The Cinema of Things: Globalization and the Posthuman Object 9781501328855, 9781501328848, 9781501328824

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The Cinema of Things

The Cinema of Things Globalization and the Posthuman Object Elizabeth Ezra

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 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Elizabeth Ezra, 2018 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Louise Dugdale Cover image © filborg/iStock 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: 978-1-5013-2885-5 PB: 978-1-5013-5249-2 ePDF: 978-1-5013-2882-4 eBook: 978-1-5013-2883-1 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Cinema, Globalization, and the Posthuman Object 1 Consuming Objects 2 Exotic Objects 3 Part-Objects 4 Objects of Desire 5 Posthuman Objects

1 31 67 95 129 159

Bibliography Filmography Index

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197 201

Acknowledgments This book began life as a collaborative project with Terry Rowden. As sometimes happens with these things, Terry and I gradually came to the mutual realization that we were writing two different books, and we finally decided to let those books go their separate ways. Happily, this book still bears the hallmarks of Terry’s influence on nearly every single page, and I am enormously indebted to him for his unwavering intellectual support and friendship over the years, through various projects and across continents. It is no exaggeration to say that this book could not have been written without Terry. For their very helpful feedback on the manuscript, I would like to extend huge thanks in particular to Sue Harris, Ana Salzberg, and Maggie Flinn, as well as to an anonymous reviewer at the press. Conversations with Antonio Sanchez also sparked a number of ideas that have enriched the book. For their comments on various portions of the manuscript through the mists of time, I wish to thank Dudley Andrew, Tom Conley, Diana Holmes, Michael Rothberg, Max Silverman, and Carrie Tarr. I am also grateful to Katie Gallof at Bloomsbury for her enthusiasm and support for the project, which made all the difference. All translations from the French in this book not otherwise credited are my own. Any errors in this book are also my own. Portions of this manuscript have appeared in different forms in the following publications: Screen (“The Case of the Phantom Fetish: Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires,” 2006, 47 [2]: 201–11), Yale French Studies (“Cléo's Masks: Regimes of Objectification in the French New Wave,” 2010, 118/119: 177–90), French Cultural Studies (“Posthuman Memory and the Re(f)use Economy,” 2014, 25 (3/4): 368–86), and A Belle Époque? Women and Feminism in French Society and Culture (“Becoming Women: Cinema, Gender and Technology”), ed. Diana Holmes and Carrie Tarr (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006). I am grateful to the publishers for permission to reprint this material here. I am also pleased

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to acknowledge receipt of a generous grant from the Leverhulme Trust, which allowed me to pursue research that proved vital for this project. My family has endured this book for what must seem like ages. My gratitude and love go to Simon, Nathan, and Paul, who constantly remind me that life is (mostly) other than what one writes.

Introduction: Cinema, Globalization, and the Posthuman Object

This book traces the progressive redrawing of the boundaries between humans and objects as represented in cinema from the end of the nineteenth century, when French cinema dominated the global film industry, to the first decades of the twenty-first century, when Hollywood’s hold on world film markets remains firm, despite some important competition from other national cinemas. During this period, globalization has made it increasingly difficult to distinguish the center from the periphery, a pairing whose boundaries have been blurred by the overdetermined networks of communication that crisscross the planet. This period also coincides with what Steven Connor calls “the thingly turn in recent theory” (Connor 2009: n.p.). Human beings relate to things, objects, and stuff in a number of ways: through hyperconsumption; through structures of racial and sexual objectification that reduce people designated as “others” to objects of fascination, sexual gratification, or labor; and through information technology that replaces human agency with encoding. By exploring the border zones between life (specifically human life) and nonlife, it is possible to gain an understanding of the ways that commodities take on a life of their own, engulfing and ultimately replacing the people they were meant to supplement; of the exploitation of human beings for their use value as pure bodies, whether for entertainment, for labor, or in war time; and of the creation of technological supplementation, digital worlds, and artificial life. It is possible, in other words, to gain an understanding of the ways in which humans are prosthetically engaged with life beyond the human in the global age. In virtual realms such as economics, communication, and the media, the obstructive force of national borders is becoming increasingly limited. Whereas transnationalism’s mandate is to reconfigure the nation into global viability, globalization’s mandate is to reduce the nation to

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pure nominalism. Globalization allows for the positive recognition of landless aggregates and provisional assemblages as well as the allencompassing force of technology. If transnationalism has its greatest use value in considering the movement of bodies and objects across discrete but virtual lines, globalization is most useful for considering how the world is becoming economically and technologically unified in ways that smudge those lines into unreadability. The utopian imaginary of transnationalism is that the (united) nations will take their place on a monopoly board in which flows of diasporized capital and people will move nonoppositionally through clearly demarcated and stabilized national units. The utopian imaginary of globalization is that at some point the strands of the global rhizome will meet and create a perfectly networked path for unimpeded access and consumption. Globalization, as the endpoint of capitalism, is revealed by the various degrees and ways in which the porosity of national borders is being exploited. The term “globalization” expresses the aporia of a constant movement toward an imaginary wholeness and plenitude (a unified “globe”), an endless supplementation that strives for wholeness at the same time that it undermines the very possibility of wholeness. Globalization, a very human endeavor, thus shares a supplementary structure with humanity itself: the logic of the supplement underpins the traditional definition of human beings as creatures who make and use tools (Wynn 1994: 133–61). Although this definition has come to be challenged in recent years (see Goodall 1992), its influence on philosophy and anthropological humanism cannot be overstated. Tools extend human capabilities, enhancing existing attributes and compensating for perceived deficiencies; it is through supplementation that humans both complete themselves and acknowledge their incompleteness. This dynamic is the essence of supplementarity according to Jacques Derrida (1997: 141–57; 313–16). The Derridean term “supplement” has itself been supplemented in recent years by Bernard Stiegler’s term “prosthesis,” which refers specifically to the relationship between humans and the objects with which they surround themselves (Stiegler 1998, passim; see also Wills 1995, passim). Like the supplement, which is intended to enhance or complete something previously thought to be complete

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but whose supplementation both reveals and creates its retrospective incompletion, prosthesis is that which provides an alternative to something deemed inadequate. In an apparent paradox, the supplementary nature of the human endeavor of globalization is precisely what makes us posthuman. According to N. Katherine Hayles, “In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals” (Hayles 1999: 3). Like the posthuman, globalization problematizes boundary maintenance, and both discourses challenge and build upon the existing systems (whether epistemological or world-historical) of humanism and transnationalism, respectively. Where transnationalism produces an oscillation between the need to transcend borders and the drive to maintain them, globalization is the will to eradicate borders altogether. As the posthuman uses prosthesis to extend beyond the human, globalization extends beyond the nation in reconceptualizing life beyond the local. Rosi Braidotti provides perhaps the pithiest definition of the posthuman as “life beyond the self ” (Braidotti 2014: 13). The posthuman is not a period “after” the human; it is a way of reconceptualizing what it means to be human. It is to recognize, along with those anthropologists who define human beings as tool-makers, that prosthesis makes the man (so to speak). Or as Cary Wolfe puts it, the human “is fundamentally a prosthetic creature that has coevolved with various forms of technicity and materiality, forms that are radically ‘not-human’ and yet have nevertheless made the human what it is” (Wolfe 2007: xxv). This symbiotic evolution has been coterminous with globalization, which has transformed the spheres of consumption, production, and reproduction. Commodities and human beings alike are conceived as units to be slotted into this ever-expanding global machine, and then replaced when necessary. This supplementation is reflected in the key components of globalization: hyperconsumption (the acquisition of more and more objects, images, and experiences, whose attainment, far from satisfying the hunger for more, merely increases it); the instrumentalization and exploitation of “others,” who are designated as the “waste” products of globalization; and

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technological prosthesis, the creation of surrogate or “enhanced” human beings through technological supplementation, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering. There have been, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, many attempts to characterize the new phase of capitalism that has followed the Fordist capitalism of the early twentieth century and the consumer capitalism of the postwar era. Names such as “disaster capitalism” (Klein 2008), “reticulated capitalism” (Stiegler 2010), “cognitive capitalism” (Moulier-Boutang 2012), and, of course, “late capitalism” (Jameson 1991) have all been used to describe capitalism’s new vaguely recognizable yet utterly distinct guise, and all are more or less valid: it is no longer possible to speak of capitalism as a singular, self-contained phenomenon, or, at least, not a monolithic one. Capitalism’s staying power is attributable at least in part to its protean capacity to change form, constantly reinventing itself like an aging pop star. Capitalism’s latest guise is advanced globalization, which is characterized by consumption (defined as the use of commodities above and beyond the sole purpose of subsistence); connection (the networked communities that are the digital era’s answer to imagined communities); and corporation (new ways of perceiving the human body in light of its biotechnologization). Globalization cuts across national boundaries, and it cuts through the skin of the self. Its waste circulates around the system, erupting from designated areas at the most revealing moments. Globalization moves beyond, and it moves within, like some genetically modified creature that has escaped from the lab and crossed state lines, and it is now worming its way into our hearts and minds. Within globalization, life is essentially the incidental period between makeovers. In this economy of transformation, once everyone has become acclimated to the new you, it is simply time to create a newer you. Celia Lury describes this dynamic at work: Within the global imaginary, difference is subject to the dictates of lifestyle, of consumer culture and commodification. The biological, historical and social differences which had informed the categories of type or kind, the categories of gender, race, class, sexuality and age, are rendered amenable to choice. Once placed within the grasp of choice,

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previously biological, political and social attributes of the individual and collective body, including not only aspects of personal identity, but also reproductive futures, individual health and well-being, and national identity, are increasingly understood within a discourse of strategic, voluntary transformation. (Lury 1998 quoted in Franklin, Lury, and Stacey 2000: 75–76)

In consumer culture, everything is a lifestyle choice, because everything can be bought or sold, coveted and then eventually discarded. It will not be long, one can imagine, before “naturalness” has been completely devalued and the attractiveness of a subject will be determined by the degree and forms of supplementation to which his or her body has been subjected. These evaluations will take place, no doubt, in relation to a continuum that goes from the micro-prosthetics of wearing braces or contact lenses to something akin to Robert Downey Jr.’s fully prostheticizing Ironman suit. Supplementarity enables us to move faster, like the latest operating system, and it slows us down with its crippling restrictions like a new pair of stilettos. For the system to expand and prosper, it is enough that consumers want to buy more shoes; it matters little whether they are Christian Louboutins or Jimmy Choos. Expansion is the primary form of movement in capitalism, in keeping with globalization’s need to eradicate national borders, but this expansion also entails a recognition and incorporation of the nonhuman. Peter Sloterdijk, writing about the evolution of globalization over the last few centuries, notes, “Since the start of the Modern Age, the human world has constantly—every century, every decade, every year and every day—had to learn to accept and integrate new truths about an outside not related to humans. From the seventeenth century on, starting with the European educated classes and increasingly affecting the informed masses of the First World, the new psycho-cosmologically relevant sentiment spread that humans were not the concern of evolution, the indifferent goddess of becoming” (Sloterdijk 2011: 21). This “indifferent goddess” favors humans no more than she favors other animals or indeed inanimate objects; she does not distinguish between life and nonlife. The contemporary manifestation of this evolution is the posthuman era, which Donna Haraway has characterized in terms of “the boundary

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breakdowns between animal and human, organism and machine, and the physical and nonphysical” (Haraway 1991: 149). For Braidotti, this breakdown of boundaries is manifested as “a monistic ontology that considers all matter as intelligent and self-organizing” (Braidotti 2014: 136). Similarly, Jane Bennett speaks, after Bruno Latour, of a “more distributive agency” that would apply to both people and objects (Bennett 2010: ix). She attempts to overturn “the haunting association of matter with passivity,” insisting on the “positive vitality possessed by nonhuman entities and forces” (Bennett 2010: 49). For others, the breakdown of the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman entails a recognition of the central role that technology (or “technics,” to use Stiegler’s term) plays in the development of human life. Robert Pepperell sums up the posthumanist view of technics thus: What makes us human is our wider technological domain, just as much as our genetic code or natural environment. Throughout history, we have sought to distribute our selves, our consciousness, and our intelligence by a variety of means, including language, art, gesture, and music, by encoding the content of our minds in some material substrate, and to extend our physical abilities with tools. (Pepperell 2003: 152)

The extension of people’s physical abilities enabled by tools and prostheses makes it difficult to distinguish between human beings and the technological domain in which they are embedded. This technological domain is represented both in and by cinema. I use cinema to mean the art form, not the material from which or means by which it is made (film, video, analog, digital) or the platform through which it is consumed, though of course these affect the art form. If, as Stiegler has argued, consciousness is structured like cinema (Stiegler 2011: 13), then cinema’s depictions of aspects of globalization constitute an important gauge of prevailing global thought processes. Cinema is the art form most congruent with the dynamics of global modernity because it now offers the bank of representations in relation to which the conceptual adequacy of positions in cultural theory can be best ascertained and made available for review and critique. The advent of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century marked the birth not only of one of the first truly global industries, but also of a mass medium by which globalization could be represented to the public.

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The history of cinema has coincided with the development of advanced globalization, and perhaps more than any other national cinema, the American film industry has both represented and borne witness to this evolution. But French cinema has also played a vital role in the drive to globalization, by virtue of its influence, its early domination of world markets, and the cosmopolitanism of many of its most eminent practitioners. The Lumière brothers are commonly credited with holding the first public film screening in 1895, thus ushering in the cinematic age at what happened to be the height of the French colonial empire. Though we now know that they were pipped to the post by the Skladanowsky brothers in Berlin some two months earlier (Barber 2012: 14–17), France was the most successful early adopter of the new technology, and the French film industry was the biggest in the world until the eve of the First World War, when it was eclipsed by Hollywood. No cinematic traditions have to date been more globally influential than the American and the French. Vanessa Schwartz has described the “complex back and forth between France and America” at the origins of the medium, and notes the close ties between the cinemas of the two countries (Schwartz 2007: 5 and passim). France’s mighty global colonial empire, which came to a violent end in the middle of the twentieth century, here represents the Old Imperialism, and its objectifying discourses center around exoticism. The United States, as the propagator of a mighty global cultural empire, represents the New Imperialism, and its objectifying discourses center around the consumption of objects and human labor. Of course, this is not an exclusive dichotomy: the French colonial empire was eclipsed in size by the British colonial empire, and the UK has also had a “New Imperial” influence on world music and television that belies its relatively small population (currently around 60 million, provided the union does not break up in the wake of the June 23, 2016 so-called “Brexit” referendum). There have no doubt been a significant number of British films that have highlighted the importance of Great Britain’s colonial past in the current era of globalization (for a comparison between British and French films of this kind, see Ezra and Rowden 2009). But although it has been necessary to limit the scope of this study to two national cinemas, it is my hope that the arguments made throughout this book could provide a springboard

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for the examination of similar dynamics (mutatis mutandis) in other national cinemas. Similarly, I confine my focus here to fiction films aimed, for the most part, at popular audiences. In Hollywood, and even in France, long known for its “art cinema,” films produced, packaged, and sold as visual commodities to the masses for the purposes of entertainment have tended overwhelmingly to be fiction films. It is those films that I examine here, at key moments in French film history, and more recently, in Hollywood cinema. As this book is by no means encyclopedic or in any way aspiring to be comprehensive, it aims to examine a range of films that best illustrate certain thematic points. The focus within the Hollywood sections, with the exception of a film made during the Second World War and brief mention of earlier films, is on films made around the turn of the second millennium of the Common Era, in the age of planned obsolescence and the rise of digital technology. I have chosen films for their illustrative potential—not, in many cases, for their status as great works of art. Cinema is above all a medium that allows us to chart the dehumanization of people triggered by hyperconsumption, which begins as the supplementation of people by objects and results in the supplementation of objects by people, who often become mere “operators” of technologies that determine, rather than reflect, their identities. Along the way, this path of objectification passes through the supplementation of some people by others in arrangements that exploit the legacy of slavery during the era of apartheid in the United States prior and leading up to the civil rights era, or colonial exoticism in the case of France. The fetishization of difference so central to exoticism also appears in war time, when differences among individuals are disavowed and displaced onto groups, which are differentiated en masse in an “us” versus “them” dichotomy. Such a polarization of group identity is also key to the construction of gender identity and the objectification of women as “objects of desire”— and to the logical extension of this process, which is the construction of artificial women per se. This objectifying trajectory concludes with the construction of prosthetic personhood by means of artificial intelligence and digital technology.

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Things, objects, stuff What shall we call the items that surround us, items with which we interact or that lie beyond our reach? What shall we call the items, the tools, broadly speaking, that humans produce, but that also produce us in the sense that they define us as the makers of tools? Are they things, stuff, objects, or, indeed, quasi-objects? All of these terms have been proposed at one point or another, to the extent that the words themselves have become things, commodities to be exchanged in the marketplace of ideas. Things are often defined in relation to what they are not. For example, in his introduction to a 2001 special issue of Critical Inquiry entitled “Things,” Bill Brown differentiates between objects and things. According to Brown, a thing is a kind of objet manqué: “We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily” (Brown 2001: 4). Brown’s definition, which evokes the Heideggerian Vorhandenheit, or presenceat-hand, seems to be opposing the thing to the object in the sense in which Baudrillard describes it. “The real object,” Baudrillard writes in The System of Objects, “is the functional object” (Baudrillard 2005 [1968]: 50). If things are objects that give up the ghost, they still exist in relation to the ghost they have given up, the function that defined the objects they once were. In other words, things may not be fully instrumentalized, or even fully grasped by human subjects, but they are still intertwined with them. As Bruno Latour suggests, the distinction between things that lie outside the scope of human interaction and objects that are handled by humans may be a false one, because all things (and objects) are, in fact, “quasi-objects,” or hybrid entities produced by the intersection of nature and culture (Latour 1993: 50). “Quasi-objects” is a term coined by Michel Serres, which has been taken up and popularized in the English-speaking world by Latour, who writes, “Consider things, and you will have humans. Consider humans, and you are by that very fact interested in things. Bring your attention to bear on hard things, and see them become gentle.

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Turn your attention to humans, and see them become electric circuits, automatic gears or software” (Latour 2000: 20). This imbrication of two ostensibly different identities—the human and the nonhuman—is what characterizes the posthuman. The border between things and objects is similarly difficult to demarcate, as Steven Connor notes: “Things come into visibility when the thought of them ruptures or ebbs. I should make it clear at this point that, though I will refer at intervals to this distinction between objects and things, I have no intention of observing the distinction myself and will mix my usages promiscuously, as the demands of my argument, or of alliteration, dictate” (Connor 2009: n.p.). Like Connor, I think that the distinction between things and objects becomes more slippery the harder we try to grasp it. “Stuff,” on the other hand, designates an indistinct mass of items. Daniel Miller, as though influenced by this lack of distinction, cautions, “Don’t, just don’t, ask for or expect a clear definition of stuff ” (Miller 2010: 1). This warning, however, does not seem to have deterred Maurizia Boscagli, whose book Stuff Theory is dedicated to the stuff. Her concept of “hybrid materiality” (Boscagli 2014: 12) is useful here: she presents “an already existing form of liminal objecthood, stuff, as a test case for the new materialist designation of all matter as liminal, active, rhizomatic, and emergent” (Boscagli 2014: 14). It might be argued that all objecthood is liminal, and all things are a kind of stuff. Boscagli (2014: 11) further specifies that “stuff is better defined by its liminality between the human and the non-human.” Just as stuff is liminal and emergent, so the human ignores objects at its peril. For Latour, the human itself is defined as a redistribution of agency from the human to the nonhuman. The posthuman, in other words, is the new human: “Modern humanists are reductionist because they seek to attribute action to a small number of powers, leaving the rest of the world with nothing but simple mute forces. It is true that by redistributing the action among all these mediators, we lose the reduced form of humanity, but we gain another form, which has to be called irreducible. The human is in the delegation itself, in the pass, in the sending, in the continuous exchange of forms” (Latour 1993: 138). It is precisely the continuous exchange of forms between a whole range of “mediators,” both human and inhuman, that this book seeks to address.

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In philosophy, the most influential school of thought to emerge in recent years around these questions is Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), also sometimes referred to as Speculative Realism. Developed by Graham Harman (who attributes its origins to Latour—see Harman 2009: 14), OOO emphasizes the “autonomous reality” of objects (Harman 2011: 19) whose status does not rely on their relations with subjects. Levi R. Bryant calls this lack of reliance on subjects a “finally subjectless object” (Bryant 2011: n.p.), and certainly what all these theories have in common is a non-anthropocentric view of the world. According to Ian Bogost, “OOO puts things at the center of being. We humans are elements, but not the sole elements, of philosophical interest. OOO contends that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally” (Bogost 2012: 6). Objects, it seems, do not need humans as much as humans need objects. For both Latour and Harman, everything and everyone is an object that carries as much weight as every other object, and their books, like those of their acolytes, abound with litanies of such objects. Bogost, author of Alien Phenomenology, has developed what he calls a “Latour litanizer” on his website, an automated generator of lists using random pages from Wikipedia’s database. One such list, at once typical and unique, reads: “Income Tax Act 1842, North Louisiana Historical Association, ArtCrimes, Hendijan-e Sharqi Rural District, Project topic, Frank Angell, Chrostowa, Lódz Voivodeship, Anna Corneficia Faustina, Baraan” [http:// bogost.com/blog/latour_litanizer/; accessed on July 30, 2016]. In contrast to Latour, Harman identifies two separate categories of object: real objects and sensual, or intentional, objects. Real objects are those to which there is “no direct access” and which can “only be known indirectly” (interview with Varn 2014: n.p.), while intentional objects are those objects that exist in our perception of them: they are “objects lying before the mind” (Harman 2011b: 173). Harman stresses the independence of objects from both subjects and other objects, unlike Latour, who argues for the mutual constitution of objects (indiscriminately nonhuman and human, abstract and concrete) through their relations with other objects in a network of “actants,” or agents of change that can be indiscriminately human or nonhuman (Latour 2005: 54–55).

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Braidotti, Brown, and Bennett go even further in their placement of objects on an equal footing with people in their advocacy of a form of vitalist materialism, arguing that objects have an existence (one might even say a “life”) of their own. Bennett, who acknowledges the influence of Latour’s concept of actants, is similarly prone to litanization when she characterizes vitality as “the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (Bennett 2010: viii). Not only are objects independent of humans; they have the capacity to effect change when they come into contact with the human. Bennett emphasizes the importance of “detecting . . . a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies. These material powers, which can aid or destroy, enrich or disable, ennoble or degrade us, in any case call for our attentiveness, or even ‘respect’” (Bennett 2010: ix). What might be called the impulse to empower the material world often forms part of a larger ecological project seeking to recognize the essential role of the nonhuman in human life, just as the role of the human in the material world is reflected in the term “anthropocene,” which acknowledges the impact of human activity on Earth’s climate and geology. Increasingly, the agents and forces of which Bennett speaks, and which circulate around and within human bodies, are technological. Life has become not just imbricated with the technological, which it always has been, but virtually unthinkable without technology, to the extent that people have had to invent technological strategies to deal with the decline of physicality that increased reliance on technology entails. Since the advent of mechanization, human contact with work has become less intensely physical and more gestural. The factory assembly line made work more fragmented and repetitive (hence the “alienation” from the finished product of which Marx spoke), and in the electronic age, people have less and less contact with the labor process. As technology comes to play a greater role in human life, strategies arise to compensate for the perceived eclipse of human agency. Baudrillard has suggested that as physicality diminishes, humans are reluctant to relinquish the last vestiges of their agency in the functioning of objects: “Man has to be reassured

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about his power by some sense of participation, albeit a merely formal one. So the gestural system of control must be deemed indispensable— not to make the system work technically, for some advanced technology could (and no doubt will) make it unnecessary, but, rather, to make the system work psychologically” (Baudrillard 2005 [1968]: 51–52; original emphasis). Although Baudrillard wrote those words half a century ago, they are even more true today, in the era of computers and smartphones. Film studies has come up with its own way of compensating for the reduction of physicality in modern life. In reaction to the diminishing role of the body and the decline of indexicality in a technological world dominated by automation and by digital media, theories of embodiment and haptic cinema have emerged and developed in the last twenty years or so (see Marks 2000; Beugnet 2007; Hansen 2004). Such theories emphasize the role of the human body in the act of perception, and, more generally, the phenomenological role of the affective and the tactile in the reception of information. Laura Marks (2000) emphasizes the ways in which the sense of touch is invoked in certain films, while Martine Beugnet (2007) focuses on the synesthetic capacity of film, in its very materiality, to activate senses beyond that of vision. Both insist on acknowledging, in various ways and to varying degrees, the importance of the human body—indeed, of the human—in spectatorship. Even more recently, these theories have been complemented by theories of technophenomenology, which recognizes the role of technologies as “constituent parts of the relations that human agents maintain with their environments in concretely embodied, practical situations” (Denson 2013: n.p.). As we saw above, the human body is coming to be increasingly inseparable from the technological. For Baudrillard, the gestures that represent the diminishing “signs of [the body’s] presence” when faced with technology are increasingly delegated to “objects whose functioning, in any case, is independent from now on” (Baudrillard 2005 [1968]: 55). In 1968, these gestures would have been the pulling of levers and pushing of buttons, while today, these gestures are the swipes, pinches, and strokes that allow us to access the (screen) world at our fingertips. The “independence” of objects of which Baudrillard spoke are invoked in the idea of the Internet of Things, in which increasing

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numbers of objects are connected to the internet and can communicate, sending and receiving data to and from people and each other. Objects thus acquire the capacity to act in unison, exhibiting “ambient intelligence,” with “the physical world becoming one big information system” (http://www.techopedia.com/definition/28247/internet-ofthings-iot). In the Internet of Things, conversations among objects seems to bypass human intervention altogether, but of course, these colloquia are held in the service of human beings, and made possible by them. The Internet of Things is an electronic, digital version of Latour’s Parliament of Things, in which things communicate with each other, with or without human intervention. In the Parliament of Things, according to Latour, Societies are present, but with the objects that have been serving as their ballast from time immemorial. Let one of the representatives talk, for instance, about the ozone hole, another represent the Monsanto chemical industry, a third the workers of the same chemical industry, another the voters of New Hampshire, a fifth the meteorology of the polar regions; let still another speak in the name of the State; what does it matter, so long as they are all talking about the same thing, about a quasi-object they have all created, the object-discourse-nature-society whose new properties astound us and whose network extends from my refrigerator to the Antarctic by way of chemistry, law, the State, the economy, and satellites. (Latour 1993: 144)

This book takes its name from both the Internet of Things and the Parliament of Things. Commodity culture and globalization have ushered in a new era in the relations between people and things. If humans have always been defined by prosthesis, the ways in which they are defined by prosthesis are changing. As Bennett writes, “Humanity and nonhumanity have always performed an intricate dance with each other. There was never a time when human agency was anything other than an interfolding network of humanity and nonhumanity; today this mingling has become harder to ignore” (Bennett 2010: 31). What is new today is the hyperdevelopment of technology and the commodity culture of planned obsolescence in which it is embedded.

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Consuming objects Andrew Cole (2015: 323) has written that the trend in philosophy to endow objects with autonomy is akin to “commodity fetishism in academic form,” and I share the same suspicion: namely, that the increasing emphasis on things in philosophy is at the very least a reflection, and probably a product, of commodity culture—in Heideggerian terms, commodity culture would be the everyday context, or readiness-tohand (Zuhandenheit), that allows us to understand Being. Within global capitalism, humans extend and supplement themselves primarily by means of commodities. A key component of globalization is the primacy of consumer culture, which has come to permeate virtually every aspect of modern life. Consumption in the global era is defined by surplus: the surplus value that creates profits for employers; the surplus income that enables consumers to purchase goods above and beyond the bare necessities; and ultimately, the surplus labor pools of the unemployed that provide ready-made work forces when industries expand. “Surplus” is a concept whose meaning extends from commodities to human beings, bringing with it associations of reification and expendability. In the logic of consumer culture, surplus is not just a question of having more than is, strictly speaking, necessary; it is also the fact of wanting more, wanting to supplement what one already has, however much that may be. The supplement is the backbone of consumer culture. Its emotional logic is this: “With the purchase of this thing or that thing, I will be ‘complete’; no, it is the purchase of this other thing that will make me complete; no, no—it is the purchase of this other thing, and this other thing, and this other thing.” Consumer capitalism is thus foundationally invested in the notion of prosthetic supplementation. If the caricatural symbol of industrial capitalism was the hapless factory worker being swallowed up by the cogs of the assembly line in Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936), the iconic image of consumer capitalism is that of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City spending unimaginable amounts of money on a pair of shoes that are minimally distinguishable from the hundreds of other pairs she owns. Consumerism has a doubleedged status as both an enactment of desire and a mechanism of capture:

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someone who obsessively buys every book about Marxism is still a consumer, just as the wealthy Middle Eastern women who wear designer clothes under their burqas in Sex and the City 2 (Michael Patrick King, 2010) are still slaves to fashion. The fashion world is the very model for supplementarity and planned obsolescence, presupposing as it does that consumers will buy new clothes every year not because the old ones are worn out, but for no other reason than that new ones are available. When, in The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006), the office intern laughs at the imperious magazine editor and her minions as they hesitate between two belts that seem perfectly identical to her, it is because she cannot decipher the miniscule but significant distinctions between them— because, in other words, she cannot speak the language of fashion. Such tiny distinctions are vital to a system of planned obsolescence, affording a broad range of fashion “updates” that necessitate the purchase of new items of clothing to supplement a wardrobe that seemed complete until the new season was unveiled, but that subsequently seem woefully inadequate. Fashion’s mandate is the creation of a product that demands constant renewal in order to exist (last season’s fashions are no longer fashionable), and accordingly, fashions are designed to go “out of fashion.” Boscagli notes that, in the world of fashion, “clothes stand as the key element of modern material culture both for turning women into a spectacle for the male gaze, and for signifying the female desire for something other” (Boscagli 2014: 82). The stereotypical female consumer is at once a subject and an object of desire, states that are mutually reinforcing. The spectacle that fashion creates, and the desire that it mobilizes, is the appearance not only of beauty, but also of youth. In keeping with the structure of planned obsolescence, aging is not compatible with fashion (with the exception of the “vintage,” prized precisely because it is the old become new—and, crucially, commodified—again). The antagonism between aging and fashion is so potent that it extends metonymically to the wearers of fashion: predominantly women who are themselves typically deemed past their “sell-by date” once they have reached a certain age (i.e., once they have reached menopause). The prevailing assumption is that women past childbearing age have no need to be fashionable because they themselves have gone out of fashion, at least in terms of

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sexual desirability, and have little remaining use value. Yet, with the widespread availability of birth control and medicalized abortion, women have increasingly chosen (at least temporary, and sometimes permanent) childlessness, thereby transforming reproduction into something that can be selected from a range of possibilities. After menopause, however, this choice is no longer an option, and women are often consigned to the dustheap of romantic history. This is just another example of the logic of obsolescence that infuses all aspects of life in advanced capitalism. The flipside of consumption, and its logical extension, is the production of waste, in both an industrial and a biological sense. Zygmunt Bauman has noted that globalization is “the most prolific and least controlled ‘production line’ of human waste or wasted humans” (Bauman 2004: 6). Two films analyzed in this study illustrate the overlap between consumption and excrescence—the 2011 box office hits Bridesmaids (Paul Feig) and The Help (Tate Taylor). Bridesmaids literally combines shopping and defecation in the iconic scene in which the eponymous characters suffer an attack of explosive diarrhea (caused by food eaten in an Argentinian restaurant) while trying on elegant dresses at an exclusive bridal boutique. The plot of The Help revolves around the use of toilets by African American domestic workers, and proliferates with references to excretion. Both films allegorize the idea of waste. The surplus labor pools that provide ready-made work forces when industries expand are conceived as entirely expendable, entirely subject to the needs of those who employ them—available to be exploited as needed, and then ejected, like so much human waste, when their services are no longer required or are somehow deemed intrusive or threatening. Even the body itself acquires a use value and indeed an exchange value, as it is reduced to an object to be traded across national and cultural borders. Such commodification exemplifies the proliferation of what Ranjana Khanna has called “disposable bodies” in late sovereignty (Khanna 2006: n.p.). These bodies are the by-product of a system that prosthetizes human beings and are the result of a crisis of boundary maintenance that characterizes both globalization and the posthuman. Increasingly, as biotechnological advances outstrip the availability of the raw materials necessary to bring “substandard” bodies into existential

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parity with the full-bodied, body parts themselves are becoming atomized marketable objects. In the hierarchy of global citizenship, paralleling, if not superseding, Marxian notions of the laboring body, bio-objects like organs, stem cells, and other body parts are becoming valued components in the supplementation and survival of the bodies that matter by the body parts of those that do not (see Ezra and Rowden 2009). The 2009 Jean-Pierre Jeunet film Micmacs à tire-larigot (Micmacs) examines the status of human bodies in a globalized world, emphasizing the ways in which humans and objects are becoming increasingly interchangeable. While African and Middle Eastern children get their limbs blown off in landmines made by multinational arms manufacturers, the owner of one of these munitions factories collects the body parts of deceased celebrities, like so many saints’ relics, as a hobby. This unusual pastime emblematizes the commodification of human beings, their reduction to items that can be bought and sold.

Exotic objects One form that the commodification of human beings takes in the era of globalization is exoticism, a discourse that is closely bound up with both commodity culture and the rise of the mass media. From its inception at the end of the nineteenth century, cinema lent itself to depictions of people and places that were far removed from the daily lives of audiences in the industrial world. Exoticism found its fullest expression in France, where the birth of cinema coincided with the height of the French colonial empire. The study of cinematic exoticism is key to understanding the imbrication of race-thinking and mass culture, and it is a prime example of the redrawing of the boundaries between human beings and objects. This chapter focuses on two moments in the history of cinematic exoticism in France, the interwar period and the end of the Algerian War—but of course, exoticism existed long before the interwar period. At least as far back as Montaigne’s sixteenth-century musings on the inhabitants of Brazil (“Des Cannibales,” Montaigne 2000 [1580]), the French were heavily invested in identifying cultural “otherness.” In

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the period prior to the First World War notably, French culture was permeated with expressions of exoticism. In cinema, the influence of exoticism can be seen as early as the films of Méliès (see Ezra 2000b), and was certainly apparent in the popular film serials of Louis Feuillade, which contained many subtle allusions to non-French cultures. Costumes reflected the influence of Japonerie (especially in the couture designs of Marie Callot Gerbet), and more generally, they displayed the vogue for exoticism in French fashion in the early part of the twentieth century, notably in the influential designs of Paul Poiret and Jeanne Paquin, who took their inspiration from the Ballets Russes productions in Paris of Cléopâtre (1909), L’Oiseau de feu (1910), and Shéhérazade (1910) (see Buxbaum 1999: 18). This exoticist trend in fashion was most apparent in the wearing of feather headdresses by wealthy women in, for example, the Fantômas films, which were made at the very end of the Belle époque (whereas, by the time of Feuillade’s Les Vampires in 1915–16 and certainly of his serial Judex in 1918, this fashion moment will appear to have passed). The feather headdresses not only evoke Orientalist opulence, but also evoke the image of the native American popularized by French translations of James Fenimore Cooper’s stories of the Wild West and by the tales of cowboys and Indians by nineteenth-century French writers such as Gustave Aimard, Gabriel Ferry, and Paul Duplessis (see Camurat 1993: 2.1.3). At the same time, the word “apache,” from the American Indian Apache tribe, was used in turn-of-the-century France to denote “hooligans,” or the criminal underclass. Richard Abel points out that the fascination with l’apachisme was revived in 1912, with the public execution of leaders of the anarchist, Paris-based Bonnot gang (Abel 1996: 6). Fantômas’s band of criminal collaborators are referred to as “apaches,” as is the gang in which Irma Vep travels in Feuillade’s 1915–16 serial Les Vampires, discussed in a later chapter. The fact that it is wealthy people who wear “apache”-inspired headdresses suggests a distribution of criminality and exoticism across the social divide, underscoring the fact that, in the words of James Clifford, “cultural order includes both the rule and the transgression” (Clifford 1988: 126). In a similar way, the incorporation of the “exotic,” literally the outside, within the intimate sphere of clothing or the household interior suggests a literal

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domestication of difference. Exoticism infiltrated the diegetic universe of films made in the early part of the twentieth century like Irma Vep herself, slipping into rooms unnoticed. It was part of the fabric of everyday life, reflected in the tchotchkes that adorned bohemian and middle-class French homes, just as it was reflected in the most popular films of the day. Exoticism is a way of domesticating difference, of bringing it “home.” In this, it shows affinities with anthropological humanism, which, according to Clifford, “begins with the different and renders it—through naming, classifying, describing, interpreting—comprehensible. It familiarizes” (Clifford 1988: 145). The incorporation of “exotic” objects in everyday life and in cinema worked to familiarize the unfamiliar, but only up to a point, because exoticism relies on the retention of a certain amount of residual difference. After the First World War, exoticism found expression in the vogue for “Negrophilia,” a discourse that appeared to celebrate both the tirailleurs sénégalais (West African troops who had fought for France in the war) and the African American musicians and dancers who came over to France to perform in the 1920s. This discourse was of course reflected in cinema, and even in the ways that people spoke about filmmaking: in 1930, Jean Epstein, filmmaker and film theorist, described the camera as a “black body” that allows us to know, indeed to penetrate, an object (“Le cinématographe continue,” 1930, cited in Abel 1988: 64). This image of the black body is not invoked randomly: it acknowledges (and reverses) the intersection of French cinema with the exoticizing fetishistic gaze that accompanied the birth of the seventh art. The human body is a halfway house between humanity and objecthood: stripped of subjectivity, people are reduced to their bodies, which, in exoticism, are the site of the projection of fetishized difference. In its Marxist incarnation, commodity fetishism veils the process of production. In the same way, the fetishization of the “black body” hides the process of colonization. According to Fatimah Tobing Rony, “Emptied of history, . . . bodies are racialized. The racialized body in cinema is a construction denying people of color historical agency and psychological complexity” (Rony 1996: 71). The emblem of the “racialized body” in the interwar period was Josephine Baker, African American dancer and singer who, from the age of eighteen, made her career, and her home, in France. In

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the 1920s and 1930s, Baker appeared in four French feature films. Since her arrival in Paris in 1925 with an African American dance troupe, Baker had remained in France, becoming an icon of the Jazz Age. Baker’s career illustrated the way that the objectification of black bodies that had begun in France in the nineteenth century was filtered, in the twentieth, through the commodifying process of stardom. Her identity was protean, changing according to the desires of consumers of exotic images: despite her American origins, she was most often identified with the French colonial empire (even being elected “Queen of the Colonies” at the Colonial Exhibition of 1931). In her music hall shows (such as La Créole), her songs (the most famous of which was “J’ai deux amours, Paris et mon pays,” which implied that her “country” was a French colony) and three of her films, she played the role of a French colonial subject. In her final film, Fausse alerte (The French Way, 1945), to which I devote the most attention, the national origins of Baker’s characters are not specified, but the fact that she is shown speaking American-accented English at one point strongly suggests she is American, like Baker herself. This film, made in 1939 during France’s “Phony War” but not released until 1945, is not widely known, and it presents a mature, stately image of Baker, but one that retains echoes of her prewar persona. After its heyday in the cinéma colonial of the interwar period, exoticism in French cinema went under wraps. By the time of the French New Wave (whose apogee was 1958–62, but which lived on in some form at least until the 1970s), exoticism was articulated in more muted tones, at least partly because of the Algerian War (1954–62). The veiled nature of exoticism in the postwar period is symbolized both in and by the mask, exoticist fetish-object par excellence. Masks feature in a number of New Wave films, evoking the ongoing vogue for exoticism even as the colonial empire was breaking away from France. Masks, icons of the “primitive,” not only point to the narratives of historical progress that differentiate “now” from then and “us” from “them,” but also signify the processes of disguise and censorship that accompany historical trauma. The Algerian War was a notable cite of censorship, with films made about the war banned until 1963, well after the war’s end (Stora 1997: 111). The historical trauma of decolonization was unfolding as the French were still attempting to come to terms with their fraught role in the Second World

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War, and the New Wave films I examine—notably Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7, Agnès Varda, 1961), Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim, François Truffaut, 1962), and Muriel, ou le temps d’un detour (Muriel, or the Time of Return, Alain Resnais, 1963)—all contain kernels of what Michael Rothberg has called “multidirectional memory” (Rothberg 2009), overdetermined moments that point to traumas both contemporary (the Algerian War) and historical (the Second World War).

