive, tax-paying member of society with every right to be here!”), that is not an answer any of us could have given at the dawn of our own existence—and not just because we lacked the words. As newborns, we don’t secure our initial place in the world through our own efforts. Rather, we receive it as a gift, as we enter a space created and maintained for us by others. As Anya Jenkins, “ever the wordsmith,”10 states with perfect, if accidental, precision in the episode “Family” (5.6): “Birth is a present thing.”11 Our birth, presenting us to the ones on whom we will count to be present for us, is itself a present, a gift through which we are given into the care of others. Our ability to flourish depends crucially on our being greeted by a welcoming gesture that doesn’t demand an impossible justification of our existence (“What are you doing here?”), but graciously makes room for us to be (“Here I am—for you!”). Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, affirming the inherently “interdividual” or social nature of human existence, is based on the insight that human beings

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are not self-contained entities who find the source of their identity within themselves, but are in fact constituted and determined by their relationships to others. Along similar lines, Charles Taylor has challenged the popular modern belief that each individual possesses a unique and “authentic” identity that is not derived from others but must be inwardly generated or discovered by each person. In contrast to this “monological ideal,” Taylor stresses the dialogic nature of human identity, the truth that we acquire our understanding of who we are and our worth as human beings only in and through our relations to others and, most importantly, through those truly “significant others” who matter most in our lives. “On the intimate level,” he writes, “we can see how much an original identity needs and is vulnerable to the recognition given or withheld by significant others.”12 It is precisely Dawn’s vulnerability that is thrown into sharp relief by Buffy’s unwelcoming words, the lack of any affirming recognition to greet her entry into the world. Of course, it is also true that Dawn came into this world endowed with many memories of being loved and cared for by her mother Joyce and even no doubt on occasion by Buffy. But once Dawn comes to realize that the monks manufactured all of those memories, along with those of everyone else around her, her sense of identity—the question of whether she is really Buffy’s little sister or just a cute container of dangerous mystical energy— will depend entirely on how she is welcomed now. Under the circumstances, then, it is not surprising that questions about identity—Who am I? What am I?—are front and center throughout Season Five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for Dawn, of course, but also for Buffy. Nor is it surprising that these questions are answered in an extraordinary act of selfgiving poles apart from the unfriendly rebuff we witness at the end of the first episode. Buffy embarks on a journey of self-discovery early in the season, after Dracula pays a visit to Sunnydale and tells her “your power is rooted in darkness,” prompting her to ask Giles to help her learn more about “where I come from” and her true nature as a slayer (“Buffy vs. Dracula,” 5.1). In due course, her search leads to a vision quest that takes her out into the desert, where she encounters an apparition of the First Slayer who delivers a seemingly contradictory set of messages—an initial reassurance that she is “full of love” (Buffy had feared that her job of slaying had made her hard and unfeeling), a prediction that “Love will bring you to your gift,” and finally the grim notification that “Death is your gift” (“Intervention,” 5.18).13 The meaning of this last message is unriddled only in the last episode of the season, titled “The Gift” (5.22),14 where the connection between love and death is clarified not discursively but performatively. As

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for Dawn, the question of her identity becomes excruciating once she learns the true story of her origins. Slicing open her arm with a knife to determine whether she is real, she cries, “What am I? Am I real? Am I anything?” (“Blood Ties,” 5.13)15 However, by the end of the season each will discover the locus of a healthy identity in bonding with the other. Despite the unpromising start to their relationship, their initial hostility is transfigured through a gesture of exorbitant hospitality, just the opposite of what occurs in their first meeting. But that comes only at the end of the season. The dominant note in their relationship through much of the season is rivalry. In the second episode, aptly titled “The Real Me” (5.2), Dawn complains to her diary in a voice-over, “Nobody knows who I am. Not the real me”—a statement much truer than she can even begin to understand at this point.16 “It’s like nobody cares enough to find out,” she adds, her words broadcasted to an initial audience of Buffy fans who care a great deal and are impatient for answers. Yet, as she continues to narrate her diary entry, she is quickly deflected from describing her supposedly recondite interiority, which turns out to be mostly a matter of banalities such as the restaurants from which she likes to order, to reeling off a litany of grievances about her sister. No one understands. No one has an older sister who’s a slayer. People would not be so crazy about her if they had to live in the same house with her every single day. Everybody cares what she thinks, just ’cause she can do backflips and stuff. Like that’s such a crucial job skill in the real world. Plus, Mom lets her get away with everything. “Your sister’s saving the world.” I could so save the world if somebody handed me superpowers, but I’d think of a cool name and wear a mask to protect my loved ones, which Buffy doesn’t even. If this town wasn’t so lame, everyone would completely know what she does. And then I bet they wouldn’t even be that impressed, because, like, killing things with wood? Oh, scary vampires! They die from a splinter.17

Just as Girard would predict, the “real” Dawn is defined largely by her mimetic rivalry with her sister, expressed as a resentful denigration of the special status that Buffy enjoys and that Dawn secretly covets. Yet, her wounded expression whenever her sister rejects her betrays the fact that what Dawn desires above all is the approval of her sister, her mediator. But this sibling mimetic rivalry is hardly a one-way street. Dawn may envy the distinction that falls on Buffy as holder of the unique office of vampire slayer, as well as the apparent freedom she enjoys as a consequence, but Buffy is equally envious of the doting attention Dawn receives from Joyce. Witnessing a morning

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snuggle session in which Joyce refers to her youngest daughter with the pet name “my little punkin’ belly,” Buffy discovers in herself a (surely mimetically generated) desire also to be the baby for once. “Why can’t I ever be little punkin’ belly?” she whines to Willow. “You just have no idea how much I wish I were an only child these days” (“No Place Like Home,” 5.5). Later in that same episode, still knotted with resentment and nettled by fresh instances of Dawn being annoying, Buffy finds her wish unexpectedly granted when she learns the truth about her sister. In a self-induced trance designed to reveal the hidden “signature” of magical spells, she gets flickering glimpses of a world without Dawn. Her sibling fades in and out of family photos and Dawn’s bedroom blinks back and forth between an ordinary teenager’s room and an unoccupied storage room. When Dawn enters, Buffy observes her image evaporate and then reappear before her eyes. The spell is disclosing the world as it was before the monks brought Dawn into existence, but what Buffy experiences also carries a strong note of wish fulfillment. She has in effect been afforded a presentiment of where unbridled resentment must finally lead, a foretaste of what it secretly desires—the sacrifice or annihilation of the other. If our identity and place in the world depends on the welcoming gesture of the other, the complete withholding of that welcome is tantamount to murder. Luckily for all concerned, Buffy’s attitude toward Dawn changes upon learning the full story of how her sister came to be and of the importance to the world of protecting her from Glory, though Buffy does later have a brief relapse into the sacrificial attitude. She reports to Willow that there was a moment when she realized that on some level she was looking forward to what she then took to be Glory’s inevitable victory: “If Glory wins, Dawn dies. And I would grieve. People would feel sorry for me, but it would be over. And I imagined what a relief it would be” (“Weight of the World,” 5.21). This fleeting but guilty thought came back to haunt Buffy after Glory finally snatched Dawn, weighing so hard that Buffy became psychologically incapacitated for a brief time. But on this occasion, her momentary desire to be rid of her sister had less to do with wanting to dispatch a mimetic rival than with wanting the crushing weight of responsibility for another person’s life to be lifted from her shoulders. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, another thinker who has explored how the self is constituted by its relationship to the other, has made such responsibility the centerpiece of his account of what it means to be human. He speaks of “responsibility as the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity,”18 originating not in the subject’s free choice to assume that responsibility but rather in the other’s

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vulnerability and need, which impose a responsibility the subject is not free to refuse. Our responsibility even “goes to the point of substitution for the Other. It assumes the condition—or uncondition—of hostage.”19 Substituting oneself for the other, suffering as a hostage on her behalf, is the very opposite of sacrificing the other, just as accepting responsibility for the other requires a repudiation of the resentment and rivalry through which we attempt to elevate ourselves and bolster our own status at the other’s expense. Yet, as Levinas also notes, we experience, alongside this indeclinable responsibility for the other, a perennial temptation to shirk our responsibility, to treat the other as merely a means to our own enjoyment, a problem to be dealt with, or an obstacle to be overcome. And that is, alas, how many of the other important players in the battle against Glory, as well as Glory herself and her worshippers, allies, and minions, come to regard Dawn. With the final confrontation on the horizon, Giles makes the sobering announcement that, if Glory begins the ritual she had planned for Dawn, “all manner of hell will be unleashed on earth” unless they halt the collapse of dimensional walls and the resulting descent into chaos and undifferentiation by hastening Dawn’s death (“The Gift,” 5.22). His willingness to entertain the thought of killing Dawn recalls words spoken in an earlier episode by General Gregor, leader of the Knights of Byzantium, a military order sworn to oppose Glory. The general also sees the solution to their problems as destroying the human form of The Key. “You can save all their lives by ending one” (“Spiral,” 5.20),20 he urges, thus revealing himself to be a leader cut from the same cloth as the High Priest Caiaphas, who is reported to have said at the trial of Jesus: “It is better for one man to die for the people than for the whole nation to be destroyed” (Jn 11:50). Commenting on this statement, Girard writes, “Caiaphas is stating the political reason we have given for the scapegoat: to limit violence as much as possible but to turn to it, if necessary, as a last resort to avoid an even greater violence. Caiaphas is the incarnation of politics at its best, not its worst. No one has ever been a better politician.”21 Not being a politician—“She’s a hero, you see. She’s not like us,” explains Giles (“The Gift,” 5.22)—Buffy refuses to participate in the sacrificial drama.22 But before we look at her alternative, let us note that this striking echo of the Christian narrative does not appear to be at all accidental, nor isolated, since it is one of many conspicuous Christological motifs that occur in Season Five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Consider the nature of Buffy’s adversary, the season’s Big Bad—the hellgoddess Glory. From the same Caiaphas-channeling Gregor, we learn that Glory

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had once ruled over a hell dimension alongside two other gods, until, “fear[ing] she would attempt to seize their dimension for herself,” they united against her and expelled her to earth at the conclusion of a great battle (“Spiral,” 5.20), replicating in miniature the human drama of scapegoating. The triumvirate of which Glory was a part looks to be a perverse parody of the Christian Trinity, with its reciprocal outpouring of generative love replaced with rivalry and mutual suspicion. Having cast her out, her rivals imprisoned her in a newborn child named Ben Wilkinson, with whom she was forced to share not only a body but also a mortal lifespan, doomed someday to die along with her mortal host. But in contrast to the Christian doctrine of incarnation, Ben and Glory, the human and the divine, are not seamlessly united as two natures in one person. Instead, they are antagonists, competing for control of a body that neither wants to share with the other, Glory despising her mortal prison and Ben resentful of being occupied by Glory. And, while Jesus bestowed healing on the sick, the crippled, and the mentally ill (or demon possessed), Glory must periodically do just the opposite to restore her strength, “brain-sucking” her victims— absorbing the energy of their minds and reducing them to empty, jabbering shells. Even her name, Glory, is revealing, suggesting a yearning for prestige and preeminence just the opposite of Christ’s voluntary surrender of his sublime station in becoming human (cf. Phil. 2:6-8, the divine kenosis).23 The abysmal depths of Glory’s narcissism are on display in one of the first sentences we hear her utter, spoken while torturing one of the monks of the Order of Dagon to get him to reveal the location of The Key: “You know, when you think about it, I’m the victim here” (“No Place Like Home,” 5.5). That Glory is meant to be seen as a kind of antichrist, that is, a type opposite to Christ, is further underscored by the name by which she is known to the Knights of Byzantium: The Beast. But most telling is how Glory intends to end her earthly sojourn, not with a voluntarily surrender of her own life so that others may live, but as the officiator of a blood sacrifice that will take the life of an innocent child. As already mentioned, Glory’s aim is to return to her hell dimension by using The Key to break down dimensional walls, with the consequence of unleashing hell on earth (literally) for as long as the portal remains open—the very opposite of the coming to earth of the kingdom of heaven that Christians believe the death of Jesus enables. Yet, as in the Christian narrative, a human death is still the catalyst of this apocalypse. Now that The Key has been transmogrified into human form, the only the way to activate it is through a ritual bloodletting. As recorded in one of Giles’s books, from which he solemnly reads to explain the