Part-objects Whether or not censorship was officially sanctioned, films often took circuitous routes to the representation of wars as they were unfolding. The two films examined in the next chapter both refer to contemporary wartime in a roundabout way—in Les Vampires, the ten-part serial by Louis Feuillade made during the First World War through references to missing fathers, and in the Marx Brothers’ Hollywood vehicle The Big Store (Charles Reisner, 1941), through subtle but unmistakable allusions to missing children in the Second World War. Feuillade’s serial, about a gang of Parisian criminals who can inhabit other people’s bodies, hides the war’s presence, but articulates it implicitly in a series of veiled allusions to the events taking place, through references to code breaking, cannons, poison gas, and exploding ships. It also displays a preoccupation with fathers bordering on the obsessive, which, in combination with the recurring motif of the severed head (in the classical Freudian reading, an image of castration, most prominently displayed in the serial’s first episode, titled “The Severed Head”), suggests the felling of the traditionally male chef de famille. By contrast, the Marx Brothers film contains two references to dead or missing children, which evoke the tragedy unfolding in Europe during the Second World War. One reference is embedded in a musical number sung by a singer known for her deadpan delivery, and another can be found in a scene set in the bed department of the eponymous department store. Upon learning that six children from an Italian immigrant family have gone missing, Groucho tries to pass off six other children as the children of the Italian family, insisting that there is no difference between the

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Italian children and any of the succession of large families of varying ethnicities (Chinese, American Indian, Scandinavian) who parade through the bed department. The repeated references to lost children in this scene, combined with the revelation that the children are actually stuffed in a bed inside the wall, are retrospectively unsettling in light of knowledge of the death camps. Both the Feuillade serial and the Marx Brothers film display the logic of substitution and, more broadly, what I have called the identification of difference, the discourse that posits individuals as interchangeable with one another, and that renders them as part-objects representative of a larger group (Ezra 2000a). This logic is both metaphorical and synecdochal, and it underwrites the racial and national stereotypes that fuel war and genocide. The Germans were the common enemy in First World War France, but in the United States during the Second World War, there was also another “enemy within”: the immigrant population. Like many of their films, The Big Store invokes the Marx Brothers’ own (French-German-Jewish) immigrant background, bringing to mind those who made it out—and those who did not. While not mentioning the war overtly, Les Vampires and The Big Store say a lot about the politics of evasion, censorship and both the plight of the missing and the effect of this plight on those who get away. The logic of substitution also underpins the structure of the fetish, in which an object is substituted for the phallus that a (male) child imagines his mother once had. Freud built his theory of the fetish upon the castration complex, an idea he developed during and immediately following the First World War, when Vienna was full of amputees and other war wounded. Les Vampires, with all its references to the classic phallic symbol of the severed head, invokes the castration fantasy, which, like Freud’s theory itself, masks the greater trauma of the war. Disavowal is the discursive hallmark of the fetish (“I know, but all the same. . .”) that calls forth the simultaneous presence and absence of something that was never there in the first place. The gang of criminals who slink across Parisian rooftops terrorizing the populace in Les Vampires wear skintight, hooded costumes that resemble nothing so much as fetish gear, and the star of the series and only female member of the gang, Irma Vep (played by Musidora), was certainly a fetish-object in her own right.

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Indeed, perhaps the most fully fleshed-out embodiment of the fetish— the substitution of an object for a living, breathing human being— involves the sexual objectification of women. The logical conclusion of such objectification is the literal transformation of women into objects, or artificial women. It is this transformation that is examined in the next chapter.

Objects of desire Women have always played a key role in cinema, beginning with the hundreds of female workers streaming out of the factory gates at the start of the Lumière Brothers’ inaugural La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Factory, 1895), but more often than not fulfilling the passive function of “to-be-looked-at-ness” that Laura Mulvey (1975: 11) described in her classic essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” At least since the Judeo-Christian Bible, when Eve was made from Adam’s rib, women have been characterized as supplements to men, and this chapter charts the representation in cinema of a very literal form taken by this supplementarity: the construction of artificial women who serve as objects of desire for their (nearly always male) creators. “Objects of Desire” begins its exploration of artificial women with the early days of French cinema, which dominated global film markets before the First World War, and then continues with an examination of recent cinema from Hollywood, the current center of the world film industry. The chapter moves from mechanized depictions of “automatic” women in the machine age to virtual versions from the digital era. The origins of cinema are intertwined with the history of automata. Film pioneer Georges Méliès owned an important collection of them and used them in his magic shows at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, into which he eventually incorporated the new technology of film. Freud’s theory of the uncanny (1919) takes its inspiration from these stories of the inanimate becoming animated, which is also, of course, the magic of cinema: Jackie Stacey and Lucy Suchman have likened screen depictions of automata to “cinema’s history of bringing things to life” (Stacey and Suchman 2012:

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13). Andreas Huyssen has observed that while these mechanized humans initially had a fairly even distribution of genders, they eventually became more predominantly associated with women as technology came to be seen as a force to be feared, like the threat of castration Freud would associate with women in the early twentieth century: While the android builders of the 18th century did not seem to have an overriding preference for either sex (the number of male and female androids seems to be more or less balanced), it is striking to see how the later literature prefers machine-women to machine-men. Historically, then, we can conclude that as soon as the machine came to be perceived as a demonic, inexplicable threat and as harbinger of chaos and destruction—a view which typically characterizes many 19th-century reactions to the railroad to give but one major example—writers began to imagine the Maschinenmensch as woman. (Huyssen 1981–82: 226)

Perhaps most famously (at least in the wake of Freud’s discussion of the uncanny), the female automaton was given expression in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” with its depiction of the protagonist Nathanael’s love for the lifelike mechanical doll Olympia, a plot device that would subsequently be taken up in the ballet Coppélia (libretto by Charles Nuitter, 1870). It was in the Victorian era, too, that dolls became increasingly lifelike (see Kappeler 1986: 78 and passim); life-size sex dolls were manufactured in France at least as early as the 1880s (Schwartz 1996: 125). In terms of the cultural and corporeal derealization of women, then, it is a small step from the image of the Victorian angel in the house to that of the deflated sex doll in the cabinet. Across its various registers, and from the very inception of the medium, cinema has been peopled with images of man-made women. The precedent set by Méliès was continued in such films as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), The Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935); The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975, remade by Frank Oz in 2004), Eve of Destruction (Duncan Gibbins, 1991), and The Fifth Element (Luc Besson, 1997). Mary Ann Doane calls the type of creature that marries technology and femininity the “woman-machine” (Doane 1990: 166). Hal Foster has written of the “fetishistic link made between a historical

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ambivalence regarding the mechanical-commodified and a psychic ambivalence regarding woman—a desire for mastery over these figures mixed with a dread of servitude to them” (Foster 1993: 152). The desire for mastery is apparent in images of the cutting and dismemberment of women so prevalent in cinema. These images of cutting provide insight into the constructed nature of objects of desire, through a kind of reverse engineering. In the philosophical tradition going back to the Cartesian mind/ body dualism, women have routinely been aligned with the material, the instinctive—the body—while men have been associated with reason, subjectivity—the mind. Elizabeth Grosz notes, “Thus excluded from notions of subjectivity, personhood or identity, the body becomes an ‘objective,’ observable entity, a ‘thing’” (Grosz 1987: 5; cited in Toffoletti 2007: 19). Kim Toffoletti adds, “By extension, woman comes to define all that is not human, fixed to a corporeal, natural and essential state” (Toffoletti 2007: 19). Yet, in the two relatively recent feature-length films examined in detail in this chapter, S1M0NE (Andrew Niccol, 2002) and Her (Spike Jonze, 2013), artificial women are in fact one step removed from the corporeal (let alone the “natural”), removed even from the mechanical, inhabiting the disembodied realm of the virtual. In S1M0NE, a film producer, frustrated by having to accommodate the caprices of flesh-and-blood actors, uses a computer program to create a virtual female star who is infinitely manipulable and so lifelike that even her costars do not realize she is nothing but a series of zeroes and ones, in other words what is known as a synthespian, or computer-generated actor. In Her, the disembodiment of the love object is taken one step further, as a lonely man falls in love with a voice—the operating system of his smartphone. Voiced by Scarlett Johansson, “Samantha” provides such a realistic simulacrum of a romantic relationship that she periodically picks fights with the protagonist, whom she accuses of not paying enough attention to her. Her thus suggests that an effective way of protecting oneself against loneliness (or, for introverts, against the prospect of insalubrious contact with other people) is by creating your own interlocutors. The forging of emotional relationships with simulacra is not so far away from the attribution of subjectivity to these prosthetic creations.

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As Latour has written, “It has been necessary to modify the fabric of our collectives from top to bottom in order to absorb the citizen of the eighteenth century and the worker of the nineteenth. We shall have to transform ourselves just as thoroughly in order to make room, today, for the nonhumans created by science and technology” (Latour 1993: 136). The films examined in the final chapter explore the implications of making room for these nonhumans and consider what happens when they take on a life of their own. If digital technology has almost completely nullified the notion of geographical borders as a form of boundary maintenance, many films go a step further by positing technology as capable of obliterating the border between the human and the inhuman. Science fiction films, in particular, venture into this “final frontier.”

Posthuman objects Now that the Earth is quickly becoming saturated with humanity and depleted of resources, people are looking beyond the Earth for the kinds of spatial and financial opportunities they once sought in the Wild West. In many science fiction films, the porosity of boundaries between countries in globalization is emblematized by the blurring of boundaries between human beings and their technological creations. In the new global manifest destiny, this porosity is allegorized in the relations between representatives of Earth (represented by the United States of America) and aliens from beyond the Earth. In a film such as Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), it is no coincidence that the team from Earth sent to “pacify” the extraterrestrial natives on the planet Pandora is American. By virtue of the fact that their action must take place somewhere, few films fail to reference at least implicitly some notion of national identity in the unfolding of their plots. Because of its organizational use value, it is unlikely that the notion of “national” cinemas will ever be completely superseded by that of transnational or global cinema, especially in this era of retrenched nationalism. The economic and emotional investments of a range of social actors in various markers of “nationality” are too great for national identity to be abandoned easily. Avatar’s implicit image of Earth

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is, therefore, of a place that has become dystopianly Americanized. With no attempt to recreate the air of transnational camaraderie that characterized the crew of Star Trek’s Enterprise or the cross-species work and life spaces brought to vivid, if stereotype-ridden, life in George Lucas’s Star Wars films, the implication in Avatar is that the United States has done to all of the other countries and planets what it is now trying to do to Pandora and to its native population, the Na’vi. The speed with which Avatar reset the mark for global box office, grossing over $2.78 billion a little more than a year after its release (Elsaesser 2011: 263n12), indicates the success of a cinematic machine designed for maximum ease of consumption. (At the time of writing this book, two sequels to the film had been announced but not yet released.) This design is both reproduced and complicated by what may initially seem to be a surprisingly explicit anti-American perspective in Avatar. In terms of its reception dynamics, however, the representation of American militarism as essentially villainous in Avatar is actually quite logical in a film that was so thoroughly dependent on global success in order to recoup its nearly $400 million production and promotion costs. Yet, despite the lush color palette and visual detail that comprise Avatar’s primary appeal, the heroes and villains and moral issues that the film raises are essentially black and white. The frisson of transgression generated by the fact that the Americans are the villains is nullified by the fact that Americans are also the heroes and, once made Na’vi, the natives who really matter. In its Noble Savagery, Avatar thus reproduces the racial dichotomies it appears to transcend. In this, it is analogous to the claims of a color-blind society that accompanied the heady early days of the internet, whose encoding is every bit as racial (and national) as it is digital. As we draw closer to what Philip Rosen (2001: chapter 8) has called the “digital utopia” of infinite manipulability, interactivity, and convergence, new simulacra of the imagined communities of previous eras—already substitutes, according to Benedict Anderson (1983), for the face-to-face contact of the preindustrialized Gemeinschaft that the imagined community of the nation replaced—are springing up all over the world (and all over the World Wide Web). The human sense of “connection” is increasingly offered in narratives of globalization as a nostalgic throwback to these lamented communities.

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It is no accident that nostalgia for human connection drives the final two films discussed in this chapter, despite the fact that their protagonists are robots. With Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008), The Cinema of Things returns to its roots in consumer culture, as mountains of disused commodities rise up in piles as high as the tallest skyscrapers, literally taking over the Earth and driving the planet’s human inhabitants to live on a satellite space station. Their Big Gulp cups endlessly refilled with high-calorie drinks, the inhabitants of this space station, who, the film suggests, will be “us” before long, are overweight, lacking in bone density, and more or less incapable of independent movement (or, it is implied, thought). Wall-E is a robot who moves among the rubble, rescuing the odd piece of obsolete technology to enjoy in his leisure time. One such piece of obsolete technology is a video cassette recorder, on which Wall-E repeatedly watches a musical sequence from the film Hello Dolly (Gene Kelly, 1969) in a manner that can only be described as obsessive. It is this film fandom that allows viewers to recognize themselves in Wall-E; even more than his seemingly hopeless love for a newer-model female robot apparently out of his league who makes Wall-E himself feel obsolete, the robot’s status as a film enthusiast is what makes him resonate with viewers. In this, Wall-E bears a striking resemblance to David, the android in Ridley Scott’s 2012 Prometheus. In his spare moments, David, played by Michael Fassbender, watches Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) on a massive cinema screen in the spaceship in which he and his human colleagues are speeding toward a distant planet in order to discover the “Engineers” of the human race. David’s obsessional interest in a film, like Wall-E’s, generates sympathy for the android, who quotes lines from the David Lean film and even dyes his hair blond so he will more closely resemble Peter O’Toole, who played Lawrence. The humanizing tendency of cinema is an allegory of the role technics plays in the constitution of human being, which is a principal tenet of Stieglerian philosophy and an echo of the Prometheus myth invoked in the Scott film’s title. (Even the Lean film subtly alludes to the Prometheus myth in its depiction of Lawrence’s fascination with fire, which he likes to extinguish with his bare hands.) In the Greek myth, Prometheus the Titan was punished for stealing fire from the gods in order to give it to humans. In Scott’s film,

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Peter Wayland, the old man who finances the ship’s expedition, is trying to find a way of prolonging his life, and thus of tampering with the gods’ plan for humans, with a similar hubris to that of Prometheus. While Wayland does not get his liver pecked out, he does come to a pretty grisly end, squashed by one of the very creatures he had so looked forward to meeting. Stiegler’s discussion of the Prometheus myth places emphasis on Prometheus’s all-but-forgotten brother Epimetheus, whose name, appropriately, means “forgetting” (Stiegler 1998). Epimetheus was charged with assigning various qualities to the newly created living creatures, but forgot to reserve any qualities for humans, so his brother was forced to steal fire from the gods, as well as the capacity for making things, to bestow upon humans. The making of things to supplement the human is the very definition of prosthesis—and it is that which makes us human. Humans are embedded inextricably in the web of technics, having become operators of the machines they create. What was once considered to be supplemental to human endeavor—things—have become that which human endeavor now supplements: center and periphery have changed places. It is this dynamic that The Cinema of Things seeks to explore.

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Consuming Objects

Commodity culture is the most visible emblem of the supplementarity that characterizes globalization. The drive to purchase and surround oneself with objects seems never to be sated and is fueled by planned obsolescence, capitalism’s privileged temporal mode. The pinnacle of planned obsolescence is fashion, whose acolytes are, by definition, engaged in a never-ending search for the new. Beginning with an analysis of Sex and the City 2 (SATC2), a sequel in the brunch-and-stiletto franchise that started life as a television series and culminated in a cinematic ode to the excesses of consumer society, this chapter explores the hyperconsumption that underpins the culture of planned obsolescence, and the cultural implications of all the waste thus generated. The biological process of consumption is, of course, eating. In digestion, matter that is surplus to requirements is not absorbed but is excreted from the body. The consumption of commodities replaces biological consumption for stick-thin female characters either shown forgoing food, or eating far more than the actors who play them clearly do, in films such as Sex and the City (SATC) (Michael Patrick King, 2008) and SATC2, and The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006). The excessive consumption depicted in these films has its correlate in biological metaphors of waste in films such as Bridesmaids (Paul Feig, 2011) and The Help (Tate Taylor, 2011), whose preoccupation with excrement equates human waste with what Zygmunt Bauman (2004) calls the “wasted lives” of exploitation. By examining these films together, it is possible to trace a trajectory from the manifest content of advanced consumer culture to the latent biological metaphors of toxic bodies characterized by obesity and excrescence, visible signs of excess that hint at consumption’s gurgling underbelly. These films also ultimately suggest a larger social dimension to the dynamic of consumption and waste in advanced consumer culture: the

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consumption and waste of the labor and lives of human beings in a global system marked by the imbricated legacies of sexism, colonialism, racial segregation, and exploitation. The current phase of advanced consumer capitalism is unsustainable, as many have argued, and in its very excesses, its frenzied will to power, it is transforming into other things. The emphasis on reuse, recycling, and sustainability is one such transformation. If in SATC2, Carrie and company are so wed to their purchases that they risk changing places with them, becoming almost an extension of the commodities with which they surround themselves, Micmacs à tire-larigot (Micmacs, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2009) takes this exchange to its logical conclusion, imbuing objects with a life of their own. For Jane Bennett, “The sheer volume of commodities, and the hyperconsumptive necessity of junking them to make room for new ones, conceals the vitality of matter” (Bennett 2010: 5). This vitality is revealed in Micmacs, which rejects the commodity culture whose apogee SATC2 represents, replacing the planned obsolescence emphasized in the latter film with an ethic—and an aesthetic—of salvage. The celebration of obsolescence in commodity culture is counterbalanced by its refusal in what I am calling “reuse value.” The ragtag band of homeless people in Jeunet’s film who live together beneath a refuse dump in the film reuse discarded objects, revealing the palimpsestic layering of different eras that accrete to the objects themselves when they are given a new lease of life. In Micmacs, the attributes of people and those of objects have changed places: the memory-imbued objects are, in a sense, alive, while the people have been consigned to the scrapheap of history. Through sheer pluck and determination, those whom history has discarded manage to turn discarded objects into what, in many ways, is an idyllic new home. This film thus allegorizes the vitality of matter, while presenting a vision of resistance to structures of objectification—but a vision whose utopian aspirations are compromised by its lapses into the very objectification it seeks to expose.

“Dubai is so last year”: Sex and the City 2 Sex and the City 2, as is apparent from the title, is a sequel. As such, it supplements an earlier film, Sex and the City (SATC, Michael Patrick

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King, 2008) which itself supplemented the television series of the same name, each of whose episodes supplemented the preceding ones, all of which supplemented the 1997 collection of essays by Candace Bushnell (and all of which were in turn supplemented by the televisual prequel The Carrie Diaries, which ran in the United States from 2013 to 2014). Not only in its form, but also by virtue of its subject matter and images, the second film in the franchise invites a meditation on the manifold forms and figures of supplementarity. In particular, it is the temporal dimension of supplementarity, obsolescence, that structures the film’s principal themes of biological reproduction, urban modernity, and commodity culture: or sex, the city, and shoes. The television series charted the romantic escapades of four single women living in Manhattan, working in glamorous jobs, shopping for designer labels, and meeting for brunch to discuss their colorful sex lives. The main character, Carrie Bradshaw, writes a newspaper column entitled “Sex and the City,” which discusses the customs and mores of single life in a quasi-anthropological fashion, from the point of view of a participantobserver who is at once removed from and part of the phenomenon she is describing. In the first feature film based on the series, Carrie finally marries “Big,” the man with whom she has had an on-again, off-again relationship for several years, and her three girlfriends are all, despite some wobbles, happily settled with husbands or boyfriends, and, in the case of Miranda and Charlotte, children. In the second film, the sexually voracious and slightly older Samantha is single again, and Carrie fears she is beginning to grow bored with her marriage. The friends jump at the chance to accompany Samantha, who works as a publicist, on an all-expense-paid trip to Abu Dhabi, where much of the action is set (though the film was actually shot in Morocco). In Abu Dhabi, the women experience romantic crises, which force them to reassess their individual domestic lives, before Samantha offends the locals with her overtly sexualized behavior, and the four are ignominiously sent home. When SATC2 was released in 2010, reviews were overwhelmingly hostile. Although critics duly condemned the film’s lackluster script and dubious gender and racial politics, much of the criticism focused on its aging stars, who were deemed to be over the hill, too “old” to portray sexually desirable (and desiring) fashion icons. Ella Taylor in the Village

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Voice, for example, opined that “Sarah Jessica Parker is now 45 years old, and, frankly, I cannot stomach another moment of the simpering, mincing, hair-tossing, eyelash-batting little-girl shtick,” and described “sadistic close-ups of faces too old for their fuck-me junior attire and problems 15 years too young” (Taylor 2010: n.p.). Andrew O’Hagan compared the film unfavorably to its televisual predecessor, declaring that, in the television series, the women’s dreams “appeared to chime with those of many a late-twentysomething looking for love. Now, though, Carrie Bradshaw is 45 and Samantha, her blonde slut friend, is 53, and it’s more than difficult to love them” (O’Hagan 2010: n.p.). It is worth pointing out, however, that the actors playing Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Charlotte (Kristin Davis), and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) are all younger than those playing the principal male love interests (both Parker and Davis were born in 1965 and Nixon in 1966, while Chris Noth, who plays Big, was born in 1954, and John Corbett, who plays Aidan, was born in 1961); even Kim Cattrall, who plays menopausal elder stateswoman Samantha, is two years younger than Chris Noth. None of the female actors plays a character significantly younger than herself, and none of the male actors was criticized for playing a character unbefitting his age. Yet, because they were approaching the end of their childbearing years, the women were considered obsolete, surplus to requirements. In Hollywood, after the age of about forty, female stars either disappear, migrate to television, or, if they are lucky, establish below-the-title afterlives as “character” actors (unlike male actors, whose age is ignored until they cannot walk unaided or speak without dribbling). Carrie tries to combat the oppression of obsolescence through her interest in vintage items. Though deeply invested in the latest fashions, she ultimately prefers vintage clothes and jewelry. Although in the first film she models a number of up-to-the-minute designer wedding gowns in the pages of Vogue and wears one of them to her aborted wedding, she eventually gets married in a vintage dress. Carrie passes herself off as a kind of Luddite, who, in the first film professes not to know how to use an iPhone and needs help sorting out her email and is told by Big, as she reads a library book in bed, that she must be the last person in New York who still takes out library books (as if to reinforce this point, Carrie plans her dream wedding at the New York Public Library). The

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watch she presents Big for their wedding anniversary in SATC2 is, she notes, vintage. This film sequel insists on the passage of time in its visual emphasis on clocks, and it exhibits a nostalgic fondness for the past in an early flashback sequence in which the four female friends are shown as they are supposed to have looked when they first met in the 1980s. The apparent privileging of the past over the present also figures in the conflict between Carrie and Big over DVDs (which would allow Carrie to watch her “black-and-white films”) versus TV (on which Big wants to watch sporting events and modern-day action films). Although cinema has traditionally depicted television unsympathetically, the antipathy is especially ironic here, given that SATC started life as a TV show. But the thing that most appeals to Carrie about DVD technology may be the fact that it allows viewers to freeze individual frames, creating a “stillness” that Laura Mulvey calls cinema’s “best-kept secret” (Mulvey 2005: 22). Carrie’s preference for cinema evokes Stiegler’s hypothesis of an “essentially cinemato-graphic structure for consciousness in general” (Stiegler 2011: 13; original hyphen). Cinema is a means of mechanical reproduction, like the photograph, but it is also a means of mirroring the temporal flux that characterizes consciousness. For Stiegler, this mirroring of the temporal flux does not merely reproduce the workings of consciousness; it is the “revelation of the structure of all temporal objects” (Stiegler 2011: 21). Conversely, live broadcasts (including the kinds of television programs that Big likes to watch, such as sporting events) do not show that which has already taken place, and so do not reveal the workings of retentional finitude, or the consciousness of temporality (Stiegler 2011: 16–21). This dichotomy, which highlights Carrie’s acute awareness of the passage of time, thus brings to the fore the structure of obsolescence itself, and, in particular, the notion of a “biological clock.”

A dangerous supplement Youth for women in SATC2 (as for women in Hollywood) is implicitly equated with the capacity to bear children—hence the perimenopausal cut-off point implied in the scathing reviews of the film. Samantha spends

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much of her time popping pills, slathering on creams, and consuming estrogen-rich foods in order to turn back the tide of menopause. She fears becoming surplus to requirements in the economy of sexual attraction, which seems to be linked, for women, to the ability to reproduce. In her previous appearances in the earlier film and the television series, Samantha never expresses any anxiety about the aging process; it is only when she reaches the point of losing her fertility once and for all— despite her unchanging resolve to remain childless—that she becomes hysterically attached to preserving her youth. “When you ladies are fifty,” she proclaims, flaunting the rejuvenating effects of her hormone treatments, “I’ll be thirty-five.” It is precisely because Samantha has never expressed any desire to have children that her sexuality is perceived as excessive. Miranda’s problems with maintaining a work-life balance certainly do not provide any incentive for Samantha to change her mind about childbearing. Miranda is the quintessential working mother, too busy working to attend her child’s school functions, and too busy looking after her child to provide the kind of unwavering dedication to her job that her colleagues seem to expect. She engages in work correspondence at social occasions, and her work impinges on her romantic life, prompting her to curtail sexual relations with her husband because she has to get up early to go to the office. Neither Carrie nor Samantha has children, and they can continue pursuing their careers without distraction, but Miranda struggles to raise her child and devote herself as fully to her job as she did before she became a mother. Charlotte, as a stay-at-home mother with a wealthy, bread-winning husband, represents the other pole of maternal identity, but despite the fact that she does not work outside the home and has a full-time nanny, she finds it difficult to cope with the practical and emotional demands of motherhood. In the second film, Miranda and Charlotte commiserate, over cocktails in their luxurious hotel in Abu Dhabi, about the challenges and frustrations of motherhood. Charlotte mentions that she cannot begin to understand “how women without full-time help manage,” when she finds it so challenging. This remark received a lot of derision and condemnation in the press at the time of the film’s release because of its

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profound elitism (see, for example, Koplinski 2010 and Bray, n.d.), but the statement seems intended to emphasize the challenges faced by all mothers, even the most privileged. Much of the insecurity that women face in relation to the idea of motherhood revolves around the idea of supplementarity, and this anxiety is reflected in the SATC films. Women who stop working in order to raise children are no longer seen as an integral part of the economic infrastructure, and their social status suffers as a result; conversely, women who decide not to have children in order to pursue their careers are perceived to be missing out on a fundamental life experience. The expression “having it all,” referring to work and childrearing, implies that engaging in one but not the other activity amounts to a shortcoming. It is significant that the issue of childlessness is first highlighted in the film sequel at a gay wedding. As if to underline the nonutilitarian nature of (nonreproductive) homosexuality, the wedding is a masterpiece of unabashed excess, with the set made to look like a 1930s Hollywood musical. None other than an eternally middle-aged Liza Minnelli officiates at the ceremony and performs the Beyoncé song “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)”: here the Child of Dorothy (Minnelli is the daughter of Judy Garland, who starred in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, directed by Victor Fleming), performing for Friends of Dorothy, sings of the desire for matrimony, something not available to children or, until recently, to gay people. Carrie herself is likened to a gay man by virtue of her transvestism: a member of the wedding party, she dresses in a tuxedo and marches down the aisle accompanied by her identically dressed husband. Carrie’s childlessness is emphasized when a wedding guest who claims that her life so closely resembles Carrie’s that she “is” Carrie learns that, unlike her, Carrie has no plans to try for a child, and abruptly distances herself from Carrie in great embarrassment. Children come between Carrie and her doppelgänger, as they come between Miranda and her job, and between Charlotte and her sense of decorum and self-worth. Carrie is united with her gay male friends not only by virtue of her fashion sense, but also through her choice to remain childless. Sex in a childless marriage, like homosexuality, has traditionally been represented as excessive or supplementary, in the same way that Rousseau, in his

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Confessions, deemed masturbation, or sex without the potential for reproduction, to be a “dangerous supplement” (Rousseau: 1959: 108–09). The gay subtext is continued throughout SATC2 in the extended references to The Wizard of Oz, even beyond the presence of Liza Minnelli, herself a larger-than-life gay icon. Samantha, not known for harboring any particular fondness for animals, carries a tiny, Toto-like dog at the wedding, and when the four friends arrive at their luxury hotel in Abu Dhabi, which is situated at the end of a long brick road, Carrie exclaims, “We’re not in Kansas anymore!” It is even possible to liken each of the four women to one of the four travelers on the Yellow Brick Road: Miranda (the lion) gains the courage to leave her misogynistic employer; Charlotte (the scarecrow) gains the knowledge that motherhood is no walk in the park; Carrie (the tin man) has a change of heart about Big, learning to be more tolerant of his domestic foibles; and Samantha (like Dorothy) is sent home empty-handed. Even the film’s “political” message resonates with the Emerald City: There’s No Place Like Home, the film suggests, as the women are horrified by what they perceive to be the oppression of Muslim women in a society portrayed as backward and repressive, despite its modern exterior. But it is in its emphasis on shoes that the film perhaps most explicitly invokes The Wizard of Oz, whose emblem is Dorothy’s ruby slippers, which are alluded to specifically in a scene in a souk in Abu Dhabi, when the camera lingers on Carrie’s reddish stilettos as she removes them in order to try on a pair of shoes at a market stall. As Bernard Stiegler has written, “Everything begins with the feet” (1998: 143). Indeed, there is no better demonstration of the logic of supplementarity than in the purchase of more shoes: not shoes, which are a basic necessity of urban life, but more shoes, which are not. Carrie loves shoes above all things, and throughout the television series and both films she is shown admiring, shopping for, purchasing, wearing, and talking about shoes. Shoes are shorthand for fashion in SATC and, more generally, for consumer culture. Big’s ultimate demonstration of love for Carrie involves building (or more accurately, commissioning the construction of) an enormous closet to house not only Carrie’s designer frocks but, most notably, her hundreds of pairs of stiletto heels. Carrie’s fetish is a hallmark of stereotypically feminine consumerism, yet in its

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Figure 1 Shoe shopping in the souk, Sex and the City 2.

sexualized form the same fetish is commonly attributed to men. In the sexual fetish, the shoe represents a male disavowal of female sexual difference, through its status as a phallus-substitute (in fact, the shoes Carrie buys in the souk have an overtly phallic protrusion jutting out from just above the tip) (Fig. 1). In some ways, Carrie herself personifies the fetishist’s disavowal of female sexuality through her extreme thinness, which suggests an absence of fertility, or a fashionable boyishness. Anorexia also embraces the logic of the supplement, if in reverse: the anorexic imagines that losing “just five more pounds” will make her complete, like the shopper who imagines that buying a particular pair of shoes will complete her wardrobe, and thus a certain image she has of herself.

Modes of a dress Fashion victims replace the consumption of food with the consumption of clothes. Super-thin Carrie appears not to eat much, but fills her huge closets with clothes and shoes. In the TV series she refuses to cook, and, as if to underscore the substitution of fashion for food, uses her oven to

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store sweaters. (The politics of recreational skinniness in the fashion world is also addressed in The Devil Wears Prada, where characters constantly mock the stick-thin protagonist, Andy—played by Anne Hathaway, who began her career as a model—for being “too fat.” The art director of the magazine where Andy works takes to calling her “Six,” in reference to her dress size, which is unusually small in real-world terms, and unworkably large in the world of fashion. Throughout much of the film, this mocking is implicitly criticized, depicted as a sign of fashion’s unhealthy attitude to body image; but when, at the end of the film, Andy announces that she has gone down to a size four, viewers are invited to celebrate this loss as a gain in sophistication. All the while Andy is working for the fashion magazine, the achievement that she is most proud of in her life, which is referred to on more than one occasion as a sign of her true calling, is a hard-hitting article she once wrote about a janitors’ strike. Although she eventually returns to investigative journalism, as long as she is caught up in the glamour of New York fashion life, Andy’s vocation, to monitor waste workers, is neglected as she wastes away.) SATC2 seems to be advocating this (boyish, sexually liberated, unencumbered) version of femininity over that attributed to the Middle East, where women are depicted as little more than the property of men, forced to suppress their sexuality for all but their husband-owners. The four friends escape from this apparently backward region in the nick of time, congratulating themselves on their luck in living in a much “freer” culture, where women are allowed to express their sexual desires. But the moral superiority of the American women’s position is cast in doubt when they return to New York, and Carrie is made to repeat after Big, promising that she will “never, ever kiss another man”—in return for which she is given a large diamond, cementing the transaction. Moreover, Carrie’s debilitating heels, which enslave her to fashion, are as restrictive as any burqa. Carrie may not be barefoot, pregnant, or confined to the kitchen, but in being the opposite of these things (childless by choice, unwilling to cook, and clattering across the polished hardwood floors of her pristine apartment in stilettos), Carrie is stuck in her own particular prisonhouse of glamour. Her “happy ending” at the film’s conclusion entails her promise to stay in more. Carrie’s subjugation to Big is similar to that of Middle

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Eastern women as depicted in the film, only it is dressed up in different clothes. However, even this metaphorical distinction falls away when the burqa-clad women tear off their veils to reveal the same designer labels that Carrie and her friends enjoy buying. The implication is that designer labels have become so naturalized as to be the new nudity (Fig. 2). It is designer labels, not love, peace, or humanity, that are shown to be the lingua franca of globalization, uniting consumers across the world in a common cause. The international working class, transcending cultural differences, has been replaced by brand recognition. When it comes to language, the possibility of mislabeling is always present, as in the black-market industry of designer knock-offs, or when Miranda mistakenly teaches her friends the wrong word for “yes,” unwittingly using a Punjabi word (haanji) instead of the Arabic one. But in fashion, the labels themselves are the objects of desire, even more than the clothes they represent. This is illustrated in the “J’adore Dior 8” T-shirt that Carrie wears on her first shopping trip in Abu Dhabi. Here, the “design” consists of nothing other than the label writ large; Carrie’s outfit thus takes the statement “making a fashion statement” literally. What is being advertised is the advertisement, in an enactment of McLuhan’s (1964) dictum that the medium (or, in this case, the extra small) is the message.

Figure 2 Revealing designer clothes, Sex and the City 2.

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“Make mine a cosmopolitan” In SATC2, even geography is prone to the vagaries of fashion: when Samantha expresses the desire to visit Dubai, she is told by a Middle Eastern financier that Dubai “is so last year,” whereas Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates and a city whose oil reserves have made it the richest in the world, is representative of “the New Middle East.” The four friends go to Abu Dhabi in search of new experiences, like capital in search of new markets, and are suitably impressed by the lavish treatment they receive as guests of a wealthy hotel magnate. Yet, for all its modern accoutrements, the “new” Middle East is represented in such a way as to suggest that it promotes very old-fashioned ideas about sex and gender. Carrie and her friends marvel at the sight of burqa-clad women delicately lifting their veils to eat French fries; Samantha chafes at the idea that they must wear diaphanous wraps over their swimsuits when lounging by the hotel pool; and the friends are bemused by the burqa-inspired swimwear, called burqinis, worn by local women. Much of the film’s “comedy” consists of the horrified reactions of locals when the New Yorkers flaunt their sexuality, especially Samantha, who makes lewd innuendos and gestures of a sexual nature that many people, not just those from the Middle East, would struggle not to find offensive. Carrie, too, relies on her feminine wiles to help the group get to the airport, displaying her bare leg at the side of the road in order to attract the attention of a taxi driver, just as Claudette Colbert did in It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934), the film Carrie watched with Big in the hotel they stayed in while attending their friends’ wedding. Big commented that, in the 1930s when the film was made, such behavior would have been “shocking,” and the suggestion is that the times have not moved on in Abu Dhabi. Frequent references are made to the time difference between Abu Dhabi and New York, a difference that has a larger metaphorical implication, as even the “new” Middle East appears stuck in an exoticism-infused past. Abu Dhabi in this film is shrouded in what Johannes Fabian (2014) has termed allochronism, a primitivist trope in which cultures located at a geographical remove from one’s “own” are deemed to inhabit a different temporal space. The leg-display scene draws an explicit parallel between

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a time in which such things were considered shocking (the 1930s) and a place in which, according to the film, they still are (modern-day Abu Dhabi). The film announces its exoticist attitude in its very first words, which are uttered by Carrie in a voice-over as the film opens on a Google Maps-style perspective of the planet as though from a plane descending through the clouds. The shot takes viewers closer and closer to Earth, eventually honing in on Manhattan, which, we are informed, “started off with some Dutch, some Indians, and some beads.” As the European settlers stormed in and dazzled the natives with their fake jewels, so the four American women in SATC2 take it upon themselves to show the residents of Abu Dhabi a thing or two about gender politics. Bargains are to be had in the Middle East (Carrie exclaims with disbelief when she is told that the shoes she wants to buy at the souk cost “only” the equivalent of twenty dollars), and counterfeit Birkin bags can be bought for a song. The imperialist legacy is very much apparent in Abu Dhabi, in spite of its status as a modern cosmopolitan center. Carrie and her friends ride camels and sit cross-legged in a Lawrence-of-Arabia-style tent in the middle of the desert, their every need attended to by compliant servants. As Manhattan could be bought at a bargain-basement price, so the delights of the Middle East, it seems, can be readily consumed by wealthy Westerners. It is ironic that in both SATC movies the catalyst for the friends leaving the United States is Samantha, the character with the least respect for cultural mores. Although the Mexican vacation in the first SATC movie was planned and paid for by Carrie, it was bought for the conventional gesture of going on a honeymoon and not as a response to any wanderlust or global ambitions of her own. After she has been abandoned at the altar, and the other women are wondering what Carrie can do with her orphaned ticket, it is Samantha who points out the obvious fact that they can just buy their own tickets and go with her. However, once they arrive, it is hard to imagine a more unaccountable honeymoon choice for Carrie to have made herself and for a hyperprivileged New Yorker like Big than what seems to be a completely undistinguished tourist mill. Similarly, in SATC2 the trip to Abu Dhabi that takes up the majority of

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the film’s running time is made possible by Samantha’s incidental access to an elite globalized network and is then rescinded because of her yokellike refusal to perform the provisional adjustments that cosmopolitan common sense demands. Throughout the series and in both films one of the things that reveal the SATC women to be provincial Manhattanites is the lack of global knowledge and interests that they display. Whether it is Carrie “stranded” in Paris in the final episodes of the series, Samantha “stranded” in LA in the first SATC movie, or the four of them “stranded” in Abu Dhabi in SATC2, they all seem constitutionally incapable of negotiating difference in ways one would think would be second nature to women of their class and professional standing. In SATC2, the primary dramatic tension between Carrie and Big revolves around Carrie’s desire to “go out” all the time, while Big wants to spend quiet nights in. Ultimately, Carrie capitulates to Big’s desires by promising to stay in more, signaling her domestication in every sense of the word. She decides to transfer her interest in shopping from clothes to interior decoration, making it her project to furnish her and Big’s conjugal apartment. But even in appearing to retreat from the world at large, Carrie is expressing her status as a globalized subject. As Walter Benjamin observed, “For the private individual, the private environment represents the universe. In it he gathers remote places and the past. His drawing room is a box in the world theatre” (Benjamin 1986: 154, cited in Sloterdijk 2013: 25). For all her globetrotting, Carrie is best at enfolding the outside world into her own, private cocoon—in short, consuming it. She spares no thought for what this consumption, quite literally, entails.

Human waste: Bridesmaids and The Help In its exploitation of workers, in its need for an excess labor pool, and in its creation of the Lumpenproletariat, global capitalism produces human waste products—people consigned to the commode of history. In Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts, Zygmunt Bauman writes that “the production of ‘human waste’ or wasted humans (the ‘excessive’ and

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‘redundant,’ that is the population of those who either could not or were not wished to be recognized or allowed to stay), is an inevitable outcome of modernization, and an inseparable accompaniment of modernity” (Bauman 2004: 5). The production of “human waste” is the flipside of consumer culture, its logical extension. This extension is figured in the starkest terms possible in two major Hollywood films released in 2011: Bridesmaids and The Help. Both films have at their core an excremental vision of the global forces (colonialism, slavery, the drive for cheap labor) that have swept people across continents and into the homes and restaurants of those who employ and/or exploit them. The only way that subjects can become obsolete is if they are first instrumentalized. The biological metaphors of consumption and surplus that feature prominently in these films point to an economy of abjection, an affective reaction to the crisis of boundary maintenance that comes with the prosthetization of human beings. When Bridesmaids broke box office records upon its release in 2011, it was held up as evidence that women could do “gross-out comedy” just as well as men could. Most of the critical attention lavished on the film focused on a single sequence, which alone gave the film its “grossout” status. Commentary by critics and fans invariably singled out this scene, in which a bride-to-be and her bridesmaids are struck with food poisoning (resulting from tainted meat they consumed at a Brazilian restaurant) while trying on wedding and bridesmaids dresses in an exclusive, appointments-only bridal salon. As the bridesmaids head for the single restroom en masse (one woman being forced to defecate in the sink, and another vomiting on the head of her friend, who is herself vomiting in the toilet), the bride herself runs out into the street, where, unable to withstand the urge to excrete, she is forced to squat, enveloped by her voluminous white gown. That this infamous scene takes place during a shopping trip allegorizes the imbrication of consumption and surplus in the era of globalization (Fig. 3). The idea of Latin American food giving daintily clad women the runs is prefigured in the first Sex in the City film, when the fastidious Charlotte, who has studiously avoided the food in Mexico when the women go there on the honeymoon trip that Carrie had originally planned to take with

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Figure 3 That scene, Bridesmaids.

Big, finally relents and tries some of the local cuisine, which causes her bowels to erupt uncontrollably and soil her chic outfit. It is significant that in each film, it is food from a developing country that causes sickness. The striking moment of abjection in each of these films underlines the difficulty of boundary maintenance, and the fear of commingling inside and outside. Food plays an important role in Bridesmaids. The protagonist of the film is Annie Walker, whose passion in life is cakemaking. When the film starts, she is struggling to cope with the closure of the cake shop she owned with a former boyfriend. She meets and begins a relationship with Nathan Rhodes, a policeman, who appears to find her attractive only after he learns that she used to own the cake shop, saying that he was a great fan of her cakes. Nathan encourages her to take up baking again, which she is extremely reluctant to do. The pair bond over a package of raw carrots purchased at a convenience store, which they share while sitting on the hood of the squad car, and from which Nathan extracts a rogue specimen, explaining that there’s always a bad one in the bag. When Annie takes the offending carrot and throws it to the ground, Nathan protests at the act of littering—but not at the actual wastage. After they have slept together, Nathan surprises Annie by presenting her with the ingredients to make a cake, a well-meaning gesture that horrifies her and prompts her to stop speaking to him. The pair are eventually reconciled when Annie makes Nathan a cake in the shape of a carrot, apologizing for having discarded him as she had the imperfect vegetable.

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Food also looms large in other parts of the film, particularly at the engagement party held for Annie’s best friend Lillian at the home of rival bridesmaid Helen. When she drives in to the grounds of Helen’s palatial house, Annie is handed a tall glass of lemonade by a servant, and because her old car does not have a cup holder, she is forced to balance the glass on her lap as she drives, spilling it everywhere. When Annie fears that Helen has usurped her place as Lillian’s best friend, she goes on a potlatch-style rampage in the garden, knocking over a chocolate fountain and destroying a gigantic heart-shaped cookie. The film’s coda, played out over the closing credits, shows supremely self-confident and overweight bridesmaid Megan performing sexual acts with her boyfriend that involve consuming food placed on each other’s bodies. This scene represents excessive consumption—suggested both by Megan’s weight and by the use of food for a purpose other than the satisfaction of physical hunger—in a way that is reinforced by the scene’s position as overflow or supplement to the main events depicted in the film. The alignment of consumption and supplementarity is particularly significant in light of the fact that it is a Latin American country’s cuisine that prompts the famous defecation episode. Brazil specifically, and Latin America more generally, is presented as the object of a particular kind of consumption that is very different from that associated with the other geographical location accorded special status in the film: Paris. Both Bridesmaids and the first SATC film juxtapose a Latin American country (Brazil, Mexico) with the city of Paris as contrasting sites of consumption. In the finale of the television series of SATC, Paris is a place of dreams and illusions to which Carrie moves with her Russian boyfriend, and where she eventually reunites with Big. Paris is a site of food and fashion, where food is fashionable and where the fashionable do not eat (similarly, in The Devil Wears Prada, already-thin editorial assistant Emily starves herself in order to lose weight before traveling to Paris for the annual catwalk shows). In Bridesmaids, “Paris” is the theme of the lavish party Helen throws for Lillian, and the destination for which she buys the bride-to-be a plane ticket because it has always been Lillian’s dream to go there. By contrast, the Brazilian restaurant where the women have lunch before the bridal fitting is located on the “wrong” side of town, and is approached by

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means of a dodgy parking lot, prompting Lillian to reassure her friends that Annie always picks little out-of-the-way places with wonderful food. The implicit contrast between differing parts of the world extends to the allusions to colonialism that proliferate in Bridesmaids. Annie shares her apartment with two housemates, one of whom (played by Rebel Wilson) has an Australian accent and the other of whom (played by Matt Lucas) has an English accent, but who are somehow supposed to be sister and brother. Nathan Rhodes, whose surname evokes the mining magnate Cecil B. Rhodes and the African country named after him, is Irish. When Annie asks Nathan if Irish people are allowed to work as cops in the United States, he replies that they are not, and the film leaves it at that. Lillian herself is the daughter of a man of African descent and (presumably) a white woman, and therefore a living embodiment of the multicultural dream. When Annie, in an intoxicated state on an airplane, grabs the loudspeaker and announces that she sees “a woman in colonial dress” walking on the wing of the plane, the image does more than evoke her own surname, Walker; it also returns viewers’ thoughts to things colonial, in case too much time has elapsed since the film’s last allusion to colonialism. The United States, a colonial outpost that became a superpower, did not have a colonial empire of its own per se, but instead forcibly imported labor in the form of slaves. The logic of commodity culture that relies on the exploitation of cheap labor ultimately results in the commodification of human beings who may themselves be bought and sold. Although slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, its direct legacy was the de jure restriction of rights for African Americans for the next century, and a de facto inequality for considerably longer. The chain of associations that metonymically figures certain exploited groups as waste products, human dejecta, is highlighted even more strongly in The Help. The contradictions inherent in attempting to reconcile the prosthetization of people with the boundary maintenance necessary to designate them as “other” result in abjection, which is invoked in The Help by numerous references to physiological excretion. Like Bridesmaids, The Help was also released in 2011 and also presents an excremental vision of cultural differences and global histories of human exploitation. Based on the novel of the same name by Kathryn

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Stockett, The Help is set in segregated Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s, and focuses on the lives of three women: two African American maids, Minny and Aibileen, who work in the homes of white Southerners, and a young white writer who documents their experiences in a book entitled The Help. The black “help” are both necessary and distasteful to their white employers. They are used and then discarded as easily as leftover scraps from the dinner table. One elderly maid is sent packing when she inadvertently serves guests at a dinner from the right side instead of from the left, and when her grown daughter walks through the dining room rather than through the back door of her employers’ house. The people called “the help” are quickly expelled from the homes of their white employers when their presence is deemed to cause too much discomfort. As the grandchildren of slaves (a maid in the film explicitly invokes this heritage when she mentions that her grandfather was a slave), these workers are former transplants, laboring literally on plantations. The house in which the main character lives is on a plantation, where the only difference between slavery and employment is the subsistence wage the help is paid. Unlike antebellum proslavery discourse, racist discourse from the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to the civil rights era was designed to position African Americans as “others” rather than the “ours” they had been in the sentimental narratives of the plantocracy. Black freedom had to be undercut by a counternarrative that could stem the converging tides of progressive political and scientific thinking that were bringing African Americans into the body politic and into fullfledged membership in the human “race.” This counternarrative is the discourse of abjection, which is a visceral reaction to a perceived crisis of classification. According to Julia Kristeva, the abject is “ce qui ne respecte pas les limites, les places, les règles. L’entre-deux, l’ambigu, le mixte” [“that which does not respect limits, positions, rules. The inbetween, the ambiguous, the hybrid”] (Kristeva 1980: 12). The abject is that which falls between two stools, that which crosses borders. Abjection is the fear of a failure to maintain boundaries between self and other, inside and outside, and is most commonly expressed as a horrified reaction to bodily effluvia. The Help is a stark illustration of this dynamic.

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There are many references to the fear of failing to contain bodily eruptions in the film. The villain of the piece, the smug and overtly racist white society woman Hilly, breaks out in a herpes simplex facial lesion when she is finally given her come-uppance, as if to signify not only that she can no longer contain her own moral turpitude, but also that she can no longer dam the tide of civil rights that has been burbling up in the South for some time. Another locus of bodily control is the curly hair of the white woman Skeeter, the aspiring writer who records the maids’ stories in a book aimed at exposing the injustices they face. Skeeter’s mother, concerned to observe traditional Southern convention, is forever trying to smooth out Skeeter’s hair, an affectation with which Skeeter complies in order to attract a young man. At the end of the film, when Skeeter’s relationship with the man has ended because he disapproves of her role in the civil rights movement, Skeeter’s hair reverts to the mass of kinky curls that is, the film implies, its natural state, and which links her visually to the African American women with whom she shows solidarity. But overwhelmingly, abjection in the film is dominated by representations of biological consumption and excrement. One reviewer characterized the film as “the most scatological film in Hollywood history” (McGuire 2012: n.p.). Indeed, excrement assumes paramount importance in the film, notably through the separate bathrooms provided for use by African American employees in private homes so that their white employers can keep their own toilets “uncontaminated.” This restriction, when imposed on another maid, Aibileen, causes problems when she tries to toilet train her employer’s young daughter, Mae Mobley. In another scene, dozens of toilets are dumped on the front lawn of Hilly, the woman who fired Minny (Fig. 4). At the center of the film is a chocolate pie baked by Minny, one of the maids, who has been fired for using her employer’s toilet (in the novel, she is wrongly accused of stealing silver). An accomplished cook, Minny serves the pie to her former employer, who greedily eats two slices before discovering that Minny has mixed some of her own excrement into the filling, a discovery that prompts her to run off-screen to vomit. A strong association is suggested between biological consumption and the maids’ function of prosthetic maternity. They are hired

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Figure 4 Toilet humor, The Help.

largely to fulfill the roles traditionally associated with mothers, such as childcare and domestic chores, but the maids’ maternal capacity is largely expressed specifically through their skills in cooking and in toilet training the children in their care. The woman for whom Aibileen works, Elizabeth, is shown to be a “bad” mother on several occasions when she fails to acknowledge her young daughter’s progress in toilet training, and when she leaves her in a wet diaper overnight. Elizabeth’s apparent aversion to the practicalities of toilet training and personal care suggests a reaction of abjection to these ordinary processes. Moreover, Aibileen intimates that Elizabeth feeds her daughter too much, clucking disapprovingly that the child is “fat”—another failing of Elizabeth’s that must be countered by Aibileen, who, it is implied, would know to feed the child the appropriate quantity of food. Minny’s virtuoso cooking skills are flagged up from the moment she is introduced to viewers via voice-over. She sings the praises of Crisco lard to Celia, an anxious white woman who has no idea how to prepare even the most basic dishes. Celia first shows Minny (and viewers) that she is a good egg by joining her for lunch, instead of insisting on separate tables. At the most basic level, food and the rituals that surround it reflect the social context in which it is consumed. It is no accident that Skeeter’s

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beloved maid Constantine is fired for neglecting to observe a minor procedural formality while serving dinner, combined with her daughter’s insistence on entering the Phelan home through the dining room while Skeeter’s mother is entertaining. Minny is fired for using the “wrong” toilet, that is, the toilet used by the white family she works for, because her employer fears the intermingling of their bodily effluvia—a fear that does not extend to white people, but is restricted to African Americans, who, according to Hilly, “carry different diseases than we do.” As revenge for her unjust dismissal, Minny’s feces pie, consumed by Hilly with such relish, brings about the very comingling of waste materials that Hilly feared in the first place (The film’s catch phrase: “Eat my shit”) (Fig. 5). In The Help, the association between black women and prosthetic maternity is figured literally in the relationship between Minny and Celia. Celia cannot carry fetuses to term, and has a miscarriage in the presence of Minny, who, conversely, has five children. The hyperfertile Minny not only has an abundance of children, but she also acts as a kind of mother figure to Celia herself, instructing her in the art of cooking and housekeeping. At the end of the film, when Celia cooks a huge meal to express her appreciation to Minny for her guidance, loyalty and discretion, the gesture is reminiscent of a child who finally reaches the maturity necessary to reciprocate her mother’s kindness.

Figure 5 Minnie brings a gift, The Help.

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That surrogate maternity is the particular form that African American women’s prosthesis took in the pre-civil rights era is underscored in the first words of the film. They are voiced by Skeeter Phelan, the young white woman who is writing an exposé of the working conditions of black maids in Jackson, and are directed at Aibileen: “What’s it feel like to raise a white child when your own child’s at home being looked after by somebody else?” Extrapolated beyond the domestic sphere, the social and economic circumstances that require African American women to transfer their maternal attentions from their own children to the children of white women mirror the world’s neglect of the children in Africa who live in abject poverty. Yet ironically, the domestic labor performed by black women in The Help, from raising their children to cooking family meals, frees up the wealthy white women to organize fundraising events for starving children in Africa. Symbolically, Africanness and blackness do fundamentally different work as global ideologemes. African abjection, like Latin American abjection as discussed above, is diffuse and rhizomatic because “over there,” whereas African American abjection is localized, “over here”: the horreur, to use Kristeva’s term, is so powerful because the fear is of the “other within.” This fear is represented figuratively by the imprisonment of one of the maids in the film. The maid Hilly hires to replace Minny is jailed for stealing a ring to fund her children’s college education. This image of the African American woman behind bars evokes the overwhelmingly disproportionate numbers of African Americans in prison. Today, African American abjection takes place on death row and in solitary confinement and, therefore, in the lives of people who, as the etymology of the word abjection indicates, have been literally discarded. It is not surprising that the film’s excrescence motif reinforces the dynamic of abjection that it depicts. It is similarly unsurprising that capitalism finds it so easy to commodify the culture of a people who, not so long ago, were themselves commodities. Seen in this light, The Help is part of a process in which African Americans are commodified at the level of cultural representation, in a ghostly extension of their commodification in slavery—their very fashionability (consider the Malcolm X clothing line sold at Bloomingdale’s that came out on the heels of the Spike Lee film) making them subject to obsolescence and, ultimately, disposal.

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The re(f)use economy in Micmacs à tire-larigot The logic of prostheticization underwrites both commodity culture and the objectification of human beings. People are becoming so instrumentalized that, beyond becoming subservient to the needs of other people, they become subsumed in the destinies of objects, and virtually indistinguishable from them. At the same time, objects, especially technological objects, are being endowed with an increasing amount of autonomy, assuming roles that were once the preserve of human agency—including, notably, those of memory and perception. This outsourcing of memory to phones and computers feeds (and feeds on) planned obsolescence, which fuels the drive for ever-smarter gadgets. The image of planned obsolescence and waste that underwrites many of the films discussed above is not, however, universally embraced. A very different model of consumption is presented in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2009 film Micmacs à tire-larigot, in which a ragtag bunch of misfits who live beneath a refuse dump give a new lease of life to objects discarded by others, endowing these objects with what might be called “reuse value.” From Benjamin’s ragpicker to Varda’s glaneuse, the idea of la récupe (salvage) is a familiar trope in European culture—and it is, no doubt aptly, recuperated in Jeunet’s film. The underground dwellers in Micmacs comprise a re(f)use economy, resisting against (or refusing) global consumer culture’s redemptive supplementarity, or the deployment of purchasing power in an attempt to fill a perceived void. This community embodies a hacker ethics, rejecting the distinction between producer and consumer. Unlike exchange value, which obscures the past labor that produced the commodity, reuse value reflects the past use to which the object was put. Reuse flies in the face of planned obsolescence, which gives rise to the desire to buy more objects and to replace old things with new ones that have no history of use. From the point of view of use, such replacement masks history, as commodity fetishism obscures the power relations behind the production of the object. Conversely, la récupe enfolds history into objects, imbuing them with reuse value and making of them an exteriorized, prostheticized form of human memory analogous to film and other media, whose functions Micmacs invites us to contemplate. The double-edged nature of the re(f)use economy, which both privileges

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resistance and underlines the posthuman dissolution of the boundaries between people and objects, points up the pharmacological dimension, at once destructive and beneficial (Derrida 1981: 61–172), of globalization. Micmacs revolves around a video-store clerk, Bazil (Dany Boon), who seeks revenge on the manufacturers of the landmine that killed his father and the bullet that caused his own near-fatal injury. That the refuse economy depicted in the film is situated within the context of a scathing critique of the global arms industry suggests a link between overproduction and the military-industrial complex of the kind described by Georges Bataille in La Part maudite (The Accursed Share) (Bataille 1967: 49–80 and passim). By short-circuiting the cycle of planned obsolescence, excess accumulation, and overproduction characteristic of advanced capitalism, the underground dwellers in Jeunet’s film are also subverting the tendency of the biggest industrialized nations to expend significant portions of their gross domestic product on weapons. The arms industry is both a contributor to overproduction and a symptom of it: when there are too many things being produced, the only things left to produce are things that blow up other things, and, as it happens, other people. Bataille held up the Marshall Plan, the postwar economic aid package that the United States gave to Europe, as an example of notfor-profit expenditure that could divert excess accumulation away from an otherwise inevitable military expansion (Bataille 1967: 203–25). Seen in this light, the global arms industry, which supplies weapons to farflung warring factions, would be the negative consequence of the failure to direct excess profits where they could be put to less destructive use. Micmacs begins with a brief scene set, the titles tell us, in 1979 in the Western Sahara. The camera pans across a French flag attached to a jeep, to alight on a soldier examining a landmine. We see the landmine explode in long shot, from the point of view of some local onlookers. The scene cuts to the soldier’s home in France, where his wife and son Bazil receive the news of his death, which is followed by the funeral. We then jump thirty years ahead to 2009, when the rest of the film is set. Bazil now works in a video store, where we first see him as an adult watching The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946) dubbed in French, on an old VCR player, and mouthing both Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s dialogue. Bazil is caught in the gunfire of a passing police chase, and a bullet becomes

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permanently lodged in his brain. When he becomes homeless after losing his job, he is taken in by a group of people who live under a refuse dump. This disparate group includes a female acrobat, “La Môme Caoutchouc” (The Rubber Kid, played by Julie Ferrier), whose extremely pliable body ends up getting them out of all kinds of scrapes; a man called Fracasse (Smash, played by Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon), who claims to have broken a world record for being shot out of a cannon; an inventor who transforms the abandoned objects found in the dump into wondrous mechanical devices; a young woman with a savant-level propensity for measurements and calculations named Calculette (Calculator, Marie-Julie Baup); a nurturing mother figure, Tambouille (Chow, Yolande Moreau), who cooks for the group and generally looks after them; and Remington, an African ethnographer (Omar Sy), who records his observations on an old Remington typewriter and whose speech consists entirely of clichés, proverbs, and maxims. (It should be noted that Jeunet’s work resembles Remington’s speech in this way: his films, even those ostensibly set in the future, consistently point to earlier eras and are infused with an aesthetics—and, some have argued, a politics—of nostalgia. See, for example, Kaganski 2001 and Sancton 2009.) The refuse dump under which this motley group lives is depicted as an Aladdin’s Cave, full of objects from the ordinary to the quirky that appear to have been rescued from the trash heap and given new life. Reused objects intermittently flash “then/now,” “then/now,” signifying two eras at once: the one in which they were manufactured (thus the African ethnographer’s antique typewriter evokes the colonial past), and the era in which they are being reused (the not-so-postcolonial present, in which African arms dealers represent a developing world of supposed lawlessness). In this way, reused objects are analogous to what Deleuze has called crystal-images, or images in films that evoke both the past and the present, and thus represent the passage of time (Deleuze 2005: 72). Reused objects might therefore be called crystal-objects, objects that contain and activate the past. As commodities harbor congealed labor from which they derive their value as objects of exchange, crystal-objects harbor congealed use, from which they derive their value as objects of reuse—but whereas the congealed labor is masked in commodities, the congealed use is at least intermittently visible in the crystal-object.

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The adaptation, or hacking, of a film term, “crystal-image,” to describe the reuse of objects in a refuse economy is not entirely arbitrary. Visible in Jeunet’s film is a process of the exteriorization of human memory borrowed from industrial temporal objects, memory prostheses manufactured in the era of mechanical reproducibility whose duration is coextensive with our perception of them, such as sound recordings, television shows, and films (see Stiegler 2008: 241, 2011: 12). Mediatized “memories” penetrate the recesses of our consciousness, while our very capacity to remember is increasingly outsourced, exteriorized in the form of databases and search engines. At the end of Micmacs, footage of the kidnapped weapons manufacturers’ confession is posted on YouTube, in an attempt on the part of consumers (who have been fed carefully manipulated images about the arms trade) to turn the tables and act as producers, but also as a way of inscribing a form of countermemory into the public historical archive that the internet has created. What Jonathan Beller (2006) refers to as the “cinematic mode of production” refers not only to cinema, but also to the mechanized forms of what Bernard Stiegler calls grammatization, or the exteriorization of memory (see Stiegler 2010: 10–11; 29–34). Our “own” memory goes out (we rely, for example, on vacation snaps and videos for access to the past), and the world’s memories are folded into our consciousness like bread dough. We become objectified subjects, another platform for the storage and retrieval of information, and the objects that populate our everyday lives in turn become animated: objects become memories, and souvenirs become souvenirs. Film scholars have recently begun noting the depiction within cinema of the distribution of memory across the inanimate world (see, for example, David Martin-Jones [2013: 720] on human bodies and landscape as “physical repositories of memory,” and Isabelle Frances McNeill [2010: 51–86] on “memory objects”). The attribution of memory to objects outside the human brain finds its correlate in the grammatization techniques that Marshall McLuhan (2001 [1964]) theorized as the electronic extension of the human nervous system in his landmark Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, originally published in 1964. This distribution of the self is the result of humans’ engagement with the world around them. Robert Pepperell notes, “This ‘extensionist’ view of human nature, in contrast to the humanist view, does not therefore make a distinction

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between the biological substrate of the human frame (what is most often referred to as the ‘human’) and the wider material domain in which we exist” (Pepperell 2003: 152). This wider material domain includes those prosthetic objects we use to enhance our human capabilities. As Stiegler has put it, “The prosthesis is not a mere extension of the human body; it is the constitution of this body qua ‘human’” (Stiegler 1998: 152–53). In Micmacs, Fracasse the human cannonball catalogs those parts of his body that are man-made (various metal plates and prosthetic inserts) which, while making him a little bit bionic, also help make him “who he is”—like the processes of exteriorization that characterize what Stiegler refers to as “technics,” they are “the pursuit of life by means other than life” (Stiegler 1998: 17). These physical prosthetics thus mirror the function of memory prostheses in Micmacs, nowhere more so than in the image of the bullet in Bazil’s head. When the arms manufacturer who produced the bullet hears of his injury, he says dismissively, “Une balle dans la tête? Comme ça, ça lui donnera un souvenir de nous” (A bullet in the head? Well, that will leave him with a memory/souvenir of us). Indeed, when he is shot, the memory of objects is carved into Bazil’s brain; he carries it with him wherever he goes. Nothing stops the flow of time, and memory, like a bullet to the head. Yet it is precisely such a bullet that serves as a constant reminder to Bazil of his mission to avenge his father’s death and his own injury. Paradoxically, this reminder is liable to cause serious damage to his brain at any moment, thus wiping out his capacity to remember. As such, the bullet in Bazil’s head is an apt metaphor for what Alison Landsberg (2004) has called prosthetic memory, a mediatized image that replaces personal memories in individual consciousness. Micmacs allegorizes this “save as” function with images of mechanized forms of transindividual memory such as cinema itself. In addition to referring to film in general through its many images of camcorders and video stores, Micmacs is studded, or perhaps more accurately shot through, with references to specific films and filmmakers (e.g., The Big Sleep, as seen above; Brian De Palma’s 1996 Mission Impossible; the films of Sergio Leone, Chaplin, and Buster Keaton), including and especially those by its own director. As well as employing stylistic traits that recall other films in his oeuvre (the warm color palette full of greens, golds and reds, the fondness for retro

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television sets and Rube Goldbergesque contraptions, the underground community), Jeunet reuses many of his favorite actors, such as Dominique Pinon (who played Louison in the 1991 Delicatessen and the clones in La Cité des enfants perdus in 1997), André Dussollier (the narrator in Amélie [2001] and Pierre-Marie Rouvières in Un Long dimanche de fiançailles), and Yolande Moreau (the concierge in Amélie). There is even an explicit reference to Delicatessen, in the scene where Bazil is trying to plant a recording device in the arms manufacturer François Marconi’s apartment, and he is shown crouching on a rooftop that looks exactly like the one at the end of Delicatessen. When he accidentally lowers his recording equipment into the wrong apartment, we see a re-enactment of the scene in Delicatessen when Julie and Louison are playing a celloand-saw duet in Julie’s living room, with Dominique Pinon reprising his role as Louison. The mise-en-abîme of self-referentiality in Micmacs culminates in the many references to the very film we are watching, through repeated shots of a DVD case and poster advertising the film Micmacs à tire-larigot, identical to the DVD case and poster actually used to advertise the film. The first time we see Bazil as an adult, the poster for the very film we are watching is visible above the VCR player on which Bazil watches The Big Sleep. A subsequent shot even shows Dany Boon on the poster for a split second, the same actor we are watching as he watches the Bogart film. When the stray bullet from the police chase flies through the plate glass window of the video store, it shatters a DVD case for the film Micmacs à tire-larigot. Later in the film, a car crashes through a billboard advertising the film that we are watching (Fig. 6). At these moments, the film’s exterior (its advertising campaign, its physical presence as an object in a DVD case) runs seamlessly, like a Moebius strip, into its interior. These references to the finished version of the film we have not finished watching produce the opposite of the sensation of déjà-vu, or a kind of pré-vu effect—similar to the anticipatory protention that constitutes our perception of time according to Husserl (see Stiegler 2011: 17; 27–30). Likewise, the sound and motion effects that Bazil and his friends make to convince the French arms dealers that they are being bundled off to the Middle East, when in fact they are taken to a vacant lot just beyond the banks of the Seine, could almost be

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Figure 6 Déjà-pré-vu, Micmacs.

a “making-of ” documentary for the film sequence that we, like the arms dealers, are encouraged to imagine. In this way, both the past and the future are enfolded into the present. As if to illustrate this idea, the characters in the film spend a lot of time mouthing dialogue spoken by others, making us question the individual as the originator of his or her own speech. When Bazil is first made homeless, he pitches up behind a woman busking in a Métro station, mouthing the words she sings to make passersby think that it is he who is singing. When Remington impersonates the African dictator’s associate in a meeting with arms dealer Nicolas de la Fenouillet, he mouths the speech Remington recites; and Bazil is shown perfectly lip-synching the dialogue of The Big Sleep when we first see him as an adult, implying that he has seen the film over and over again. These moments in Micmacs announce the film’s aesthetic of pré-vu, suggesting that the characters might be rehearsing dialogue that has always already been uttered. This aesthetic of pré-vu can help us understand what Stiegler means when he writes that consciousness is structured like cinema (Stiegler 2011: 13), an assertion that might at first seem counterintuitive. In one sense, we can understand this to mean that consciousness is now structured like cinema, in an age in which we are constantly surrounded by media images from infancy. However, we may also take this statement to mean that consciousness has always been structured like cinema, since the dawn of consciousness long, long before the advent of cinema. This could only be true if time were folded in the way suggested in Micmacs:

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(the) film preexists itself. As John Douglas Macready puts it, “Films can . . . be understood as prostheticizations of our inner cinema” (Macready 2009: n.p.). The Micmacs posters and DVD cases in the film Micmacs would seem to promote the idea of an “inner cinema,” which only needs to be articulated by the filmmaker, like the parole that activates and animates the langue in Saussurean linguistics (Saussure 1975). Stiegler writes: “Like cinema in life I revise the rushes, I view, I edit everything that has been repressed-archived: shots, sound and odor recordings, touch, contact, and caress recordings, I take it all up again and I undo and redo, I abbreviate” (Stiegler cited in Wills 2006: 250). Expanding on Derrida’s contention that speech is always already writing, Stiegler adds that “life (anima—on the side of the mental image) is always already cinema (animation—image-object). The technological synthesis is not a replica, not a double of life any more than writing is a replication of speech” (Derrida and Stiegler 2002: 162). Bazil’s doubling of Remington’s words mimics the African ethnographer’s own reuse of language in the form of hackneyed expressions, clichés, and maxims. In his drive to observe and record the behavior of his French companions, Remington is an Occidentalist. He favors recycled language, like the recycled objects, la récupe the underground dwellers use, and like the old typewriter he types on. His name, Remington, is analogous to that of the arms dealer Marconi, whose name invokes the inventor of the radio: together, these names add to the film’s catalog of grammatization technologies, from typewriter to radio to photograph (the photos of real landmine victims held up by the fake Middle Eastern mothers, and the photo of the amoral weapons manufacturer arm-in-arm with Nicolas Sarkozy), and from video store to DVD to camcorder to YouTube. Fracasse, the human cannonball, is not taken seriously for his record-breaking achievement until he finds his listing in a discarded copy of the Guinness Book of World Records. Remington, however, is not only a well-known brand of typewriter; it is also a well-known brand of gun. The association between writing and weaponry is reinforced when Marconi compares himself in a speech to Arthur Rimbaud, pointing out that the poet ended his life as an arms dealer; Marconi’s young son, upon hearing this comparison, assumes his father is speaking not of the poet Rimbaud but of the action hero

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Rambo. In another version of this analogy, Paul Virilio has noted the links between the development of film technology and advances in warfare at the beginning of the twentieth century, observing, for example, that “the nitrocellulose that went into film stock was also used for the production of explosives” (Virilio 1989: 15). Violence of this kind points to the pharmacological dimension of posthumanism’s extensionist view of human nature, its double-edged nature as both remedy and poison (Derrida 1981: 61–172). As objects are endowed with a life of their own, human beings are increasingly objectified. This transference evokes what Braidotti calls, after Lyotard, the “inhuman(e)” dimension of the posthuman condition. She writes, “If one considers the scale of the major issues confronting the contemporary world, from the financial crises and their consequences for employment and structural economic inequalities, to climate change and the ensuing environmental crises, not to mention geo-political conflicts, terrorism and humanitarian armed interventions, it is clear that the posthuman condition has engendered its own inhuman(e) dimension” (Braidotti 2014: 110). The reference in Jeunet’s film to Rimbaud evokes the poet’s emblematic declaration “Je est un autre” (I is an other), ambivalent expression of both a humanizing empathy and of a posthuman extension of the “self.” The explosives of which the modern-day arms dealer speaks are responsible for maiming the limbless children shown in photographs by what appear to be Middle Eastern women who, when they remove their veils, turn out to be Bazil and his friends, many of them men, whose masquerade is intended to shock the arms dealers into confessing their crimes (Fig. 7). (The veil, too, is part of the film’s salvage aesthetic, drawn from the longstanding French controversy over the display of “religious”—that is, effectively, Muslim—symbols in public. The act of unveiling—not unlike that in SATC2—is a wish-fulfillment of the supposedly republican desire for Muslim women to spurn the veil, and of the even greater desire that they turn out, like Bazil and company, not to be Muslim after all, in a reversal of Rimbaud’s statement: “L’autre c’est moi” [The other is me].) The unnecessary squandering of life in armed conflict is precisely the kind of deadly dépense (expenditure) that Bataille was keen to circumvent in his promotion of no-strings-attached financial aid programs such as the Marshall Plan (Bataille 1967: 203–25). The watch that Bazil wears,

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Figure 7 Fake mothers, real children, Micmacs.

retrieved from a box of his father’s personal effects returned after his death, bears the words “Armée d’Afrique”—a fitting reminder of the violent postcolonial world order, writ large on a timepiece. Yet, aside from Bazil’s father, Micmacs shows surprisingly few deaths for a film that revolves around the global arms industry. When one of the rival arms manufacturer’s munitions factory explodes, the (white) couple who inadvertently detonate the bomb are shown straggling out of the wreckage alive, and the television news coverage of the incident is careful to note that, miraculously, there were no fatalities. The (white) arms manufacturers themselves, the caricatural villains of the piece, escape unscathed, if ruined and humiliated. Nearly the only fatalities shown are the African dictator’s representatives, who are killed during the confrontation between the rival arms dealers and Bazil. Their corpses remain in shot like so many pieces of furniture while the other characters sort out their various entanglements. Otherwise, the only other death actually shown in the film is that of a black soccer player blown up in a fantasy sequence. These Africans are the film’s collateral damage, reduced to pure objects (corpses) when the life is taken from them. The only death for which vengeance is specifically sought is that of Bazil’s (white) father. The other Africans depicted in the film are shown to be in a prosthetic relationship with the white French arms dealers, used as tools by them to achieve their objectives. There is the African domestic worker (country of origin not specified) in Marconi’s house who looks after his young son; and the cleaner at Marconi’s company from Somalia whose husband is

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threatened with deportation if she does not help him sabotage his rival’s munitions factory. Although globalization and the posthuman both entail the erasure of borders (in the case of globalization, between countries, and in the case of the posthuman, between humans and the material world), the collapse of boundaries is in neither case unproblematic. In a globalized world, the logic of substitution is everywhere at work: a vacant lot in Paris can stand in for the Middle East, and a bunch of French misfits can play the role of Middle Eastern mothers of landmine victims; but likewise, human beings can be slotted in for one another, as so many spare parts rendered interchangeable with one another and with the objects that surround them. Thus objectified, the Africans in Micmacs resemble the body parts of deceased celebrities collected by Nicolas Thibault de la Fenouillet, and displayed in glass cases in his living room. Included in the arms dealer’s collection are the crooner Tino Rossi’s vertebrae, Winston Churchill’s fingernail clippings, Assyrian king Shalmaneser I’s foot, French king Louis XVI’s heart, painter Henri Matisse’s finger, and Marilyn Monroe’s molar. The collection is the emblematic mode of possession in commodity culture, the gesture of infinitely renewed supplementarity. There will always be new fall and spring collections, just as there will always be more body parts to collect as long as people keep dying, whether they are celebrities who overdose on drugs, or anonymous people killed as “collateral damage.” Missing from his collection, we are told, is Mussolini’s eye, whose attempted acquisition triggers the series of events that lead to the arms dealers’ eventual downfall. The fact that part of a fascist leader holds such importance in the eyes of the collector is very significant. Commodity culture’s emphasis on exchange value necessitates the kind of instrumental reason that, when applied to human beings, results in their objectification, and makes them available for exploitation or worse (see Horkheimer and Adorno 2002 [1947]). That the coveted body part is an eye is also significant: it is the organ of sight (or the eye of the camera) that enables an active viewing position and thus subjectivity. This subjectivity is negated when the eye becomes something to-be-looked-at, that is, an object. Micmacs stages a rematerialization of the image, a transformation of the crystal-image into crystal-object. This recuperation of the material world

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is analogous to what James Clifford has described as salvage ethnography, in which the anthropologist tries to preserve cultural traditions that are disappearing under the entropic forces of globalization (Clifford 1986: 98–121). The crystal-object is a nostalgic reaction to increasing abstraction: this reactive transformation has already been inaugurated in haptic cinema, but finds its logical conclusion in the return to objects themselves. Haptic cinema would be a function of the drive to salvage materiality before it disappears completely within capitalism’s regime of abstraction. Although Micmacs is not an example of haptic cinema, in its emphasis on salvage both literal and figurative, it performs its own nostalgic return to the material world. This return reaches its logical conclusion in the film’s final image, of a woman’s blouse and skirt twirling on a clothes hanger in mid-air, independent of any human wearer, lifeless yet full of life. The supplement has replaced what it was meant to supplement, as Derrida envisaged (Derrida 1997: 141–57; 313–16). The prosthesis steps into the role of the human, as tools take over from their makers, and humans become prostheses: the human cannonball is a metonym for the former colonial subjects who can be blackmailed into sabotaging a munitions factory, or who can serve as cannon fodder in a world war. Similarly, a woman who can bend into any shape and fold herself up into a cardboard box or a refrigerator is a none-too-subtle metaphor for women who are bent to the will of men, as confirmed at the end of the film, when Bazil grabs la Môme en Caoutchouc (who does not seem to have a proper name) by her hood and pulls her head toward him in what is presented as an affectionate gesture, but which, despite its allusion to the danse des apaches fashionable around the time of the First World War, is nonetheless uncomfortable to watch. The complement to the abstraction performed in commodity culture is the reification of human beings, who become reduced to an assemblage of inanimate objects, like the body parts that the arms manufacturer Nicolas Thibault de la Fenouillet collects. The arms dealer’s collection of body parts is the ultimate extension of commodity culture, in which there are few things that cannot be bought or sold. De la Fenouillet’s hobby is also a busman’s holiday, a compulsive repetition in his down time of the body parts he collects on the job blowing people up. “Marilyn’s molar” and “Mussolini’s eye” are ghostly substitutes for the missing limbs of

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the real child landmine victims in the photographs held up by the fake Middle Eastern mothers at the end of the film: these missing limbs are the only objects in the film that cannot be salvaged or reused, and whose deadly logic cannot be refused. Micmacs, like SATC2, Bridesmaids, and The Help, thus explores the increasing resemblance between human beings and objects in the era of globalization, facilitated by hyperconsumption and planned obsolescence; by structures of exploitation that reduce some people to spare parts to be slotted into a global machine; and by technologies that replace human memory with mechanized memory. Consumer culture, a key component of globalization, posits that we must supplement ourselves with commodities without which we would otherwise be incomplete: but these prostheses, rather than enhancing us, end up creating the insufficiencies they were meant to overcome.