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gravity of the situation, “The blood flows, the gates will open. The gates will close when it flows no more.” By way of clarification, he adds, “When Dawn is dead” (“The Gift,” 5.22). In the final scene of Season Five, Glory has abducted Dawn and bound her atop a high tower. While Glory and her minions attempt to fend off an assault by Buffy and her friends, one of the hell-goddess’s demonic henchmen begins the ritual by dragging his knife across Dawn’s flesh, making cuts that are just deep enough to start the blood flowing but shallow enough to prolong the bleeding, giving Glory plenty of time to pass through the portal that the blood has opened. As predicted, the portal opens, with bolts of lightning and various demonic creatures, including a huge dragon, passing through it. Just then, Buffy arrives and, without so much as batting an eyelid, tosses Glory’s henchman over the edge and frees Dawn. But it is too late. Witnessing the mayhem and destruction being unleashed on earth and understanding that her death can stop it, Dawn attempts to throw herself from the tower, but Buffy restrains her. It is then that the words of the First Slayer—“Death is your gift”—come back to her, along with the realization that, since the monks made Dawn out of Buffy’s own substance, her death could substitute for Dawn’s in closing the portal. The literally cruciform shape that Buffy’s body assumes as she plunges from the tower, not to mention the epitaph that appears on her grave at the end of this episode (“She saved the world. A lot.”), leaves little doubt that we are being invited to view her as a Christ-figure—a decidedly “Girardian” Christ-figure, who sacrifices herself to save a sacrificial victim. “Be brave. Live. For me,” says Buffy to Dawn, before throwing herself from the tower. These final words to her sister are, in the meaning they convey, almost the precise opposite of the inhospitable words with which Buffy rebuffed Dawn when she first appeared at the beginning of the season. In her gift of herself and summons to live, Buffy finally extends to her sister a belated welcome into the world, ushering her into a space where she can be more than just The Key, more than a mere thing. Buffy affirms Dawn in a way that bids her to affirm herself, to join in a relationship from which all rivalry has been banished. And in so doing, in substituting herself for her sister and making space for her rather than displacing her or pushing her out of the world, Buffy completes the journey of self-exploration she had undertaken earlier in the season, discovering her true ethical vocation as one who bears responsibility for the other. As the First Slayer so cryptically foretold, Buffy’s love for her sister led to her “gift,” the giving of herself even to the point of dying for the other. And it is significant that Buffy

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was able to come to her “gift” only after having experienced, first through a magical spell and later through the exercise of her own imagination, a foretaste of the desolate place to which her resentment of Dawn was leading her. “Only by understanding the dangers of mimeticism can we conceive of authentic identification with the other,” wrote Girard, 24 referring to the ethical response to the other that lies on the far side of mimetic rivalry. We can understand this response as a “positive mimesis,” an identification with the other that does not aim at usurping her place, as in mimetic rivalry, but acts instead from a deep understanding that—in the words of Rabbi Israel Salanter, whom Levinas was fond of quoting—“the other’s material needs are my spiritual needs.”25 To respond in this way is our ethical vocation. As Buffy tells Dawn before selflessly sacrificing her life for her sister, “This is the work I have to do.”

The dream reveals the reality While the supernatural may drive the plots of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we believe the lasting impact of this series derives from its painfully true-to-life dramatizations of human relations and cultural forces. Girard’s hypotheses are especially illuminating in showing how those forces function in the Buffyverse. Moreover, our enriched understanding of this imaginary world can help us gain deeper wisdom about the world beyond the series against which it enacts its artistic mimesis. First, Girard’s work draws attention to—and provides an exceptionally clear and consistent framework for understanding—certain powerful and recurrent motifs that appear not only in the episodes we have discussed but in many other episodes as well: the consistent failures of love, the menacing rivalries and outbreaks of violence, the apocalyptic note of cultural collapse, and the sadderbut-wiser view that victims are the only ones “truly in the know.” These comprise the stuff of Girard’s theory. It is precisely because Buffy’s world is so Girardian that she has to “save the world. A lot.” Secondly, Girard’s theory can help resolve an apparent inconsistency in the series’ attitude toward religion. On the one hand, as Wendy Love Anderson has noted, “The category of religion is simultaneously a metaphor for human evil and a quasi-historical source of human evil throughout the Buffyverse.”26 From the Order of Aurelius in Season One to the worshippers of Machida in “Reptile Boy” (2.5)27 to the Vahrall demons who attempt to perform the Sacrifice of Three

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in “Doomed” (4.11),28 it is significant that many of the series’ most “religious” characters are demons and their acolytes seeking victims for their sacrificial cults. This fact is entirely consonant with Girard’s interpretation of religion generally—and religious rituals especially—as disguised reenactments of the original scapegoating violence that founds human culture. The series’ ostensible hostility toward religion is understandable as a reaction against the violence and obfuscation of reality that Girard traces back to the very beginnings of religion as a historical phenomenon. On the other hand, despite his obvious fondness for lampooning the unsavory aspects of religion, series creator Joss Whedon has openly admitted what attentive viewers have known all along, namely, that “the Christian mythos has a powerful fascination to me, and it bleeds into my storytelling. Redemption, hope, purpose, Santa, these all are important to me, whether I believe in an afterlife or some universal structure or not.”29 Of all the facets of the Christian mythos that may have bled into Buffy the Vampire Slayer, none seem more significant to us than the theme of cruciform love to which Whedon continually returns. Buff y has repeatedly demonstrated her willingness to suffer and, if necessary, give her life to save her friends, her family, and (last but not least) the world, a complete reversal of the scapegoat mechanism that saves the social order through the sacrifice of the vulnerable outsider. The gulf that separates this cruciform love from the sacrificial mentality of the scapegoat mechanism is on stark display in “The Gift” (5.22), as Glory’s sacrifice of Dawn, which threatens to unleash hell on earth, is thwarted by Buffy’s selfless substitution of herself for the sacrificial victim, a gesture born out of her refusal to comply with the sacrificial drama this narcissistic hell-god has set in motion. A similar Christ-like gesture occurs in “Grave” (6.22), the finale to the next season. Armed with nothing but his undying love and referring to himself tellingly as a “carpenter,” Xander stands between dark Willow and the ruins of a satanic temple through which she has been channeling her power in order to destroy the world. Refusing (this time) to play the mimetic game of answering aggression with anger and hatred, he allows her to wound him repeatedly, crying “I love you” each time in response until she collapses grieving in his arms.30 The recurrence of this motif of cruciform love as a response to sacrificial religion and mimetic violence suggests to us that the series does not exhibit hostility to religion per se, but only to those expressions of religion premised on scapegoating. Finally, just as Girard’s hypothesis may help to unravel an apparent contradiction in the Buffyverse, the artistic integrity and power of that

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imaginary world might also be proffered as a piece of evidence for the truth of Girard’s theoretical insights in our real world, at least for those who find merit in Aristotle’s interpretation of literary art as mimesis—an imitation of reality that highlights those features that are most universal31—and are open to Kafka’s claim that “the terror of art [is that] the dream reveals the reality.”32 If the grotesque and magical world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer exposes inauthentic love, violent rivalries, and scapegoating as the products of mimetic enchantment, we may well suspect that this artistic “dream” serves, like Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, as a grotesquely accurate picture of the real world. Girard himself has spoken of the contribution of literature in stimulating the development of his own theories. He first presented his mimetic theory in Deceit, Desire and the Novel, a study of Cervantes, Flaubert, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Proust, arguing that each of these writers had succeeded in portraying the psychology of mimetic desire in a unique way.33 Subsequent studies of a diverse assortment of authors, including Dante, Shakespeare, and Camus, have helped Girard build his case that the great writers have all arrived at fundamentally similar conclusions about the nature of human desire, the enormous variety of ways they had of expressing their converging insights constituting a mountain of circumstantial evidence for their validity. In an interview, he responded to a question about the status of this evidence: Writers are always different in their coping with the mimetic mechanism. . . . This variety posits a fascinating case for the mimetic theory: if writers are all so different, and yet the same fundamental principles can be identified in their works, then this could be considered as strong evidence of the viability of the mimetic hypothesis.34

Considerations drawn from the episodes we have examined make a strong case for adding Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the list of works that independently confirm the power and menace of mimetic desire in human experience, while also gesturing toward the possibility of transcending mimetic rivalry in the direction of something immeasurably nobler, self-sacrifice and responsibility for the other.

Notes 1 Marti Noxon, “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Two, dir. James A. Contner (1998; Los Angeles; 20th Century Fox, 2017), DVD.

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2 René Girard, A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2004), pp. 30ff. 3 The possibility of the model and object of desire coinciding is illustrated with malicious wittiness in Dorothy Parker’s comment on the autobiography of a prominent Englishwoman: “The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest romances of literature.” 4 In light of what happens later on in the series, especially in season six, this statement may need to be qualified. Willow’s actions under the spell of mimetic violence may foreshadow her later actions when she is controlling the spells instead of being merely victimized by one. 5 In the interests of full disclosure, we should acknowledge that the authors of this chapter are of two minds on this issue. 6 Marti Noxon, “Buffy vs. Dracula,” dir. David Solomon (2000; Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Five, Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 2017), DVD. 7 Douglas Petrie, “No Place Like Home,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Five, dir. David Solomon (2000). 8 Douglas Petrie, “The Weight of the World,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Five, dir. David Solomon (2000). 9 We are given precious few details about how the monks actual created Dawn, beyond the fact that Buffy’s blood seems to have been the crucial ingredient. Consider the following dialogue from Joss Whedon, “The Gift,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Five, dir. Joss Whedon (2001): Giles: She’s not your sister. Buffy: No. She’s not. She’s more than that. She’s me. The monks made her out of me. I hold her and I feel closer to her than . . . . It’s not just the memories they built. It’s physical. Dawn is a part of me. The only part that I . . . (interrupted by Willow) (5.22) 10 As described by Xander in Joss Whedon, “The Body,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Five, dir. Joss Whedon (2001) (5.16). 11 Joss Whedon, “Family,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Five, dir. Joss Whedon (2000). 12 Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Charles Taylor et al., Amy Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 36. Taylor has openly expressed his admiration for the work of Girard. 13 Jane Espenson, “Intervention,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Five, dir. Michael Gershman (2001). 14 Whedon, “The Gift.” 15 Stephen S. DeKnight, “Blood Ties,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Five, dir. Michael Gershman (2001).

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16 David Fury, “The Real Me,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Five, dir. David Grossman (2001). 17 Fury, “The Real Me.” 18 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 1997), 95. 19 Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 100 20 Stephen S. DeKnight, “Spiral,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Five, dir. James A. Contner (2001). 21 René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 114. It’s important to note that Caiaphas’s political judgment was not endorsed by the most distinguished Rabbis of the Jewish tradition, Moses Maimonides in particular. In his Mishneh Torah, he writes that “if idolaters said to men: ‘Give us one of you to be killed or we will kill all’, all must be killed rather than surrender an Israelite soul. . . . All die rather than sacrifice a soul of Israel” (The Book of Knowledge: From the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides, Treatise 1, Chapter 5.6, trans. H. M. Russell and Rabi J. Weinberg, Brooklyn: KTV Publishing House, 1983, 14). 22 Giles, on the other hand, does not heroically repudiate the necessity of sacrifice. Immediately after pronouncing these words, he takes the life of Ben Wilkinson, the mortal whose body Glory had been occupying and whom Buffy had just spared, as he lies helpless on the ground, thus insuring that Glory will not “reemerge and make Buffy pay for that mercy—and the world with her.” 23 In this passage, the apostle Paul urges Christians to imitate Christ’s humility in their dealings with each other, exhibiting what Girard calls “positive mimesis.” 24 René Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chante, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010), x. 25 See, for example, Emmanuel Levinas’s interview with Richard Kearney, “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas,” in Richard A. Cohen, ed., Face to Face with Levinas (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 24. 26 Wendy Love Anderson, “Prophecy Girl and the Powers That Be: The Philosophy of Religion in the Buffyverse,” in James B. South, ed., Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court Press, 2003), 216. 27 David Greenwalt, “Reptile Boy,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Two, dir. David Greenwalt (1997; Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 2017), DVD. 28 Marti Noxon, David Fury, and Jane Espenson, “Doomed,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Four (2000; Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 2017), DVD. 29 Quoted in Amy Pascale, Joss Whedon: The Biography (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014), 139.