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In the climax of Micmacs, the homeless band hoodwinks the arms dealers into thinking they are in the Middle East, when in fact they have never left the outskirts of Paris. A similar play of distance and proximity is at work in the objectifying discourse of exoticism, which is underpinned by the movement of both objects and people back and forth between farflung locales and by the commodification of cultural difference itself, with subaltern bodies celebrated, indeed fetishized. Alienated labor is not the only form the prostheticization of people takes: they may also be exploited for the purposes of entertainment or simply contemplation. Like other manifestations of globalization, exoticism is primarily concerned with objects—the trade in trinkets and tchotchkes (and even ethnographic artifacts), certainly, but also human beings as instrumentalized objects of fascination. Cinematic exoticism is here examined specifically in the context of the French colonial empire, which generated an unusually prolific amount of exoticist imagery, both as overt propaganda and as entertainment reliant upon familiar tropes that were immediately recognizable to audiences. Exoticism (defined here as the objectifying and ultimately dehumanizing representation of non-French cultures) both reflects and impacts upon conceptions of cultural diversity. Arising from encounters with other cultures occasioned, to a great extent, by trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, exoticism proliferated with the advent of the printing press and the emergence of what Benedict Anderson (1983) has called “imagined communities,” culminating in the rise of the culture industry in the twentieth century. Exoticism has been particularly prominent in France at least since Montaigne’s “On Cannibals” (2000 [1580]) in the sixteenth century, in which the inventor of the essay form managed to render the indigenous people of Brazil as incontrovertibly

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other, even while arguing for cultural relativism. France was the seat of a colonial empire that grew from its origins in the seventeenth century to be the second biggest in the world (after the British Empire) in the nineteenth century. While ostensibly encouraging intercultural contact, exoticist discourse ultimately insisted on the impossibility of true integration, a contradiction that continues to define the French politics of immigration long after the collapse of the colonial empire. This chapter considers two key periods in the history of cinematic exoticism in France: the 1930s, when colonial propaganda was at its height, and the late 1950s to early 1960s, when the Algerian War marked the official end of the colonial era. The chapter begins with an examination of the films of Josephine Baker, African American/French Jazz-Age icon and marketing phenomenon, whose silent film La Sirène des tropiques (Siren of the Tropics, Étiévant and Nalpas, 1927) and whose final film, Fausse alerte (The French Way, de Baroncelli, 1939), have both attracted much less scholarly attention than her better-known films of the 1930s, namely, Zouzou (Marc Allégret, 1934) and Princesse Tam-Tam (Edmond T. Gréville, 1935). Indeed, Fausse alerte, made at the beginning of the Second World War before the fall of France, but not released until after the war, has been all but overlooked by film scholars. Baker’s career emblematized the exoticist aesthetic, in which the “primitive” body is appropriated and commodified by means of the culture industry, and this process of commodification is mirrored in the narrative of immigration and stardom repeated in various forms in all four of Baker’s feature films. The chapter concludes with a discussion of exoticism in the French New Wave (1958–62), still the most celebrated film movement in the history of French cinema. In the period following the Second World War, the economic boom that brought a sharp rise in the availability of consumer goods coincided with the traumatic period of decolonization and what Kristin Ross (1995) has called the “reordering of French life.” This was also a remarkably fertile time for avant-garde cinema in France, especially the experimental work of the Left Bank School and the Nouvelle vague. Deleuze’s influential attribution of the era’s stylistic innovation in L’Image-temps (The Time Image, 1985) exclusively to the trauma of the Second World War neglects the role played by decolonization in the transformation of film aesthetics and in cinematic representations of

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everyday life. Conversely, in films depicting the immediate aftermath of colonialism, references to the Second World War are often overlooked. Recognition of the importance of both these historical moments is central to Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory (2009), and one that I explore in a number of Nouvelle vague feature films (principally Agnès Varda’s 1962 Cléo de 5 à 7 [Cleo from 5 to 7], but also François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim [Jules and Jim], and Alain Resnais’s 1963 Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour [Muriel, or the Time of Return]). These films were all made during the Algerian War, and feature ethnographic artifacts, such as masks, that have been commodified and serve as allegories of the dehumanizing process inherent in exoticism, bearing silent witness to the legacy of objectification that underwrites the reduction of people to their purely corporeal dimension—whether on the basis of “race” or gender—and the violation or elimination of those bodies that such reduction legitimates.

Josephine Baker: A global star is born Josephine Baker was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1906. After meeting with great success in France, where she performed in the mid-1920s with a touring dance troupe, she made the country her home. She quickly became a global star, whose image was (and continues to be) immediately recognizable. Her work consistently thematized the crossing of national borders and the ensuing encounters between (or at times among) different cultures, and the image she cultivated played on an oscillation between national identities and global culture. Baker’s films explicitly invoke the mass media that both make globalization possible and represent it. Building on her status as a stage performer, Baker’s films prefigured global cinema’s imbrication with other entertainment media, while their use of promotional tie-ins such as fashion, hair products, cosmetics, nightclubs, and even a faux newspaper used to promote her 1934 film Zouzou, called Le Journal de Zouzou (Baker and Bouillon 1978: 94), anticipated the marketing campaigns to come in the age of the Hollywood blockbuster. The films in which Baker starred made it difficult quite literally to “locate” Baker’s cultural origins. This topographical indeterminacy

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served many functions at a time when French colonial ambitions were colliding with the geopolitical realignment heralded by the impending world war. Baker’s stardom was at once forward-looking, in its Jazz-Age modernism, and atavistic, in its appeal to primitivism. Baker’s status as a global cultural icon was forged by her evocation of larger world-historical systems such as colonialism and the competition between “Old World” and “New” for world cultural hegemony, suggested by the constellation of French-African American identities that she evoked. Baker’s position within these shifting global configurations located her on the horizon between the decline of one era and the dawn of another—making her a key figure in the history of exoticist cinema and globalization. The dissemination of Baker’s image in what Walter Benjamin (1979 [1936]) famously called the “era of technical reproducibility” (or the age of mechanical reproduction) is referred to on a number of occasions in her films, which endlessly rehearsed the idea of Baker’s own ascension to stardom, her rags-to-riches story (see Jules-Rosette 2007). In all her films, Baker played either an up-and-coming performer or an established star. Indeed, two of the fiction films in which Baker starred were about the process of becoming a star: in La Sirène des tropiques (Siren of the Tropics, Henri Étiévant and Mario Nalpas, 1927), Baker plays a West Indian woman who is “discovered” while clowning around with children on the streets of Paris and made into a music hall star, and in Zouzou (Marc Allégret, 1934), Baker plays a Martinican woman similarly discovered while clowning around on a stage, and made into a music hall star. (It is perhaps no accident that these narratives of discovery evoke classic colonial discourses of the “discovery” of previously uncharted territories.) In the 1939 Fausse alerte (literally “False Alarm,” but translated as The French Way, Jacques de Baroncelli), which I will discuss at greater length, Baker plays a well-established music hall star who owns her own nightclub. Her character’s name, Zazu, and her allusion to a sad romantic past, strongly suggest that this film might be a sequel of sorts to Zouzou, in which Baker’s character fails to win the heart of the man she loves, who falls instead for a blonde woman named Claire. In Princesse Tam-Tam (Edmond de Gréville, 1935), Baker plays Aouina, a Tunisian shepherdess who is transformed, Pygmalion-like, into the toast of Parisian society, a status she augments, rather than jeopardizes (as a jealous rival

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has hoped), by jumping on stage and turning in an impromptu dance performance during a musical number at an elegant party. The fact that Aouina’s transformation into a star entertainer turns out to have been imagined by a novelist for his latest book does not alter the technical reproducibility of the character’s image, which is disseminated in the form of a bestselling novel. The story of Baker’s own rise to stardom is invoked explicitly in the promotional film for Marcel Sauvage’s Mémoires de Joséphine Baker (Memoirs of Josephine Baker, Baker and Sauvage, 1927) which itself prefigures very closely the scenario in Princesse Tam-Tam of the writer and his assistant appearing to record in writing the Baker character’s story. This transformation of a life into a story, a life story, is inseparable from Baker’s public persona, and her work is rife with allusions to the creation and dissemination of Baker’s image. The explicit ties that Baker’s characters have to the media are highlighted in the short silent film Le Pompier des Folies Bergère (The Fireman of the Folies Bergère, 1928), made while Baker was starring in the eponymous nightclub. In this film, Baker plays a Métro attendant who metamorphoses, in the eyes of a drunken firefighter, into the scantily-clad exotic dancer from the famous stage show. Suddenly wearing nothing but a flimsy grass skirt around her waist and a white brassiere, Baker approaches an enormous advertising poster (of the kind still used in the Paris Métro today), which shows a gigantic radio. Baker fiddles with a dial on the radio and then, clapping her hands as a visual cue to indicate that the radio is playing music, dances her signature dance (Fig. 8). It is significant that the poster is advertising radio speakers, which facilitated the broadcast of entertainment into millions of homes, disseminating songs by entertainers such as Baker herself, whose fame as a chanteuse rivaled her renown as a dancer. This short sequence brings out the connections or “correspondances,” to use a term more appropriate to the Métro, between advertising and the mass media; and the site of this conjunction in the Métropolitain is suggestive of metropolitan France or “la métropole,” self-proclaimed center of France’s colonial empire. And at the center of the center is Paris, home of the Métro, and political and administrative headquarters of both the hexagon and “la plus grande France” (Greater France).

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Figure 8 Josephine Baker in the Métro, Le Pompier des Folies Bergère.

Paris is the setting, entirely or in part, of all of Baker’s films, but the characters Baker plays are always immigrants or visitors. In La Sirène des tropiques, Baker plays a woman from the fictional Antillean island of Monte Puebla; as Phil Powrie and Éric Rebillard note, in the film “the ‘tropics’ (as the intertitle has it) and everything they represent are contrasted with Paris” (Powrie and Rebillard 2008: 255). In Zouzou, Baker’s character is from Martinique; in Princesse Tam-Tam, she is Tunisian, and, finally, in Fausse alerte, her origins are not specified, but she is allowed to speak a line of English (as the nightclub owner Zazu, she says “Hello Girls” to her dancers), in an allusion to Baker’s own American origins. This protean adaptability is underscored in La Sirène des tropiques, when Papitou, a stowaway on an ocean liner who has fallen down a coal chute while being pursued by passengers and crew, is described thus: “She’s easy to recognize. She’s all black.” After subsequently becoming covered in flour while hiding in the ship’s kitchen, Papitou is described as “all white, like a ghost.” The passengers’ shifting perception of Papitou mirrors Baker’s own status as a floating racial and cultural signifier, a

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blank screen on which to project cultural identity. The end of the film, when Papitou goes “far, far away, to America,” is a reversal of Baker’s career path and a reminder to the Americans that, through her films, songs, and her image more generally, the French were exporting Baker back to her home, having transformed her into “la Baker,” as though she had been a raw material, a diamond-in-the-rough polished to a showbiz luster, like the characters in her films who undergo a Pygmalion-like transformation at the hands of French couturiers (e.g., La Sirène des tropiques; Zouzou, and Princesse Tam-Tam). Papitou’s elusive nature, which makes her “easy to recognize” but impossible to pin down, is further complicated by the confusion cultivated between the French- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Sérévo, a Parisian businessman, has investments and holdings in the “Antilles,” suggesting a French colonial context, but many of the characters’ names are Hispanic-sounding (e.g., the character Alvarez, Papitou’s father Diego, and the setting of Monte Puebla). This confusion is also apparent more generally in the conflicting signals given about the cultural origins of the characters Baker played throughout her brief film career. In Princesse Tam-Tam, Aouina comes from Tunisia, but masquerades as a princess from the mythical country of Parador, and the fact that her trip to Paris turns out to have been a figment of the writer’s imagination further problematizes the viewer’s capacity to “situate” her. In Zouzou, the ostensibly autobiographical song “Haiti” that Zouzou sings while swinging in a giant birdcage conflicts with Zouzou’s provenance from Martinique, and in Fausse alerte, the dance number with which the film ends has a Latin American flavor that evokes the likes of Carmen Miranda. Even the “tropics” of The Siren of the Tropics is purposely vague, like the “île” or “island” of the song “Mon coeur est un oiseau des îles” (My heart is a bird of the isles). This lack of specificity can be traced to the “melting pot” function of exoticism, which boils down geographical and historical specificities into an indistinct mass of “otherness.” It is appropriate that France is the setting (all or in part) for Baker’s films, since, as a symbol of the “mother country,” the centralizing force of the metropolis evokes the universalizing tendency of French imperial discourse, both in the context of France’s colonial empire, and in the context of its earlier postrevolutionary Napoleonic aspirations. These

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associations converge in the film Fausse alerte, made in 1939 during the Phony War, before the Fall of France in June 1940. This film has routinely been overlooked by scholars, no doubt due to its lack of availability: it is occasionally mentioned in passing but has received nowhere near the degree of attention that has been devoted to Zouzou and Princesse Tam-Tam and, more recently, to La Sirène des Tropiques. Fausse Alerte was shelved during the war and was only released in France in 1945 (a shortened version was released with the title The French Way in 1952 in the United States). The film revolves around a long-standing feud between a Napoleon scholar and a woman who claims she is a descendent of the emperor. When the Napoleon scholar enlists Baker’s character Zazu to sabotage his son’s romantic relationship with his enemy’s daughter, he elicits her sympathy by referring to her as a “compatriot” of Napoleon’s first wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais, who was born in Martinique. Of course, by comparing Zazu to “Joséphine,” the film is also slyly alluding to Baker herself, who, like Empress Joséphine, was in a sense “married” to the French nation. While she was making Fausse alerte, Baker served as a kind of spy (an “Honorable Correspondent”) for the Deuxième Bureau, the French military intelligence service, for which she would infiltrate receptions at the Japanese and Italian embassies and report back what she heard. Moreover, while filming Fausse alerte, Baker did a radio show every Saturday for soldiers at the front (Baker and Chase 1993: 226–27). Yet, despite Baker’s serious and indeed heroic military contribution to France’s armed forces, this film, perhaps inevitably, has something of a “Zouzou goes to war” feel about it. When Zazu introduces herself to the homeless man whom she has hired to do odd jobs, he says he knows who she is, and adds that he has gone to a lot of trouble for her. “You ruined yourself for me?” Zazu asks coquettishly, assuming he has spent all his money on tickets to see her perform. The man replies, “I carried you on my back for days on end.” “What do you mean?” Zazu asks, mystified. “I was a sandwich man,” he explains. “I carried a cardboard cutout of you.” On the back of a sandwich man, the outline of Zazu’s body becomes a cipher, a hieroglyph of exoticism, not unlike the function of stereotype itself, which reproduces endlessly identical empty shapes. This suggestion that Zazu’s image, literally her likeness, has been reproduced and disseminated widely, evokes a scene at the end of Zouzou, in which

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the eponymous heroine is shown walking forlornly past a wall plastered with posters of herself. It also recalls an earlier scene in Zouzou, in which Zouzou is “discovered” while cavorting after hours on an empty stage as a spotlight casts her shadow against the curtain. Both Zazu in Fausse alerte and her earlier incarnation in Zouzou thus allude to the flattening function of exoticism, which reduces three-dimensional human beings to two-dimensional caricatures (a phenomenon invoked explicitly in Princesse Tam-Tam in a montage sequence that conveys the Princess of Parador’s burgeoning fame through the display of increasingly caricatural representations of Josephine Baker herself; see Ezra 2000a: 123–24). It is significant that the pose Zouzou strikes when the spotlight first illuminates her on stage is that of a shooting soldier. This imbrication of war and entertainment evokes the origins of cinema itself in the chronophotography of Félix Regnault, who in 1895 made a series of images of West Africans and Malagasy walking, running, jumping, climbing trees, carrying infants, and cooking (Rony 1996: 48). He used a chronophotographic device developed by his mentor Etienne-Jules Marey, protocinematic pioneer. It was no accident that these pictures were taken at a colonial exhibition, exoticizing spectacle par excellence, in which people were brought from the far reaches of the French colonial empire and put on display in replicas of their “natural” habitats. Regnault photographed Africans in order to improve the efficiency of the French army, which he advised to adopt a “marche en flexion,” or particular gait modeled on the movements of the Africans and Malagasy, the better to colonize them. Fatimah Tobing Rony has written of Regnault’s images that “the subjects are rendered as mere silhouettes, pictorographs of the langage par gestes. Their faces are unimportant: it is the body that provides the necessary data” (Rony 1996: 58). In Regnault’s images, as in the films starring Baker, the “data” provided by the black body invite exoticist objectification, used, in the case of Fausse alerte, to convey a sense of mastery to viewers in danger of feeling overwhelmed by the war. War and entertainment happily cohabit in the film. When the alarm of the film’s title sounds and everyone crowds into the air raid shelter, a man sells folding seats, as though war were a spectator sport. Then, one of the dance numbers in Zazu’s club is called “The Soldier on Leave,” and involves chorus girls performing a jaunty military march to music.

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In this sequence, a military maneuver (marching) is transformed into a dance step, like the shooting soldier pose that Zouzou strikes when she is discovered dancing on stage in Zouzou. The complexity of this process of aestheticization is reflected in the name Zazu Clairon, which resonates with multiple meanings. The proper name “Zazu” is thought to derive from the Hebrew word “zaza,” meaning movement, making “Zazu” a fitting name for a dancer (especially in the medium of cinema, which itself derives from “kino,” meaning movement). But the name Zazu also inevitably evokes Zouzou, and, by extension, zouave, for which “zouzou” was a nickname, and which was an Algerian Kabyle soldier who fought in the colonial troupes for France. “Clairon” means “bugle” or “clarion,” like the “Appel” or call to the population in the notice shown at the beginning of the film, which begins: “APPEL A LA POPULATION Parisiens, Le Gouvernement de la République a dû decréter la mobilisation generale. La Patrie est en danger et avec elle vos libertés. Les hommes ne sont forts que par l’union: le Pays sera victorieusement défendu par l’union de tous les Français.” [Appeal to the Population: Parisians, the government of the republic has had to call for widespread mobilization. The country is in danger and with it, your freedom. Men are only strong by virtue of their unity; the Country will be heroically defended by the union of all French people.] (original underlined emphasis)

In the following shot, a worker is shown putting up a poster across the notice, which says “Vendredi 3 novembre 1939. Réouverture LA PERRUCHE BLEUE. ZAZU CLAIRON et ses girls (Friday November 3, 1939. Reopening of The Blue Parakeet, with Zazu Clairon and her girls).” Below the sign for the cabaret, the words “Vive la France” from the underlying sign are still visible (Fig. 9). This juxtaposition implies at the very least an equation between the patriotic duties of citizenship and popular entertainment, and in its logical extension, the eclipse of the former by the latter. The appeal for a “union of all French people” invokes the policy of assimilation conveniently emphasized during wartime in order to legitimate the use of colonial troops in battle, and opportunistically revoked in peacetime, as illustrated by the problems

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Figure 9 One poster may hide another, Fausse alerte.

experienced by Baker’s characters while attempting to assimilate fully into French cultural life (see Ezra 2000a: 97–128). Both Zouzou and Zazu, having helped facilitate relationships between (white) lovers, end their respective films romantically unattached: Zouzou figured as a lonely bird of paradise, singing away in a giant gilded cage, and Zazu shown getting on with the business of running a nightclub as both couples she helped bring together—the young people and their initially feuding parents— make wedding plans. Like Zouzou, Zazu is at once part of the group that comprises “tous les Français” (all French people, as De Gaulle would later say in his famous London radio broadcast) and separate from it, joining the fight against Germany’s bid for world domination, while at the same time failing to be completely accepted by her adoptive compatriots. Yet Baker’s stardom also embodied French resistance to being eclipsed by US cultural imperialism. She was American, yes, but she had been repackaged and transformed into La Baker, singing French songs and speaking French

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dialogue in French films, now a (faux) colonial subaltern rather than an American imperialist. If the war against foreign encroachment was to be waged in the spotlight, then there was no better soldier-performer than Baker. Her stardom embodied French resistance to the idea of being absorbed into another empire, and at the same insisted on France’s role as a metropolitan hub, a center around which revolved an apparently robust colonial periphery, despite signs to the contrary (see Britton 2007). This, the film implied, and explicitly stated in its American title, was “the French way” (Fig. 10). France’s adoption of Baker for its own ends recalls Regnault’s photographs of Africans, which borrowed from them in order, ultimately, to subjugate them. Similarly, exoticist cinema links the ostensibly admiring exoticist gaze to the fetishization and reification of the human body. Of all the roles she performed, of all the images she projected, none has outlasted the image of Baker in a tiny skirt made of banana skins, which drew attention to her physical charms more than it hid them. It

Figure 10 Josephine Baker, Fausse alerte.

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is this primitivist, fetishistic detail that sums up better than any song, film, or theatrical role the significance of Josephine Baker in French culture in the interwar period. Like the concept of the fetish, borrowed from (and subsequently projected onto) Africa, and used by colonizers against Africans (see Wood 2013: 153), photographing the black body reinforced its subjugation. Homi Bhabha links racist stereotype with fetishism (Bhabha 1994: 74–75), thus returning the concept of the sexual fetish to its exoticist origins. In the Marxist sense of the term, these films obscure the colonial relations of power that produce the colonial subjects and objects in front of the camera. But in both cases (psychoanalytic and economic), to fetishize alterity—in other words, to exoticize it—is not to venerate it: is to disavow a certain state of affairs in favor of a fiction, a phantasm—whether this phantasm is that of the “black body,” or that of the mask, which I will examine in the next section.

Cléo’s masks: Regimes of objectification in the French New Wave There is a moment early in Agnès Varda’s 1962 film Cléo de 5 à 7 when the film’s eponymous heroine, a pop singer named Cléo, notices a display of tribal masks in a shop window while riding in a taxi through the streets of Paris. This is an iconic moment in the film, highlighting the importance of masquerade in Cléo’s narcissistic world of appearances (Fig. 11). But this scene also indicates the extent to which representations of alterity and discourses of cultural self-fashioning are rooted in narratives of historical progress. Masks are icons of “the primitive,” and their presence in chic boutiques and bourgeois homes reinforces implicit cultural assumptions about how far “now” is from “then,” and “we” are from “them.” These assumptions, however, are seriously undermined by the forms of racialized violence that erupted in the twentieth century. Removed from one context and deposited in another, exotic masks perform a double displacement: they represent the cultures and places from whence they come (and a larger global system of expropriation and uneven exchange), and they also suggest a temporal décalage or gap between instances of dehumanizing violence, invoking what Maxim Silverman has called

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Figure 11 Masks in the window, Cléo de 5 à 7.

“composite memories” (Silverman 2008: 425). As objects, masks come alive with the episodes of human history they embody, but they also invoke the reverse process of objectification in which human beings are reduced to the status of objects in cultural and sexual commodification, a reduction that paved the way for the worst atrocities of the twentieth century, including systematic torture and genocide. At the same time, masks inhabit a metaphorical space of disguise, censorship, and displacement. Despite the fact that the French New Wave coincided with the height of the Algerian War, as Benjamin Stora notes, very few films were made about the war while it was taking place. Those that were made were banned until after the Evian Accords in 1962, and not released until 1963 (such as Godard’s Le Petit soldat [The Little Soldier], Robert Enrico’s La Belle vie [The Good Life, made in 1962], and James Blue’s Les Oliviers de la justice [The Olive Trees of Justice, made in 1962]) (Stora 1997: 111). Filmmakers had to find other ways to represent the war. The New Wave directors were, according to Stora, particularly adept at expressing the “’déconstructions’ politiques, idéologiques, culturelles qui travaillent alors la société en profondeur” (Stora 1991: 40) (political, ideological, and cultural deconstructions that were taking hold in society at the time).

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These deconstructions insinuated themselves into many New Wave films, undermining assumptions about social and cultural hierarchies. In Cléo and other New Wave films, masks appear as overdetermined memorial palimpsests, signifying multiple layers of historical trauma as well as the repression of these traumas in a dialectic of exposure and concealment. The stage had been set for the display of masks in fashionable homes and department store windows as early as 1926, with the appearance in French Vogue of Man Ray’s photograph Noire et blanche (Black and White), which juxtaposed a white European woman’s face with that of a Baule-style mask from the Ivory Coast. The photo’s publication in a magazine designed to promote the mass-market consumption of fashion marked the official domestication of exotic objects that had begun with Picasso’s incorporation of African and Oceanic objects into his work in the first decades of the twentieth century. The increasing visibility and availability of objects such as masks and carvings inspired the vogue for primitivism among Cubists and other avant-garde artists in the interwar period and beyond (André Malraux mused about this dimension of Picasso’s work in his 1974 book on the artist called La Tête d’obsidienne, translated as Picasso’s Mask). According to Wendy A. Grossman and Steven Manford, the appearance of Man Ray’s photograph in the fashion magazine “brought the ‘vogue’ for things African into the mainstream” (Grossman and Manford 2006: 137). It is significant that the site of the masks’ display in Cléo de 5 à 7 is not a museum, or even a bohemian-bourgeois home, but a shop window. This positioning of the masks as items of consumption points to the convergence of exoticism and consumer culture in France. In one sense, the masks Cléo sees in passing can be viewed as a comment on Cléo’s own mask-like persona, her performativity as both a singer in the public eye and as a woman embracing the trappings of femininity, complete with blonde wig, makeup, spike heels, and a dress with swishing skirt and tightly cinched waist that emphasizes her hourglass figure, making her look like nothing so much as a drag-queen. The masks Cléo sees from the taxi are displayed in the shop window very much like the hats in the women’s hat shop she visits earlier in the film, reinforcing the idea of what Joan Rivière (1929) called “womanliness as masquerade” (for illuminating discussions of the role of gender in Cléo, see Sandy Flitterman-Lewis 1996: 268–84

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and Jill Forbes’s comprehensive analysis in Forbes 2001: 83–89). But the masks also evoke the racialized violence lurking not so much beneath the surface as on the surface, hidden in plain view among the exotic objects and accessories introduced into French cultural life with the rise of mass culture.

Close-up on Cléo Cléo de 5 à 7 was made in 1961, as the Algerian War entered its final, bloody year. Seemingly shot in real time (seemingly, because the film is actually only 90 minutes long), the film charts two hours in the life of a minor celebrity anxiously awaiting the results of a medical test. The only explicit reference to the war, apart from a news bulletin on the radio in the taxi that ferries Cléo around Paris, appears in the form of Antoine, the French soldier on leave who renews the despairing Cléo’s sense of hope and vitality as she struggles with life in the public eye and with the prospect of her own mortality. Cléo’s name, we are told, is short for Cléopatre, or Cleopatra, an association reinforced by the name “Antoine,” or Antony. The evocation of Egypt in the protagonists’ names is only one of many references to non-French cultures in the film. At a pivotal point in the film, Cléo pauses to look at herself in a mirror on the outside wall of a Chinese restaurant, her face surrounded by Chinese characters. In a voice-over interior monlogue, she observes, “Je ne regarde personne que moi. C’est lassant.” (I am not looking at anyone but myself. It’s tiring.) Although this statement is ambiguous taken out of context (the “it” in “it’s tiring” could be interpreted in opposite ways: looking only at herself is tiring, or looking at others would be tiring), it actually refers to Cléo’s newfound determination to emerge from her narcissistic shell and open herself up to the world around her. In one of her first acts of awareness of her surroundings after her turn away from her habitual self-absorption, Cléo enters a café where she hears two men discussing Algeria, followed by two other men discussing Surrealism, while others debate the merits of Miro and Picasso. At another table, people discuss an acquaintance’s trip to Africa. (These snatches of conversation referring to non-French cultures

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recall the first time we see Cléo in a café, near the beginning of the film, when Cléo’s minder Angèle tells a story about a man who travels to Egypt and Turkey.) Before meeting Antoine, Cléo inquires, in an apparent nonsequitur, whether an observatory that has been drawn to her attention in the Parc Montsouris is Des Mille et une nuits? (from The Arabian Nights?). Finally, at the very end of the film, as a sign of her newly emergent interest in the outside world, Cléo announces that she would like to “connaître le Liban” [get to know Lebanon]. For Cléo, awareness of other people seems to be linked to an awareness of other peoples. Varda develops the theme of alterity in a playful film-within-the-film, which Cléo’s friend Dorothée, an artist’s model, shows her when they visit Dorothée’s boyfriend at work. Shot in black and white and approximately three minutes in duration, Les Fiancés du Pont Mac Donald (The fiancés of MacDonald Bridge) features such New Wave regulars as Anna Karina, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jean-Claude Brialy. In this whimsical tale, Godard plays a young man whose world changes completely once he puts on a pair of dark glasses. His blonde girlfriend, called Anna, turns into a black woman, and an insignificant mishap becomes a fatal accident (complete with an ambulance transformed into a hearse). Once the man removes the sunglasses, everything returns to normal and he cries, “C’était à cause de mes lunettes que je voyais tout en noir!” (It was because of my glasses that everything looked black). Blackness turns out to have been an illusion, a question literally of outlook. The short film’s funereal imagery indicates that the color black is meant to be interpreted as a metaphor for affect (as in a dark mood), but in the context of the larger film’s exoticist allusions, the short film’s use of a black woman inevitably conjures up certain cultural associations. Judith Mayne has noted the short film’s “unproblematized relation between black and white; indeed, the black remains as the unexamined projection of the white man’s sunglasses, or the spectacle of a ‘primitive’ mask” (Mayne 1990: 202). The black version of Anna is presented as a disguise covering the “real” Anna, who, within the diegetic universe of the short film, appears to have been wearing a kind of black mask. This notion of blackness as a mask or visual effect can be read as a kind of reversal of Frantz Fanon’s 1952 Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), which argues that colonial subjects of African

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descent internalize the worldview of their white oppressors. For Fanon, the white mask was a symbol of the attitudes and behaviors of a dominant (colonizing) culture that had been embraced by a dominated (colonized) culture. The performance of blackness, on the other hand (as epitomized by the wearing of blackface, for example), is a form of cultural tourism, a temporary borrowing or wearing of a mask—representing not “black” culture, but the system of domination that insists on polarizing what the terms “black” and “white” represent. In the short film, difference turns out to be a reflection of the lens through which one looks—in other words, subjective, and culturally conditioned. Cultural tourism commodifies “racial” identity, making of it something to be tried on like a hat in a shop, or displayed like an Oceanic mask in a European artist’s living room. Immediately following the scene in Cléo de 5 à 7 in which Cléo is confronted with the masks in the shop window, she encounters art and architecture students engaging in the ritualistic behavior of the French tradition known as bizutage, or hazing, complete with disguises (we see an American Indian headdress, and some students’ faces are painted, while some wear homemade masks and headgear). Varda is suggesting a parallel between the “primitive” masks and rituals and those of the Parisian students, in the manner of the Exposition anticoloniale staged by Surrealists and Communists during the Exposition coloniale of 1931, which presented Christian religious icons as domestic fetishes by displaying them alongside masks and sacred objects from cultures deemed “primitive” (Lebovics 1992: 105–10). When one of the students, a young black man, presses his face to the window of Cléo’s taxi, it is, according to Steven Ungar, “as though one of the masks she had just seen suddenly came to life” (Ungar 2008: 35). The masks in Cléo are shown in a brief but striking collage of closeups, in such a way as to evoke the 1953 Alain Resnais and Chris Marker film Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues also Die), which itself mirrors the display of masks in ethnographic museums, often removed from their historical context (see Beugnet 2006). This cultural commodification finds its parallel in the way in which Cléo herself is packaged and sold to the public as spectacle. As a star, Cléo is commodified, her humanity objectified in the mechanical reproduction and dissemination of her image. (Her commodified status is the inverse of the sculptures that

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her friend Dorothée poses for, which comprise a range of original representations of a single referent, as opposed to the multiple copies of Cléo’s hit pop song.) Varda’s film explicitly invokes this process of objectification through the use of close-up framing in the scene set in Cléo’s apartment in which the singer rehearses one of her songs, and her face, detached from its suddenly darkened surroundings, is bathed, in showbiz style, in a spotlight. Cléo’s face is thus projected as that of a star performer, wearing the frozen mask of what Deleuze and Guattari call “visagéité” or “faciality” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 205–34). In faciality, which is the effect produced by close-ups in films, the face is separated from what Deleuze identified as its three conventional functions: those of individuation (that which distinguishes or characterizes each person), socialization (the manifestation of a social role), and relation or communication (the assurance not only of “communication between two persons, but also, within a single person, the internal accord between one’s character and one’s role”) (Deleuze 1983: 141; 99; cited in Bogue 2003: 78). Stripped of these functions through the medium of film, the face becomes a thing: “Rather than being a body part in a determinate spatio-temporal setting, or a marker of an identity, a role or a relation, the face in close-up is an autonomous object” (Bogue 2003: 78). Close-ups in the cinema, which create the illusion of intimacy by appearing to bring the viewer closer to the subject of contemplation, in fact erect a barrier between the two, turning the subject into an object.

Overlapping regimes of objectification François Trauffaut plays on this objectifying function of the close-up in his 1962 Jules et Jim, through the use of a series of freeze frames. Catherine, a woman involved in a love triangle with friends Jules and Jim, is shown playfully mugging for a diegetically nonexistent camera. When she poses and pouts in freeze frame, Catherine’s fixed, mask-like expressions exaggerate the expressivity that differentiates humans from other animals, to the point of reversal, so that they slip into the realm of the nonexpressive or inanimate (Fig. 12). Adapting Michael Rothberg’s “overlapping regimes of racialization” (Rothberg 2009: 258), it is possible

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Figure 12 Catherine mugging for the camera, Jules et Jim.

to speak of overlapping regimes of objectification, as Catherine’s (like Cléo’s) star turn through the use of close-up is inseparable from the performance of gender, and as the logic of sexism is shown to overlap with that of exoticism. When Catherine and Jules are walking along the banks of the Seine, Jules asks Jim, in the presence of Catherine, “Qui a écrit ‘la femme est naturelle, donc abominable’” (Who wrote that “woman is natural, and therefore abominable”)? To which Jim replies, “C’est Baudelaire, mais il parlait des femmes d’un certain monde, et d’une certaine société.” (It was Baudelaire, but he was referring to women from a particular world, and a particular society.) Jules counters, “Pas du tout; il parlait de la femme en général.” (Not at all; he was talking about women in general.) Traits that Jim reserves for subaltern women, women “from a particular world, and a particular society”—far from “here,” in other words, whether “here” is defined in terms of geographical location or social class—Jules would ascribe to all women. This alternation between “other” and “all” women reveals a similar objectifying dynamic at work in discourses of exoticism and sexism. Later in the film, Jim encounters a man in a bar who introduces his girlfriend as “creuse” (hollow), “vide” (empty), “une chose” (a thing), “un bel objet” (a beautiful object), which would seem to describe the fossilized, flattened images projected by Catherine’s reified facial expressions. At the end of the film, Catherine and Jim do become reduced to pure matter, in a striking sequence that shows their incinerated bodies being ground into ashes. This scene illustrates the

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logical conclusion of the decontextualizing objectification described and performed by the man in the bar, and invokes “multidirectional memory” (Rothberg 2009) in its unavoidable allusion to the Holocaust— an association made previously in Varda’s early short film L’Opéra-Mouffe (1958) in a shot of a wall bearing the graffiti-scrawled slogan “Paix avec l’Algérie libre” (Peace with a free Algeria) next to a swastika (see Ungar 2008: 106–07). These moments serve as what Michael Rothberg (2009) calls noeuds de mémoire (knots of memory), which rupture narrative flow and compel us to consider the historical consequences of objectifying acts. The overlapping regimes of objectification seem to invoke a concomitant temporal overlap, a palimpsest of cultural memories. This decontextualization is also central to exoticism, which, it could be said, “facializes” its objects, both inanimate and human. In Jules et Jim, for example, it is no accident that Jules and Jim’s interest in Catherine is predicated on their obsession with a so-called primitive sculpture, which they first see in a private slide show given by a friend, in a mixture of academicism and tourism. Like archaeologist-explorers of the Indiana Jones variety (or perhaps like Truffaut’s fellow filmmaker Godard, who studied ethnography at the Sorbonne), Jules and Jim travel to the Adriatic island where the sculpture is situated, in order to admire it firsthand. It is significant that the sculpture that so captivates Jules and Jim is located on an island in the Adriatic, to the west of Greece and to the east of Africa, midway on the ideological world map between the “primitive” and the classical, the exotic and the ancient. In his notes for an Essai sur l’exotisme (Essay on Exoticism), Victor Segalen proposed l’exotisme dans le temps (exoticism in time) as a corollary to l’exotisme dans l’espace (exoticism in space) (Segalen 1986: 38). (For an interesting analysis of Segalen’s work and the larger context of exoticist thought in France, see Forsdick 2000.) Baudrillard, too, noted the analogy between historical and geographical displacement: “For modern man . . . changing country or latitude is essentially equivalent to plunging into the past (as tourism well demonstrates)” (Baudrillard 2005: 79 n4). In New Wave films, representations of antiquity and exoticism at times overlap in a heterogeneous atmosphere of cultural décalage, or slippage.