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30 David Fury, “Grave,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Six, dir. James A. Contner (2002; Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 2017), DVD. 31 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (New York: Penguin Classics, 1997), 16. 32 Franz Kafka, “Introduction” to “The Metamorphosis,” trans. Joachim Neugroschel, in Sarah Lawall, ed., The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, Vol. 2 (New York: Norton, 1999), 1640. 33 René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 34 René Girard, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2008), 174.

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It’s Not the End of the World: Postapocalyptic Flourishing in Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time Emma A. Jane

The scholarship of and around René Girard is mostly very large and very serious. In the Girardian purview, we find a theory concerning no less than the origins of all human life and culture. Alongside this, there are revelations of (literally) biblical proportions and the looming threat of (again, a completely nonmetaphorical) apocalypse. The television program under analysis in the present chapter is small fry in comparison. Adventure Time1 is just a children’s cartoon created by a child-like adult called Pendleton Ward. Also, Ward protests—Shakespeare might say too much—that he did not intend to make anything meaningful and that if meaningfulness has occurred in his cartoon, it is entirely by accident.2 My case, however, is that while some aspects of Adventure Time are indeed small and silly, many other dimensions are large, serious, and extraordinarily Girardian. As I will explain over the course of this chapter, the series’ handling of issues such as the potentially world-destroying malignance of emulous desire, mimetic violence, and the will to scapegoat is wildly imaginative and unexpectedly inspiring. Indeed, the series epitomizes the value of surreal metaphor, absurd humor, and types of irony as delivery systems for large and serious commentary and warnings. It also explores interesting extratextual questions about whether revelation, redemption, and salvation might be achieved not—or at least not only—via the Plan A of a single grand moment of unveiling, but by a Plan B of relatively banal daily habits and practices. The latter are small fry in comparison with an en masse conversion to Christianity, yet this might be the very reason they ultimately stand a better chance of averting catastrophe. Further, those moments in Adventure Time that do involve an acute revelatory crisis point to important distinctions between traditional religious “conversion” (in which

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a convert’s ability to stand up in church and recite the creed is no bulwark against barbarism) and the Greek term metanoia which can denote a complete, nondenominational transformation of the heart, alongside profound intellectual as well as spiritual reformation.3 While this chapter does canvas the possibility of solutions to human violence and victimage that could be read as varying from what might be understood as Girard’s “best practice” schema, it is intended as neither a wholesale critique nor an endorsement of Girard’s overarching thesis. (And here we might observe that Chris Fleming’s excellent precis of the intellectual endeavors required to engage in effective critique of Girard’s thesis4 is surely equally demanding in the other direction in terms of offering a comprehensive underwriting.) Instead, my aim is to introduce and invite reflection on an odd exemplar of a fictional, eudaemonic world whose inhabitants routinely face and defuse various personal and planetary catastrophes in a manner that arguably relies on, departs from, as well as extends Judeo-Christian ethics, all the while mirroring and inspiring its own form of faith.

The Utopian Dystopic Land of Ooo The postapocalyptic landscape in film and television is rarely attractive real estate. Whether it’s a high-tech teen take on cage fighting (The Hunger Games5), the perma-threat of zombie ingestion (The Walking Dead6), or one of those future worlds that seems functional but is actually rotten to its em-podded, biosucking core (The Matrix7), such representations tend to serve as cautionary tales: renounce the warfare, the planetary rape and pillage, and/or the pimped-up robots or else. Adventure Time is an entirely different kettle of mutant fish. It is set in a place called the Land of Ooo roughly a thousand years after a nuclear war has blown a large, bite-sized chunk out of the earth and bathed the land in mutagenic horror (for example, irradiated monsters oozing corrosive goo), as well as mutagenic loveliness (for example, a talking—and extremely ticklish— video game console called BMO who, in one episode, falls in love with a sentient bubble). Despite the environmental devastation, most of the Land of Ooo’s abundant population is not only surviving but thriving. Nearly everyone is some sort of mutant, and there is widespread tolerance for and celebration of cultural, spiritual, and bio-aesthetic diversity. Joyous parties and dancing—sometimes

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to lutes but mostly to techno, rap, beatboxing, and indie rock—are particularly popular pastimes. (As a point of interest, these activities appear to be happymaking both intratextually and extratextually: a Google search for the terms “Adventure Time” and “dancing” yields several million results, including links to fan-generated images, GIFs, image collections, and tattoo art, with one twenty-seven-second dance clip from the series attracting 2.8 million views on YouTube.8) Further, the type of esprit de corps and social catharsis that might otherwise be generated from the collective banishment or sacrifice of victims tends to be generated via nontoxic means, such as sports, games, picnics, scholarly conferences, talent quests, tea ceremonies, musical jamming and composition, roof parties, and the perennially popular dance fests described above. While this is not a place free from suffering, trauma, and evil, for the most part, wonder, joy, kindness, forgiveness, and love (including love for one’s antagonists) win out. Political organization in the Land of Ooo is mostly a sort of loose, opt-in feudalism, with the bulk of the action taking place in the totalitarian “princesspality”9 of the Candy Kingdom. The latter is ruled by Princess Bubblegum—a goofy and occasionally Mengele-esque inventor, science nerd, and genius. Bubblegum’s would-be champion is a twelve-year-old boy called Finn who lives in a treehouse fort with BMO and his adoptive brother Jake—a shapeshifting, thirty-something, talking dog. Over 270 episodes and nine seasons, Finn (for a long time believed to be the last human on earth), and Jake (revealed (#spoileralert) in episode 172 to have been birthed from his father’s skull after an incident with an alien) spend their time playing video games, hanging out with their friends, and embarking on various adventures. The latter range from classic missions such as rescuing female royals to more obscure expeditions such as assisting a pandemonium of hard partying teddy bears who don’t realize that the “phat party-club” in which they’ve chosen to “grind” is actually the belly of a lavadrinking beast on the verge of digesting them into feces. Further, many quests undertaken by Finn, Jake, and other characters in the series are metaphysical in that the searchers are seeking greater understanding about themselves, about their loved ones and enemies, about why the world is the way it is, about what happens after death, and about what the point of life might be. Adventure Time’s dippy humor and meticulous exploration of the backstories and inner lives of its copious cast has inspired intense emotional attachment of a type unusual for a children’s cartoon. Since its 2010 debut on Cartoon Network, the internationally syndicated series has attracted gushing odes from devoted adult fans who shower the series with superlatives they say still don’t

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do it justice. The blurb for the edited collection Adventure Time and Philosophy describes it as “one of the deepest and most thoughtful television shows ever to assault the human brain waves,” drawing attention to its consideration of issues such as the nature of reality, and the point of fighting for justice and of assisting others in distress.10 Archer magazine applauds the “revolutionary complexity” of its portrayal of sexual diversity,11 while Emily Nussbaum—writing in The New Yorker—describes it as “one of the most philosophically risky and, often, emotionally affecting shows on TV.”12 Echoing this is the critic Maria Bustillos who compares the series to the circa 1480 Giovanni Bellini painting St. Francis in Ecstasy, noting that, despite ostensibly being aimed at boys aged between six and eleven, Adventure Time is “a deeply serious work of moral philosophy . . . rich with moments of tenderness and confusion, and real terror and grief . . . moments sometimes more resonant and elementally powerful than you experience in a good novel.”13 Adventure Time’s creator—a bespectacled and seriously bearded American animator, writer, producer and voice actor who would probably be rejected from the Harry Potter franchise for being a bit too magical—repeatedly downplays or rejects suggestions that the series he has created is anything other than light entertainment. Indeed, Ward appears genuinely mystified when questioned about the sorts of high praise detailed in the paragraph above.14 Yet his selfdeprecating style need not deter us from examining Adventure Time’s deeper significance. Ward—who gives the impression of being a profoundly humble person—has maintained in a multitude of media interviews that—despite its fantastic setting—his main intention with the cartoon is to reflect the banalities and emotional dynamics of what he observes “normal” life and “normal” people to be like.15 Here, Ward appears to be using “normal” not in terms of normativity but in a reference to his attempts to truthfully represent what life looks like from his perspective. While it would obviously be a stretch to argue that Adventure Time is on par with the great literary works analyzed by Girard, my argument is that—regardless of the avowed intentions of its creators—the cartoon does have the sorts of “true-to-life” and “realistic” qualities (in the Girardian sense) that suggest Ward and the rest of Adventure Time’s creative team are intuiting something significant about the world—that they are offering a “quasitheoretical voice” and “superior perspective” in terms of furnishing “real knowledge” about human relations.16 To demonstrate the above, I will now move on to a discussion of Adventure Time’s treatment of mimesis, desire, and violence, before drawing attention to

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the compassion, care, and protection it extends to characters who might be at risk of scapegoating; the moral rehabilitation opportunities it offers evildoers; and what I will explain is its ironically earnest approach to promoting virtue. I will then conclude by using the insights gleaned from this chapter’s analysis of Adventure Time as a springboard for discussing a seemingly insurmountable logistical problem associated with the idea that the best/only remedy for catastrophically escalating human violence is mass conversion to Christianity.17 Finally, I make the—admittedly rather large move—of canvassing a potential alternative approach to achieving individual, social, and planetary flourishing that might be seen as diverging from yet is arguably still entirely harmonious with the Girardian purview.

“Alright, I’ll try to turn into a cheetah farting. I can’t do the spots”: Adventure Time on Mimesis, Desire, and Balbaflonic Lasers Mimetic desire, doubling and twinning, and problems stemming from both a surplus and deficit of differentiation are recurring themes in Adventure Time. These manifest in plotlines revolving around: clones (in both bio- and robotic forms); disguises and extended role play (in which characters dress up as or otherwise pretend to be someone else or each other); consensual and also magically coerced physical transformations (discussed at greater length in the “Sweet weirdos and moral rehab” section below); out-and-out copying (sometimes for nefarious purposes, sometimes stemming from obsessive fandom, and sometimes just for fun); and classic romantic triangulation. The natural starting point for a discussion of the treatment of mimesis in Adventure Time is Jake’s surreal “Stretchy Powers”—that is, his ability to change his shape and dramatically increase and decrease his mass in order to approximate the appearance of other beings and objects. The term “approximate” is significant, here, because, unlike, say, a television shapeshifter such as True Blood’s18 Sam Merlotte who can turn himself exactly into something else, Jake’s imitation efforts are more like a child’s early attempts at drawing in that they usually bear only a distant resemblance to their models. His versions of a horse and of a cheetah farting, for instance, both resemble inflatable pool toys. Given the ease with which Adventure Time’s animators could have granted Jake the power to imitate perfectly, their decision to tinker with the shape-shifting trope

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in this way is not only amusing but invites a reconsideration of the motif as well as the act of imitation itself. The subconscious force of mimesis to derail and sometimes completely override sanity and free will is also frequently traversed terrain. In the episode “Davey,”19 for instance, Finn disguises himself as a balding, middle-aged man in order to escape the slavish attention of fans of his heroic deeds, as well as to imitate those he believes are enjoying an “ordinary” life. Very quickly, however, the new persona takes over and Finn is so consumed by his alter ego that he dramatically changes his voice, moves out of the treehouse, refuses to answer to any name but “Davey,” and—as Jake puts it—completely loses his teacups. While the makers of Adventure Time offer nothing like a straightforward critique of or readily discernible “takeaway” about mimesis, time and again the program lays bare the types of mimetic dynamics Girard sees as problematic. Rather than having these churning away beneath characters’ avowed motivations or buried deep in subtext, however, the series foregrounds them using a variety of techniques including hyperbole and reductio ad absurdum. An example is an episode set in a walled city where the desire for things desired by others is so contagious and all-encompassing that snatching others’ possessions is not just the primary but seemingly the only order of business. Thus, when Finn and Jake enter, they observe—in rapid succession—a goblin stealing a large male creature’s ring, the large male creature stealing a skeleton baby from its skeleton mother, the baby stealing the large male creature’s tooth, a turtle stealing the tooth, a man with a crossbow stealing a jewel from the turtle’s crown, and a two-headed person stealing the crossbow. Objects (as well as subjects and body parts of subjects) pass so swiftly and relentlessly between citizens in a perpetual motion of theft and counter-theft that the act of mimetic desire and acquisition is rendered absurd and entirely pointless. Adventure Time also includes a multitude of triangulated standoffs involving mimetic desire in romantic contexts. In the episode “Ricardio the Heart Guy,”20 for instance, Finn competes overtly for Bubblegum’s attentions with a sleazy, valentine-shaped creature called Ricardio (who turns out to be the fugitive heart of a putative villain called The Ice King). Aware of her penchant for ancient technology, Ricardio impresses the princess tremendously when he asks if she has ever used “the balbaflonic laser to align the hybernotalist rift in the bubaflon plasmodial formation.” Finn’s intellect is not his strong point (he’s known to chastise himself for being not righteous but “wrong-teous . . . stupidteous!”), and his response is to launch into an aggressively geometric “science

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dance” which repels his rival from the palace dance floor. The remainder of the episode is dedicated to increasingly hostile exchanges between Finn and Ricardio, neatly illustrating Girard’s point about the avowed objects of mimetic desire diminishing in importance or disappearing completely as rivals become increasingly fixated on each other. Several seasons later, it is Ricardio and what remains of his host body squaring off over Bubblegum. The episode “Lady & Peebles”21 begins with Bubblegum and her offsider Lady Rainicorn hunkered down in an arctic base discussing—mostly in long monologues of untranslated Korean—how best to conduct a search and rescue for the missing Finn and Jake. After passing through a “sphincter” in the wall of a black ice cave kitted out by Ricardio, Bubblegum and Lady battle their way through groping arms, eyeballs shooting lasers, and a giant licking tongue— that is, through a surreal material realization of the male gaze and sexual harassment. Eventually they find Finn and Jake lying poisoned and unconscious, while the hideously injured Ice King rages against Ricardio: “This is total bunk! You copier! You’re only in love with her because I’m in love with her!” While this line appears to be approaching peak Girard in its depiction of the mediating role of the model in desire, once again it is significant that this dynamic is named explicitly rather than being depicted as a hidden or subconscious puppet master.

Nietzsche’s Übermensch vs Mandroid: Who would win? Violence in Adventure Time Adventure Time has achieved a degree of infamy among television regulators and concerned parents because of its alleged ultraviolence.22 There is good evidence, however, to support the claim that its depictions of violence often involve a type of a “mention” of rather than “use.”23 As I will show in this section, much of the program’s treatment of violence constitutes an ironic meta comment about rather than an unproblematized deployment of traditional cartoon violence—this meta commentary sharing many commonalities with the sort of cross section evoked in the character of Charles Tavis in the David Foster Wallace novel Infinite Jest.24 Tavis, Wallace writes, is possibly the openest man of all time . . . less like a person than like a sort of crosssection of a person . . . too self-conscious and awkward to join right in with any group of the kids clustered around . . . [he’d] just kind of drift from cluster to cluster and lurk around creepily on the fringe, listening, but . . . always [saying],

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loudly, in some lull in the group’s conversation, something like “I’m afraid I’m far too self-conscious really to join in here, so I’m just going to lurk creepily at the fringes and listen, if that’s all right, just so you know,” and so on.25

The term “cartoon violence” is often used to refer not just to violence in the cartoon genre but to any media representation in which the act of violence is overplayed (usually for comic effect) while the consequences of violence are underplayed (such that even severely injured characters are able to rapidly regroup to exact hilarious and hyperbolic vengeance). In Adventure Time, characters do make enthusiastic use of bizarre opportunities for recreational violence which are edgier than, say, an organized bout of kung fu. Yet these still fall well short of surrogate victimage or out-and-out warfare, partly because (again like Charles Tavis in Infinite Jest) they constantly declare themselves for what they are—that is, bizarre opportunities for recreational violence. Consider, for example, the episode “My Two Favorite People” which opens with Finn and Jake fighting a land shark and a character called Science Cat. The latter throws a potion on Jake that turns him into a butterfly, leading to the following exchange: Jake: Who are these guys? This is a great fight! Finn: Yeah! You never fought them? They come out every day at four o’clock on the dot. . . . You should stay, man. At five o’clock every day, I chop both their heads off, and they grow them back for the next day.

On one hand, this seems like a straightforward depiction of cartoon antagonists having a fine time annihilating each other, yet always managing to bounce back to battle again. Yet the hyperbole of the scene—the fact that ongoing combat occurs at exactly the same time each day, that one contender routinely rebounds from the usually fatal experience of being beheaded, and that everyone seems to be enjoying an almost wholesomely good time—self-consciously satirizes the “sworn enemies,” “endless combat,” and “bounce back” cartoon violence tropes. Further disrupting the ability to easily determine Adventure Time’s position on violence is its pillorying of not only over-the-top ultraviolence but also radical nonviolence. In one episode, Jake pledges himself to pacifism and fails dismally in his attempts to use “controlled conversation” to rescue Finn from being turned into a crystal. On another occasion, a washed-up champion called Billy tells Finn and Jake that fighting monsters with violence is as pointless as a dog chasing its tail because evil will always reappear. Finn and Jake’s attempt to follow Billy’s suggestion and help people by being peaceably active in their community, however, results in citizens being chased and burned by dragons,

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turned into stone and cyborgs, and in need of various emergency dermatological assistance. Finn’s conclusion at this point is, “I think us being nonviolent is hurting people.” Despite the loaded nature of this observation, it would be wrong to assume that Adventure Time simplistically supports “righteous” violence as opposed to the “wrong-teous” (or “stupid-teous”) variety. A signature trait of the series is its examination of the gravity and consequences of violence, with many episodes depicting in truly unsettling detail the physical and emotional impact of violence perpetrated not only by “bad guys” but by characters with all manner of motivations and moral orientations. Characters frequently suffer realistic-looking injuries, and articulate pain and fear about being hurt. Finn, in particular, sustains many hideous wounds, including facial abrasions, bruises and burns, black eyes, scalded flesh, and broken bones. In one chilling scene in season six, his arm is torn from its socket during an encounter with his uncaring and narcissistic biological father. The horror of the injury combined with the familial betrayal causes Finn prolonged suffering mitigated only slightly by the fact that a small flower sprouts from his stump, eventually growing into a (temporary) new arm made of grass. For Girard, of course, a comprehensive consideration of the consequences of violence includes but moves well beyond a recognition of the material hurt inflicted upon individual victims. Instead, it recognizes both the culturally generative properties of violence as well as its metastasizing effect on entire societies, including the moral harm caused to perpetrators and bystanders. While Adventure Time does not investigate these macro-level consequences in anything like Girardian depth or detail, it does obliquely explore the ferocious and paradoxical effects of violence in that the Mushroom War is depicted as having created the Land of Ooo’s most lovely inhabitants and cultural features, as well as the most evil creature on earth (a Satan-like character called the Lich whose sole goal is to destroy all of life). The Land of Ooo is littered with battlefield detritus and post-civilization techno-dejecta—full of metaphorical and literal corpses that serve as a major driver of its aesthetics, plotlines, and sprawling character arcs. Indeed, the global holocaust referred to as “The Mushroom War” almost constitutes a character itself given the key role it plays in explaining why the world and its inhabitants are the way they are. In short, the postapocalyptic landscape is used not just as a handy backdrop but as a constant reminder of the escalating mimetic violence—the nuclear arms race and warfare—that destroyed the previous iteration of the earth. From a Girardian perspective, it is also cogent to note that Adventure Time is mostly a surrogate victimage-free zone. A conspicuous exception to the cartoon’s

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eschewing of “an eye for an eye” themes, is an episode in which Bubblegum sends Finn and Jake in pursuit of a character called the Duke of Nuts because she believes (rightly) that he has been stealing pudding from her castle and (wrongly) that he has turned her green and bald. Over the course of the episode, the Duke of Nuts is revealed to be a paragon of kindness and compassion whose dessert raids on Bubblegum’s castle are the result of a medical condition in the form of a pudding deficiency. As he resigns himself with grace to his fate (“Innocent or not, I should accept what’s coming to me”), it is Bubblegum who is unambiguously identified as the victimizer despite having been the victim of misfortune (in the form of an unfortunate physical transformation) herself. Significantly, the Duke ultimately remains unharmed in this episode because no one has any doubts that—in her crazed attempts to engage in scapegoating and vengeance—it is Bubblegum who has temporarily lost her teacups. The simple takeaway about violence offered in Adventure Time is that it is unable to offer a simple takeaway about violence. To deploy an overused phrase in the pop cultural vernacular: its message is that it’s complicated. The series deepens this complexity further still by continually engaging in meta commentary about the act of meta commentary on violence itself. In addition to the “I think us being nonviolent is hurting people” example offered above, another instance is the episode “The Real You”26 which features a surreal worm university scenario in which a worm professor of “theoretical fightonomics” asks his students (also worms) who would win in a battle between Nietzsche’s Übermensch and Mandroid. Eventually the scholar reveals, in a state of inexplicable rage, that the answer is  .  .  . WEREWOLF QUEEN! IT’S ALWAYS WEREWOLF QUEEN! . . . And when I finally meet the Werewolf Queen, she will take me on as her royal consort and we will rule in blood!

Despite its farcicality, the term “theoretical fightonomics” neatly captures some key aspects of violence studies,27 while the scene in which the term is deployed is a delightfully absurd send-up of the tendency of some of us in academia to form obsessive attachments to our objects of inquiry, and/or to end up as irretrievably immersed participants in the very phenomenon we claim to be impartially observing. In a nutshell, Adventure Time’s representations of violence—like its subversive depictions of gender28—are extremely transgressive in that existing stereotypes are bizarrely deconstructed and radically reinvented rather than simply inverted. Its critique of violence does not involve, for instance, the offering of

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only Gandhi-types inhabiting strictly peacenik domains. Instead, it presents an unusual and thought-provoking meditation on violence that cannot easily be deciphered as constituting either a simple “for” or “against” case. This apparent agnosticism is clearly at odds with Girard’s view that there is a radical (and largely undetected) incompatibility between violence and love.29 Yet, given Girard’s concern with the evils of misrecognition and concealment resulting from the “type of thought that never succeeds in ridding itself of its own violence,”30 once again it is significant that Adventure Time’s violence: a) constantly declares itself; and b) constantly declares itself as morally suspect. These moves invite—at both the intratextual and extratextual level—continual reflection on the ethics and functions of violence, especially violence that might otherwise be rationalized away as unproblematically righteous—for example, violent means that are used to secure putatively nonviolent ends such as communal “peace,” or violence that is deployed by a “good” character to defeat a “bad” one. Perhaps even more powerful in terms of unveiling victimage, however, is Adventure Time’s wholesale rejection of “goodie”/“baddie” binaries altogether. As I will explain in the next section, this move not only creates richly multifaceted characters but contributes to a socially structuring logos working strongly against the surrogate victimage mechanism.