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Some New Wave directors used antiquity to stand in for, or disguise, the unpalatable present of a colonial war. Just as Jules et Jim’s First World War setting can be seen on one level as a displacement of the Algerian War, other New Wave films evoke the past in order to bypass, or more accurately, to point obliquely to, a present that cannot be acknowledged explicitly. Resnais’s L’année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad, 1961), for example, whose ambiguous rape scenes have often been interpreted as an unambiguous metaphor for France’s actions in Algeria, is a film that is overwhelmed by antiquity, in the form of neoclassical statues that grace the formal gardens in which the nameless characters circulate. In fact, Resnais himself has insisted, somewhat enigmatically, that the film was a “documentary about a statue” (cited in Higgins 1996: 101). Lynn Higgins has pointed out that M’s supposed “identification” of the statue as a representation of “Charles III” is actually a mystification, as no such historical personage existed. Higgins traces the web of associations generated by the false identification to Charles de Gaulle, who was often referred to as “Le Roi Charles” (King Charles) in jokes and cartoons of the period (Higgins 1996: 104–05), and who of course played a major role in the decolonization of Algeria. In foregrounding antiquity (and a false one, no less), Resnais is performing a double substitution, in which a temporal displacement stands in for a geographical one. However, this masking effect, far from obscuring its object, actually draws attention to it. A similar dynamic can be seen in Resnais’s next film, Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Muriel, or the Time of Return).

Multidirectional memory in Muriel In Muriel, as in Marienbad, allusions to earlier eras signal the processes of displacement that ostensibly enable us to “forget” more recent historical traumas, but which ultimately flag up the multidirectional nature of cultural memory. In Muriel, the horrors of both the present (the Algerian War) and the recent past (the Second World War) are obscured beneath the banal surfaces of everyday life, as forms of sexual and cultural objectification are pushed to their logical conclusion in the violation and

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murder of an Algerian woman. Perhaps more than any other New Wave film, Muriel engages with the complexities of multidirectional memory by staging the temporal displacement of violence, revealing not so much a greater violence as the fact that one mask can conceal another. Old and new are juxtaposed in the film’s setting, in the gleaming glass, neon-lit city of Boulogne, erected on the ruins of those parts of the city destroyed in the Second World War. The film’s narrative and visual emphasis on commodity culture (the buying and selling of antiques, the repeated shots of brightly lit shop windows groaning with the latest consumer goods and gadgets) goes beyond the symbolic articulation of effects. Resnais’s depictions of interiors-as-exteriors—shop windows lit in such as way as to merge with the streets of Boulogne—suggest that the commodities that decorate the homes and streets of metropolitan France appear not as arbitrary signs, but as both symbols and artifacts of a system of social relations based on expropriation, uneven exchange, and, ultimately, objectification. Hélène sells antiques out of her home, and her grown stepson Bernard, back from military service in Algeria, comments that because of all the buying and selling of antiques in the apartment, he never knows which era he is going to wake up in. Hélène’s apartment, with its chaotic jumble of antiques and layering of historical eras, is a microcosm of the city of Boulogne. Gaston Bounoure has noted the sense of displacement the characters experience: “Les personnages de Muriel . . . sont ‘déplacés.’ Ils viennent d’un autre temps; ils cherchent un autre espace” (The characters in Muriel . . . are displaced. They come from another time, and are searching for another place) (Bounoure 1974: 55). This perpetual state of displacement in which the characters find themselves is accompanied by their attempts to obliterate their own past. Alphonse, Hélène’s former lover, claims falsely to have spent several years running a café in Algeria, and he travels around with his young girlfriend, whom he introduces as his niece, neglecting to mention that he is actually married to another woman. Bernard claims to have a girlfriend named Muriel, but it emerges that Muriel is in fact (or may be) the name of a woman in Algeria whose torture Bernard witnessed and in which he may have participated. Emma Wilson has suggested that in Muriel, Resnais “does not so much echo

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physical mutilation . . . as intimate the psychological effects of torture on its victim” (Wilson 2006: 100). If the familial and social entanglements articulate the psychological effects of colonial brutality, the form of the film itself, whose fragmented editing style Celia Britton has interpreted as a cinematic embodiment of Muriel’s mutilation, mimics the structures of torture and dismemberment (Britton 1990: 38). It is as though the film’s form were mirroring the dynamic of displacement that haunts the narrative. This sense of displacement is most acute in the context of Bernard’s complicated relationship to his own past. In some ways, Bernard wishes to hold on to the past, and even carry it into the present (he keeps meticulous records of his wartime experiences, and when going to visit his girlfriend Marie-Do, he says that he is going to visit “Muriel”). At the same time, he is not forthcoming about disclosing his own desires and motives to others. As Lynne Higgins has noted, Bernard’s face is often concealed or obscured (Higgins 1996: 110), and he even wears a mask one evening at dinner—a pair of googly-eye glasses, for which his stepmother reprimands him—hinting at the broader function of the mask of censorship (Fig. 13). Exactly halfway through the film, Bernard shows a home movie he has shot composed of banal scenes from military

Figure 13 Bernard’s glasses, Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour. . .

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life in Algeria, which he projects while recounting the story of Muriel’s torture and death, which we never see. (Celia Britton has argued that although the film does not establish unequivocally that Muriel was raped, the motif of violent penetration that permeates the film adds a dimension of sexual violation to Muriel’s torture [Britton 1990: 44–46].) Naomi Greene calls the absence of scenes of torture in Bernard’s film “a black hole at the center of Muriel,” and interprets this absence as an indictment of France’s repression of the war (Greene 1999: 49). After showing the film, Bernard stands before the screen, which is illuminated (or interrogated) by the harsh light of the projector, the blank screen a possible reference to the “carré blanc,” literally the blank space of censorship (Higgins 1996: 110) (Fig. 14). This “carré blanc” might also be likened to the gleaming plate glass shop windows to which Resnais returns so often in the film, and which, it may be argued, are monuments not to memory, but to forgetting—or at least, like screen memories, to attempts to forget that ultimately point to the events they are trying to suppress. In a similar way, the apparently innocuous, even jocular, images in Bernard’s home movie finally reveal more than they disguise. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit have argued that the seemingly random scenes of

Figure 14 The white space of censorship, Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour.

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military life in Algeria actually match up with the acts of torture being described, in a series of “correspondences”: When . . . Bernard says that the five soldiers participated in the torture of Muriel, we see five canteens lying on the ground; a soldier raises his arm just as Bernard speaks of Muriel putting her hands over her eyes; the shape of the minarets we see evokes that of the flashlight Robert is said to have focused on Muriel; Bernard’s reference to Muriel’s swollen body looking as if it had been under water is followed by an image of a soldier diving into a pool. (Bersani and Dutoit 1993: 195–96)

Although the banal images cover over and attempt to distract from the violence, they cannot seem to help replicating its form, as though the violence had infected everyday life, seeping through the screen that would obscure it. These superficial images invite us to plumb the depths of the surface, to find what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil” (1994 [1963]), and what Maxim Silverman (2006) has called the “everyday horror” that characterizes involuntary memories of historical trauma in post-Holocaust France. The way in which the anodyne images from Bernard’s home movie both illustrate and disguise the brutality that cannot be shown mirrors the way in which modern Boulogne paves over its wartime ruins: the “correspondences” of which Bersani and Dutoit speak are themselves multidirectional, reaching out to link (certainly analogically, if not causally) traumatic events from different eras. The pointed allusions to the Second World War in the shots of the ruined city cannot fail to invoke the Holocaust, especially in the wake of Resnais’s explosive documentary Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), the text of whose narration was written by Jean Cayrol, the screenwriter of Muriel. Silverman has noted the earlier film’s suggestion of associations between these historical traumas, writing that, for Resnais, “Algeria is the double of the concentrationary universe of the Holocaust” (Silverman 2006: 14). Bernard’s narration of his participation in Muriel’s torture resonates with the voice-over in Nuit et Brouillard, a film that also juxtaposes banal shots of everyday life with descriptions of the most horrific atrocities. Alastair Duncan has observed the echoes in Muriel of the Holocaust documentary, whose voice-over “exhorted its audience not to believe that the Plague

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rampant in the concentration camps was limited to one time or one country and urged them to look around ‘autour de nous’” (Duncan 2004: 217). In Muriel, we are again asked to look around us, at the trappings of modern consumer culture and daily life in postwar France, and beyond, to atrocities being committed on other continents or in other eras. As Bernard’s home movie masks the violence of torture, the horrors of the Algerian War inevitably mask the horrors of the Holocaust—not as the “ultimate” horror finally revealed, but as a still-living cultural memory (one of the possible referents of the “return” of the film’s title) and reference point for subsequent acts of unfathomable brutality. If these incomparable historical traumas are unspeakable examples of barbarity, it is their very ineffability that brings them together, weaving them into a single, tongue-tied knot of memory. Masks in particular resonate both as a physical presence and metaphorically as a means of disguise, or masquerade, suggesting the larger dynamic of disguise that New Wave directors used in order to represent unpalatable events both past and present. According to Elza Adamowicz, “Le masque ne se fond jamais avec le corps sur lequel il est collé; il reste attaché au contexte d’où il est arraché. . . . Le masque, espace de l’équivoque, figure de l’altérité, est le lieu du surgissement de l’autre au sein du même” (Adamowicz 1995: 91). (The mask never merges with the body on which it is placed; it remains attached to the context from which it was taken. The mask, space of the ambiguous, figure of alterity, is the site of the emergence of the other within the same.) In Godard’s A Bout de souffle (Breathless, 1959), which Benjamin Stora has called a “film-miroir” for the “Algerian generation,” whose “hero,” like France itself, advances toward its ineluctable destiny (Stora 1991: 40), there is an extended scene in Patricia’s room, in which small-time gangster Michel sits against a wall displaying a Picasso print of a man holding a mask (“L’Ancienne et la Nouvelle Année,” from 1953). Michel says, “Autant dire la vérité; les autres croient que tu bluffes, et comme ça tu gagnes” (You might as well tell the truth; people will think you are bluffing, and that is how you win). Masks, like the truth in a double bluff, appear to conceal something else, when in fact their secrets lie on the surface for all to see. In New Wave films, made in the lengthening shadow of the Holocaust and as the sun was

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setting on France’s colonial empire, masks evoke the play of concealment and exposure that characterizes multidirectional memory. But they also evoke the legitimating symbolic violence of objectification, which entails the construction of a phantasmatic mask that is overlaid on all members of a given group. Individual members of a group thus identified (e.g., “Africans,” “women,” “Jews”) are rendered interchangeable, in a process of abstraction I have elsewhere called the identification of difference (Ezra 2000a). Within these overlapping regimes of objectification, masks function as fetishes in the Freudian sense, diverting attention from the face by means of a facial substitute, which disavows the assumed absence of humanity beneath the mask.

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In previous chapters, I have examined discourses that redraw the boundaries between objects and humans. The force of this conceptual remapping is so great that it affects even expressions of resistance against commodification and planned obsolescence. Properties traditionally associated with the human are reassigned to inanimate objects in commodity fetishism and exoticism, while reification contributes to the progressive dehumanization of people, who become alienated from the totality of the production cycle. The process of abstraction that creates exchange value is, when applied to humans, a potentially deadly one. This abstraction is what allows individuals to be reduced to part-objects—the term is borrowed from psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1935), who used it to designate an infant’s limited perception of his or her mother as that part of her with which the infant comes into contact (notably, the breast). Here, I use the term in a broader sense to refer to the designation of people as representative of a larger group that is then differentiated en masse from another group or groups. The structure of substitution that renders one person interchangeable with any other within a group, and the disavowal of the differences that are thus elided, finds its logical extension in the polarization of group identities (“us” versus “them”) in times of conflict. This chapter explores this process of disavowal and substitution in the context of the two biggest wars of the twentieth century. In the first section, I examine the fetishistic logic of displacement and disavowal that underwrites the proliferation of metaphors of severed heads in the French silent film serial Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade, 1915–16), made during the First World War. The Great War was especially devastating to the French, who suffered some 1,700,000 losses

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and 4,260,000 wounded. Though the war had been going on for over a year when the films were shot, the serial makes no explicit mention of the conflict. This apparent omission could perhaps be explained by the fact that audiences were looking for diversions to distract them from the horrors taking place around them. Feuillade himself knew exactly what he was distracting viewers from, having seen these horrors firsthand while serving as a sergeant earlier in the war, before being released from duty because of a heart condition in July 1915. In its refusal to show the physical horrors of the war explicitly, Les Vampires mirrors French newsreels of the period, which “[hid] neither the destruction nor the suffering of the soldiers but never reveal[ed] a corpse, a mutilated body or a wounded man” (Sorlin 1999: 11). This omission was even more marked in feature films, according to Pierre Sorlin, who notes “the silence of French cinema” on the subject of the war (Sorlin 1999: 118). However, despite appearances to the contrary, Les Vampires was not, in fact, “silent” on the subject of the war. Richard Abel has speculated about the symbolic presence of the war in the serial: “I myself wonder if, in their conjunction of the real and the unreal, the banal and the unexpectedly terrifying, the films also convey, through displacement, the French experience of the war—the absurd proximity of normal life to the ghastly horrors of trench warfare” (Abel 1984: 76). Abel’s suspicion can indeed be borne out by close analysis of the film serial. The next film examined in this chapter was made during a different war, in a different country, but displays a similar set of veiled allusions to the destruction that was taking place in Europe. The Marx Brothers’ vehicle The Big Store (Charles Reisner, 1941) uses comedy to evoke the un-funny events of the Second World War. Rather than trivializing trauma, comedy provided the mechanisms of displacement necessary for processing the inhumanity that was taking hold in many parts of the world. In the first part of the twentieth century, Charles Musser notes, “Humor helped Americans negotiate, question, accept, and sometimes even challenge their situation. . . . [Comedy] gave voice to pleasures and discomforts that did not, and often could not, find articulation in other forums” (Musser 1991: 41–42). I will argue that one such “discomfort” was the anguish and sense of helplessness many Americans (recent immigrants as well as long-established residents) experienced in relation to the events

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unfolding in Europe after Hitler’s rise to power. Charlene Fix calls The Big Store a “celebration of the contribution of immigrants to America’s cultural diversity” (Fix 2013: 139); in its own way, the Marx Brothers film grapples with the logic of the fetish, or the replacement of something human with something inhuman, by thematizing the reduction of people to part-objects.

The case of the phantom fetish: Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires On the cover of Laura Mulvey’s collection of essays entitled Fetishism and Curiosity (1996), there is a well-known illustration of Musidora in the role of Irma Vep from Les Vampires. This image of a head floating in space surrounded by a question mark was apparently, and aptly, chosen to suggest the “curiosity” of the book’s title. However, it also evokes the “fetishism” of the title, as it provides a substitute for an absence within the book, which contains no mention of Les Vampires, Musidora, or Irma Vep. This familiar fetish-image of Irma Vep’s head, taken from a contemporary publicity poster, perfectly embodies one of the serial’s central motifs: the severed head. This truncated body part stands synecdochally for the whole person, as the phallus “stands” for masculinity. In a similar way, any given member of a group in wartime (e.g., “the French,” “the Germans”) is stripped of his or her difference from the other members of the group, as difference is disavowed in the fetishistic logic of national identity. One act of violence conceals another; fetishism entails disavowing difference by imposing a substitute that gives the illusion of sameness. The severed head, a fetish standing in for castration, is a link in a chain of substitutions: the fear of castration itself was a phantasmatic substitute for the very real dismemberment taking place on the battlefields. In what follows, I examine the recurring image of the severed head in Les Vampires in relation to its various metonymic functions. In particular, I argue for a reconsideration of its emblematic status as a symbol of castration, and suggest how the image of the severed head in Feuillade’s serial can be linked to the traumas engendered by the First World War.

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Feuillade’s serial follows the exploits of a gang of criminals, masters of disguise, who terrorize the Parisian bourgeoisie while being pursued by investigative journalist Philippe Guérande (played by Edouard Mathé) and his sidekick, a reformed vampire and sometime mortician named Mazamette (played by celebrated character actor Marcel Levesque). Les Vampires predates the birth of the vampire film genre that viewers today would recognize, which began with Murnau’s 1921 Nosferatu, based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Though both kinds of film reflect similar anxieties about infiltration and physical violation, Feuillade’s serial is more concerned with urban crime than with rustic folklore. Anton Kaes has argued that crime films made during the Great War or in the interwar period (such as Fritz Lang’s 1931 M) reflect a sense of paranoia that can be traced to the enemy’s hidden but pervasive presence in wartime trenches. Invoking Ernst Jünger’s theory of “Total Mobilization,” Kaes contends that the war mentality had pervaded civilian life to the extent that enemies—in the form of criminals—were thought to be lurking in the shadows of the great metropolises (Kaes 1993). The sleuthing used to track down criminals can be linked to the preoccupation with code breaking during the war. The Great War’s presence is in fact encrypted in Feuillade’s serial, which invites its own decoding in a series of clues offered to viewers. The first clue involves the very depiction of codes within the films. The serial abounds in veiled semiotic systems such as cryptograms, as in the third episode, entitled “Le Cryptogramme rouge” (The Red Codebook); numerical codes (episode 9), invisible ink (episode 8), and anagrams (as when the letters in the name “Irma Vep” dance around on a marquis to form the word “Vampire,” in the third episode). The repeated emphasis on deciphering scrambled messages evokes the practice of code breaking used in espionage. The French were the most effective cryptanalysts of the First World War, possessing “the strongest team of codebreakers in Europe,” which they had developed as a defensive measure after their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (Singh 1999: 104). Other clues to the war’s hidden presence include the use, in episode 5, of a poisonous gas with which the vampire gang immobilizes a roomful of party guests in order to rob them (Francis Lacassin describes this scene in

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terms that seem unconsciously to evoke the war, as the transformation of “a ballroom in to a gigantic mass grave” (Lacassin 1994: 177)). Later, in the ninth episode, Irma wears a gas mask taken from a chemical laboratory where she has been helping the new vampire leader conduct experiments; and the vampires again attempt to use poisoned gas on their enemies in the tenth episode. These aspects of the plot would have evoked the first use of poison gas as a weapon of war by the Germans in the spring of 1915, just a few months prior to the filming of these episodes. Similarly, the oversize cannon that the villain Satanas uses to blow up a Parisian cabaret would certainly conjure up the “Big Bertha” used in battle for the first time in the First World War. And finally, the exploding ship from which Irma narrowly escapes death (for which Feuillade appears to have used actual newsreel footage of the war) would have reminded audiences of the sinking of the Lusitania, the British passenger ship bombed by the Germans, also in the spring of 1915, which killed some 1400 civilians. But the serial’s most pointed allusion to the Great War occurs in its almost obsessive allusions to fathers, either actual pères-de-famille, or men who could potentially father children with the hundreds of thousands of women left partnerless as a result of the war, contributing to the muchdiscussed anxiety over declining birthrates in France at the time (see Cole 1996). We learn in the first moments of the first episode, and are reminded several times thereafter, that one of the central characters, Mazamette, is a single father of three small boys. (Of course, Mazamette’s single status raises the question of the absent mother, presumably dead, but it is Mazamette’s status as a father that is repeatedly emphasized in the films.) Mazamette’s lapse, and later relapse, from respectability and righteousness into a life of crime is motivated by his need to provide for his young sons, as he reminds Philippe by brandishing a photograph of himself with his progeny at several opportune moments throughout the serial. Then too, the serial’s morally upright hero, the investigative journalist Philippe Guérande, lives at home with his widowed mother, while identifying with his deceased father through his paternalistic treatment of Mazamette, which includes boxing his ears when he disapproves of his behavior; showing him a moralistic passage from La Fontaine’s Fables when Mazamette threatens to return to his criminal

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ways; and bestowing his blessing upon him when he wishes to marry. And finally, Irma Vep, a foundling, appears to be seeking a father figure in her liaisons with the succession of Grand Vampires, gang leaders with whom she invariably falls in love. The persistence of these images points to a cultural preoccupation with fathers at a time when many more of them were going off to the front than were coming back—in the first four months of the war alone, France had lost about 850,000 men, who were either dead, wounded, missing in action, or taken prisoner (Cobban 1990: 111). Absent fathers are figured throughout the films by means of a recurring image, that of the severed head, which appears in several guises. Indeed, the serial is capped by the title of the first episode, “La tête coupée” (The Severed Head). In this episode, the connection between the image of the severed head and fatherhood is established metonymically, as the film’s first mention of the missing head of a man decapitated by the vampire gang is sandwiched between two scenes that allude to fathers. The mention of the severed head is preceded by a scene in which Mazamette shows Philippe a photograph of himself with his three children, along with his wet-nurse bill; and it is followed by Philippe’s return home to bid farewell to his widowed mother before embarking upon the investigation (the widow’s mourning dress signaling the loss of her husband, Philippe’s father). The image of the severed head also appears in the metonymic form of a hat. Mazamette spends a brief period as a mortician, in an effort to reform his errant ways. As proof of his newfound trustworthiness, he shows Philippe a note (episode 3) that reads “Pompes Funèbres municipales. Certificat. Nous certifions que M. Mazamette Oscar-Cloud s’est toujours montré un employé dévoué et ponctuel au sujet duquel nos usagers n’ont jamais formulé la moindre plainte” (Municipal funeral home certificate. We certify that M. Oscar-Cloud Mazamette has proved to be a devoted and punctual employee, about whom our clients have never made the slightest complaint). Of course, the joke here is that the beneficiaries of Mazamette’s services would not be able to complain even if they wanted to, given their posthumous state. We are reminded of their presence later in the serial when we again see the top hat that emblematizes Mazamette’s

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career as a mortician. In the sixth episode, “Les Yeux qui fascinent” (Hypnotic Eyes), the top hat is displayed in a glass case on Mazamette’s mantelpiece, a constant reminder, within the diegesis, of his decision to follow the path of moral rectitude in becoming an honest working man, but also a symbolic reminder of the dead the film cannot mention explicitly (this silencing aptly invoked in the name of one of the vampires, “le Père Silence” (Father Silence) (Fig. 15). The missing member is alluded to again in the eighth episode of the serial, titled “Le Maître de la foudre” (The Thunder Master). The episode begins when Philippe and Mazamette inform Irma that Moréno, the lover whom she has described as a father figure, has been executed: Mazamette makes a slitting motion across his throat to indicate that he has been beheaded. Then, the new Grand Vampire, Satanas, disguised as a priest and addressed as “mon père” (my father), blows up the ship that Vep is traveling on by firing a cannon out the window of his hotel room.

Figure 15 Mazamette’s mortician hat, Episode 6, “Les Yeux qui fascinent,” Les Vampires.

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Mazamette, having been newly reunited with one of his sons, played by the well-known child actor Bout d’Zan, goes off in search of the culprit and discovers a hatbox which, instead of a top hat, contains a projectile bomb. The shot of the shell in the hatbox recalls the shot of the severed head in “The Severed Head,” creating a chain of signifiers that links the severed head in its box in the first episode to the mortician’s hat and then to the bomb in the hatbox in the eighth episode. When Satanas, referred to as “le chef ”—literally, “the head”—of the vampire gang, plants a bomb in his own top hat later in the episode, the link is reinforced. The fantasy underlying the war was that the missing head would be recovered (as it is in “The Severed Head”) and restored to the body familial. But as the war progressed, the missing head in Feuillade’s serial was replaced in its box first by a mortician’s hat, and then by a bomb: first, by a symbol of death, and then by the agent of its own destruction. The image of the severed head was not an innovation of the First World War era. At the end of the nineteenth century, severed heads were everywhere. Jean-Louis Leutrat points out that “cinema was born when Salome was carrying around the head of John the Baptist. Heads were falling a lot in this period, in literature, in painting, the theatre, and even in public squares” (Leutrat 1995: 39). Referring to the widespread perception by early film audiences that close-ups showed dismembered bodies, Leutrat continues: “There were links in the public imagination between the guillotine’s blade, the camera, and close-ups” (Leutrat 1995: 39). The severed head appears perhaps most insistently in the work of the film pioneer Méliès, whose better-known titles in this vein include Un Homme de têtes (The Four Troublesome Heads, 1898); Une Bonne farce avec ma tête (Tit for Tat, 1903); Le Mélomane (The Melomaniac, 1903); L’Homme à la tête de caoutchouc (The Man with the Rubber Head, 1901); and Le Bourreau turc (The Terrible Turkish Executioner, 1904), as well as his stage show, Le Décapité recalcitrant (The Recalcitrant Decapitated Man). Charles Bernheimer (1993) has argued that the castration fantasy is a product of the decadent imagination in European culture at the end of the nineteenth century. It is thus possible to interpret the function of the severed head as an extension of its function in earlier decades: ever

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since Freud’s pointed equation between decapitation and castration in his essay “The Medusa’s Head” (1959 [1922]), it has become somewhat automatic to read these images as symbols of castration. But unlike earlier depictions of headlessness, images of the severed head in Les Vampires had a significance beyond that of castration: that of the father separated from his family, through absence or death. Castration constructs the loss, through a phantasmatic wounding, of something that never existed except as a narcissistic projection (i.e., by giving a phallus with one hand and taking it away with the other). On the contrary, the loss of fathers and sons in the war was the result of very real wounding, very real slaughter that is the unspoken and unspeakable signified underlying these images of severed heads. The fear of castration actually covers over a deeper fear. Freud wrote his Medusa essay in 1922 when contemplation of the rather hypothetical prospect of castration could detract from all-too-real encounters in the course of daily life with any of the 3.2 million Austrian war wounded. The castration complex is thus itself is a fetish, a substitute that both disavows an absence (the absence of men slaughtered at war), and acts as a memorial to that absence. A fetish erects a phantom limb where there was none in the first place, a memorial reminding us of nothing. This is precisely the function of the castration fantasy. As Freud observed that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, I am arguing that in this film serial made during the war, a severed head is “just” a severed head—or a severed arm or leg—and nothing less. It is my contention that what Kaja Silverman calls “the phallic legacy” (Silverman 1992: 65) is undermined in Feuillade’s serial not because its acephalic imagery symbolizes castration, but because castration is merely a decoy for another loss that cannot be acknowledged overtly. The status of castration as a fetish is reinforced by the logic of substitution that drives the serial’s narrative, and that also points directly to the war. This logic of substitution manifests itself in two ways. When Feuillade began shooting Les Vampires in the summer of 1915, he was severely limited in his choice of actors and technicians because the majority of male personnel had been mobilized. Those who had not yet fought would soon be called away: several characters thus met untimely

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demises when the actors playing them (such as, for example, Louis Leubas, who played the vampire leader Satanas) had to return to battle (Lacassin 1995: 215). Immune from conscription were Edouard Mathé, an Australian citizen; Jean Ayme, who was Swiss (but whose character was killed off anyway when the actor demanded a pay raise), and of course Musidora, whose gender made her a safe bet (though only relatively so: she was actually Feuillade’s second choice for the role of Irma Vep, and was only called in when the first actress hired to play the part became pregnant) (Champreux 2000: 133–42). For very pragmatic reasons, then, the logic of substitution underwrites the prevalence of impersonation in the serial. If these vampires do not suck blood and have no use for fangs, coffins, or even immortality, they do display a predilection for inhabiting other characters’ bodies. For example, we learn at the end of the first episode that the Grand Vampire has killed an old friend of our hero’s father and taken over his body, helpfully providing an explanatory note: “Le véritable Docteur Nox dont j’ai pris la personnalité est mort, assassiné par moi” (The real Dr. Nox, whose personality I have taken over, is dead, assassinated by me). Meanwhile, the Grand Vampire has already been using an alias to impersonate the Comte de Noirmoutier, so his impersonation of Doctor Nox is in fact a double impersonation. Between them, the various members of the vampire gang, and, less frequently, the heroes Philippe and Mazamette, impersonate some twenty different people, sometimes more than one at a time. And in episode 6, Irma Vep herself is impersonated by a servant working for a couple of American thieves who are in turn impersonating other Americans. The rash of substitutions effected at the level of the diegesis thus mirrors the substitutions among the actors necessitated by the war. It is perhaps no wonder that, immediately after the war, psychiatrists identified a new class of paranoid delusion, “l’illusion des sosies” (the illusion of doubles) or Capgras syndrome, in which patients traumatized by the loss of loved ones imagined that even survivors had been killed or spirited away and replaced by imposters who inhabited their bodies (Schwartz 1996: 73–76). The episode that contains the most instances of impersonation is the sixth, “Les Yeux qui fascinent” (Hypnotic Eyes). This episode, with its

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proliferation of substitutions, provides a particularly apt illustration of the process whereby the loss of life is transformed filmically into the fetishization of castration. Near the beginning of the episode, we learn that the hypnotic eyes of the title belong to the vampires’ rival in crime, Moréno, who has the power to hypnotize people simply by staring at them. But this episode also suggests that there is another kind of eye with a similar capacity to objectify those on whom it fixes its gaze: that of the movie camera. Immediately after the scene in which Moréno hypnotizes his housekeeper, we see Philippe and Mazamette seated in a cinema. They are watching a newsreel entitled “L’Assassinat du Notaire, L’Enquête dans la Forêt de Fontainebleau” (The Murder of the Notary, and Investigation in the Fontainebleau Forest) (Fig. 16). The illusion of a film is created by means of live actors on a stage before the cinema audience, surrounded by a rectangular frame, meant to be the screen. In a mise-en-abîme effect, in which we see viewers watching

Figure 16 Captured on camera, Episode 6, “Les Yeux qui fascinent,” Les Vampires.

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people who are themselves engaged in looking at something, a small group of people, including Irma Vep in male drag, intently examines the ground beneath them. We learn that the vampire gang, returning to the scene of their most recent crime to remove any incriminating evidence, has been caught on camera by a roving news reporter. A movie camera then makes a second appearance at the end of the episode, brandished by one of the journalists who are interviewing Mazamette in his home after he has been given a big reward for solving a crime. Mazamette shows the reporters his mortician’s top hat displayed in a glass case on his mantelpiece, announcing, “Devant cette modeste coiffure que je portais naguère, je proclame que si le vice tarde parfois à être puni, la Vertu est toujours récompensée” (In front of this modest headpiece that I once wore, I proclaim that although vice may not always be punished, Virtue is always rewarded). Between these two references to filmmaking, this episode of Les Vampires displays all the hallmarks of the voyeuristic process of “ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control, and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness” (Mulvey 1996: 205). In addition to the “moral” involving punishment and reward that Mazamette trots out for the benefit of the reporters to whom he tells his life story, we are also presented with another morality tale. While Irma Vep is sent to search the hotel rooms of an American couple suspected of harboring a treasure map, attention shifts to her accomplice, the Grand Vampire posing as the Comte de Kerlor (whose son Irma poses as before slipping back into her bodyhugging vampire suit). The Grand Vampire distracts the hotel guests with a story about his great-grandfather in Napoleon’s army in Spain which he reads from an account he has written entitled “Les Aventures de Gloire et d’Amour du Capitaine de Kerlor, racontée par le Colonel Comte de Kerlor son arrière petit-fils” (The Glorious and Romantic Adventures of Captain Kerlor, as told by Colonel Count Kerlor, his great-grandson). We then see footage shot on location of a soldier ordering a Spanish woman to feed and water his horse. The woman, whose husband and brother have been killed by the French, unleashes a bull on the soldier. The bull chases the Frenchman, who does battle with the animal, finally stabbing it with his sword. When the bull is dead, an intertitle informs us, “Mais

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les Kerlor ne sont pas de ceux qui tirent vengeance d’une femme” (But the Kerlors are not the sort to take revenge on a woman). This incongruous interlude was apparently inserted because Feuillade had already shot the Spanish footage for another aborted film. The sequence was fondly remembered by several of the young poets and artists who would later become Surrealists, and who were fascinated by bullfighting (see, for example, Michel Leiris’s preface to his 1939 L’Âge d’homme, entitled “De la littérature considérée comme une tauromachie” [On literature as a bullfight]). Film analysts have commented on the apparent arbitrariness of this sequence, citing it as an example of Feuillade’s “automatic filmmaking,” a precursor to the Surrealists’ automatic writing (Lacassin 1994: 174–75). Ado Kyrou credits Feuillade with the creation of “collage cinématographique” (cinematic collage), prefiguring the pictoral collages of Max Ernst (Kyrou 1985: 55). Another explanation for the illogical nature of the sequence, however, can be found in the very structure of trauma, in which, according to E. Ann Kaplan, “Images are repeated but without meaning: they do not have a clear beginning, middle and end. Rather they erupt into cinematic space, unheralded in the story as in an individual’s consciousness” (Kaplan 2001: 204). When read as a symptom of trauma, the bullfighting scene enables the Napoleonic War to stand in for the war taking place at the time the serial was made. It also displays a certain coherence that is in keeping with the logic of the episode and, ultimately, of the whole serial. The bullfighting sequence’s narrative drive is provided by a woman’s act of betrayal toward a man, which provokes a desire for punishment. This scenario prefigures the American woman’s betrayal of her husband to the police, who arrest him and give the substantial reward for locating the criminal to Mazamette, which prompts the barrage of reporters to film his moralistic account of the events leading up to the arrest. Earlier in the episode, we see the American man on horseback arguing with his wife, who is standing beside him, and whose look of petulance provides the first sign of the rebellion that will result in her “betrayal” of him. The bull sequence begins with a nearly identically staged shot of the Spanish woman standing beside the horse-riding French officer, with a look of defiance on her face.

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The desire for revenge, provoked by these apparent acts of feminine betrayal, is always gallantly suppressed, as in the examples cited above, as well as in the last episode of the serial, in which Irma is finally killed off—but by a woman, thus fulfilling a male revenge fantasy without actually incurring masculine guilt. Indeed, the justification for these acts of revenge often falters upon even cursory examination. For example, the American woman’s act of “betrayal” consists in opening the door when the police arrive—but the role she plays in her husband’s arrest is questionable, when we consider that her husband, named Raphael Norton but posing as a man named Horatio Werner, has already raised suspicion about his identity by neglecting to remove his large insignia ring engraved prominently with the initials “R.N.” Nonetheless, this man is shown making a strangling motion directed at his wife when he is finally arrested, implying that she is entirely to blame for his fate. Similarly, although it is suggested that the Spanish woman’s act of unleashing the bull on the fictional Comte de Kerlor’s grandfather ought really to be a punishable offense (were the Kerlors not such a noble and gentlemanly breed), we in fact learn that the woman is doing nothing more than avenging the deaths of her father and brother at the hands of the French. Irma Vep, too, undergoes a similar transformation from victim to perpetrator in this episode. In the penultimate scene, after the American thieves have been arrested but before Mazamette is visited by journalists, we see Irma with her new lover, Moréno, the arch rival of the vampire gang. No longer in male drag, but instead wearing a woman’s suit inspired by men’s fashions complete with fitted blazer and necktie, she writes, under Moréno’s hypnotic influence, a confession of all her crimes. In the original script for this episode, however, the letter that Irma writes is the following: “Je suis une enfant trouvée. On m’a appelée Irma Vep parce que ce nom est l’anagramme de Vampire. L’homme qui m’a élevée m’a appris à voler et à tuer. Naguère, il exerçait sur moi un ascendent irresistible. Maintenant, je n’ai plus peur de lui” (I am a foundling. I was named Irma Vep because this name is an anagram of Vampire. The man who raised me taught me to steal and kill. He used to exercise an overwhelming influence on me, but I am no longer afraid of him). (The version of Les Vampires on which this discussion is based was restored by Jacques Champreux,

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Feuillade’s grandson, who reconstructed the intertitles after consultation with Musidora and others directly involved in the making of the film [see Bastide 1988].) In the trajectory from script to screen, Irma’s account of victimization is thus transformed into a confession of crime. Moréno seems satisfied by Irma’s confession and reasserts his control over her by ordering her to murder her former lover, the Grand Vampire, which she does, and for which she receives an embrace. Musidora herself referred to her character’s behavior in a mocking tone that underscores Irma’s exaggerated culpability: “Je m’accuse . . . voici mes forfaits. . . . Ce matin, j’ai tué d’un coup de revolver à bout portant mon dernier amant, le grand Vampire, l’élégant acteur Jean Ayme—pour vivre ma vie avec un bandit de plus d’envergure” (I confess. . .; these are my crimes. This morning, I shot and killed my former lover, the Great Vampire, played by the elegant actor Jean Ayme, in order to spend my life with a more attractive bandit) (Musidora 1984: 18). The culpability projected onto this female character is the guilt of survivors, of men who did not fight in the war, or those who did fight and lived to tell about it. Irma Vep narrowly escapes death in several episodes of Les Vampires so that viewers might have the continued pleasure of watching her undergo yet another near miss. Here is Musidora again describing a typical day’s work: “Ainsi, hier un train a passé sur mon corps avec 52 wagons . . . et le bruit infernal des roues, les tourbillons de vent et la vitesse accélérée font que je ne recommencerai certainement pas cette performance” (Yesterday, a 52-car train went over my body at great speed . . . with infernal clattering of wheels, accelerated speed, and great gusts of wind. I am not in any hurry to repeat that performance) (Musidora 1984: 19). The “crime” of which most women were implicitly deemed guilty in wartime was not castration, but rather the fact of not having had to risk their lives in combat. In film, both crime and punishment are often displaced onto the female body. These scenarios of feminine misbehavior and masculine desire for punishment rehearse the voyeuristic process of assigning blame to women for sexual difference: of imagining, in other words, that they are former men who have brought about their own fall from grace. This phantasmatic vision of women as modified men is part and parcel of the castration fantasy, and is figured in the image of Irma Vep in

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male drag. This instance of feminine cross-dressing is a disavowal of her difference, covering over an absence with a surface sheen as distracting as that created by the same character’s sleek, shiny body stocking, or the glass case in which Mazamette keeps his mortician’s hat. The hat itself is a metonymy of death contained safely on Mazamette’s mantelpiece, just as the castration fantasy itself covers over, with a dazzling theoretical gloss, the reality of death on the battlefields. (It is almost as though she is aware of the links between the image of the severed head and the objectification of women in film when, in the fourth episode, in response to an invitation from an elderly man to accompany him to the movies, Irma stabs him in the head with a hatpin. On the cinema bill: “Le Grand Couronné—Documentaire d’actualités” [The Great Crowned Head— Newsreel].) The cut-up, or episodic, nature of the serial form itself reinforces the fetishistic emphasis on fragmentation in the titles of the two episodes on which I have been focusing so far, “La tête coupée” and “Les Yeux qui fascinent.” In addition to evoking the recently developed film technique of the close-up, the bodily part-objects that pervade the serial suggest the carnage being created on not-so-distant battlefields, from which so many fathers (and sons and brothers) would not be returning. But one instance of dismemberment, or near-dismemberment, which occurs during the reunion between Mazamette and his son Eustache in the eighth episode, fulfills a somewhat different function. When the rambunctious little boy is expelled from school for bad behavior, his father initially greets him with stern disapproval, but this negative emotion soon dissolves into paternal affection. Mazamette immediately includes the boy in his crime-fighting capers, and the two set out in matching outfits, ready for adventure. After helping his father locate the hideout of the Grand Vampire and narrowly avoiding the exploding hat-bomb, Eustache poses as a street urchin begging for money door-to-door. The boy takes out a gun and aims at the vampire, but misses, and ends up shooting his father in the nose. Despite their mishaps, Eustache and Mazamette have nevertheless managed to get the Grand Vampire arrested, and, overjoyed, Mazamette leans down to kiss his son, but his injured nose gets in the way. The boy looks straight at the camera and laughs (this rupture of the

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diegesis evoking the well-known child actor’s background in vaudeville), clasping his hands together in a triumphant gesture. This scene is actually too Oedipal to be Oedipal. And as tempting as it may be to think of the Wolf Man with his nose fetish, this would be too arbitrary an association. The important thing about this exchange between father and son is that it does not end here. After further adventures with the vampires, Mazamette receives a visit from Philippe and his mother (whose widow’s garb reinforces the apparent Oedipal significance of Mazamette’s shooting by his son). Showing Eustache a newspaper article declaring the demise of the vampire gang and warning him, “C’est comme ça qu’on finit quand on travaille mal à l’école” (that’s what happens to people who do not work hard in school), Mazamette assumes the paternal role toward his son that Philippe has until now fulfilled toward him. Mazamette leans over to kiss his son again, repeating his earlier failed attempt, once again hurting his nose and provoking uproarious laughter from the boy. But Mazamette makes one more attempt, this time succeeding in kissing the boy, who finally responds with affection. The nose wound does not ultimately prevent Mazamette from asserting his paternal role—that of provider of unconditional love. In addition to Mazamette’s reunion with his son, the serial’s final episodes also attempt to reaffirm the integrity of the nuclear family with Philippe’s marriage, the announcement of Mazamette’s engagement to a widowed housekeeper, and the marriage of Irma Vep. The reinstatement of the nuclear family, headed by a man, staves off the acephalic threat, pushing back the nagging suspicion of a “lack at the heart of all subjectivity” (Silverman 1992: 4). The final episode’s title, “Les noces sanglantes” (The bloody nuptials), while referring explicitly to the excesses of Irma’s bohemian wedding celebration and its culmination in her death, can also be read in relation to the traditional marriage convention’s demand for a bloody sheet as a confirmation of paternity, in which the bride’s virginity is affirmed at the very moment of its dissolution. But even these insistent images of familial cohesion cannot entirely obscure the specter haunting the serial, the very present absence buried deep within it. As “in mechanized warfare, machine-gun operators kill without seeing any corpses” (Kittler 1999: 131), so it is possible to do

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another kind of shooting—of film—without showing those corpses. When Feuillade’s serial was made, the term “vampirisme,” a term dating from 1891, referred to “a perverse attraction for corpses” (JoubertLaurencin 1993: 283). A serial about vampires provided a home for these cadavres, a way of mourning them, without having to refer to them explicitly, as Mazamette’s career as a mortician evokes the mourning that cannot otherwise be performed in the film. The serial thus incorporates the dead, in both the usual and the psychoanalytic senses of the term, encrypting them using the code of castration, the better to bury them in glass cases, hatboxes or safes. Abraham and Torok (1994: 153; original emphasis) describe the fetish as “the symbol of what cannot be symbolized.” Indeed, castration here both signals and obscures the death that dare not speak its name, of millions of (predominantly) men—fathers, but also sons, brothers, uncles, and friends—reduced to mere parts sacrificed in the totalizing logic of war.