Sweet weirdos and moral rehab For the most part, the only type of sacrifice endorsed in Adventure Time is the sacrifice of oneself for the good of others. There are a handful of episodes in which Bubblegum sacrifices one or more of her kingdom’s citizens for chilly, utilitarian reasons, but—as with the treatment of violence more generally in the series—these occasional sacrifices of innocents are always named for what they are rather than being (incorrectly and self-servingly) framed as involving the punishment of wrongdoers. For example, in an episode in which a Bubblegumled expedition is overwhelmed by irradiated ooze monsters, Finn references the pop cultural trope of “survival cannibalism”31 when he says, “There’s only one way out of this jam. One of us has to eat the big one so the others can survive.” His attempt to offer his “teen-boy body” to the monsters to devour so the others can make their escape is thwarted, however, when Bubblegum knocks him out with a wrench and puts the hard word on an annoying candy person called James to sacrifice himself in Finn’s place. Her view is that James is replaceable

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via candy people cloning techniques whereas Finn is not. (A subsequent episode takes these themes of mimesis and sacrifice to caricatural new dimensions when the cloned James II returns and repeatedly fakes his own death via self-sacrifice to “save” the princess from (non)danger so as to collect bravery medals as well as a large number of new, cloned versions of himself for company.) That surrogate victim slaying does not occur in the Land of Ooo does not explain, of course, why it is not necessary. How, for instance, is sacrificial violence and all-out warfare averted in Adventure Time despite the toxic presence of mimetic desire, mimetic rivalry, and sometimes even full-scale mimetic crises? Girard’s reasoning, after all, is that rivalry no longer constrained by sacrificial violence has the effect of leaving the world more at the mercy of rivalry and antagonism than ever before, leaving “modern societies hovering on the brink of apocalyptic calamity, in which the outbreak of mimetic conflict can easily escalate into the effort to annihilate entire peoples.”32 As I will now explain, communal peace in Adventure Time is upheld as a result of four, interrelated factors. First, the Land of Ooo’s dominant social norms are structured around an ethics of difference as well as what could be called an ethics of sameness. Second, the relatively common occurrence of magical transformation continually gives characters firsthand experience of the vantage point of both victims and villains. Third, communities are purged and purified not by sacrifice but by redemption and rehabilitation. And, fourth, with the exception of some immature individuals and communities who/which can be childishly selfish in their orientations, most characters are implicitly or explicitly committed to living lives of virtue. Points one to three will be dealt with in this section, while point four will be discussed in the “Adventure Time’s earnestly ‘Ironic’ virtue” section below.

On sameness and difference With regard to Adventure Time’s treatment of diversity and pluralism, we can consider the first episode of season seven, in which it is revealed that Princess Bubblegum has a previously unknown candy dragon brother called Neddy. Thanks to a birth-related trauma, Neddy lives in subterranean isolation where he sucks constantly on candy tree roots for comfort, while excreting copious quantities of crimson fluid. Neddy—whose body is covered with what looks like a combination of gills and “man boobs”—lies low when left on his own, but, if disturbed even slightly, runs and flies aimlessly around wailing hysterically and smashing everything in his path. Nothing about Neddy is particularly likable.

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Yet even when he is at his most irritating and high maintenance, Princess Bubblegum treats him with great patience and affection, referring to him with gentle resignation as a “sweet weirdo.” When Jake asks about the difference in the siblings’ temperaments (noting that Neddy is “a wet hotdog around everyone”), Bubblegum’s reply is: “People get built different. We don’t need to figure it out, we just need to respect it.” While this sort of explicit ethical mission statement is rare in Adventure Time, Bubblegum’s endorsement of diversity—and also an ethics of diversity—reflects a theme which runs very deeply in the series, and which serves to embrace and protect—as “sweet weirdos”—community misfits who might otherwise be vulnerable to being used as scapegoats. Further, those strange-lings who cannot be accommodated in community arrangements are cared for by the state in that the Candy Kingdom has a psychiatric unit (complete with real-world lapses in standards of care). Diversity is also embraced at the extratextual level in that large numbers of episodes as well as entire spin-off miniseries are devoted to detailed and poignant explorations of the backstories and points of view of secondary, marginal, and/ or outright evil characters who might otherwise be reductively dismissed as objects, outlanders, irrecoverable enemies, and so on. The Ice King, for instance, initially seems like a straight-up “baddie” with nothing in common with any of the “goodies.” As the series progresses, however, he is revealed to be a mentally ill and heartbreakingly lonely being who, more than anything, just wants friends as well as a life partner with whom he can enjoy prosaic domestic pleasures such as washing the dishes after dinner. In fact, the blue-skinned wizard is so obsessed with finding a mate that on one occasion he coquettishly proposes marriage to a face he has scrawled on his left foot. Even this version of romance quickly takes a Girardian turn for the triangular, however, when the Ice King “discovers” another love interest competing for his affections—a winking face drawn on his right foot. (Revealing insights into the motivations of Adventure Time’s creators can be found in a number of media interviews in which Ward confesses that he identifies with the Ice King more than any other character and weeps frequently while editing scenes involving the Ice King’s tragic life and backstory.)33 As well-meaning and potentially empathy-inspiring as these representations of capital “O” Others may be, however, it is worth remembering that enthused celebrations of diversity and difference are not new in popular culture. Furthermore, given Girard’s concerns about the potentially devastating consequences of our “exasperating illusion of subjective difference,”34 we might wonder whether valorizing difference—or at least perceptions of and orientations

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toward certain types of difference—might be a double[d]-edged sword. As such, it is significant that Adventure Time includes not just an ethics of difference, but also an ethics of sameness. Most dramatically, the latter involves depictions of the moral way to behave if one finds oneself in the middle of a lynch-minded mob, or if one finds oneself dealing with members of such an assemblage (the tl;dr35 is “look before you lynch”). More banally, the series provides multiple snapshots of the quotidian comforts and ego-erasing humility offered by the realization that one is not an excitingly exotic outsider but a metaphorically beige sort of being who looks and acts very much like all one’s neighbors. As one of the notoriously inept palace banana guards explains poignantly at the end of “The Thin Yellow Line,”36 not only does he look indistinguishable from every other banana guard; he does not have a single special talent. Stepping back from the level of the individual episode, we can also observe an unveiling of the singularity myth in the lengthy story arc concerning Finn’s glacial discovery that he is not, as he believed for so long, the world’s last surviving human but just one of many surviving members of a race as deeply flawed and individually and collectively myopic as it ever was. Stepping back even further— into the domain of the meta—we can return to Ward’s insistence that neither he nor his work are exceptional but “normal,” no different from anything else you might see if you walked out your front door and took a look around. The irony here, of course, is that, in this age of high individualism, sincere-sounding claims that one is nothing exceptional is itself exceptional (and reminiscent of that scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian37 in which a large crowd chants in unison, “We’re all individuals! We are all different!” except for one man who quietly announces, “I’m not” before being promptly shushed).

Transformation Also working against the surrogate victimage mechanism in Adventure Time is the fact that central characters repeatedly find themselves transformed into liminal beings who are prime candidates for scapegoating. This process cultivates an understanding of and compassion for victims, as well as realizations of the “there but for the grace of Grob Gob Glob Grod go I” variety (“Grob Gob Glob Grod” being the four-faced deity from Mars often evoked as a religious entity on Adventure Time’s earth). Characters who have experienced such metamorphoses generally have more capacity to reason with and appease angry and frightened citizens coalescing into what might easily become sacrifice-hungry lynch mobs.

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In the episode “Freak City,”38 for example, a Magic Man banished from Mars by his brother (the aforementioned Grob Gob Glob Grod) for being a jerk, turns Finn into a giant foot. Then, when Foot Finn and Jake attempt to save the citizens of a burning village, the townspeople accuse Finn of being “another one of those freaks” and—in a classic scapegoating move—conclude he must therefore have started the fire. Banished beneath a bridge, Finn discovers a number of other characters who have been transmogrified by the Magic Man. These include a giant, lava-vomiting head called Gork, an arm called Zap, a human waist called Trudy, a leg called Kim, and a set of tonsils called Wee Wee and Gorflax. Appalled by their willingness to give up in despair, Finn kicks everyone into a combined body and together they confront the Magic Man and are switched back to their regular forms. If the episode ended here, it could be read as a relatively straightforward morality tale in that Finn’s firsthand experience of life as an outcast has helped him overcome his initial revulsion to the bridge freaks’ appearance and odor (they smell like “vomit on fire”) allowing him to befriend and assist them rather following the villagers’ lead, and maligning them as varmints. However, sweet weirdness is not just tolerated in Adventure Time, it is celebrated and often chosen voluntarily by citizens as a desirable mode of being. Thus, the former bridge freaks refuse Finn’s invitation to return to their regular lives and say they have decided to stay joined together as a new type of freak because they enjoy being that way. Similar oddity-positivity is demonstrated by Jake in the same episode when Finn confronts him about his reluctance to help him change back from a foot to a boy and Jake confesses that he has “kind of always wanted to be a foot.” It is unsurprising that Girard never explicitly mentions the socially marginal status and exquisite vulnerability of human boys or magical dogs shaped like giant feet. He does, however, observe that, in the modern world, scapegoating rituals often involve ridicule, derision, and social ostracism—these directed toward victims from liminal social categories such vagabonds, beggars, and cripples.39 In Adventure Time, vagabonds, beggars, cripples, and the like are invariably unveiled as belonging to the infinitely elastic category of “us” rather than to a demonized “them.” Further disrupting simplistic us/them distinctions are the number of plot lines in which characters give rein to their darkest sides, or which involve otherwise virtuous community members being possessed by or temporarily transformed into evil beings because of magic, reckless behavior, and/or crises of the self. Once again, frequently enduring these experiences and

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events makes it extremely difficult for the citizens of Ooo to cultivate and sustain the extended fiction that evil is something that exists only in others and can therefore be expelled by destroying these others.

Rehabilitation and redemption That most of Adventure Time’s protagonists are occasional or recovering evildoers also helps explains the community’s charitable and optimistic attitude vis-à-vis villain redemption and rehabilitation. After being defeated in the episode in which Finn suffers the aforementioned arm avulsion, for instance, exposure to healing blood transforms the Lich into a very large, very strange baby called “Sweet P” who is adopted by a pygmy elephant and pig couple. Sweet P continues to be embraced by his adoptive parents and the larger community even after he begins displaying Lich-like qualities when threatened or upset (not infrequent occurrences given that he is basically a toddler). The Lich’s transfiguration into Sweet P obviously involves rebirth and redemption, but it is also reminiscent of a compassionate rehoming—like a rescue dog prone to aggression who doesn’t suit Household #1 with its small children and tiny courtyard but does suit Household #2 with its vet bachelorette and large backyard. The example of the Lich also demonstrates the way evil in Ooo is not framed as a force that can be permanently snuffed out but one that can potentially arise in everyone and must therefore be managed on an ongoing basis. The relevance of this framing of evil as “normal” and inextinguishable but manageable is revisited in the conclusion of this chapter.

Adventure Time’s earnestly “Ironic” virtue Large-scale transformations and conversions such as that involving the Lich do serve important roles in the purging and purification of Adventure Time’s communities at moments of grave crisis. (Indeed, the transformation of the earth from a place ruled by humans and beset by mimetic violence, to a land full of relatively peaceful mutants also constitutes a type of grand conversion.) Yet it is the cumulative effect of many citizens’ ongoing commitment to small, and relatively quotidian acts of virtue that seem to be the key reason these crises remain, for the most part, contained and non-sacrificial. Virtue in Ooo is cultivated via the sorts of daily practice espoused by Aristotle40 and as

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observable in spiritual traditions such as Buddhism,41 these supplemented by various local religious and spiritual doctrines.42 Virtuous conduct and excellence of character are also modeled—via positive mimesis—by characters with strong moral compasses such as Finn who is known for small acts of kindness, as well as grand gestures. In one episode, for instance, he takes a moment from his busy, being-a-hero schedule to help a bird with an injured beak feed her babies (although, being Adventure Time, his distinctly non-Disney approach is to chew up mouthfuls of apple and spit it directly into the hatchlings’ mouths). The virtues promoted in Adventure Time include most of the big-ticket cardinal and theological items (prudence, justice, courage, temperance, faith, hope, charity, and so on). Yet close attention is also paid to a virtue which tends to receive less contemporary press but is arguably critical if we hope to extract ourselves from entanglement in toxic and escalating mimesis: that is, a commitment to pondering on, interrogating, being honest with, and increasing our knowledge of ourselves. Time and again, Adventure Time’s story lines involve beings reflecting on what it means to be a good person/mutant on earth circa the year 3000. Its dramatis personae also repeatedly engage in meta narration about inner experiences and interpersonal dynamics that are rarely named or spoken aloud, and/or that might usually lie partially or completely beneath consciousness. This creates a multitude of wry possibilities for both the characters in and viewers of Adventure Time to reflect on themselves and also on those social scenes and cultural tropes involving well-worn, verging on mechanistic dynamics. In one episode, for instance, a powerful cosmic wish master called Prismo chides Jake for the shortsightedness and selfishness of wishing for a sandwich as the world burns: Wait, dude! Look, I like you, so you should know my wishes always got an ironic twist to them. It’s like a monkey’s paw kind of thing. . . . You just gotta be really specific. Say your wish is: “I wish for a back rub.” Who’s gonna give it to you? A dirty man? A bear? And where does this “masseuse” come from? Do I zap some guy away from his family dinner? Leave some kid traumatized?