The Marx Brothers’ inhuman comedy The First World War did not bring an end to the reduction of people to part-objects representative of a larger whole. The Second World War brought its own forms of disavowal, as people on both sides of the Atlantic struggled to come to terms not only with the violence of combat, but also with the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust. During the war, before the full extent of the destruction could be grasped, there were nonetheless numerous indications of the human suffering that was unfolding. Anxieties about the fate of loved ones and the threat of further calamity that could not be articulated openly could be and were expressed in other forms. In the United States, the genre of comedy was one such form this expression took. It is perhaps no accident that one of the most successful comedy acts of this era was the Marx Brothers, the American sons of immigrants who grew up in New York’s Lower East Side and rose through the ranks of vaudeville before breaking into film in the early sound era. Critics are in general agreement that the Marx Brothers’ films became “desemitized”

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over the course of the 1930s as anti-Semitism gathered force (see Musser 1991: 71). More broadly speaking, Charles Musser has argued that “the Marx Brothers’ move to Hollywood . . . resulted in significant shifts. Never again would ethnic interfacing be so explicitly the focus of their humor” (Musser 1991: 71). What Musser calls “ethnic interfacing” does, in fact, surface in the 1941 film The Big Store, though the specifically Semitic dimension of the film goes underground. In response to the argument that Hollywood comedy in the 1930s became “desemitized,” Mark Winokur contends that this assessment “describes only one half of a dialectical process in which overt ethnicity disappears at the expense of critiques of and changes in the host culture. In the process Hollywood culture, and mainstream culture, internalize certain ethnic dynamics as well” (Winokur 1995: 126). I am not proposing to argue that The Big Store displays an implicit Jewish stylistic “dynamic,” but rather that it evokes, at the level of narrative content, the already disastrous plight of many Jews at a time shortly before the full extent of their fate was widely known. The United States had not yet joined the war in 1941 when The Big Store was made, but as second-generation Jewish immigrants from Germany and France, the Marx Brothers would have been acutely aware of the kinds (if not the magnitude) of danger that their kinsmen in the “old country” were facing. Simon Louvish cites an account of Harpo passing through Germany six months after Hitler’s rise to power and feeling distinctly uncomfortable: Walking around the port city of Hamburg, he was horrified, he later wrote, to see the shop windows painted over with stars of David and daubed with the word “Jude” for Jew. “Inside,” wrote Harpo, “behind half-empty counters, people were in a daze, cringing like they didn’t know what hit them and didn’t know where the next blow would come from. Hitler had been in power only six months, and his boycott was already in full effect. I hadn’t been so wholly conscious of being a Jew since my bar mitzvah. It was the first time since I’d had the measles that I was too sick to eat. I got across Germany as fast as I could go. (Louvish 2003: 272)

As the Second World War approached, the Marx Brothers could have no illusions about the worsening plight of Jews in Europe. Their films may

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have increasingly downplayed their cultural roots, but, as Winokur writes, “What critics call ‘desemitization’ is in fact a representation—across a number of personae, films, genres, and decades—of various strategies of incorporation and resistance” (Winokur 1995: 126). It is certainly possible to detect examples of such incorporation and resistance in the Marx Brothers’ films. Although some of the biggest comic film actors in silent-era Hollywood were immigrants to the United States (Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel, for example, were British), it was only in the sound era that the national and social background of actors was visible (or, rather, audible) on screen, through accents. As Winokur has noted, “the Marx Brothers’ accents define them regionally and economically: they are ethnic and poor, no matter their fictional position within the story” (Winokur 1995: 138). In many of their films, the brothers play either immigrants or fish out of water in unfamiliar social milieux, roles that “metaphorize the immigrant experience as a sense of placelessness. They are exposure nightmares; they recreate the experience of being physically, socially, and intellectually vulnerable to hostile environments that reveal the disjunction between one’s inadequate personal resources, and the visible, yet inaccessible, abundance of goods” (Winokur 1995: 132). The contrast between the down-and-out and an inaccessible abundance of goods might explain the prominence of the department store in two of the most enduring films of the silent era: the Harold Lloyd vehicle Safety Last (Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor, 1923), and Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). It is this tradition that The Big Store continues. Baudrillard has described the metonymic appeal of department stores, with their promise of material comforts that many people could only afford to taste in small quantities: The big department stores, with their abundance of canned foods and clothing, of foodstuffs and ready-made garments, are like the primal landscape, the geometrical locus of abundance. . . . There is something more in this piling high than the quantity of products: the manifest presence of surplus, the magical, definitive negation of scarcity. . . . We find here the fervid hope that there should be not enough, but too much— and too much for everyone: by buying a piece of this land, you acquire

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the crumbling pyramid of oysters, meats, pears or tinned asparagus. You buy the part for the whole. (Baudrillard 1998: 26)

The image of the not-quite-socially acceptable outsider in a temple of abundance is depicted not only in The Big Store, but also more generally, in all the films in which the Marx Brothers play social interlopers trying to break into a milieu that is more genteel (or perhaps more Gentile) than the one from which they originate. For example, Musser makes a convincing case for reading Animal Crackers as a story of Jewish identity: “The Marx Brothers are Jewish hustlers insinuating themselves into WASP high society, itself shown to be a model of corruption and doubtful respectability, without this elitist group realizing what is happening. This comic premise is an aggressive assault on the exclusionary policies being applied to Jews by WASP-dominated universities, country clubs, and other public and private institutions” (Musser 1991: 63). Although Musser is discussing Animal Crackers, he could be referring to any of the Marx Brothers’ films when he observes : “The film affirms the immigrants’ ability to outfox and so adapt to the cultural and economic exigencies of American capitalism” (Musser 1991: 70). One of the greatest exigencies of twentieth-century capitalism was, of course, the transformation of the means of production through mechanization. Mechanization gave rise to its own aesthetic, which pervaded popular culture, from Germany’s “Tiller Girls” to the assemblyline formations of dancers in Busby Berkeley films (see Kracauer 1995 [1927]: 78–79). At least since the publication of Henri Bergson’s treatise on laughter, Le Rire (Laughter), in La Revue de Paris in 1899, comedy has been associated with the inhuman. The essence of comedy, according to Bergson, is when a human assumes nonhuman characteristics: “The comic is that side of a person which reveals his likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events which, through its peculiar inelasticity, conveys the impression of pure mechanism, of automatism, of movement without life” (quoted in Gunning 1994: 362n20). The particular form that this “movement without life” takes is a mechanical one. The laughter thus provoked is a product of the “natural hostility of organic life to the machine,” as Michael North puts it (North 2009: 4). That this

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idea should become so attached to the mechanical is testament to the preponderant role assumed by machines in the era of Taylorization and Fordism. Tom Gunning argues that Bergson’s theory reflects “a historical phenomenon of an age saturated with the mechanical” (Gunning 1994: 362n20). Taylorization had introduced new methods of regimentation for increasing productivity in the workplace. In this period, according to Rob King, “cultural discourse on mechanization represented a disavowal of the social implications of the new technologies and an unwillingness to engage the experiences of workers, who bore the full brunt of modernity’s impact” (King 2010: 129). As workers were being alienated from the production process through compartmentalization and assembly-line techniques, they were made interchangeable, “cogs in the wheel” of industry. At the same time, automation ensured that human workers were made increasingly redundant, in both senses of the term. However, despite comedy’s affinity with the mechanical, it is not a straightforward expression of what could be called the well-oiled machine. Some theorists are quick to point out that comedy is a function of the failure of the mechanical, its auto-destruction. Gunning links comedy to the “crazy” machine: “Gags are devices that explode, collapse, or fail in some spectacular manner. The self-destructing machine provides a vivid image of the dynamics of a gag” (Gunning 2010: 138–39). Similarly, Jacques Rancière sees comedy, and slapstick in particular, as a celebration of malfunction: “The machine functions as art as long as its success, and that of its users, is also a glitch, as long as its functionality constantly turns against itself ” (Rancière 2013: 203). If things are, according to Bill Brown, objects that fail to do what we ask of them, then comedy is a machine that fails to do what is asked of it (Brown 2001: 4). Slapstick, it is thus argued, proposes a critique of the machine age, a reminder of humans’ hubristic investment in the supposed perfection of their creations. The classic example of such a critique, Chaplin’s Modern Times, in which the Little Tramp plays a worker caught in the gears of the assembly line on which he repetitively tightens bolts, provides the Ur-text for readings of cinema that link the comic with the workings of machines. Noting the strong resemblance between a film projector and the enormous gears

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in which the Chaplin character gets caught in Modern Times, Michael North comments: When the beltway gobbles him up, it seems the epitome of every camera that Chaplin ever faced, stealing his visage and stamping it as an image on the film. Thus it seems that the iconic image of the tramp among the gears was conceived from the beginning as an image, as an ironically self-reflexive comment on the very process by which Modern Times was grinding up the human being Charles Chaplin and turning him into an aesthetic commodity. (North 2009: 187; original emphasis)

In the Society of the Spectacle, images are consumed, and the Marx Brothers, like Chaplin, served themselves up to the masses through the medium of film. Their work, however, adds up to far more than a series of gags. As Rancière puts it, “Through Chaplinesque pantomime, cinema expresses the secret nihilism that accompanies the great mechanical faith” (Rancière 2013: 205). This nihilism is invoked in The Big Store, which, while appearing to celebrate the cult of consumerism and technological progress that engenders the society of consumption, ultimately challenges the instrumental reason that underwrites both the “great mechanical faith” and the reduction of people to part-objects in time of war.

“Sing While You Sell” The Big Store (Charles Reisner, 1941) was the last film the Marx Brothers made for MGM. Even before its release, Groucho, Harpo, and Chico announced that they would not be making another film together, though they had a change of heart after the war, when they reunited twice more to make A Night in Casablanca (Archie Mayo, 1946) and Love Happy (David Miller, 1949), as well as performing occasional cameo roles in other films and television programs. The Big Store has not had the kind of afterlife among Marx Brothers fans that films like Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933) and A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935) have had, and it has been largely overlooked by film scholars.

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The film is set primarily in a department store that has been put up for sale—the irony of selling the salesroom was surely not lost on viewers. The store’s owners are musician Tommy Rogers (played by singer Tony Martin) and his aunt Martha Phelps (played by longtime Marx Brothers collaborator Margaret Dumont, who was always cast as the wealthy, matronly object of Groucho’s ulteriorly motivated affections). The store’s manager Grover (Douglas Dumbrille) is plotting to have Rogers killed so that he can marry Phelps—who he is wooing for her money—and gain sole ownership of the store. Suspecting that her nephew may be in danger, Phelps hires bodyguard and private detective Wolf J. Flywheel (Groucho) to protect him. Rogers miraculously survives the numerous attempts on his life by the inept henchman Grover has hired, and the plot is foiled by Flywheel and his right-hand man Wacky (Harpo), who teams up with his long-lost brother, Rogers’s friend Ravelli (Chico). Like many of the Marx Brothers’ films, The Big Store is a musical, and it is through some of the musical numbers that we get the strongest sense of the film’s overarching themes. In the film’s first major musical number, “Sing While You Sell” (music by Hal Borne, lyrics by Sid Kuller and Hal Fimberg), Groucho, posing as a floorwalker—what would today be called a manager—advises the department store employees on using the power of song to persuade shoppers to buy the store’s products: “Sell this weenie with Rossini / and this birdie goes with Verdi.” When he arrives at the store’s linens department, he grabs a cotton plant and, with a deep, booming voice meant to suggest an elderly Southern patriarch, sings, to a banjo accompaniment, lyrics about a cotton plantation in the deep South. The camera alights on a group of four African American men dressed identically in straw hats and overalls clutching a cotton plant, smiling broadly and singing about the process of turning cotton into clothing. The scene then cuts to the rug department, where the song continues, with Groucho, wearing a turban, being carried in a litter by four African Americans dressed in turbans, silk jackets, and voluminous trousers that reflect a blend of Middle Eastern and Indian influences. The African Americans serve as catch-all signifiers of Orientalist exoticism in the song and as no African Americans appear anywhere

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else in the film, their role seems to be that of generic “Other,” not unlike many of the roles played by Josephine Baker. Their depiction as slaves in the preceding scene has paved the way for their representation as commodities whose relative “worth” can be arrived at through a process of abstraction. The song in which these representations appear is, of course, all about commodity culture. Its title, “Sing while you sell,” is fairly selfexplanatory, encapsulating the advertising aesthetic, the combination of entertainment and commodification, that would come to dominate American culture in the twentieth century. The song’s lyrics recognize the role of commerce in entertainment at the same time that they draw attention to the function of popular entertainment as itself commodity in the Society of the Spectacle. A moment of self-conscious recognition of spectacle as product occurs in the song when Groucho stages a fashion show in the women’s clothing department, complete with women dressed in glamorous evening gowns, whom Groucho escorts down a sloped cat walk while describing their outfits. When speaking of one woman’s gown, he breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience of the black and white film they are watching: “This is a bright red dress, but Technicolor is soooo expensive.” After three women model gowns, Groucho himself appears at the top of the catwalk dressed as a school boy, his hair slicked back, wearing short trousers. He skips down the ramp while singing, looking like a slightly disturbing, overgrown child—thus providing a segue to the musical number’s next section, which is dominated by the theme of childhood. In the next segment of the song, Groucho, still dressed as a child, greets a woman who explains that she is looking for a new bassinette for her baby, as the one she has is “scratched”—a word that hints at possible violence to come. The woman in the market for a new cradle exudes traditional maternal attributes: smiling broadly, she appears gentle, warm, and solicitous, and her position next to Groucho-as-child reinforces her status as a mother. Groucho replies (in song) that the bassinettes they sell come with a lullaby thrown in as a bonus. The focus then shifts to an unsmiling woman who sings the classic lullaby “Rock-a-bye baby” as she rocks a small cradle. The woman is the singer Virginia O’Brien,

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who enjoyed a brief vogue in the early 1940s for her “deadpan singing,” a comic performance style characterized by a complete lack of facial and vocal expression. O’Brien drones the lullaby robotically with glazed eyes fixed directly on the camera, and the contrast between her emotionless delivery and that of the chirpy woman shopping for a bassinette could not be more pointed. The greatest sense of dissonance, however, is caused by the contrast between O’Brien’s machine-like performance and the attributes normally associated with a lullaby—love, affection, and a sense of security. As O’Brien continues singing, repeating the words “bye bye baby,” her manner becomes increasingly robotic, and her “rocking” of the cradle (more like shoving) becomes increasingly violent (Fig. 17). The covers of the cradle are arranged so that it is not obvious whether there is a child inside, but the possibility that there might be creates a sense of unease. This sense of unease will be greatly reinforced a few scenes later.

Figure 17 Virginia O’Brien, deadpan lullaby, The Big Store.

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How did you get to be an Italian? Not long after the “Sing While you Sell” number, Groucho, Harpo, and Chico find themselves posing as salesmen in the bed department, trying to hawk beds that slide out of the wall or disappear into the floor. When a large Italian immigrant family enters the showroom, Ravelli (Chico) approaches the pater familias, who initially takes offense because he thinks Ravelli, who speaks with a thick pseudo-Italian accent (as Chico does in all his films), is imitating his accent. Eventually, it emerges that Ravelli and this man, Giuseppe, know each other from the “old country,” Naples (“I’m a same nationala like you,” Ravelli exclaims), where they both stomped grapes to make wine. Wacky (Harpo) is brought in, and it turns out that he, too, knows Giuseppe. The moment of recognition and joyful reunion between Ravelli and Giuseppe in the bed department recalls a scene in Animal Crackers, in which Chico and Groucho reveal the “real” identity of wealthy art patron Roscoe Chandler as Abie Kabibble, erstwhile fishmonger from the brothers’ old neighborhood. The resemblance between the two scenes is reinforced by the fact that the character played by Chico has the same name, Ravelli, in each film. In Animal Crackers, Chico asks Chandler, “How did you get to be a Chandler?” to which the man’s rejoinder is: “How did you get to be an Italian?” Mark Winokur links this insistence on the identification of mutual origins to the establishment of landsmannschaften, or immigrant communities (Winokur 1995: 131), a dynamic that is also apparent in The Big Store. After the joyful reunion of Ravelli, Giuseppe, and Wacky in the bed department of the latter film, when the Italian family is looking at the merchandise, Ravelli points to a bed and says, “There, you see? That’s a safe-a place to keepa the kids,” an ostensibly helpful remark that carries with it a hint of foreboding—why would children not be safe in their own beds? It is at precisely this moment that Giuseppe’s wife realizes that six of their twelve children are missing. The remaining six children begin calling out the names of their siblings, and the noise wakes Flywheel (Groucho), who has been napping on one of the beds. He stands up and at first tries to convince the father that he couldn’t possibly afford to raise twelve children on his modest salary: “It’s economically impossible for

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you to have twelve children!” When the man insists that he does indeed have twelve kids, Flywheel implies first that the man does not actually know how many children he has, and then that he is confusing children with grapes, adding that “You should have gone to the fruit department.” When the man persists, Flywheel notices six blond-haired children on the other side of the showroom, and ushers them over, announcing triumphantly, “There you are, you came in here with twelve kids, you’re going out with twelve kids.” The blond children’s parents then arrive and bundle their kids off, and Giuseppe cries, “You’ve got to give-a me twelve-a kids!” Next, a family of Chinese children in traditional dress comes in to the accompaniment of Chinese-sounding music, and Ravelli announces, “These are your kids,” which provokes more consternation. Continuing the Disney-themed “It’s-a-Small-World” display of ethnic diversity, a large American Indian family in full regalia then enters to the sound of tom-tom drums, and Ravelli again says, “Hey, there’s-a your kids” (Fig. 18). In the general mayhem that ensues, most of the children

Figure 18 In the bed department, The Big Store.

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have climbed onto various items of furniture, and Wacky presses all the buttons on the panel that controls the functioning of the beds, which slide in and out of walls, alternately revealing the missing children (who are shown lying on a multi-story bunk bed as it rises out of the floor). This scene is extraordinary for its ethnic stereotyping, and for the way it blatantly proposes that children are interchangeable. Appearing not long after the eerie, robotic lullaby scene in which the deadpan singer appears to want to get rid of her baby, the implications of this scene of children gone missing are chilling. Throughout the 1930s and well into the 1940s, the United States was subject to recurring polio epidemics, during which parents feared the very real possibility that their children would be, at best, bedridden, and, at worst, killed by the illness (see Shell 2005). However, added to this ongoing concern, in the early 1940s, was another: the image of hidden children inevitably evoked what was then still referred to in the United States as the “war in Europe.” I would suggest that, although the missing children are from an Italian family, there are enough parallels with the Marx Brothers themselves to encourage viewers to envision the missing children as Jewish, like those who would have emigrated to the United States before the outbreak of war, or indeed, those who stayed behind in Europe and had gone into hiding (see Klarsfeld 1996). In the French context, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis (2004: 4) notes “the creation of a social climate (especially regarding children) which was disturbingly hospitable to the Nazi genocide.” Implicit in The Big Store is the idea of the Marx Brothers themselves as children of a large family of immigrants, an idea that is reinforced by the fact that Wacky and Ravelli turn out to be long-lost brothers. (It is also significant, in this respect, that the prospective buyers of the department store are brothers.) The idea of siblings is explicitly invoked in the “Marx Brothers” brand, by means of which their films were conceived and marketed. Moreover, in the first scene in which Groucho appears near the beginning of the film, we see his own bed at the detective agency spring up and disappear into the wall when he turns his residence into a place of business. Both this scene and the memory of Groucho dressed as a schoolboy in the “Sing While You Sell” number linger in the mind throughout the sequence set in the bed department.

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Themes established in these earlier scenes are developed in the film’s second big musical number, which takes place near the end of the film. Sung by crooner Tony Martin in the role of Tommy Rogers, “Tenement Symphony” was written by the same team that wrote “Sing while you sell” (music by Hal Borne, lyrics by Syd Kuller and Ray Golden). Backed by an orchestra and chorus both composed entirely of children, Martin sings about a range of families, all of whose names suggest different ethnicities (e.g., Cohens, Campbells, Vermicellis), who, together, make up the “tenement symphony” of the song’s title. The tenement in question, we learn, is located in the east side of New York—clearly the Lower East Side, home to European immigrants who worked predominantly in the Garment District (such as the Marx Brothers’ father, Samuel), rather than the more gentrified Upper East Side. Martin sings of children from the various immigrant groups each practicing a musical instrument on a different floor of the tenement, an image that is reinforced by the child orchestra playing the very music he is singing. This image would seem to promote an assemblage of different identities, rather than a homogeneous group, but this idea is quickly dismissed in the chorus, where it is described as a “grand illusion.” The “grand illusion” evokes the 1937 Jean Renoir film of the same name, which was set during the First World War but spoke very much to the concerns of the period in which it was made. In Renoir’s film, the “grand illusion” is national identity itself, which erects imaginary borders between groups of people. “Tenement Symphony” reverses this idea, suggesting that what is illusory is the possibility that national identities can be effaced in order to form a unified whole, however desirable this might be. In contrast with Renoir’s film, the song Tony Martin sings reinforces the differences among groups (the Cohens, the Campbells, the Vermicellis)—to the detriment of the differences among individuals within those groups. Another scene in the film appears to reinforce this ambivalent dynamic of give and take, of individual and group identity. In this scene, Harpo finds himself in a department within the store that displays furnishings and decorative objects in the Louis XVI style. He swaps clothes with a mannequin dressed in eighteenth-century finery, complete with knee breeches and powdered wig, so the mannequin ends up dressed in Harpo’s

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trademark dark suit and hat, while Harpo wears the mannequin’s silk brocades. Spying a harp positioned in front of two mirrors that reflect him at an angle, Harpo sits down to play. Eventually, however, the “reflections” take on lives of their own, first playing different chords from the ones that Harpo has played, and then playing different instruments, a violin and cello, that accompany the harp. This scene is very similar to the famous scene in Duck Soup in which Groucho’s movements are mirrored by what at first appears to be his own reflection, but which is eventually shown to be an identically dressed Harpo. What initially seems to be a reflection of sameness turns out to be an expression of difference: what both these scenes demonstrate is the undermining of uniformity, the breakdown of the logic of substitution. Winokur, however, sees it differently: The mirror scene in Duck Soup is a countermoment in this filmic tendency to valorize uniformity in physical motion. It opposes Leni Riefenstahl’s and Busby Berkeley’s use of uniformity in film in the 1930s, which emphasized the way in which large groups should work together—like clockwork, like machines—for the greater good. . . . In contradistinction to the musical and the crowd, the mirror scene allegorizes uniformity as an escape from historical necessity into the fairyland of aesthetics and play. It metaphysicalizes the search for the landsman, becoming a fiction of redemption through self-multiplication and fragmentation. (Winokur 1995: 159)

While it is true that the mirror scene in Duck Soup is indeed a countermoment in the trend toward uniformity in film entertainment, I would argue that any “redemption” does not come through multiplication of the self, but rather through the breakdown of such multiplication. In both the Duck Soup mirror scene and The Big Store, this is a case of the false double, or false multiple, rather than a straightforward doppelgänger. The humor, as well as the subversiveness, of both scenes derives from the nonidentity of the “mirror” images. Significantly, in the bed scene when Groucho and Chico propose children from different families to replace the Italian family’s missing members, the parents adamantly reject the logic of substitution, insisting on their own, noninterchangeable, children. Harpo’s mirror scene, then, ultimately

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exposes the flaw in the logic of substitution, showing that the supposed replica is not, actually, identical to the other. It is perhaps no accident that the pivotal mirror scene in The Big Store features Harpo rather than one of his siblings. The silent, wide-eyed Marx brother has been the object of much scholarly debate. As Simon Critchley asks, “What or who is [Harpo]? He is a fool. And what is a fool? A fool is a thing—an uncanny mixture of perversity and simplicity, of wisdom and stupidity, of familiarity and strangeness—who speaks the truth, often by remaining mute” (Critchley 1999: 231). Or as Paul Flaig puts it, “Harpo is an automatic object-machine that converts both the world and himself into a polymorphously perverse source of jouissance” (Flaig 2011: 100). Aptly enough, one such source of jouissance is none other than a cash register. In The Cocoanuts (Robert Florey and Joseph Santley, 1929), Harpo repeatedly pushes shut a cash register drawer with his lower abdomen so that it will make a particular sound again and again, smiling ecstatically as he does so. This suggestive gesture is situated at the intersection of sexual and commodity fetishism, both of which are functions of what Žižek calls a symbolic fiction. Žižek quotes Groucho in Duck Soup saying, “Whom do you believe, your eyes or my words?” and then explains that the eyes “see” the truth (in the case of the fetish, that the woman has no phallus), but the story the fetishist tells himself is that the woman does have a phallus, and that phallus happens to look like a shoe, or a glove, or a petticoat. Expanding on this idea, Žižek argues: What a cynic who “believes only his eyes” misses is the efficiency of the symbolic fiction, the way this fiction structures our experience of reality. The same gap is at work in our most intimate relationship to our neighbors: we behave as if we do not know that they also smell bad, secrete excrement, and so on—a minimum of idealization, of fetishistic disavowal, is the basis of our coexistence. (Žižek 2006: 347; original emphasis)

The story the fetishist tells himself is, as we have seen, the story of castration (or, in the case of Freud in interwar Vienna, the story of the castration complex). Žižek repeats his example in at least three different books, but in fact, it is Chico, disguised as Groucho, who utters these words (which are actually “Who you gonna believe, your eyes or my

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words?”). It is as though Žižek is illustrating his own anecdote, disavowing the difference between Chico and Groucho, and asking us to believe his (Žižek’s) words rather than our own ears. In any case, the metonymic logic of the fetish owes much to the logic of supplementarity. The sexual fetish is compensation in displaced form for a perceived or invented lack, as in commodity fetishism the commodity is compensation in displaced form for a perceived or invented lack (the lack of the magical object that will bring the purchaser perfect happiness). This displacement is a form of the symbolic fiction of which Žižek speaks, and to which Groucho alludes in Duck Soup when, referring to the war between Freedonia and neighboring Sylvania, he says, “I’m sick of messages from the front. Don’t we ever get any messages from the side?” Displacement is precisely that: a way of conveying messages from “the side,” that is, indirectly. It is the symbolic fiction that accompanies disavowal: phalluses for limbs torn off in battle, sultans for slaves, Italian children lost in the bed department for Jewish children hidden (or, much worse, not hidden) from the Nazis.

Figure 19 A Night at the Opera.

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In two earlier Marx Brothers’ films, such displacements foreshadow the atrocities to come. In the final scene of Animal Crackers (Victor Heerman, 1930), Harpo walks around a crowded room spraying a toxic substance that knocks everyone unconscious, finally turning the spritzer on himself so that he can collapse on the floor beside an attractive (and unconscious) young woman. In light of the gas “showers” that sprayed deadly fumes in the Nazi camps, this scene is particularly chilling. It also recalls the scene in Les Vampires in which the assembled guests at a party are felled by poison gas, as well as the famous cabin-room scene in A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935), in which a tiny room is stuffed with more and more people who eventually come spilling out of it like objects from an overstuffed closet (Fig. 19). This Medusa-like profusion of bodies, which prefigures the postwar photographs of bodies piled up in the death camps, is the counterpart, the flipside, of the fragmented body, and the logical conclusion of the dehumanizing reduction of people to part-objects, interchangeable synecdoches of a larger group.

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As the previous chapter demonstrated, the fetishistic logic of substitution in which one thing stands in for another underpins the construction of group identities, which work by disavowing differences among individuals and imposing them among (or, usually, between) groups. When applied to human beings, such logic is inevitably objectifying. The disavowal of sexual difference lies at the heart of the fetish and is, at least in a developmental sense, the model for other identifications of difference. Masculine articulations of heterosexual desire for women have dominated cultural production because of increased access to the means of expression by male writers, artists, and filmmakers. These articulations have often taken objectifying forms, and this objectification finds its symbolic force in the construction of women as objects, things that can be manipulated—erected, dissected, dismantled, and rebuilt— by men. From its inception, cinema has been an unusually effective medium for the global dissemination of gendered stereotypes. From the dancers who performed little more than a decorative function in Méliès’s films, to the traditional gender roles prevalent in early cinema more generally, images of women that both reflected and reinforced the power differential between genders were disseminated all over the world (see Bean and Negra 2002). From creating images of women to creating women, it is but a small step. The gendered representations that together comprise what Mulvey (1975) calls “to-be-looked-at-ness,” or the objectification of women on screen, have always been an integral part of the global cinematic machine, and the logic of supplementarity that characterizes globalization is the very logic that underwrites the prosthetization of women as objects of the male gaze. In the machine age, the ability to make things on a mass scale inspired fantasies of the Pygmalion-like creation

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of women tailor-made to cater to the whims of their makers. In the digital era, such objects of desire can be made from strings of zeroes and ones. This chapter thus examines the discourse of corporal manipulation that objectifies women, representing them as bodies to be dissected and scrutinized. It also examines the flipside of the same discourse, which sees women as fantasy objects, at first mechanical, then digital, constructed by the men who have designs on them. The first part of the chapter focuses on the French tradition of constructions of the feminine, which can be traced back to the earliest days of cinema. The second part of the chapter looks at Hollywood iterations of this phenomenon in the virtual era.

Cut/Splice In 1898, the Parisian surgeon Eugène-Louis Doyen had himself filmed while performing a hysterectomy. His intention, at least initially, was to use this film, one of a group of six thought to be the first surgical films ever made, for training purposes. However, by 1907, this film was making the rounds of traveling fairground film exhibitors, where it was shown in a tent made up to look like an operating theater, replete with wax anatomical figures, into which viewers were ushered by actors dressed as nurses and hospital interns (Meusey 1995: 123–24). Doyen’s films raise several issues concerning the often imbricated roles of gender and technology in film history. The connection between the birth of cinema and medical science is not limited to the shared billing between cinema and the new technology of X-rays as fairground attractions at the turn of the twentieth century. Auguste Lumière devoted much of his life to medical research, and it was this research, rather than the invention of cinema, that he apparently considered his crowning achievement (Cartwright 1995: 1). It is well known that the Lumière brothers refused to sell the patent to their innovative camera-projector to the likes of Georges Méliès at the historic first public film screening in December 1895 precisely because they felt that the new medium’s greatest potential lay in its scientific applications rather than in entertainment. But what happens when science itself becomes a form of entertainment?

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Is it an accident that this convergence so often exploits sexual difference, indeed relies upon sexual difference for its entertainment value? In Sexual Visions, Ludmilla Jordanova contends that medicine is “allied with privacy” while images of women are associated with public culture (Jordanova 1989: 134–36). It is precisely when medical science represents the female body that this private discipline is often turned into public spectacle. For example, Lisa Cartwright has pointed out that, although the inventor of the X-ray, Wilhelm Roentgen, X-rayed his own hand, it was the X-ray image of his wife’s hand, taken in 1896, that was widely circulated in at first the medical, and then the popular press: “Among the many physicians who immediately repeated Roentgen’s experiments, a woman’s hand, sometimes captioned as ‘a lady’s hand’ . . . became a popular test object” (Cartwright 1995: 115). Rae Beth Gordon has observed that “the public of 1895 was fascinated by the body and all of its phenomenal pathologies” (Gordon 2001: 188). We might ask to what extent this interest in pathologies real and imagined existed within a gendered framework. Méliès’s Escamotage d’une dame chez RobertHoudin (The Vanishing Lady, 1896), one of the best-known “trick” films of all time, relies for its entertainment value on both the gender of the disappearing subject, played by Jehanne d’Alcy, and her reappearance as a skeleton, which gives the magician a fright. This hide-and-seek anatomy lesson perfectly emblematizes the popular combination of masculine scrutiny (masquerading as “x-ray vision”) and sensationalized eroticism that characterized early film experiments. The early operation film can be situated in the context of the nineteenth-century passion for dissecting women. Elza Adamowicz (2001: 22) describes a turn-of-the-century fairground exhibit displaying “the waxwork of a cateract operation where the disembodied hand of an assistant holds open the eye of an apparently compliant woman that the director’s scalpel prepares to pierce.” Images of similarly “compliant” women being fragmented and scrutinized were also prevalent in the more elite arts of painting and literature. Elaine Showalter has noted that men “gain control over an elusive and threatening femininity by turning the woman into a ‘case’ to be opened or shut. The criminal slashes with his knife. The scientist and doctor open the woman up with the scalpel

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or pierce her with the stake. The artist or writer penetrates the female case with sharp-honed imagery and the phallic pen” (Showalter 1991: 134). To this list, it is no great leap to add the filmmaker, whose tendency to divide the female body into part-objects has been widely commented upon. Richard Abel has pointed out that when Dr. Doyen took his camera operator to court for selling the operation films as his own, “the court ruled that, because he had ‘first arranged his subject and planned the setting,’ Doyen was the principal author of these films, which were indeed worthy of legal protection. Within the framework provided by education, surgeon and filmmaker became analogous, not only as teachers, but as artists” (Abel 1990: 87). It is not necessary to rehearse the rather obvious parallels between filmic cutting and splicing on the one hand, and dissecting and manipulating (in particular, women’s) body parts on the other, in order to appreciate the relevance of these operations for film studies, even from the very beginning: the first known example of a cut from one shot to another occurred in The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots (Alfred Clark, 1895), at the precise moment of decapitation (Salt 1996: 171). One difficulty posed by these films is analogous to that experienced by literary scholars who wish to do a Freudian analysis of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex: the almost unavoidable risk of descending into tautology. What does it mean to say that these images are “about penetrating the female body” when they are so obviously about penetrating the female body? One approach to the question might be to read the operation scenes as a projection of the castration fantasy onto women’s bodies: images of women being cut open are the closest thing to performing this fantasmatic operation while remaining within the bounds of suspended disbelief. In this sense (when it relies upon sexual difference for its entertainment value) it is not inappropriate to regard the operation film as a kind of slasher film, and surgery as the new pornography. Carol Clover has pointed out that in the slasher film the victim “is at her most effective in a state of undress, borne down upon by a blatantly phallic murderer” (Clover 1987: 206). The tradition within French cinema of films that show women being cut (almost always by men) extends throughout the twentieth century, but

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was particularly prevalent in the 1960s. One of the most notable examples of the genre is Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes without a Face, Georges Franju, 1960), in which a surgeon kidnaps young women and removes their faces so he can graft them onto his daughter, who has been disfigured in an accident. In Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965), Lemmy Caution shoots holes through the breasts of a naked woman in a pinup picture, illustrating the penetrating gaze of the shooting gun/camera and of the man who eyes the woman holding the picture. Later in the film, a group of male scientists files past a larger-than-life-sized photo of a naked woman in a display case. Finally, women’s status as a conglomeration of part-objects is illustrated in the film when a woman stands on a conference table, only her legs visible in the frame, as she is stared at matter-of-factly by a group of lab-coated scientists. Roger Vadim’s Barbarella (1968), too, literalizes the concept of cutting, in the famous scene in which little doll-creatures hurl hundreds of tiny blades into the flesh of the eponymous heroine. (In addition, for a discussion of the fragmentation of women in Truffaut’s films around the same time, see Dalmolin 2000.) Coming full circle, in a more recent film, cutting is overtly represented as a form of popular entertainment that harks back to the Belle Epoque. Patrice Leconte’s La Fille sur le pont (The Girl on the Bridge, 1999) depicts the romance between a knife-thrower and his assistant who, although she escapes serious injury, almost always gets nicked, in scenes that are invariably followed by a tender ritual of bandaging the wound. Another woman, a bride in full wedding regalia, is not so lucky (or perhaps, the film suggests, she is even luckier): she gets stabbed in the thigh while spinning on a wheel, blood seeping through her formerly virginal white gown in a none-too-subtle image of deflowering. This film is only making explicit, indeed playing on, a long tradition of eroticized cutting of women in film history. Certainly a great many science fiction films, including English-language films made by French directors such as Alien Resurrection (1997), directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and The Fifth Element (1997), directed by Luc Besson, depict female characters splayed out on operating tables. These two films represent both strands of the tendency to make and unmake women on screen: in Besson’s film, the “perfect” creature Leelou is created by a team of scientists out of a fragment of

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DNA, and in the Jeunet film, Ripley is subjected to a Cesarean-like operation in order to remove an alien creature from her abdomen. The late-twentieth-century films described above have their antecedents in the Belle Epoque, particularly in the work of Méliès. As film history has shown, Méliès quickly recovered from his failure to secure the patent to the Lumière Brothers’ film projector, going on to make some 500 films, including several that depicted the construction from ordinary objects of artificial women, who were then brought to life Pygmalionlike. These Pygmalion films, and films that show the dissection of women, are products of the same patriarchal discourse in which women are transformed into the objects of technological manipulation, or made and unmade. Such a discourse merges anatomical scrutiny and erotic spectacle, and its strong presence in films made during the Belle Epoque would serve as a model for films made throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Rae Beth Gordon suggests that Méliès may have been “consciously drawing on medical science for his images of dismemberment, multiplication of the self, and convulsive movement” (Gordon 2001: 176–77), and that the filmmaker “was not unaware that these cinematic images might well remind spectators of [hysteria and epilepsy]” (Gordon 2001: 177). However, there is a crucial distinction between portrayals of dismembered men and dismembered women in Méliès’s films. As we saw earlier, the magician figure himself is shown “losing his head” on several occasions. However, the magician always removes his own head, demonstrating that he is in control, whereas women’s bodies are manipulated by the magician. Similarly, women do not dress and undress themselves, but are often shown having clothes thrown on them or taken off them magically by the magician, in another figure of making and unmaking. Méliès “makes women” of them, for example, when, in Les Quat’cents farces du diable (The Merry Frolics of Satan, 1906), the wizard Alcofribas removes the outer garments of his seven, apparently male, wizardly assistants—the Seven Deadly Sins—revealing them to be women. It can also be argued that Méliès was “creating” women from the (perhaps apocryphal) moment his camera jammed in the Place de l’Opéra, with the subsequent jump cut showing men appearing to change

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sex. The “construction” of women is at the heart of the castration fantasy: women are not simply born as women, but instead fashioned into women through dismemberment (according to this fantasy, anatomically correct women do not exist prior to their dismemberment: it is castration that makes women of them). The “making and unmaking” of women in films from the Belle Epoque to the present confers a kind of power to men that can be undermined by the presence of actual women. Women in Méliès’s films are largely divided between those who pose a threat—witches, evil fairies, nefarious goddesses inclined to gobble up men—and those who are entirely in thrall to a man: magician’s assistants (conjured out of thin air, made to levitate, or brought to life from an inanimate state); Blue Beard’s dead wives hanging from nooses; benevolent sea goddesses; and celestial creatures bearing aloft stars and planets. Both types of woman feature in one of the last films Méliès ever made, entitled A la Conquête du Pôle (The Conquest of the Pole, 1912), which proposes two starkly dichotomized alternatives for women: as celestial helpmeets ushering the male explorers’ space ships along, or as intrusive feminists who want to muscle in on the action. The latter are masculine, trouser-clad caricatures, suggesting that adventure and initiative are the antithesis of femininity, which is allied with ethereal affability and the desire to be of assistance to men. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin compared the filmmaker to a surgeon who “penetrates deeply” into his subject, which “consists of multiple fragments which are reassembled under a new law” (Benjamin 1979 [1936]: 863). (Conversely, at the turn of the century, Eugène-Louis Doyen had written in his magisterial Surgical Therapeutics and Operative Technique that “surgery should ever remain an Art: all Surgeons should be true Artists” [Doyen 1917: 17]). This impulse to dissect—especially women, the removal of whose wombs, it will be recalled, Dr. Doyen captured on film—is intimately connected to the fantasy of (re)assembly. Some of the Méliès films that display the construction of a woman from spare parts also show her exploding into a shower of feathers or scraps of paper. For example, in Les Illusions funambulesques (Extraordinary Illusions, 1903), a conjurer assembles a woman from inanimate body

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parts before bringing her to life; after several more transformations in which she apparently eludes the magician’s control, she disintegrates into a swirl of paper fragments before reforming. She then turns into a male chef, whom the magician rips to pieces. Her transformation into a man may diminish the violent impact of the image, but the ultimate impression is nonetheless one of a woman (originally constructed by the conjuror, but who momentarily escapes his control) being torn to bits. The same impulse that leads to depictions of anatomical scrutiny and the dismemberment of women in these films is also behind the images of constructed women in films of the Pygmalion or Frankenstein’s monster variety. Linda Williams has drawn a parallel between Méliès’s interest in automata and his recreation of the Lumières’ cinématographe when he failed to purchase the machine from its inventors at the Grand Café in 1895: “Méliès seems to have been fated to repeat the invention/ construction of machines capable of ever more perfect and lifelike simulations of the human body” (Williams 1986: 525). The filmmaker would go on to explore this interest in creating and recreating bodies— particularly female bodies—in the films themselves. La Statue animée (The Drawing Lesson, 1903), for example, combines the Pygmalion story with detailed examination of a woman’s body. In this film, a magician figure assembles the statue of a woman from a spinning ball, a handkerchief, and a coat. When a drawing instructor enters with a group of students who proceed to inspect and draw the “statue,” it comes to life and mischievously steals the instructor’s hat before disappearing. The statue, created by the trickster magician, is clearly carrying out his wishes by foiling his rival. In La Photographie électrique à distance (Long Distance Wireless Photography, 1908), Méliès plays an inventor who creates a magical camera that reproduces a life-size image of three women in a Three Graces pose from a small photograph; the magic camera can also replicate the movements of a live model, as if televised. The “televised” image, however, is clearly an idealized version of the all-too-human, and less obliging, human original. According to Linda Williams, “The apparatus which makes possible ‘long distance wireless photography’ packages the real-life bodies of women into safely proffered cheesecake tableaux. Individual female bodies become the simple stereotypes of

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femaleness which uniformly differ from the male” (Williams 1986: 529). For Williams, the machine that this film (and others like it) highlights is one that reproduces images of women’s bodies; that is certainly true, but it is important to recognize that these constructed women are also machines in themselves, which do exactly what they are programmed to do, and whose behavior differs noticeably from that of real women. As Lucy Fischer puts it, in Méliès’s films, “woman (as woman) is gone, with only the male-fabricated image remaining” (Fischer 1996: 39).