Here, Prismo both participates in yet also engages in meta commentary about the “be careful what you wish for” trope. While the content of the Prismo example might seem silly, meta commentary of this type does involve a form of intratextual revelation in that characters must be sufficiently self-aware to be able to “unveil” and name the personal motivations and social processes in

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which they are engaged. Extratextually, it also issues an invitation to viewers to notice and consider things hidden if not since the foundation of the world, then at least since the advent of postmodern ironic reflexivity in popular culture. On this topic, it is critical to note that Adventure Time does not follow the lead of so many other cultural forms associated with postmodernity by continually reminding viewers that it knows it is a television program. It does not, for instance, wink knowingly toward a fourth wall or enclose everything in invisible quote marks. Instead, it deploys a type of earnest irony that deepens rather than creates distance from its endorsement of virtue, self-awareness, and the leading of an examined life. This sets the series apart from the detachment, and jaded cynicism commentators such as Claire Colebrook,43 and Wallace44 have observed about the “all-encompassing”45 and “institutionalized”46 irony of postmodernism. Indeed, Wallace goes so far as to accuse irony of being oppressive, totalitarian, and junta-like in that—like a political rebellion or coup—it excels at tearing down but seems “noticeably less great at the mundane, non-negative task of . . . establishing a superior . . . alternative.”47 Further, no one knows anymore whether anyone means what they say and having the “heretical gall” to ask creates the impression that the inquirer is “an hysteric or a prig.”48 Adventure Time’s irony, however, comports more with Umberto Eco’s view that it is entirely possible to tell a woman “As Barbara Cartland would put it, ‘I love you madly’” in a way that plays the game of irony consciously and with pleasure yet which also, sincerely, speaks of love.49 Thus, in Adventure Time, it is entirely possible for a character to say something along the lines of “I seem to be having a crisis about whether I am virtuous enough to call myself a good person at the exact point the protagonist in an adventure show might have this sort of crisis” while still speaking earnestly of virtue, and crises about virtue, and crises about virtue in television shows about virtue and crises about virtue (and so on). (Such themes and imagery of infinite regress appear repeatedly in Adventure Time, offered not as a reason or excuse to surrender to mimesis at its most carnivorous, but seemingly in recognition that sometimes this is simply the way life appears or, indeed, is.) As such, Adventure Time’s harnessing of the entertainment value of irony— as well as of hyperbole, reductio ad absurdum, and humor in general—is not simply a case of using a spoonful of funny sugar to make the serious moral medicine go down. Instead, it demonstrates an unusual capacity to appreciate and acknowledge the dark absurdity of much of existence without mocking, ridiculing, or retreating into nihilism or despair. Rather than making light of the

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seriousness of issues such as evil, betrayal, torture, mutilation, madness, death, and apocalypse, Adventure Time’s approach is more closely akin to the Buddhist ethos of holding lightly.50 That is, it stares directly, and unflinchingly at the darkest of dark things while maintaining an affectionate, gentle, and Buddha-esque half smile.51 Yet, even as it uses humor to (ever-so-slightly) soften the horror, it warns against the use of humor for precisely this reason. As BMO says to Jake: “When bad things happen, I know you want to believe they are a joke, but sometimes life is scary and dark. That is why we must find the light.”

Conclusion While some of its most ardent fans might attempt to argue otherwise, Adventure Time is not a grand philosophical work, an exemplar of high art, or even a cultural artifact intended for adults. It is just a cartoon—animated children’s entertainment full of magic beings and events, supposedly created solely for fun. As such, it obviously disqualifies itself from being a literal “how-to-live” guide for those of us not born on its animators’ storyboards. That said, the series is wise beyond its genre, and might well be read metaphorically as a set of blueprints for sustainable living—sustainable not primarily in relation to environmentalism but in terms of managing interpersonal difficulties such as mimetic rivalry and conflict in a manner that is both moral and viable over time. The fact that Adventure Time’s intratextual “remedies” often involve magical acts in clear defiance of those laws of physics governing the non-cartoon world need not concern us, so long as we consider the series as an extended thought experiment able to pique reflection rather than a literal instruction manual to be followed to the letter. There are, however, several aspects of Adventure Time discussed in this chapter that might well be directly exportable to non-animated dimensions with fruitful results: specifically, its secular(ish), open-ended, and playful approach to revelation and conversion, alongside its advocation of virtue and its deployment of ironic humor in the service of knowledge of the self. The opening lines of this chapter noted the breadth and sobriety of Girardian scholarship. Double business is serious business, bound not just to the prospects of a single love triangle but potentially to life as we know it. Yet at the heart of Girard’s concerns about the viability of human civilization is an issue that is relatively small and personal: the limits to and extent of our ability to know ourselves. For Girard, metastatic self-deceit and disavowal occur in three

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distinct stages. Firstly, during mimetic desire, there is the charade of spontaneity and originality. The desiring subject avows that she is autonomously choosing a coveted object because of its special qualities, rather than because she has noticed that someone else wants it, too—this “intimate conviction that our desires are really our own” being “the dearest of all our illusions.”52 A second phase of denial and pretense underpins mimetic rivalry, as the subject and the model insist their primary interest is the coveted object whereas in truth it is their increasingly hostile fixation on the rivalry—their burning urge to get their hands on each other being the desire that dare not speak its name. The third, and most heinous lie of all, occurs at the moment of mimetic crisis when a warring community unifies by sacrificing a scapegoat, an innocent or unexceptionally guilty surrogate who—thanks to a sort of collective hallucination—is proclaimed as the root cause and embodiment of all the community’s problems. While Girard’s take on how we might respond to these issues seems to vary,53 it is tempting to assume he is proposing a sort of carrot and stick approach to a solution, with the carrot being the benefits of renouncing violence and converting to Christianity, and the stick being the end of the world. On this subject, we should note that, regardless of whether one buys into the Christian framing, human-made planetary threats in forms such as climate change and nuclear proliferation make a potential, contemporary apocalypse all-too secular. Indeed, at the time of writing, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock was sitting at two-and-a-half minutes to 12—the closest it has been to the midnight of global catastrophe since the early 1980s.54 Yet, despite the acuity of Girard’s diagnosis of the disease, there is an elephant-in-the-room-sized logistical issue associated with proposed cures that rely on conversion in the historical Christianity sense. That is, it seems highly improbable that the world will ever experience a sudden, en masse conversion in terms of formal adherence to creedal Christianity and participation in its rituals—even if the Doomsday Clock’s current reading does inspire some fake-ittill-you-make-it type conversions as per the wagering Pascal.55 It seems critical, therefore, to inquire whether alternative interventions might be available. This, in turn, raises a more provocative question: namely, even if we believe the only solution to impending apocalypse is the remedy associated with Girard (Plan A), shouldn’t we consider at least acting as if there might be another option (Plan B)? This modified version of the Pascalian approach would have the rational Girardian living as if an alternative to en masse Christian conversion is possible for salvation in recognition of the high unlikelihood of mass conversion. Why?

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Because if Plan B turns out to be workable and the efforts of Girardians and their allies to promote better ways of saving the world succeed, the gains are enormous. If Plan B turns out to be workable but Girardians and their allies insist on prosecuting a strict, Plan A-only case for intervention and the world (which, again, could have been saved by Plan B) ends, all that remains is the cold comfort of “I told you so.” Adventure Time is relevant because it offers a suggestive vision of the types of practices and moral orientations that might well form part of a Plan B as described above. While its characters and societies do reach a variety of potentially cataclysmic flash points, these crises are continually being confronted and worked through in a manner conducive to peace. Critically, catastrophes are averted not via a process of deferral—which suggests a desperate scrabble to postpone the inevitable—but instead are defanged, dismantled, and dissolved via various means including revelation, dark nights of the soul, and/or metanoia involving profound—though not strictly Christian—physical or spiritual transformation. Sometimes these do involve a moment of violence but, for the most part, this violence is contained and does not involve surrogate victimage. A downside to this sort of Plan B is that there is no neat ending or happily ever after. For instance, again and again, the citizens of Adventure Time find themselves in potentially catastrophic circumstances, and again and again, they are called on to find moral methods to decipher and deal with their inner and outer demons. Paradoxically, however, this downside of Plan B is also its upside—especially with regards to its extratextual applications. The binary framing of “become a proselyte or perish” offers little conceptual or material wriggle room. Neither does it adequately reflect the fact that, in contemporary real-world contexts, it is extremely rare to find neat—or complete—examples of the surrogate victimage mechanism at work. Instead, what occurs are partial and overlapping episodes of mimetic desire and antagonism, scapegoating and sacrifice, sociopolitical clashes and détentes.56 A glass half full reading of this chaos is that it might have the potential to increase the impact and efficacy of similarly ongoing and “messy” alterations to human behavior in contrast to a single, grand gesture (or at least a single, grand gesture involving everyone at once). Girard’s argument that we can only participate in the surrogate victimage mechanism if we are not conscious that we are doing so57 positions nascent or partial vision of our own scapegoating tendencies as impossibilities. But surely human awareness is not so black and white. What of those niggling concerns or flickers of guilt that something is not quite right or that we are not behaving quite as well as we could be? Surely there is potential here for conversion if not

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to Christianity or a life devoted entirely to moral philosophy then at least to more modest endeavors such as occasionally engaging in introspection and mindfulness practices, considering others’ points of view, and thinking before acting. Embracing these possibilities might open the door to a different kind of faith; faith that—as monumentally flawed as humans are—we might still have the capacity to reflect and change ourselves for the better regardless of whether this process is embarked upon inside or outside of organized religion.

Notes 1 Adventure Time, television series, created by Pendleton Ward and directed by Larry Leichliter (New York, California, and Georgia: Frederator Studies and Cartoon Network Studios (production companies), Warner Bros. Television Distribution (distributor), 2010–18). 2 See: Pendleton Ward cited in Rick DeMott, “Time for Some Adventure with Pendleton Ward,” Animation World Network, April 25, 2010, https://www.awn .com/animationworld/time-some-adventure-pendleton-ward [accessed November 26, 2017]; Pendleton Ward cited in Dan, “A Chat with Pendleton Ward, Creator of Adventure Time [Interview],” Geekadelphia, July 10, 2012, http://www.geekadelp hia.com/2012/07/10/a-chat-with-pendleton-ward-creator-of-adventure-time-int erview/ [accessed November 26, 2017]; Pendleton Ward cited in Maria Bustillos, “The bizarre magic of the world’s greatest kid’s—is it for kids?—television show,” The Hole Near the Centre of the World (n. d.), http://theholenearthecenterofthewor ld.com/ [accessed November 26, 2017]. 3 While both types of conversion can sit together, and perhaps Girard thinks they do go together (even like country and western), there is no historical reason to believe that one must involve the other. (Many thanks to Chris Fleming for input in this section.) 4 Chris Fleming, René Girard: Violence and Mimesis (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 163. 5 The Hunger Games, film series, directed by Gary Ross and Francis Lawrence (California: Color Force (studio), Lionsgate (distributor), 2012–15). 6 The Walking Dead (television series), developed by Frank Darabont, multiple directors, producers, and writers (New York and California: Idiot Box Productions, Circle of Confusion, Skybound Entertainment, Valhalla Entertainment, and AMC Studios (production companies), 2010 ongoing). 7 The Matrix, film series, created and directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski, produced by Joel Silver (California and Sydney: Warner Bros. Pictures and Roadshow Entertainment (distributors), 1999–2003).