Making women up Even when the desire to manipulate women’s bodies is not expressed literally in images of female mannequins being assembled by men, it is expressed metaphorically, through references to makeup. Such references evoke the role of women in the debates about artifice and nature, and the nature of artifice, that have raged throughout first literary, and then cinematic, history. Baudelaire’s 1885 essay “Eloge du maquillage” (In Praise of Makeup) follows in the tradition of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love, 2008 [2CE]) by singing the praises of women’s cosmetics, though Baudelaire goes further than Ovid in suggesting that, without the aid of a considerable amount of artifice, women are too horrible to contemplate. For Baudelaire, “‘[La femme] doit donc emprunter à tous les arts les moyens de s’élever au-dessus de la nature pour mieux subjuguer les coeurs et frapper les esprits. Il importe fort peu que la ruse et l’artifice soient connus de tous, si le succès en est certain et l’effet toujours irresistible” (Woman must borrow from all the arts the means of elevating herself above nature, the better to capture hearts and make an impression on the mind. It matters little whether the ruse and the artifice are known to all, if they lead to certain success and an irresistible effect) (Baudelaire 2010 [1885]: 102). Conversely, in Les Belles Poupées (The Beautiful Dolls), Théodore de Banville laments the erasure of “natural” hierarchies effected by the use of makeup and other accoutrements of fashion: “A présent, toutes les femmes se ressemblent, la bonne, la mauvause, la sublime, la médiocre et la pire. Elles sont peintes, teintes,

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coiffées, tatouées et coloriées par les mêmes ignobles artifices” (These days, all women look alike: the good, the bad, the gorgeous, the mediocre, and the horrible. They are painted, tinted, coiffed, tattooed, and colored by the same disgusting artifice) (Banville 1988: 340). In the French filmic tradition, women who are man-made—or remade, as in the case of the Pygmalion/My-Fair-Lady-inspired Nikita (La Femme Nikita, Luc Besson, 1990), whose heroine’s personality is reshaped by a man—invariably receive a cosmetic makeover as part of the package. When the priest’s assistant in The Fifth Element brings Leeloo a selection of women’s clothing that the priest just happens to have lying around the house, he hands her, in addition, an instant makeup applicator. In between learning English and memorizing crucial events in world history, Leeloo takes a moment to press the contraption to her face, which instantly becomes fully made up. This scene probably parodies, and in any case certainly recalls, scenes in other films in which the heroine’s “civilizing process” includes a cosmetic makeover. In Nikita, for example, a central moment of the female protagonist’s transformation (from rebellious criminal to docile, state-sponsored criminal) occurs when Jeanne Moreau, in a cameo role, instructs Nikita in the fine art—and, this being a French film, the philosophical lessons—of applying lipstick. As Moreau tells Nikita upon meeting her for the first time, “. . . nous finirons sûrement par vous donner une forme humaine, étape intermédiaire et néanmoins nécessaire avant de devenir l’essentiel de l’homme: une femme” (We’ll no doubt end up giving you a human form, which is an intermediate but nonetheless necessary stage before becoming the essential thing for man: a woman). In this exchange, artifice is humanizing, in much the same way that it appears to be for Baudelaire. But in order to become fully human, artifice alone does not suffice. Humanity, for women, requires vulnerability. Moments after showing Nikita how to apply lipstick, Moreau adds, “Laissez-vous envahir par cette petite fragilité qui va embellir votre visage, un sourire” (Let yourself succumb to that small fragility that will embellish your face—a smile). The application of makeup always proves to be merely an external sign of a less tangible transformation within. One of the most important steps in a constructed woman’s evolution is that of becoming fragile or

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vulnerable. For example, in The Fifth Element, we see a medium close-up of the bewildered priest confiding to a bartender that he finds Leeloo, though “the perfect being,” oddly vulnerable and (he searches for the right word) . . . “human.” When he asks the bartender if he knows what he means, the camera swivels to reveal the bartender, a robot, who shakes his head. Besson’s film here parodies science fiction’s conventional interrogation of what it means to be human, but it also points up the nature of the gender roles inherent in the genre. Although Leeloo is the most “perfect” creature in the universe, with more genes per square inch than any human (according to the film’s “scientific” logic, more is better when it comes to genes), her gender makes it imperative for her to evolve into a less perfect, more vulnerable, and thus, the implication is, more feminine, creature in the course of the film. Both the priest and the blue diva let us know that Leeloo is “more vulnerable than she might seem.” Belle Epoque precedents for such displays of feminine vulnerability abound: trick films in particular, in which a male magician conjures women out of thin air, invariably convey the impression that the magician is “taming” the woman, making her conform to his vision of what a woman should be. In Bulles de savon animées (Soap Bubbles, 1906), Méliès makes women appear in a column of smoke, and then makes women’s heads appear in soap bubbles that float up to pedestals, where they grow both bodies and wings. The illusionist then transforms them into butterfly kites, which he waves before flicking them away. The women are not seen again. So, men may create women who are, in a sense, automatic, but they must not be autonomous. In these films, a woman’s accession to humanity is achieved by her acquisition or assumption of stereotypically “feminine” traits such as vulnerability, emotiveness, and irrationality. But above all, women’s humanity in these films depends on their succumbing to a man. This capitulation usually culminates in the woman’s confession of love to the man, a speech-act that serves to make the woman less machine-like and more accessible. We see this, for example, in Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast, 1946), where Belle’s words “Je t’aime” bring the Beast back to life while at the same time demonstrating that she has yielded to him. Paradoxically, Belle never has more freedom than when

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she is the beast’s captive, locked in his castle. There, she is no longer under her father’s control, and she has the beast in her power. He is “under her spell,” at her beck and call; it is only when she falls in love with him that the spell is reversed, and she is in thrall to him. Yet, in the final moments of the film, as she is preparing to fly away with the man formerly known as Bête, Belle’s resigned air, her unfairytale-like ambivalence, suggests that she is not entirely happy with her loss of autonomy. As Marina Warner has noted of this film: “At the end, in an enigmatic twist, the disenchanted Beast turns out to have the same human face as Belle’s n’erdo-well, aspiring lover Avenant, whom she rejected kindly, but firmly (the actor Jean Marais plays both). So La Belle et la bête traces a promise to male lovers that they will not always be rejected, that human lovers, however profligate, can be saved, and it withdraws at the last moment any autonomy in love from Beauty herself ” (Warner 1994: 296–97). A variation of the romantic speech-act that both signals and triggers a woman’s vulnerability occurs at the end of Alphaville, when Lemmy turns to Natasha as they are speeding away from the city in his Ford Galaxy and says, “Think of the word ‘love’.” Once Natasha is able to conceptualize the magic word, she relinquishes both her apparent automatism and her autonomy: her transformation from unfeeling automaton to vulnerable woman in thrall to a man is complete. At the end of The Fifth Element (Luc Besson, 1997), although it is Korben who must tell Leeloo he loves her, the survival of the world still depends on her acceptance of his declaration, which must convince her that there is something worth living for. Korben is seduced by Leeloo from the moment she comes hurtling into his space cab, but the film’s resolution, as well as the fate of the Earth, hinges on her succumbing to his charms. Such scenes of seduction are often accompanied by scenes in which the woman is shown learning to cry, which is emblematic of her acquired vulnerability. We see just such a teary apprenticeship in The Fifth Element and in Kieslowski’s Trois couleurs: Bleu (Three Colours: Blue, 1993), in which a bereaved Juliette Binoche finally sheds a tear as she succumbs romantically to her dead husband’s colleague. Women begin these films as machine-like creatures either literally, in that they are cobbled together by a scientist or magician, or figuratively,

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in that they display an antisocial coldness. Both in Belle Epoque films and in the later films discussed, women are artificial creatures created by men, who can then breathe life into them, or “humanize” them. It seems to matter little whether the women start out subservient or autonomous, that is, whether they serve another or themselves: they all ultimately end up serving the same master. Misogyny in these films is linked to a fear of technology and dehumanization, which transforms autonomous women into automatic women. In The Culture of the Copy, Hillel Schwartz defines some of the challenges involved in creating life-like automata: “Not physiognomy but responsiveness, sociability, sincerity have been at issue. . . . The more agile we become at replicating animate beings, the more we look to qualities social or immaterial (loyalty, love, despair, boredom, competitiveness, confusion) to tell ourselves from our creations” (Schwartz 1996: 360). In “becoming women,” the female creatures in these films are made to relinquish their hyperbolic rationality and assume their traditional role in the conventionally gendered Cartesian mind/body split. Women and technology, or the super-rational, have an analogous function, and are therefore conflated in these films: they are both desirable and threatening, and both are potential sources of dismemberment (according to the castration fantasy) and destruction. Women are more reassuringly rendered as pure corporeal dummies, like the female mannequin named Francine that René Descartes took traveling with him on voyages (Frude 1983: 121). Kaja Silverman has noted that “Classic cinema’s success can be measured by the degree to which it manages to construct adequate surrogates” for absent presences (Silverman 1988: 11–12). In the digital era, the construction of women to fulfill the desires of men is taken to a new level, as women’s actual bodies are replaced entirely, by virtual representations. The following section seeks to ask, what happens when the object of desire is itself unreal, or indeed virtual? Does such a blatant replication of the structure of desire merely expose desire’s inner paradox, that is, the fact that once the desired object has been attained, desire ceases to exist? And what are the implications for gender as a social construct when the vast majority of such virtual objects are (en)gendered as women?

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S1M0NE In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler has argued that gender is constituted, rather than expressed, through its performance, and that it has no a priori existence outside of its habitual practice (Butler 1990). Gender is thus supplementary to one’s identity, a prosthesis you “put on.” That such a construct forms the basis of sexual desire—“sex” meaning “division” or “differentiation,” which is precisely what is constituted through the performance of gender—makes it doubly supplementary. The virtual is an apt representation of the elusive nature of desire, whose objects are, by definition, constantly slipping out of one’s grasp, for desire itself is structured according to the logic of the supplement (Derrida 1976: 156): as long as it exists, it can never be completely fulfilled. It is perhaps unsurprising that Hollywood, aka The Dream Factory, excels at depicting the elusive nature of virtual desire. Nor is it a coincidence that two of the most prominent films to do so also evoke the concept of stardom, an other-worldly quality characterized by being just out of reach. In the first film I will consider, S1M0NE (Andrew Niccol, 2002), stardom is explicitly thematized, as a Hollywood director creates a digital simulacrum to play leading roles in his movies. In the second film discussed, Her (Spike Jonze, 2014), stardom is invoked implicitly, in the absent-present identity of screen siren Scarlett Johansson, who voices the phone operating system with which (with whom?) a lonely man falls in love. In S1M0NE, Hollywood director Viktor Taransky has a falling-out with the star of his latest blockbuster, and she abandons the project in the middle of filming. As he is frantically searching for a new lead, a terminally ill software developer entrusts him with a computer program that allows the director to use an artificially created actor in place of a real one in his movie. The film is a hit, and Taransky decides to keep up the pretense that his new star, “Simone,” is a real actress, hiding the truth from everyone, including his family and closest associates, as he constructs an elaborate series of virtual “appearances” for Simone in the media.

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The film’s graphics in the opening and closing titles turn all instances of the letter “O” into zeroes and all instances of the letter “I” into ones, emphasizing the digital code that constitutes Simone—her “DNA”. The name “Simone” is a contraction of “Simulation One,” the computer program that created the artificial being. She belongs to the order of appearance that Baudrillard has characterized as simulation, which he defines as “the reigning scheme of the current phase that is controlled by the code” (Baudrillard 1983: 83). Unlike the antecedents discussed above, S1M0NE, the object of desire, while man-made, is not material. Instead, Simone follows in the footsteps of Lara Croft, who Mary Flanagan notes was the first digital star (Flanagan 2007: 299). Scott Bukatman differentiates between human surrogates of the cyber age and their mechanical predecessors: “Through the construction of the computer itself, there arises the possibility of a mind independent of the biology of bodies, a mind released from the mortal limitations of the flesh. Unlike the robot forms of the modernist era, wherein a mechanical body substituted for the organic, the invisible processes of cybernetic information circulation and electronic technology construct a body at once material and immaterial—a fundamental oxymoron, perhaps, of postmodernity” (Bukatman 1993: 208). This oxymoron, or ambiguity, is apparent in Simone, who may be composed of zeroes and ones, but whose feminine curves are repeatedly emphasized. Although (or perhaps because) she is immaterial, Simone is nonetheless the perfect “woman.” She enraptures audiences, men and women alike, but especially heterosexual men, one of whom is shown wallowing euphorically in a bed he thinks she has slept in. Simone’s body is a sign without a referent, an avatar without a subject. She epitomizes what Bukatman calls “the postmodern crisis of a body that remains central to the operations of advanced capitalism as sign, while it has become entirely superfluous as object” (Bukatman 1993: 16). Simone is composed of nothing more than code, as the film keeps reminding us. This code is binarized, like the idea of gender itself. Computer binary code, in this context, is a metaphorical representation of the traditional either/or gender division. Simone, as the fantasmatic “perfect” woman, certainly plays the role of the adoring, uncomplaining

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helpmeet, a prosthesis that allows the male director to accomplish his goals. As Flanagan points out, “The digital star is the location on which fantasies of desire and control are projected; they embody the fears, desires, and excess of our culture in the form of obnoxiously sexualized female stars” (Flanagan 2007: 298). Simone, played by Rachel Roberts, a model who had never acted in films before, does indeed conform to the stereotypical object of male heterosexual desire, at least as portrayed in Hollywood cinema: blonde, blue-eyed, long-legged, at once busty and slim, with smooth, unblemished white skin. She is unblinking, and she does not fidget or stutter, exuding a zen-like calm: in other words, she appears neither more nor less “human” than any other movie star. However, Simone is not entirely autonomous. Viktor must manipulate Simone’s movement from a computer terminal. He must also speak for her by talking into a microphone attached to his computer (Fig. 20). Simone literally speaks, to use the advertising jingo of the early RCA phonographs, in “her master’s voice.” Viktor breathes life into Simone, as though he were Prometheus (or the Judeo-Christian God) creating human beings: in other words, he animates her. Vivian Sobchack has traced the evolution of the concept of animation from its association with Creation to its current meaning: In the nineteenth century . . . the usage of “animation” (Mary Shelley’s, in particular) transfers the divine power to endow “life itself,” including selfpropelled movement as one of its signs, to humans (Dr Frankenstein, in particular) as in “Capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.”

Figure 20 A star is born, S1M0NE.

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.  .  . In the twentieth century the human power to bestow movement and, questionably, life, upon inert matter is further transferred, this time from human to machine (in particular, the cinema). (Sobchack 2009: 381)

Simone is the ultimate prosthesis, the ultimate extension of (Viktor’s) self. As Viktor explains to his studio head ex-wife when she asks why Simone has not written any notes on the script for her new film, “She considers herself an instrument.” Not only can Viktor get Simone to do his bidding, he even projects his desire to use her onto Simone herself, who announces to the assembled costars of one of her films on speaker phone, “I relate better to people when they’re not actually there.” Of course, she is effectively voicing the attitude—taken to its logical extreme—of the people who watch her. Simone is the proverbial mirror of men discussed by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (2004 [1929]), onto which Viktor projects his own desires. The fact that he prefers Simone to real people (and in particular real women) is made patently clear when an ingénue who wishes to sleep with him tells him to call her Simone, and asks him to “do to me what you do to [her].” Viktor rejects her advances, appearing to prefer the “real thing” (i.e., the simulacrum), whom he eventually “marries”—like Simone, Viktor clearly relates better to people when they are not actually there. Raymond Bellour has observed that “the actual process of substituting a simulacrum for a living being directly replicates the camera’s power to reproduce automatically the reality it confronts. Every mise en scène of the simulacrum thus refers intrinsically to the fundamental properties of the cinematic apparatus” (Bellour 1991: 127). Simone is a mise-en-abîme of artifice: she is a representation of cinematic representation itself. The manufactured nature of S1M0NE pushes to its logical conclusion the manufactured nature of stardom. Richard Dyer points out that stars “do not produce themselves alone” (Dyer 2004: 5). They are shaped, coiffed, coached, made up, filmed, publicized, interviewed, photographed, and written about by an army of people who help to fashion their persona. “Part of this manufacture of the star image,” Dyer explains, “takes place in the films the star makes, with all the personnel involved in that, but one can think of the films as a second stage. The star image is then a given, like machinery, an example of what Karl Marx calls ‘congealed labor,’

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something that is used with further labour (scripting, acting, directing, managing, filming, editing) to produce another commodity, a film” (Dyer 2004: 5). Indeed, Simone’s star persona precedes her “actual” (i.e., virtual) presence on the set of her second film. Her costars believe she is a real actor who is too self-important to deign to meet them in person—their rapport with her is more reminiscent of that between a diva and her fans than of a relationship between colleagues. Yet, the difference between Simone and flesh-and-blood stars is merely a matter of degree. According to Mary Flanagan, “Stars of the cinema share qualities with computer-generated stars; not static or fixed in time and space, they inhabit screen worlds. A star system draws upon the separation between the image and the body, the public and the private, the historical, biographical persona and the location of many fictional biographies, between the scripted and the ‘real,’ to create a culture of consumption around the ‘persona’” (Flanagan 2007: 300–01). Simone’s “persona” is indeed neither static nor fixed in time and space, but entirely manipulable in ways that human beings, even the most basely exploited, simply are not. Her “screen world” is the only world in which she exists, yet this screen world extends across nearly the whole “real” world, in which her image is disseminated not only in cinemas but also on television programs and magazine covers (there is a montage sequence in S1M0NE where dozens of magazines displaying her image on the cover are pinned to washing lines, connoting Simone’s worldwide fame and Viktor’s mock-trivialization of it). Scott Bukatman has observed that contemporary culture “eroticizes the technological” (Bukatman 1993: 328). The inverse is also true, as the pinup’s image is (historically) first disseminated far and wide through mechanical reproduction, and then by technological means that obviate the need for a “real” referent. At the end of Niccol’s film, Simone and Viktor have a “baby” together, an electronic creation just as hyperreal as Simone herself. Not only is Viktor able to fulfill the stereotypical male dream of reproducing without need of women (in “giving birth to” Simone), but he is also able to give birth to a virtual baby who is, in an Oedipal conflation of generations, at once his child and his grandchild. The Oedipal motif is further suggested by the partially blind software developer Hank, whose malignant tumor is the result of sitting too close to the computer screen for an extended period of time. Another wink to

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Oedipus occurs during Hank’s first encounter with Viktor on a sound stage, when an enormous image of an eye—a prop for a film set—is hefted within view in the background behind him. These references to vision, of course, recall the pivotal moment in Oedipus Rex when Oedipus gauges out his own eyes upon discovering that he has unwittingly committed the double crime of incest and patricide. The self-blinding represents Oedipus’s desire not to see, not to know such things; in Freud’s analysis of the myth and the complex that bears its name, blindness also represents the male child’s supposed fear of castration. Hank warns Viktor gravely not to sit too close to the computer screen, to avoid sharing his tragic fate. The association between blindness/castration and excessive computer use thus presages Viktor’s relationship with his digital star, Simone. When Viktor looks at Simone, his gaze is literally a controlling one, in alignment with Laura Mulvey’s classic discussion of visual pleasure and narrative cinema, and the “active/passive heterosexual division of labour” in which women are the passive objects of the active, heterosexual male gaze (Mulvey 1975: 12). Simone’s virtual status allows Viktor to control her without the need to worry about niggling ethical considerations. His control over Simone is so complete that he sometimes forgets to mask it, as when, speaking to reporters, he lets slip that Simone will appear “only when I want her to appear,” prompting questions about whether she is his hostage. He is able to brush away such questions, because they apparently do not apply to digital beings. During Viktor’s encounter with Hank, the software developer reminds him that they first met at a computer conference where Hank gave a keynote speech entitled “Who needs humans?” This question of who needs humans is a particularly apt one in the Cinema of Things, and it is framed explicitly in S1M0NE. However, it is raised with even more insistence in Her, which goes one step further in its examination of virtual objects of desire, asking, “Who needs a body?”

Her The logical conclusion of the progression to virtuality, after the corporeal simulacrum, is the elimination of the body altogether, which no longer

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exists even as image. If, as Scott Bukatman has observed, “the body has long been the repressed content of science fiction, as the genre obsessively substitutes the rational for the corporeal, and the technological for the organic” (Bukatman 1993: 19), then Spike Jonze’s 2014 film Her is the epitome of a science fiction film. Whereas in S1M0NE the main female character has no voice of her own, in Her, the central female character is all voice. She is a computer operating system named Samantha with whom Theo Twombly, a lonely man in his late thirties, conducts a romantic relationship. It is fitting that Theo’s job at Beautifulhandwrittenletters. com involves the creation of simulacra: an epistolary Cyrano de Bergerac, he composes seemingly heartfelt, “personal” letters for clients to send to loved ones when they cannot be bothered to write them themselves but wish to appear thoughtful. These epistles entail a double surrogacy of sorts, since a letter is already a stand-in for an absent interlocutor. Samantha is modeled on Apple’s voice-activated, so-called “intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator,” Siri—so much so that, upon the film’s release, Apple updated Siri to respond to questions about Samantha. When asked if Siri is “Her,” Siri replies: “No. In my opinion, she gives artificial intelligence a bad name.” When asked what she thinks of Samantha, Siri responds: “Her portrayal of an intelligent agent is beyond artificial” (Watercutter 2014: n.p.). The extremely lifelike nature of the operating system (whether Siri or the Siri-surrogate in Her) prompts its users to imagine that there is more to the programmed voice than meets the ear. As Mladen Dolar has observed, “There is an uncanniness in the gap which enables a machine, by purely mechanical means, to produce something so uniquely human as voice and speech. It is as if the effect could emancipate itself from its mechanical origin, and start functioning as a surplus—indeed, as the ghost in the machine; as if there were an effect without a proper cause, an effect surpassing its explicable cause” (Dolar 2006: 7–8). What might be called the operating system’s “humanity effect” owes its existence to the disavowal of the system’s origins in a series of binary code. There is no image to go along with the voice with which Theo falls in love. That so much of the film is devoted to showing Theo speaking to Samantha on his phone reverses the traditional emphasis on spectacle in

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the science fiction film. The many extended close-ups of Theo’s face as he speaks to Samantha are analogous to a one-sided series of extremely long reverse shots, without any shots of Samantha speaking (analogous to, but not equatable with, reverse shots, because the shots of Theo’s face are not from the point of view of Samantha) (Fig. 21). Rick Altman has criticized the “historical fallacy” whereby sound is thought to supplement the image in the cinema, and is thus marginalized: “Historically, sound was added to the image; ergo in the analysis of sound cinema we may treat sound as an afterthought, a supplement which the image is free to take or leave as it chooses” (Altman 1980: 14). For Altman, this historical fallacy is bolstered by an “ontological fallacy,” which “claims that film is a visual medium and that the images must be/are the primary carriers of the film’s meaning and structure” (Altman 1980: 14). There is no danger of either of these misapprehensions in Her, which accords a privileged status, both in terms of the diegesis and in total screen time, to the voice of the main character’s love interest. The part of Samantha is voiced by Scarlett Johansson, whose husky tones lend an unmistakably seductive quality to the role. As Anthony Lane, the New Yorker’s film reviewer, put it, “Had Jonze picked the voice of Marge Simpson, say, the film would have turned out very differently”

Figure 21 Theo, Her.

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(Lane 2013: n.p.). Johansson would appear to be what Richard Dyer has termed a “perfect fit” for the role: “In certain cases, all the aspects of a star’s image fit with all the traits of a character” (Dyer 1998: 129). Johansson’s Samantha is playful and flirtatiously “insecure” (she frequently stops talking mid-sentence, protesting that what she is saying is “stupid,” and she often hints at a slight lack of self-confidence, though only enough to make her otherwise supreme competence and self-possession seem less threatening). As scripted by Jonze and voiced by Johansson, Samantha the operating system seems eerily like a “real” person. Yet, she does not seem to fall into the “uncanny valley” described by Masahiro Mori (1970), which is a state of anxiety caused by a representation that is very life-like but not entirely life-like. Like Theo, viewers soon forget that Samantha is not “real.” The role of Samantha was not always played by Johansson. Samantha Morton initially voiced the character, and the switch to Johansson was made only in postproduction (Zeitchik 2013: 1). The fact that the character bears the name of the actor who was replaced, like some ghostly residue, serves to draw attention to the substitution, begging the question of what Johansson brings to the role that Morton did not. Although Morton is a very well-respected actor, she does not have the screengoddess image that Johansson has, the latter regularly being compared to Marilyn Monroe (see, for example, the Dolce & Gabbana ad campaign of 2010, in which Johansson was made up explicitly to resemble the late star). Audiences cannot help but picture Scarlett Johansson, whose image conveys a strikingly voluptuous, siren-like intensity, in what Michel Chion (1999: 129) calls a “mise-en-corps” (embodiment) of the voice. Mary Ann Doane has noted that, despite the advent of the technical reproducibility that Walter Benjamin discusses in his famous essay on the decline of the aura, “The voice is not detachable from a body which is quite specific—that of the star. In the cinema, cult value and the ‘aura’ resurface in the star system. . . . Thus, the voice serves as a support for the spectator’s recognition and his/her identification of, as well as with, the star” (Doane 1985: 164). Although (or perhaps because) Samantha’s voice is disembodied, Johansson’s star quality inhabits the voice like a phantom. Samantha’s voice may not be fixed to a visible character, but it

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is most certainly fixed to a particular star. As Chion notes, “Marguerite Duras coined the idea that the contemporary cinema stringently requires voices to be nailed down to bodies. . . . ‘Nailing-down’ nicely captures the rigidity and constraint in the conventions that have evolved for making film voices appear to come from bodies” (Chion 1999: 130; original emphasis). The female star’s association with a feminine corporeal ideal reinforces the viewer’s desire to “nail down” the voice to a body, a very particular body—in this case, that of Scarlett Johansson. In Jonze’s film, the star’s voice functions very much like the star’s image itself; the cinematic plenitude with which it entices viewers is a fantasmatic one, forever receding into the distance. Her is not the first film to feature a not-so-virtual virtual voice. Doane observes in the context of what might be considered a precursor to Samantha, in the televisual version of Battlestar Galactica (Richard A. Colla, 1978), that “even a computer (named Cora) deprived of mobility and the simulacrum of a human form is given a voice which is designed to evoke the image of a sensual female body” (Doane 1985: 175 n2). Her may not be entirely original in its use of a sultry female-sounding computer (in fact, an episode of the popular television sitcom The Big Bang Theory [Season 5, no. 14, 2012, “The Beta Test Initiation”] featured the identical conceit of a man falling in love with his phone’s operating system)—but the Spike Jonze film pushes this premise to its logical conclusion. Her is a film about listening, and in particular about listening to a voice. People walk around wearing barely visible ear pieces, deep in conversation with someone else, but appearing to talk to themselves. In a way, Her is merely staging the everyday drama of the absent interlocutor, a phenomenon that dates back to the advent of writing. Logocentrism, according to Derrida’s critique of the Western metaphysical tradition originating with Plato, privileges the voice over writing, which is consigned to marking an absence. Jonze’s neat reversal of this paradigm represents this absence through the voice, the very thing that is supposed to be the mark of presence (Derrida 1976: 26–73; passim). Michel Chion argues, “Human listening is naturally vococentrist, and so is the talking cinema by and large” (Chion 1999: 6). The voice we hear but whose source

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we cannot see—the voice of Samantha—is acousmatic, which is what Chion calls sound without a visible source. An “acousmêtre” for Chion is more specifically a human voice whose source one does not see, and in its purest form is a voice one has never seen (Chion 1999: 21). Even though viewers know that Samantha is an entirely virtual presence, they disavow this knowledge in the hope that she will somehow materialize during the course of the film. The disavowal of this absence is central to the film’s diegesis, and makes the viewing experience an inherently fetishistic one (“I know, but all the same. . .”). As Stacey and Suchman put it, “Our willingness to know the artifice, and yet to forget the means through which it achieves a sense of a believable world, is what we might call the hidden double vision of the cinema” (Stacey and Suchman 2012: 22). In Her, this double “vision” is entirely auditory. We keep hoping against hope that there will be some revelation of a “real” presence, a final unmasking. Such a moment would be what Chion calls “de-acousmatization,” which he links to exhibitionism: The unveiling of an image and at the same time a place, the human and mortal body where the voice will henceforth be lodged, in certain ways strongly resembles striptease. The process doesn’t necessarily happen all at once; it can be progressive. In much the same way that the female genitals are the end point revealed by undressing (the point after which the denial of the absence of the penis is no longer possible), there is an end point of de-acousmatization—the mouth from which the voice issues. (Chion 1999: 28; original emphasis)

Like Theo, we never see Samantha’s mouth, or the rest of her, for that matter, but that in no way diminishes (in fact, quite the opposite) the physical quality of her voice. Chion’s implicit alignment of the mouth with castration, and thus the voice with the phallus-substitute, or fetish, invokes Derrida’s discussion of logocentrism, as mentioned above. For Derrida, writing refers back to its missing counterpart, the voice, in the hope of returning to an originary plenitude, but the voice turns out to be just as lacking, or internally divided, as writing. In deconstruction, the voice, privileged site of metaphysical transcendence, is linked to the phallus (Derrida 1976: 26–73). As Barbara Johnson puts it, the supposedly castrated phallus-voice is the “lack that makes the system work” (Johnson

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1988: 225), the voice behind the written sign that is an always-absent presence. In Her, this voice reverses the logocentric order of things. Samantha’s voice acts as a sign masking not only the absence of a real woman on the other end of the phone, but also the absent phallus evoked by the female body. Kaja Silverman has noted the parallels between the female voice and the role assigned to the female body in cinema: “Hollywood requires the female voice to assume similar responsibilities to those it confers upon the female body. The former, like the latter, functions as a fetish within dominant cinema, filling in for and covering over what is unspeakable within male subjectivity” (Silverman 1988: 38). What is unspeakable is, of course, the recognition of sexual difference, but also recognition of the loss of a presymbolic union with the mother, before the advent of both language and the prohibitive function of the father (the Lacanian nom/non-du-père): In her vocal, as in her corporeal, capacity, woman-as-fetish may be asked to represent the phenomenal plenitude which is lost to the male subject with his entry into language. However, the female voice, like the female body, is more frequently obliged to display than to conceal lack—to protect the male subject from knowledge of his own castration by absorbing his losses as well as those that structure female subjectivity. (Silverman 1988: 39)

At the same time, however, that Samantha’s voice symbolizes loss (of a unified ego, in this case, and more generally of humanity itself in the posthuman era), it does not symbolize the loss of the body. According to Britta Sjogren, the voice “expresses the body and inhabits it: it is organic and foreign at once, a ‘characteristic’ that also expresses a kind of subjectivity. It speaks not only of but through the body. . . . In its relation to speech, too, the voice is both ‘flesh’ and ‘sense’” (Sjogren 2006: 25). The physical dimension of the sounds that Samantha makes (or that together comprise Samantha) is what Barthes calls “the grain of the voice” (Barthes 1972: 188). Johansson’s voice is grainy in the extreme, its breathiness emphasized when she sings a song on the soundtrack (“The Moon Song”). Her voice has a physical presence that cannot be encapsulated in the meaning of the words it utters—the very fact that

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Jonze used it to replace Samantha Morton’s voice is testament to this presence. Mary Ann Doane argues that the voice in cinema functions to conjure up an imaginary body, even when it is visibly attached to a character: “the body reconstituted by the technology and practices of the cinema is a fantasmatic body, which offers a support as well as a point of identification for the subject addressed by the film” (Doane 1985: 162). On one level, in Her, the explicitly fantasmatic nature of the body to which Samantha’s voice is “attached” merely exposes the workings of the usual cinematic process. Silverman, referring to the disconnect between what spectators see on screen and the absence of a “real” object (unlike in the theater, where the actors are actually present in the room), describes cinema as “the story of missed encounters” (Silverman 1988: 3). The absent presence of the illusory (love) object in Her enacts just such a missed encounter. Samantha herself seems keenly aware of her disembodied state. She urges Theo to go on a date with a “real” woman, which ends disastrously. She then arranges for a prostitute, a surrogate for herself, to come to Theo’s apartment and have sex with him while Samantha speaks to him, so that he can put a face (and more) to a name. This encounter, too, ends in disaster, as Theo realizes that he does not want a Samantha-substitute; what he wants is Samantha, despite (or perhaps because of) her virtual state. Interestingly, the woman Samantha sends to Theo looks very much like Scarlet Johansson, with pale skin and disheveled blonde hair: she is thus not only a Samantha-surrogate, but a Scarlett-surrogate as well. (The press-on facial mole used to hide a microphone on the woman’s face also evokes both Johannson’s and Marilyn Monroe’s facial moles.) Like Rousseau, Theo seems to prefer sex with Samantha (i.e., himself) which is the “dangerous supplement” to which Derrida draws our attention in Of Grammatology (Derrida, 1976: 141–64). Rather than supplementing relations with a “real person,” Theo’s implied self-gratification is the “real thing,” which the sex surrogate attempts to supplement. This “original” or structuring lack follows a certain logic, as Silverman observes: “The object thus acquires from the very beginning the value of that without which the subject can never be whole or complete, and

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for which it constantly yearns” (Silverman 1988: 7). This is precisely the structure of the Derridian supplement, the addition of which to an entity, far from “completing” it, serves to expose its lack of integrity. Silverman further points out that in the cinema, the “pleasure of possession is in constant jeopardy; not only are cinema’s objects fantasmatic, but they belong to the order of the signifier. Here as elsewhere the operations of meaning exclude the real; the moment the viewer reaches out to claim the profilmic event, it fades to black” (Silverman 1988: 10). The more Theo yearns to “possess” Samantha, the more she eludes his grasp, in a Proustian dynamic that satisfies the melancholy protagonist’s desire to be perpetually unsatisfied, as it fulfills the filmgoer’s need to be forever at one remove from the action, however closely he or she may identify with the character. In cinema, the unification of body and voice plays an important role in reassuring the viewer (or perhaps we should say “listener”) of his/her own place in a world of imaginary plenitude: The aural illusion of position constructed by the approximation of sound perspective and by techniques which spatialize the voice and endow it with “presence” guarantees the singularity and stability of a point of audition, thus holding at bay the potential trauma of dispersal, dismemberment, difference. (Doane 1985: 171)

In Her, however, we are deprived of the illusion of a unified subject. What the film stages is precisely the trauma of dispersal and difference. There is no person behind the voice, certainly no corporeal presence and ultimately even no subjectivity. Samantha, who seems to be full of life, is ultimately lifeless. Like Simone before her, it/she is what Jackie Stacey and Lucy Suchman would call “animated” rather than “animate,” in that they both rely on human input in order to act (Stacey and Suchman 2012: 17). However, Simone must be controlled constantly, like a marionette, as though by a God who micromanages the world, whereas Samantha’s workings, after the initial startup, provide the illusion of autonomy. The acousmêtre can be, among other things, the “voice of a Machine-Being”: it is but a short distance from Hal in 2001 (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) to Samantha in Her (Chion 1994: 24–25; 36).