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8 Alex K., “Adventure Time: Dancing Bug,” YouTube, May 15, 2011, https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=E5KC1E5NyR0 [accessed November 26, 2017]. 9 shishakes, “Candy Kingdom: Style and Ideology,” Ooo and Art, January 7, 2015, https://oooandart.wordpress.com/ [accessed November 26, 2017]. 10 Nicolas Michaud, Adventure Time and Philosophy: The Handbook for Heroes (Chicago: Open Court, 2015). https://www.amazon.com/dp/0812698584/ref=rdr_ ext_tmb 11 Laurence Barber, “Queer in Children’s Television: Adventure Time,” Archer, May 4, 2015, http://archermagazine.com.au/2015/03/queer-in-childrens-television-adv enture-time/ [accessed November 26, 2017]. 12 Emily Nussbaum, “Castles in the Air: The Gorgeous Existential Funk of ‘Adventure Time’”, The New Yorker, April 21, 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/ 2014/04/21/castles-in-the-air [accessed November 26, 2017]. 13 Bustillos, “The Bizarre Magic of the World’s Greatest Kid’s – is it for Kids? – television show.” 14 See: Pendleton Ward cited in Rick DeMott, “Time for Some Adventure with Pendleton Ward”; Pendleton Ward cited in Dan, “A Chat with Pendleton Ward, Creator of Adventure Time [Interview]”; and Pendleton Ward cited in Bustillos, “The Bizarre Magic of the World’s Greatest Kid’s—is it for Kids?—television show.” 15 Charlie Jane Anders, “Pendleton Ward Explains how he’s Keeping Adventure Time Weird,” i09, March 2, 2012, https://io9.gizmodo.com/5890128/pendleton-ward-exp lains-how-hes-keeping-adventure-time-weird?IR=T [accessed November 26, 2017]. 16 René Girard, “To Double Business Bound”: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1988 [1978]), ix–xi. 17 I acknowledge that there is a way of reading Girard against himself in much of this. While it might be possible to interpret his position as arguing that mass conversions to Christianity (perhaps even Catholic Christianity) are required to avoid apocalypse, there are also strong currents in his thought that seem to work precisely against that conclusion. The important point to make, here, is that, for Girard, the enormous and deep cultural impact of Judeo-Christianity is such that in many respects this influence is carried for the most part by those with no specifically Christian confessional commitments. Indeed, he has argued at various points that historical Christianity has been one of the principal means of hiding its own revelation (Fleming, René Girard, 143–44). 18 True Blood, television series, created by Alan Ball (California: Your Face Goes Here Entertainment (production company), Warner Bros. Domestic Television (distributor), 2008–14). 19 Skyler Page and Somvilay Xayaphone (writers and storyboarders), “Davey,” Adventure Time television episode, directed by Larry Leichliter and Adam

200

20

21

22 23

24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32

Mimetic Theory and Film Muto (New York, California, and Georgia: Frederator Studies and Cartoon Network Studios (production companies), Warner Bros. Television Distribution (distributor), 2013). Sean Jimenez and Bert Youn (writers and storyboarders), “Ricardio the Heart Guy,” Adventure Time television episode, directed by Larry Leichliter and Patrick McHale (New York, California, and Georgia: Frederator Studies and Cartoon Network Studios (production companies), Warner Bros. Television Distribution (distributor), 2010). Cole Sanchez and Rebecca Sugar (writers and storyboarders), “Lady & Peebles,” Adventure Time television episode, directed by Larry Leichliter and Adam Muto (New York, California, and Georgia: Frederator Studies and Cartoon Network Studios (production companies), Warner Bros. Television Distribution (distributor), 2012). Emma A. Jane, “‘Gunter’s a Woman?!’—Doing and Undoing Gender in Adventure Time,” Journal of Children and Media 9, no. 2 (2015): 235. The use-mention distinction distinguishes between the use of an expression (for example, “Jim went to Paris”) and the mention of an expression (for example, “‘Jim’ has three letters”). From: Herman Cappelen and Ernest Lepore, “Quotation,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https ://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/quotation/ [accessed November 27, 2017]. David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York: Back Bay Books, 1996). Wallace, Infinite Jest, 517. Adam Muto and Rebecca Sugar (writers and storyboarders), “The Real You,” Adventure Time television episode, directed by Larry Leichliter, Patrick McHale and Cole Sanchez (New York, California, and Georgia: Frederator Studies and Cartoon Network Studios (production companies), Warner Bros. Television Distribution (distributor), 2011). Sadly, the author’s addition of “theoretical fightonomics” as research interest category on academia.au has yet to attract any followers except the author herself. Jane, “‘Gunter’s a Woman?!’”. René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), 270–272. Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, 270. “No Party Like a Donner Party,” TV Tropes, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.p hp/Main/NoPartyLikeADonnerParty [accessed November 28, 2017]. Peter Y. Paik, “Apocalypse of the Therapeutic: The Cabin in the Woods and the Death of Mimetic Desire,” in Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge, eds., Mimesis, Movies, and Media: Violence, Desire, and the Sacred, Volume 3 (New York, London, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2015), 105.

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33 Ward cited in Bustillos, “The Bizarre Magic of the World’s Greatest Kid’s—is it for Kids?—television show.” 34 Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, 400. 35 “tl;dr” is a contraction used online for “too long; don’t read” (also “too long; didn’t read”) used to indicate a brief summary of an idea or post. 36 KC Green and Emily Partridge (writers and storyboarders), “The Thin Yellow Line,” Adventure Time television episode, directed by Adam Muto (New York, California, and Georgia: Frederator Studies and Cartoon Network Studios (production companies), Warner Bros. Television Distribution (distributor), 2016). 37 Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, John Cleese, and Michael Palin, Monty Python’s Life of Brian (London and California: HandMade Films and Python (Monty) Pictures (production company, Cinema International Corporation and Orion Pictures/Warner Bros (distributors), 1979)). 38 Tom Herpich and Pendleton Ward (writers and storyboarders), “Freak City,” Adventure Time television episode, directed by Larry Leichliter and Patrick McHaleb (New York, California, and Georgia: Frederator Studies and Cartoon Network Studios (production companies), Warner Bros. Television Distribution (distributor), 2010). 39 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1979 [1972]), 271, 254. 40 Rather than a prescribed or precise rule for right conduct, Aristotle espouses the cultivation of the sort of “practical wisdom” that comes about as habits are established with practice. Abraham Edel, The Theory and Practice of Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2017 [1946]), 393. 41 Consider, for instance, the parallel the Buddhist nun Thubten Chodron draws between the daily practice of meditation and the regular training undertaken by a football team. Thubten Chodron, “Practicing Buddhism in daily life,” thubtenchodron.org, September 9, 2013, http://thubtenchodron.org/2013/09/everyd ay-dharma/ [accessed November 30, 2017]. 42 It is worth noting that, in a number of places, Girard talks about the anti-sacrificial tendencies of non- or a-Christian cultures. For instance, he praises Brahmanic Hinduism (Girard, Sacrifice, trans. Matthew Pattillo and David Dawson (East Lansang: Michigan State University Press, 2011)), and has also observed that Buddhism is “very aware of mimetic desire, and of contagion, and of all the things that matter in human relations” (The Girard Reader, ed. James G. Williams (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company), 63). 43 Claire Colebrook, Irony: The New Critical Idiom (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). 44 David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (London: Abacus, 1998 [1997]), 68.

202 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53

Mimetic Theory and Film Colebrook, Irony, 1. Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram,” 68. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 67–68. Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 67–68. Lori Deschene, “Letting Go of Attachment: From A to Zen,” Tiny Buddha, https://ti nybuddha.com/blog/letting-go-of-attachment-from-a-to-zen/ [accessed December 2, 2017]. Albert Low, Zen Mediation Plain and Simple (North Clarendon: Tuttle Publishing, 1989), 88–89. Girard, “To Double Business Bound,” ix. Girard has, at various times, claimed that only Christian revelation provides a means by which the violence and conflictual desire of the world can be remedied. At other times, his view has been far more ambiguous. In an interview with Rebecca Adams (Rebecca Adams and René Girard, “Violence, Difference and Sacrifice: A Conversation with René Girard,” Religion and Literature 25, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 9–33), for instance, he appears to affirm that positive mimesis is not the sole domain of the religious believer: Adams: For those who would not a priori l a religious framework, nor the concept of the “imitation of Christ” as you employ it, it might be understood also as the desire for love, for creativity, for community. Girard: Cultural imitation is a positive form of mimetic desire.

And even when Girard—in the same interview—inscribes his views into a theological framework, there is no entailment that recipients of what he thinks of as divine grace, accept or acknowledge this: Girard: Wherever you have that desire, I would say, that really active, positive desire for the other, there is some kind of divine grace present . . . Adams: Divine grace is present, you would say, whether or not it is recognized as such? Girard: Whether or not it is recognized as such. (25–26)

It is also worth pointing out, in line with this, that many—perhaps most—of the writers he has claimed have laid bare the operations of mimetic desire—from Stendhal to Proust and Virginia Woolf—are not, in fact, confessionally Christian. Finally, Girard has also argued at various points that other religious scriptures and traditions have anti-sacrificial messages. In Sacrifice, for instance, he argues that the Brahmans of Vedic India reveals sacrifice in a way that parallels— although is not identical with—the biblical tradition.

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54 “It is Two and a Half Minutes to Midnight,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2017, https://thebulletin.org/timeline [accessed December 2, 2017]. 55 “Pascal’s Wager” is the name given to Blaise Pascal’s argument that we cannot know whether God exists but must “wager” one way or the other. While “reason cannot settle which way we should incline, but a consideration of the relevant outcomes supposedly can.” This results in the following decision matrix:

Wager for God Wager against God

God exists

God does not exist

Gain all Misery

Status quo Status quo

From: Alan Hájek, “Pascal’s Wager,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/ entries/pascal-wager/ [accessed December 2, 2017]. 56 See: Emma A. Jane, “The Scapegoating of Cheerleading and Cheerleaders,” in Joel Hodge, Scott Cowdell, and Chris Fleming, eds., Violence, Desire, and the Sacred Volume 2 (New York, London, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2014), 83–100. 57 Cited in René Girard and Markus Müller, “Interview with René Girard,” Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology II, no. 1 Spring/Summer, 1996, Special Issue on René Girard, www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/AP0201/interv .htm [accessed December 2, 2017].

Index acting culture and 118–19 styles of 114 Act of Killing, The (Oppenheimer) dangerous truth in 39 empathy in 45–6 focus 35 government propaganda and 37–8, 40 historical violence and 35–6, 41–2, 46 lying in 39–41 memories and 44 mimetic levels in 36 remorse in 39 self-aggrandizement in 44–5 self-awareness and 43 social harmony and 41 truth monuments and 38 truth-telling and 36–41 victim alienation in 36, 40–1 victims’ voice in 42–3 violence in 47–9 Adventure Time (Ward) apocalypse and 197–8 assessments of 179–80, 195 characters 179 differences in 188–90 empathy in 190–2 ethos 178–9 humor in 194–5 intention 180, 195 mimesis in 181–2 models in 183 nonviolence in 184–5 peace in 188 plots 179 politics in 179 redemption in 192 rivalry in 182–3 sacrifice in 187–8

sameness in 190 self-awareness in 193–4 setting 178, 185 violence in 183–4, 185–7 virtue in 192–3 aesthetics 3–7 Alison, James 64 apocalypse 19–21, 71–2 preventives against 196–8 archaic religion 159 art 172 artificial agents/intelligence 54, 63, 76. See also robots Artificial Intelligence (Spielberg) 52 autonomy 69 aversion 153 belief 21 Belle du jour (Buñuel) 23 betrayal 94 “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” (Noxon; dir. Contner) biblical revelation and 159–60 intelligence of victim and 160–1 mimetic desires and sequelae in 151–61 mimetic doubles in 155 mob violence in 155–7 models in 152–3 obstacles in 152, 153–4 scapegoating in 156–9 single-victim mechanism and 159 undifferentiation in 155–6 vengeance and 153–4 biblical revelation 159–60 bourgeoisie 18–23 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series). See also “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” (Noxon; dir. Contner) envy in 165–6 identity in 164–5

206 positive mimesis in 169–70 religion in 170–1 resentment in 161, 163, 166 responsibility in 166–7 rivalry in 165 sacrifice in 169 scapegoating in 167–8 self-sacrifice in 171 Buñuel, Luis Belle du jour 23 Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The 21–2, 28 Ensayo de un crimen 24 Exterminating Angel, The 18–21, 22 Milky Way, The 21, 28–9 Nazarin 15, 16 That Obscure Object of Desire 23–4, 26–7 Viridiana 15 cartoon violence 184 Cervantes, Miguel de Don Quixote 15 charity 64, 71 “Chinese room” (Searle) 78 Christ. See Jesus mimetic theory and 65, 66 Passion of 6 prophecy and 65, 67, 68 Christianity culture and 16, 17 failure of 17 institutional 15, 16–17 cinema. See film Cinema (Deleuze) 114 Cocteau, Jean Orphée 118 cognitive science 76 Cold War 131 comedy 31, 94, 95, 194–5 “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (Turing) 77–8 consciousness 118 contagion, mimetic 125 culture acting and 118–19 Christianity and 16, 17 crisis of 29–30 film and 111, 120, 124

Index history and 118–19 popular 1, 5, 113–14 texts of 2 Western 4 death 25 Decalogue One (Kieślowski) 86–90 Decalogue Ten (Kieślowski) and 90–1 Decalogue series (Kieślowski) 83–6 Ten Commandments and 84 Decalogue Ten (Kieślowski) 90–4 Decalogue One (Kieślowski) and 90–1 Deconstruction 79 deferral of violence 116, 119, 120–1 Deleuze, Gilles Cinema 114 Derrida, Jacques 79 desire 11, 19, 85, 103, 104 autonomy and 69 death and 25 metaphysical 70 mimetic 23, 64–5, 93–4, 105–6, 140–1, 151–61 obstacles and 23–6, 153–4 ontological 70 desymbolism 137 deus ex machina 53–4 differences 129, 134, 155–6, 188–90 sameness and 2, 190 violence and 144 Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The (Buñuel) 21–2, 28 diversity. See differences divinization 130, 132, 159 Don Quixote (Cervantes) 15 Dostoevsky, Feodor Eternal Husband, The 27 double bind 141 doubles 134 mimetic 28, 128, 129, 155 monstrous 128 dreams 27–8 Dumouchel, Paul “Mirrors of Nature” 52 Duras, Marguerite. See Hiroshima mon amour (Duras; dir. Resnais) empathy 45–6, 65–6, 190–2 Ensayo de un crimen (Buñuel) 24

Index envy 98, 165–6 Eternal Husband, The (Dostoevsky) 27 ethics 59 Girard and 63–4 Girardian studies and 64–8, 72 mimesis and 63–73 evil 107 Ex Machina (Garland) assessments of 80–1 characters and roles 54, 59, 81 ethics and mimesis in 59, 69–72, 73 message 59, 63 plot 54–9, 72–3, 81 setting 53 title’s significance 53–4 Turing tests in 60–3 Exterminating Angel, The (Buñuel) 18–21, 22 fantasy 113 femininity 80, 81 film emergence 109 Girard and 7 Girardian studies and 1, 3, 4 global culture and 111, 120 innovativeness 110 narrative and 111–13 novel and 112–13 postmodern 120 reality and 110, 111 scene of representation and 110, 117–18 theater and 110–11 Turing test and 61 friendship 55–6 Garland, Alex Ex Machina 52–63, 69–74 Gibson, Mel Passion of the Christ, The 6 Girard, René aesthetics and 3–7 ethics and 63–4 film and 7 Girardian studies and 68 literature and 2–3 on Macbeth (Shakespeare) 106 on violence 106–7

207

Girardian studies Christ and 65–8 ethics and 64–8, 72 film and 1, 3, 4 Girard and 68 gods 53 Goodhart, Sandor 64 Gospels 6–7, 129 guilt 132 Hamerton-Kelly, Robert 64 harmony, social 41 heresies 28 hero, tragic 132–3 hierarchies 29–30 Hiroshima mon amour (Duras; dir. Resnais) 115–16, 117, 118 history 118–19 Hitchcock, Alfred Vertigo 81 holy, the 72 humor 31, 94, 95, 194–5 hyper-mimesis 70 identity 164–5 idolatry 67, 68, 85 image-mouvement 114 image-temps and 118–19 time and 115, 117 image-temps 114 consciousness and 118 image-mouvement and 118–19 time and 115 imitation. See mimesis “imitation game” 77–8 instrumentalism 71 intellectual symbolism 137 interdividuality 164 Jediism 123 Jesus in film 28–9 as human and divine 67–8 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) 98, 106–7 Kieślowski, Krzysztof 83–4 Decalogue One 86–90 Decalogue series 83–6 Decalogue Ten 90–4

208 Kurosawa, Akira Throne of Blood 100–6 language and violence 107, 108 n.23 laughter 31, 94, 95 leisure class 18–23 liar’s paradox 815 literature 2–3, 109, 112–13. See also novel, the lying 39–41, 56, 70–1. See also simulation nature of 38 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 97–107 Berger’s interpretation 97–9 Girard on 106 Kurosawa’s interpretation 100–6 orthodox interpretation 97 machines femininity and 81 thought and 76–8 masks 142 masochism 25 meaning 76, 78 mediated desire 23 external 140 innermost 64–5 internal 140–1 intimate 64 memories, alteration of 44 Milky Way, The (Buñuel) 21, 28–9 mimesis 64–5, 181–2 art and 172 Christ and 65, 66 ethics and 63–73 levels of 36 popular culture and 5 positive 63, 169–70, 202 n.53 theory of 51–2, 87 mimetic contagion 125 mimetic theory 51–2, 87 Christ and 65, 66 myth and 125 mimetic triangles 87–8, 105 mimetism 64–5 mind 76–8 miraculous, the 30 “Mirrors of Nature” (Dumouchel) 52

Index mob violence 155–7 models 140–2, 152–3, 183 modernity, secular 21–2, 27 monomyth 123–4, 125, 126, 146 n.16 monsters, mythological 127, 129 movies. See film mutilation 128, 129 myths ancient 130, 136–7 defining features 124–5 history of 126 mimetic theory and 125 modern 123, 136–7 monomyth 123–5, 126, 146 n.16 monsters in 127, 129 Oedipus 135–6 rationalization of 138 symbolism of 137–8 tragedy and 132, 137 Tristan and Iseult 23–4 victims and 136–7 violence and 126, 127 narrative 119 film and 111–13 literary 109, 112–13 mimetic contagion and 125 Nazarin (Buñuel) 15, 16 nonviolence 184–5 novel, the 4–5, 119 film and 112–13 Nuit et brouillard (Resnes) 116 obstacles 23–6, 152 desires and 153–4 Oedipus myth 135–6 “one medium” 110 ontological sickness 27 Oppenheimer, Joshua Act of Killing, The 35–49 originary scene 9–10, 105 Orphée (Cocteau) 118 Passion of the Christ, The (Gibson) 6 peace 188 perversions 24 Piesiewicz, Krzysztof 83, 84

Index politics 179 succession in 99–100 violence and 35, 47–9, 97–107 popular culture 1, 113–14 mimesis and 5 postmodernism 194 primitive religion 159 propaganda 37–8, 40 prophecy 65, 67, 68 psychoanalysis 22–3 rationalization 132, 138 realism 6–7, 17–18, 27–8, 110–12 reality, virtual 113 redemption 192 religion 159, 170–1 remorse 39 repetition 18, 21, 22 representation, scene of 10, 109, 110, 117–18 resentment 161, 163, 166 Resnes, Alain Hiroshima mon amour 115–16, 117, 118 Nuit et brouillard 116 responsibility 166–7 revelation, biblical 159–60 ritual 142–4 rivalry 88–9, 91, 97–9, 102, 103, 153, 165, 182–3 robots 52, 54–5. See also artificial agents/intelligence; Ex Machina (Garland) capacities 59 emotion and 57–8 violence and 58 romantic love 23–4 sacrifice 90, 129, 130, 133, 169, 187–8 of self 171 sacrificial crisis 48, 134 sadism 25 sadomasochism 26–7 sameness 2, 190 scandal 89–90 scapegoating 19–20, 90, 94, 127, 129, 130, 133, 156–9, 167–8 real vs. fictional 137, 138

209

scene, originary 9–10, 105 scene of representation 10, 109 film and 110, 117–18 Schwager, Raymund 64 screenic world 10 Searle, John 78–9 secular modernity 21–2, 27 Seinfeld (TV series) 5 self-aggrandizement 44–5 self-awareness 43, 54, 62, 193–4 self-deceit 195–6 self-sacrifice 171 Shakespeare, William 5, 130 Julius Caesar 98, 106–7 Macbeth 97–107 on violence 106–7 simulation 62, 77–80 sin 85 single-victim mechanism 159 singularity 54 sparagmos 106, 107 Spielberg, Steven Artificial Intelligence 52 Star Wars original trilogy 124, 126–31 (IV) A New Hope (Lucas) 124, 127–8 (V) The Empire Strikes Back (Lucas; dir. Kershner) 124, 128 (VI) The Return of the Jedi (Lucas; dir. Marquand) 124, 128, 129–30 ancient myth and 130 Cold War and 131 differences in 129 divinization in 130 doubles in 128, 129 history of myths and 126 monomyth and 126 monsters in 127, 129 mutilation in 128, 129 scapegoating and 127, 129, 130 violence and 130 Star Wars prequel trilogy 131–8 (I) The Phantom Menace (Lucas) 131–2 (II) Attack of the Clones (Lucas and Hales) 131 (III) Revenge of the Sith (Lucas) 131, 133, 134–6 differences in 134

210

Index

divinization and 132 doubles in 134 myth and 132, 135–6 rationalization in 132 sacrificial crisis in 134 scapegoating in 133 tragedy and 132, 136 tragic crisis in 133 Star Wars saga culture and 124 modern myth and 123, 136–7 as monomyth 124–5 Shakespeare and 130 violence and 130 Star Wars sequel trilogy 138–45 (VII) The Force Awakens (dir. Abrams) 138–9 (VIII) The Last Jedi (Johnson) 139, 140–2 (IX) “Episode IX” (dir. Abrams) 144 double bind in 141 legendary figures in 139 masks and 142 models in 140–2 reenactment and 139–40 ritual and 142–4 tragedy and 142 story. See narrative storytelling 119 subjectivity 77 surrealism 16, 111 surrogate victim mechanism 159 symbolism, intellectual 137 symmetry 97–8, 102, 103–4, 105, 134. See also doubles Talmud 68 Ten Commandments content 84–6 Decalogue series (Kieślowski) and numbering 84, 96 n.12 That Obscure Object of Desire (Buñuel) 23–4, 26–7 theater 109 film and 110–11 thought 76–8 Throne of Blood (Kurosawa) 100–6 critiques 100–1

84

time 115–17, 119 Torah 66–8 tragedy 132, 134, 136, 142 hero in 132–3 myth and 137 tragic crisis 133 triangles, mimetic 87–8, 105 Tristan and Iseult, myth of 23–4 truth dangerous truth 39 monuments to 38 nature of 38 truth-telling 36–41 Turing, Alan 77–8 Turing test 56, 57, 60, 77 Ex Machina (Garland) and 60–3 film and 61 origin 54 Turing thesis 75–6 twins 134 uncanny, the 22 unconscious, the 30 undifferentiation 155–6 vengeance 153–4 Vertigo (Hitchcock) 81 victims 16. See also scapegoating alienation of 36, 40–1 empathy with 190–2 intelligence of 160–1 myths and 136–7 voice of 42–3 violence 130, 183–7 in cartoons 184 Cold War and 131 consequences of 185 deferral of 116, 119, 120–1 differences and 144 Girard on 106–7 historical 35–6, 41–2, 46 institutional 17 language and 107, 108 n.23 of mob 155–7 myths and 126, 127 opportunistic 47–9 play and 44 politics and 35, 47–9, 97–107

Index redemptive 127, 130 robots and 58 Viridiana (Buñuel) 15 virtual reality 113 virtue 192–3

war 116, 131 Ward, Pendleton Adventure Time 177–98 warrior society 101–2, 104–5 Western culture 4

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