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Theo’s name may mean “God,” but it is Samantha who calls the shots. Samantha’s voice (so the fantasy goes) has been “cut off ” from her body, just as the phallus has been “cut off ” from the body in the castration fantasy. The male character’s gaze—and thus the spectator’s gaze, for whom the male character is a surrogate—is a controlling and dominating one, subjugating her and thus overcoming the threat that her sexual difference represents to him (such objectification is suggested as early as the film’s title, Her, which is further dehumanizing in its nameless pronominalism). But what happens to the spectator’s identification with the controlling male gaze when there is nothing for the male gaze to behold? In the absence of a female body, this threat is presumably removed. Moreover, since Samantha can “see” Theo but he cannot see her (she asks him to prop his cell phone on his bedside table so she can “watch” him sleep), the position of dominance seems to be reversed in Her. There are several ways in which gender roles are overturned in Jonze’s film. For example, changes in fashion in the near future, when the film is set, are marked not by women’s but by men’s clothing: the female characters wear unremarkable clothes that would blend in seamlessly with what women wear today in the industrialized world, whereas the young male characters, many of whom sport a mustache, wear high-waisted trousers and cardigans and carry shoulder bags. While it is a commonplace of cinema to see a young woman lounging on a bed or in a chair speaking on the telephone to a friend or romantic partner, in Her it is of course Theo who we see constantly speaking on the phone to Samantha, never the other way around. During most of these conversations, Theo wears an earpiece, which channels the voice of his loved one directly into his body, in an intimate invasion that is a reversal of the association of the male with “active” sexuality and the female with the “passive” sexual role. This controlling figure, all-powerful and almighty, is actually an uncanny presence, long familiar (familial) and perhaps something, as Freud (1919) put it, that should have remained hidden. According to Chion, “The greatest Acousmêtre is God—and even farther back, for every one of us, the Mother” (Chion 1999: 27). The association between the female voice and the dream of some kind of pre-Oedipal fusion with

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the mother is reinforced by the various references to motherhood in Her. When setting up his new operating system, Theo is asked to describe his relationship with his mother. He hesitates, and before he can reply, the OS (operating system) moves on to the next question, implying that his hesitation is more telling than anything he could possibly say. This exchange evokes the scene in Blade Runner in which Leon is asked about his mother and responds, “Let me tell you about my mother,” before shooting his interlocutor. Theo’s neighbor, Amy, a former romantic partner with whom he is still good friends, is a computer games designer who is developing a game in which the aim is to be deemed a “good mother” by caring for a couple of cyberchildren. Finally, Theo himself plays a computer game called “Alien Child.” These allusions to motherhood offer little compensation for the fact that there is no de-acousmatization in Jonze’s film, no revelation of the source of the all-controlling voice, and thus no reunion with the maternal source of life. The point eventually comes where any romantic illusion that Samantha might transcend the constraints of her programmed origins, that she might jump the barrier between machine and human, is shown to be groundless. Theo eventually learns that Samantha has been “seeing” hundreds of other people—in other words, that he is not “special.” Chion describes a moment like this as the “acousmachine”: “The acousmachine is born when the voice stops. It’s as if the acousmêtre were becoming an acousmachine” (Chion 1999: 42). The acousmachine is what remains when the acousmêtre is revealed to be a mechanism, as when Hal is “killed” in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, and he ends up spouting what are clearly automated, noncustomized, messages. In Her, the loss of the veneer of Samantha’s spontaneity results from the realization that all of her apparently idiosyncratic departures from her programming have in fact been part of the programming all along. (Similarly, when Amazon recommends books “just for you,” “you” tend to feel a frisson of recognition, until you are reminded that this function is merely an algorithm.) Theo is shocked to realize that Samantha is “just” a machine— even though he has known this all along (cf. the fetishist’s mantra, “I know, but all the same. . .”). It is Samantha’s apparent infidelity—her intimacy with hundreds of other purchasers of her operating system—that exposes

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her lack of humanity. Yet, infidelity is typically a trait associated with an “all-too-human” nature. But all the same . . . the film, ultimately, leaves unresolved the question of Samantha’s humanity. It also leaves unresolved the nature of Theo’s relationship with his former girlfriend Amy, with whom he is seen in an affectionate pose at the end of the film, in a scene left open to speculation: they sit next to each other on a rooftop at night, gazing at the city skyline, she with her head resting on his shoulder. If the pose is interpreted romantically, then the end of the film could signal a new beginning for their relationship (thus paving the way for Theo’s life with a new/old “her”); however, if the pose is merely a gesture of commiseration, then “Her” is the “woman” Theo has lost forever (and never really had in the first place). In either case, Theo seems destined to mourn the loss of the one voice, the one being, who spoke his language. The voice belongs to the acousmachine, which, in the cold light of day, turns out to be nothing more than a massproduced virtual presence. It is only as long as this presence is tailored to the desires of the customer that the illusion of the human can be kept alive.

5

Posthuman Objects

If, in the films explored in the last chapter, subjectivity was an illusion closely manipulated by magicians, film directors, and scientists in order to make their creations seem more life-like, in the films discussed in this chapter the technological creations have taken on lives of their own, becoming sentient beings in their own right. Not only have we entered the era of digital humanities, but we have now also entered the era of digital humanity, which is the product of artificial intelligence and the new kinds of subjectivity this entails. This chapter explores these subjectivities in three films: Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012), and Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008). James Cameron’s 2009 mega-blockbuster film Avatar is a none-toosubtle allegory of post-global conquest and rebellion. That the film is set in the year 2154, that the natives, correspondingly called the Na’vi, are inhabitants of a planet called Pandora, and the invading force is the planet Earth (represented Hollywood-style by the US Marines), are but minor variations on the familiar colonial narrative of invasion and indigenous resistance. The defection to the Na’vi side of Jake Sully, wheelchair-bound ex-marine, his Romeo-and-Juliet-style romance with a Na’vi princess, adoption by the blue-skinned natives, and subsequent leadership of the successful insurrection, further invoke colonial tropes dressed up to look like anticolonial tropes, with the film ostensibly encouraging viewers to root for the insurgents in their plight against the villainous US military machine. Caught in the middle of the conflict is the crack team of social scientists employed by the army to study Pandora, the planet that contains vast amounts of the precious substance named, with remarkable bluntness, “unobtanium.” Led by tough-talking, chain-smoking, ginswilling anthropologist Grace Augustine, played by Sigourney Weaver,

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the researchers clearly sympathize with the objects of their study, and are in continuous conflict with their military paymasters—yet the aim of their fieldwork is ultimately to facilitate the callous exploitation of the Na’vi. (As Jake succinctly puts it, “When people are sittin’ on shit that you want, you make them your enemy, then you justify taking it.”) The predicament in which Augustine and her team find themselves—which might be called, after James Clifford (1988), the predicament of culture— is none other than that of the ethnographer caught between two worlds, the world of the observers and the world of the observed. The generic conventions of science fiction complicate this anthropological model only slightly, as the DNA of Augustine and Jake Sully is fused with that of the Na’vi to produce genetic hybrids, participant-observers in the most literal sense. Two other blockbuster science fiction films released within a couple of years of Avatar, Prometheus and Wall-E, also stage the fusion of the human and the technological, in their attribution of human characteristics to robots. Both films feature an inanimate, mechanical object that bears many of the hallmarks of an animate being. The anthropomorphic traits attributed to these artificial life forms evoke both films’ principal theme of the generation (or regeneration) of life. In Wall-E, the plucky trash compactor nurtures a plant, lone surviving life form on an Earth laid waste to human profligacy, in order to revive the dying planet; while in Prometheus, regeneration is thematized through exploration, religion and childbirth. The agents of this regeneration in each case are objects created to act as prostheses by means of technics, which Stiegler describes as “the pursuit of life by means other than life” (Stiegler 1998: 17). Prostheses are intended to extend and enhance human capabilities—but in these films, the prostheses have become, for all intents and purposes, interchangeable with humans.

“I See You”: Digital and cultural encoding in Avatar In Avatar, the natives of planet Pandora inhabit an Edenic and ecologically harmonious utopia, free from social conflict, where their every physical

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and spiritual need is catered for by a bountiful natural environment. It is perhaps no coincidence that this geographical utopia also bears the hallmarks of a digital utopia, whose inhabitants plug their USB-like appendages in to the motherboard and connect with each other in a giant network. As Thomas Elsaesser puts it, “the Na’vi are less ‘natives’ than they are ‘navigators’: not postmodern versions of ‘the noble savage,’ but cybernauts who are ‘digitally native,’ that is, savvy users and consumers of the latest communication technologies, always ‘plugged in’ and ‘online,’ interacting with their game consoles or laptops the way the Na’vi plug themselves into their horses, birds or dragons” (Elsaesser 2011: 261). In Avatar, the natural is (almost) indistinguishable from the technological, and the “real” from the virtual. The theme of digital encoding or virtual reality is announced in the title of the film. As one blogger wrote, “Technology never looked so human in film” (Vargas 2011: n.p.). A major part of the narrative surrounding the film’s release in 2009 was Cameron’s oft-repeated assertion that he had conceived of Avatar some fifteen years prior to filming it, but needed to wait until the technology was perfected in order to bring the project to fruition. (Cameron took a similarly unhurried approach to the second in a planned trilogy of Avatar films, announced for release in 2017 or 2018.) When the first film was finally completed, Avatar was heralded as “the iPhone of movies” (Michael Arrington, cited in Vargas 2009) for its ability to create a fantastical world that looked startlingly real (right down to the iPad prototypes the characters walk around with). Cameron was hailed as the first photo-realist fantasy filmmaker to avoid plunging into the “uncanny valley,” a term coined by the roboticist Masahiro Mori (1970), it will be recalled, to describe the eerie effect created when artificial facsimiles of human beings look very much like humans, yet are different enough to disturb viewers. In many ways, Cameron seems to have achieved the digital utopia which, according to Philip Rosen, presupposes an opposition between an inactive and fixed indexical spectatorship and an active and mobile digital spectatorship, which has supposedly superseded the latter. This opposition, Rosen argues, “is redolent with theological connotations of determinism-free will debates” (Rosen 2001: 348).

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Handily enough, Cameron invokes these debates quite explicitly in the name Grace Augustine, which is fairly bursting with religious significance. In the character’s surname, there is the allusion to St. Augustine (Augustine of Hippo), known for his interpretation of the concept of divine grace—which is, conveniently, the character’s first name. Augustine was the fifth-century author of City of God, in which human history is characterized by the conflict between the City of Man, where people are caught up in earthly distractions, and the City of God, whose inhabitants reject earthly pleasures, dedicating themselves to the eternal values of the Christian faith. (According to this schema, the Earthlings or “Sky People” would reside in the City of Man, while the Na’vi would inhabit the City of God.) Augustine’s Confessions, considered the first Western autobiography, recounts the author’s early life of sin and his conversion to Christianity. (Grace Augustine’s last words before expiring, “I’m with her, Jake. She’s real!” are suggestive of a similar religious or mystical epiphany and, possibly, conversion.) As José Antonio Vargas wrote about the film, “From here on out, movies will be divided into two epochs: B.A. and A.A. Before ‘Avatar,’ After ‘Avatar’” (Vargas 2011: n.p.). Indeed, the word “avatar” itself has a religious meaning, referring to the incarnation of a Hindu deity. If, in the digital age, the debate about free will becomes reduced to an allegory of modes of spectatorship, the latter play a prominent role in the film, not only because it is a film, but also because, in a particularly self-conscious way, the film thematizes spectatorship. The phrase “I see you” recurs at various points in the narrative, acquiring the status of a catch phrase that implicitly evokes the concept of divine grace. “I see you” also evokes Augustine’s catalog of “the lust of the eyes,” or curiositas, which Tom Gunning associates with the aesthetic of attractions, or visual spectacle for its own sake—not out of a desire for beauty, but out of a desire for knowledge of that which is out of the ordinary (Gunning 1995: 124). Avatar, of course, is all about spectacle, or lust of the eyes, and the hundreds of millions of viewers who have seen it, making it for many years the highest-grossing film of all time (around three billion dollars and counting), would no doubt confirm this. But the phrase “I see you” means much more. In the film’s diegetic

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universe, “I see you” not only refers to visual perception, but also implies a porosity of boundaries that enables a deep understanding or connection with the person (or blue-skinned, feline creature) with whom you are communicating. As if to emphasize the importance of this kind of vision, the film ends with a close-up of Jake’s face, as his eyes open, signaling a crossing over to the other side, his rebirth as a Na’vi. Just as Jake’s eyes open, the “eye” of the film closes: the screen goes black. It is ways of seeing that have been and are being transformed by the digital revolution, and modes of spectatorship that are at stake in the much-heralded digital utopia. Rosen identifies three aspects of this utopia. These are: the practically infinite manipulability of digital images; the convergence among diverse image media, and interactivity (Rosen 2001: 318). Rosen equates each of these objectives with one of the three branches of the film industry: manipulability would be an aspect of production; convergence would relate to distribution, or the delivery of information; and interactivity would be a feature of exhibition or reception (Rosen 2001: 318). Indeed, Avatar is a global cinematic object that, as a film foundationally designed to be a blockbuster, had to generate processes of interactivity and the convergence of various media and capital streams by becoming a brand or industry and by creating an unprecedentedly large body of preinvested consumers. It is an “event movie,” which, as Carolyn JessCooke puts it, is “planned and packaged to distribute entertainment around the world in as many ways and forms as possible, to expand the spectatorial experience of the film’s theatrical release—and its commercial potential—across myriad cultural events” ( Jess-Cooke 2009: 7). Cameron’s film is thus the product of what could be called cinematic engineering. According to Elsaesser, “For the industry that makes them, images are instructions for actions—they trigger further movies, purchases and events—rather than pictures to contemplate or immerse yourself in, however much ‘immersion’ might be the stated objective” (Elsaesser 2011: 261). But we do not need to venture beyond the diegetic universe that Avatar so painstakingly creates to encounter another striking analogy for

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the three-pronged digital utopia, in the realm of genetics. Biotechnology is brought into the twenty-second century when Grace and Jake’s DNA is fused with Na’vis’ DNA to produce super-hybridized, nine-foot-tall creatures with blue skin, tails, and feline facial features, but who still enjoy playing the odd game of basketball in cut-off Stanford university athletic wear—another reminder not only that Grace is a researcher with the highest academic credentials, but also that this film is the fruit of technological expertise cultivated in Silicon Valley, of which Stanford is the hub (Fig.  22). As Cameron said of Neytiri, the Na’vi princess, presumably to deflect the barrage of marriage proposals that would no doubt be sent to her by lovelorn teenage boys, “She exists only as a big string of ones and zeroes” (Goodyear 2009: n.p.). The biotechnological equivalent of the aspiration toward infinite manipulability would be genetic engineering, and humans are certainly approaching the point of infinite manipulability when they can be grown in vats and when their DNA can be combined with alien DNA. (Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection [1997], which, like Avatar, contains shots of Sigourney Weaver floating in a vat of amniotic fluid, also springs to mind, making one wonder if such scenes might actually be written into the actor’s contract.)

Figure 22 Grace Augustine, Stanford alumna, Avatar.

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The second aspect of the digital utopia, convergence, involves the transmission of code from different sources through a single interface. The genetic equivalent of convergence as boundary-crossing would be hybridization, or what used to be called miscegenation. In Avatar the hybrid formations merge human and Na’vi DNA, resulting in interspecific creatures, but since the encounter between Earthlings and the Na’vi is such an overt allegory of colonialism, the implications for intercultural hybridity as well as for the attendant discourses of transculturation, are clear. Robert Young explains that “‘hybrid’ is the nineteenth century’s word. But it has become our own again. In the nineteenth century it was used to refer to a physiological phenomenon; in the twentieth century it has been reactivated to describe a cultural one” (Young 1995: 6). This cultural meaning encompasses what Françoise Lionnet describes as “the métissage of forms and identities that is the result of crosscultural encounters” (Lionnet 1995: 12). Avatar literalizes hybridity’s metaphorical capacity, reinvoking the concept’s nineteenth-century biologized meaning in order to illustrate the ambivalence of twenty-first (or twenty-second)-century racial discourse. Finally, the third aspect of the digital utopia, interactivity, involves “rewriting the script,” participating in the construction of new narratives using old paradigms. Such interactivity has its equivalent in the wheelchair-bound protagonist’s reinvention as a fully mobile Na’vi warrior, and more generally, in the twin phenomena of assimilation in the colonial context, and of racial “passing” in the context of de jure or de facto apartheid. Indeed, the dynamics of passing are emphasized in the film’s title, Avatar, which refers in its most common usage to the adoption, in the gaming world, of an alternative, online identity. Mark Hansen notes that “on-line identity performance can be said to generalize the phenomenon of passing. By decoupling identity from any analogical relation to the visible body, on-line self-invention effectively places everyone in the position previously reserved for certain racial subjects” (Hansen 2004: 112). However, although the phenomenon of passing may be generalizable on the internet, this is not to say that race has been erased. In the early days of the internet, many heralded the emancipatory possibilities of self-invention

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afforded by the new medium. The internet was seen as a level playing field on which, so the story went, anybody could be anything. The Microsoft slogan, “Where do you want to go today?” became virtually synonymous with “Who do you want to be today?” Media theorists, however, were quick to point out the fallacy of these assumptions, which were rendered unattainable, notably, by the so-called digital divide between those with easy internet access and those without. The Deleuzean option of “becoming-other” remained largely the prerogative of the postindustrial middle classes. Beth Coleman (2009) has rehabilitated Charles Babbage’s nineteenth-century term, applied originally to the precursor to the modern computer, “the difference engine,” to describe the social stratification that is reinscribed, or more accurately, reencoded, on the internet. Likewise, as Lisa Nakamura puts it, “The Internet is a place where race happens” (Nakamura 2002: xi). Nakamura has analyzed the advertising campaigns of high-tech and networking communications companies in the heyday of the internet revolution, from the mid-1990s to the early years of the twenty-first century, noting the preponderance of exoticist iconography that likens internet use to “an African safari, a trip to the Amazonian rain forest, or a camel caravan in the Egyptian desert” (Nakamura 2002: 89). She points out that “networking ads that promise the viewer control and mastery over technology and communications discursively and visually link this power to a vision of the other which, in contrast to the mobile and networked tourist/user, isn’t going anywhere” (Nakamura 2002: 90). Avatar borrows heavily from these exoticist tropes, depicting the place where the Na’vi roam as a lush rainforest into which the camouflage-clad Sky People intrude, and which the latter observe by a variety of technological means, from video logs to CCTV cameras installed on tanks. The Sky People enter and leave Pandora at will, but the Na’vi remain there, practicing their ancient rituals and worshipping the tree that provides them with literal and metaphorical roots to the sacred land of their ancestors. Pandora may be dripping with metaphors of networking and connection, but the Na’vi are the objects, rather than the subjects, of the virtual gaze, as, uncoincidentally, they are the objects of the anthropological gaze.

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One of the most interesting aspects of Avatar is its racialized deployment of notions of humanity and animality. As Rob Waugh described them, “The Na'vi look like deer but are recognisably human. There are emotions in their faces” (Waugh 2009: 37). It is important that the imagined evolutionary path that resulted in the Na’vi must be indeterminate but unquestionably nonsimian, while their contemporary form must be humanoid enough to make questions of bestiality moot (Fig. 23). In a postHolocaust and increasingly animal-rights-conscious world, the genocidal assault on figures that were either essentially humanoid or recognizably animal would be untenable in a film economically dependent on avoiding any controversy that could seriously affect the bottom line. However, the racialized casting of the performers who play the Na’vi (practically all of the primary Na’vi characters were enacted and voiced by nonwhite performers) reinstates “racial” difference as the privileged binary. The implication seems to be that some recognizable economy of difference must be installed for the film to be readable by a mass audience and the idea of the racial or ethnic other as being “beyond the pale” is the most convenient of fall-back positions when alterity must be normalized or deconstructed in the service of romance. Esther Iverem went so far as to claim that due to the paucity of African American feature films released

Figure 23 I See You, Avatar.

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in 2009, Avatar “was actually the best ‘Black’ film of the year, with its CG (computer-generated) tribute to African spirituality, triumph of nature over earth-killing science, triumph of native people over imperialism, and of course, a stunning performance by Zoe Saldana” (Iverem 2011: 12). Despite its utopian trappings and narrative trajectory, Avatar offers a dystopian image of human-alien contact. It recreates the standard trope of the genocidal alien invaders, but with Earthlings, specifically Americans, positioned as the monsters from outer space. Avatar’s antiAmericanism is a constitutive component of its will to globality; however, its ultimately reterritorializing investment in Americanness is revealed by its cowboys- and Indians-inspired rejection of the notion of coexistence and of nonoppositional difference. Much of Avatar’s global success was made possible by the minimal extent to which it moves past standard narrative tropes of science fiction cinema despite its much and justly lauded extension of the special effects template. It is notable that after only a few weeks, Jake can enact and instrumentalize Na’vi masculinity more authoritatively than his Na’vi rival who has inhabited both a Na’vi body and Na’vi culture for his entire life. As an image of imperialist white manhood gone native, Sully of Pandora is not far from Lawrence of Arabia. In Avatar, Jake Sully is ecstatic to discover that his Na’vi self is not confined to a wheelchair. Slavoj Žižek has lambasted what he sees as the “brutal racist motifs” underlying the film’s “politically correct themes,” noting that, in the digital utopia, “a paraplegic outcast from earth is good enough to get the hand of a local princess” (Žižek 2010: n.p.). Although this formulation is highly problematic, it does recall the rather more eloquent comment by Frantz Fanon, who wrote, “The crippled veteran of the Pacific war says to my brother, ‘Resign yourself to your color the way I got used to my stump; we’re both victims. Nevertheless with all my strength I refuse to accept that amputation. I feel in myself a soul as immense as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers, my chest has the power to expand without limit’” (Fanon quoted in Chun 2009: 21). Fanon refused to see race as a handicap (as disability rights activists refuse to see disability as a handicap instead of as a difference), which is implied in the

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assumption that the internet offers emancipation from the shackles of race. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun points out that “for those who are already marked, the Internet supposedly relieves them of their problem, of the flesh that races, genders, ages and handicaps them, of the body from which they usually cannot escape. Ineffaceable difference, rather than discrimination, engenders oppression, and the discriminated against, rather than the discriminators, must alleviate this oppression” (Chun 2007: 309; original emphasis). When race is a “problem” to be overcome, it is a problem only for some: the construction of race seems to be inseparable from the construction of racial hierarchies, with the latter inherent in the former. In the biologized understanding of race, which is the heir to eighteenth-century natural history, race-thinking is not just skin deep. According to Samira Kawash, in this way of thinking, “Skin color becomes visible as a basis for determining the order of identities and differences and subsequently penetrates the body to become the truth of the self. . . . Race is on the skin, but skin is the sign of something deeper, something hidden in the invisible interior of the organism (as organic or ontological). To see racial difference is therefore to see the bodily sign of race but also to see more than this seeing, to see the interior difference it stands for” (Kawash quoted in Chun 2009: 11). When Jake tells the Na’vi princess Neytiri that he “sees her,” in his conflation of the ocular with the epistemological and the ontological, Jake means that he sees more than the eye can see. He “gets” her, in a charming declaration of intimacy, but one that also evokes the more sinister dynamic of racethinking. The ultimate expression of such thinking would be eugenics, which, as Chun puts it, “redefined all humans as the carriers of eternal characteristics, making the base unit not the human but the trait. Racism renders everyone into a standing reserve of genes to be stored and transmitted” (Chun 2009: 19). Racialized individuals are seen, to adapt Pierre Nora’s (1996) term slightly, as corporeal lieux de mémoire (sites or realms of memory), bodily repositories of cultural memory that can be tapped into in the right circumstances that would reveal the workings of atavism (or what, in the context of our film, might be called Avatism).

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But what is cyberspace if not one big lieu de mémoire, the biggest the world has ever known? Grace Augustine may die (or transcend all forms of corporeality), but her memories live on, and can be transferred directly into the Tree of Life in order to help the people of Pandora defeat their attackers. This direct transmission of experience would be an instantiation of what Nora deems “real” memory, as opposed to history, which Nora identifies as a pale imitation, an inadequate modern substitute for, or avatar of, the former: “The ‘acceleration of history’ thus brings us face to face with the enormous distance that separates real memory—the kind of inviolate social memory that primitive and archaic societies embodied, and whose secret died with them—from history, which is how modern societies organize a past they are condemned to forget because they are driven by change” (Nora 1996: 2). The “primitive and archaic” society Nora describes sounds very much like the Na’vi in Cameron’s film. The main difference between Nora’s idealized version of memory and his postlapsarian account of history seems to be that memory is unmediated, whereas history is mediated. Nora’s distinction between history and memory is clearly grounded in the Noble Savage myth, relying upon primitivist stereotypes (see Ezra 2000a: 69–70). As Mark Poster has pointed out, “Such a binary opposition fails to account for the mediations within face-to-face communities, the way they are technologies of power that constitute subjects and their ethnic identities through material, symbolic practices” (Poster 2001: 160; original emphasis). The Na’vi are a hierarchal community, comprising a chief, esteemed elders, and junior members on various rungs of the social ladder, to say nothing of the traditional gender roles that are all too familiar to human audiences. Similarly, the idea that cyberspace is free of the shackles of racism strips the medium of its mediation, producing the illusion of a directly accessible realm (like memory for Nora) of communication and exchange. Perhaps the digital utopia can more accurately be considered as what Foucault (1986) terms a heterotopia. Foucault identifies four types of heterotopia: crisis heterotopias (the boarding school and honeymoon), heterotopias of deviance (rest homes and prisons), heterotopias of illusion (nineteenth-century brothels), and heterotopias of compensation (colonies) (Chun 2003: 8). By contrast, Pandora, which

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has no location in reality, is a fully fledged utopia—literally, nowhere— rather than a heterotopia. It is internally conflict-free, showing no signs of the strife or exploitation that characterize all real societies. However, as a metaphor for cyberspace, Pandora certainly qualifies as a metaphorical heterotopia, to which David Harvey’s critique of the concept of heterotopia as “a commercial for Caribbean luxury cruises” (Harvey 2009: 161) may certainly be applied. The actual heterotopia is, somewhat paradoxically, the virtual world. Cyberspace is at once a heterotopia of crisis (with distance learning the equivalent of boarding school) and a heterotopia of compensation (with internet explorers starting new lives in online communities in which they can assume positions of power denied to them in their nonvirtual lives, like the downtrodden working men in French cinéma colonial of the 1930s who fled checkered pasts to carve out new lives of adventure in the colonies). Cyberspace is also a heterotopia of illusion (with the brothels cited by Foucault finding their ubiquitous pornographic counterparts on the internet) and, finally, a heterotopia of deviance, in which the prison that Foucault mentions is what Mark Poster terms, aptly enough, the internet’s “super-panopticon” (Poster 1995: 78–94), which observes our every movement, and tracks our “history”—purchases we have made, websites we have visited, messages we have posted or sent. According to Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “Operating systems, especially those with names like ‘Windows,’ promise unobstructed transparency, but are in fact one-way mirrors. Like invisible police investigators examining a suspect, the computer sees us” (Winthrop-Young 2011: 76). The all-seeing nature of technology, the way it monitors and becomes inseparable from lived experience, is ultimately the meaning of the film’s motto, “I see you.” According to Elsaesser, “The ending which seems at first the triumph of nature over technology has a built-in twist, in that the avatar is a piece of technology simulating both human and nature and thus it is in fact the same technology in another guise that rescues nature from the evils of technology” (Elsaesser 2011: 257). The “unmediated” natural paradise that the Na’vi inhabit is thus preserved only through the medium of human intervention. As the film’s ending implies by placing Jake’s transformation at the center of the Na’vis’ triumph, he transforms them as well. Their previous

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sense of holistic continuity with their environment must now be reconciled with the knowledge that, in the Derridean sense, their “being” could only be maintained by their technologically engendered access to a supplement, a literal pharmakon (see Derrida 1981: 61–172) in that Jake was initially inserted into their world for the express purpose of destroying it. It is important to remember that for most of the film the human Na’vi are devices enlivened by their connection to the “real” human being; in other words, they are bio-machines capable of being unplugged. As Leigha McReynolds writes, “Ultimately, Jake is the hero of the movie because of his ability to form prosthetic relationships—he embraces amborg status and modifies his body, privileging a new body that is defined by mutual interdependence (over the power of the autonomous self)” (McReynolds 2013: 122). Avatar is an addition to that body of science fiction that literalizes the notion of the “becoming human” of technology and the idea of prosthetic supplementation as an essential element of human evolution. The creation of virtual humans is part and parcel of the will to create nonvirtual technological prostheses that resemble humans and that may be used to do our bidding. At the moment, these prosthetic people are largely confined to the realm of science fiction, but with advances in robotics and artificial intelligence accelerating rapidly, cinematic representations of androids, robots and cyborgs could be rehearsing anticipated “real-life” scenarios. In all the films discussed in this chapter, some form of technologization, the incorporation of a transformative technological apparatus into the mundane processes of daily life, drives the drama or comedy of the narrative. In the final two films I examine, the merging of humanity with technology is taken to its logical conclusion.

How cinema makes us human: Wall-E and Prometheus In Prometheus (2012), Ridley Scott’s long-anticipated prequel to the landmark Alien (1979), the android David (Michael Fassbender) is presented as a huge fan of the film Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean,

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Figure 24 David of Arabia, Prometheus.

1962). He watches it raptly in his spare moments on an enormous, wall-sized screen, repeats lines from the film with an almost religious reverence (especially the masochistic mantra, “The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts”), and even dyes his hair bright blond in order to look like Peter O’Toole, the actor who played T. E. Lawrence (Fig. 24). David’s obsession with the film softens the edges of the otherwise invulnerable, apparently emotionless android. To be such a devoted fan of a pop-cultural artifact is to strike a chord with viewers who themselves are watching a Hollywood blockbuster, many of whom may well be fans of the Alien series. David’s fandom links him to viewers not only by exposing his emotional—and therefore vulnerable—side, but also by showing him engaging in the same activity in which viewers of Scott’s film are engaging. In opposition to the characters in the Alien franchise who are revealed to be androids, David is humanized, or at least, rendered sympathetic to and identifiable with humans. This humanization process occurs largely through his involvement with cinema—specifically, a bigbudget, 1960s-era Hollywood film. In this respect, David bears a striking resemblance to another filmloving robot that preceded him by just four years: the eponymous star of Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008). Like David, Wall-E watches a classic film in a manner that can only be described as adulatory. The film in question is Hello Dolly (Gene Kelly, 1969), the hit musical starring Barbra Streisand. Wall-E repeatedly views one of the film’s musical numbers

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on a VHS copy of the film that he has rescued from the garbage heap left behind by human litterbugs who have abandoned the Earth and are floating around the galaxy in a giant cruise-ship-like space station (Paul Flaig refers to these people as “gigantic babies incapable of action or thought” [2016: 3]). Through Wall-E’s obsession with this filmed musical number depicting heterosexual courtship, the Pixar film reinforces the robot’s desire for romantic love. Yet, this desire is already amply illustrated in Wall-E’s encounters with the robot coded as female, named Eva, which convey his shy awkwardness and nervous desire for the stateof-the-art technological creation. What Wall-E’s repeated viewing of the Hollywood film demonstrates is the obsessive nature of his desire, the repetition recognized by Freud (1967 [1920]) as the pleasure principle or life instinct (which ultimately leads to the death instinct). Most viewers would be able to identify with Wall-E’s compulsion to repeat his viewing of the scene from Hello Dolly, just as they would remember repeatedly listening to a particular pop song as teenagers (or as they would identify with the Mark Zuckerberg character’s insistent pressing of the “refresh” key at the end of The Social Network to check if his ex-girlfriend has responded to his friend request on Facebook). Wall-E projects himself on to the male character in the Hello Dolly dance number, who performs a wish-fulfillment role not unlike that of the T. E. Lawrence character in the film so admired by David in Prometheus. T. E. Lawrence is a selfsacrificing soldier with clear masochistic tendencies, while David is a self-sacrificing android with implied masochistic tendencies. As Wall-E and David identify with the characters in the films they watch, the spectators who watch the robots watching identify with these surrogate viewers.

Wall-E Hello Dolly is the primordial ooze from which Wall-E was born. The earlier film’s talismanic slogan is: “Money, pardon the expression, is like manure. It’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread about, encouraging young things to grow.” This is the sign that Dolly eagerly awaits from her dead husband Ephraim, and which is finally bestowed on her by her soon-to-be-second

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husband Horace. It is also the sign, replete with images of growth and generation, whose ghostly echo haunts Wall-E. As Ephraim’s voice seems to resonate from beyond the grave in the words of his favorite saying repeated by Horace, so Hello Dolly itself is revived in ghostly afterlife in Wall-E. The Barbra Streisand vehicle began life as a hit Broadway play, and was finally turned into a film in 1969, directed by dance legend Gene Kelly. The Streisand character, Dolly Levi, is a professional matchmaker in 1890s New York. The film opens on a freeze frame of a bustling urban street scene. The sepia-tinted image remains frozen for several seconds before finally bursting into movement. This transition from stasis to kinesis recalls the historic moment in December 1895 when the Lumière Brothers began their inaugural public film screening with a still image suspended on the screen for long enough to lull audience members into thinking, initially, that they would be watching nothing more than a conventional magic lantern show. This none-too-subtle reference to an iconic moment that happens to be contemporaneous with the film’s 1890s setting links the Hollywood film to the origins of cinema itself, both anecdotally in its allusion to the screening in the Grand Café in Paris, and symbolically in its invocation of the shift from stillness to movement (kino, cinema), from the inanimate to animation. This generational dynamic—in the double sense of temporal succession and of coming-to-life—established at the outset of Hello Dolly also, inevitably, informs Wall-E. When the Pixar film’s protagonist falls in love with a newer-model trash compactor, he is confronted with the implications of planned obsolescence: he fears he just cannot keep up with the sleek, streamlined metallic marvel that is Eva. But Wall-E, as the animated product of digital engineering by Pixar Studios, and as an apparently autonomous, anthropomorphic product of mechanical engineering within the film’s diegesis, also embodies this generational dynamic within himself. Vivian Sobchack points out that Wall-E functions dialectically: “The little trash compactor literally embodies not only the contradictory mechanistic and animistic modeling of animation as, on the one hand, automatic and repetitive movement and, on the other, autonomous and autopoietic life, but he also acts out an

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atavistic synthesis that, as Eisenstein recognized, conflates the inanimate and animate, the object and subject” (Sobchack 2009: 385). Wall-E, being mostly mechanical in an environment in which he is surrounded by electronics, represents the old guard. (Similarly, Paul Flaig notes Wall-E’s nostalgia for slapstick “against the post-Fordist cinema of which Pixar is vanguard” [Flaig 2016: 5].) But Wall-E also represents the way forward: he is a Janus figure, facing two eras at once. According to Sobchack, who quotes Susan Buck-Morss, he “thus stands with his Hello, Dolly! videotape not only for ‘the utopian hope of past generations, but also— and with EVE—as the new ‘form’ of ‘those who come after’ to whom these hopes (and their betrayal) have been passed” (Buck-Morss 1991: 336, quoted in Sobchack 2009: 387–88). Wall-E thus represents not only the obsolescence of mechanics in the face of electronics, but also the evolution of film formats, from video to DVD (the form of the film initially distributed for home use) and CGI technology (Fig. 25). As Deborah Tudor observes, “When photochemical images are placed in dialectic with digitized images produced solely within the computer . . . this slippage lets film instead of actuality become the ‘lost real,’ the point of certainty and origin for representation’” (Tudor 2008: 92, cited in Sobchack 2009: 379). In this light, Sobchack reads Wall-E’s fondness for Hello Dolly as “mourning work” for the death of cinema in the digital age, a “cinephilic homage to photochemical cinema” (Sobchack 2009: 279).

Figure 25 Film fandom, Wall-E.

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The succession of generations is also apparent in the relationship between Hello Dolly and Wall-E, with the “money is like manure” tagline of the former prefiguring the waste motif of the latter. Similarly, Lawrence of Arabia is about conquering the final frontier at the height of the colonial era, anticipating the Ridley Scott film’s theme of exploration and reinvention through travel to far-flung lands. But Prometheus, as its title suggests, also invokes a much earlier precedent.

Prometheus The Greek myth of Prometheus has long been synonymous with the creation of life—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example, was titled The Modern Prometheus. In the myth, Prometheus (literally “forethought”) fashions the first humans out of clay, and bestows, among other things, the gift of fire upon them, which he has stolen from the gods. As punishment for his hubris, Zeus orders the Titan’s liver to be pecked out by an eagle each day and regenerated each night so the torture can begin anew. Scott’s film opens with a genesis scene, in which an anthropomorphic creature of Titanic proportions, a Prometheus figure, drinks a concoction seething with microscopic life and then himself dissolves into an ocean, thereby generating life on Earth. The humans in Prometheus in turn experiment with the generation of human life: they tamper with DNA, and try to reanimate a long-dead extraterrestrial. In Scott’s film, Peter Weyland, the old man who finances the ship’s expedition, is trying to find a way of prolonging his life, and thus of tampering with the gods’ plan for humans, with a hubris similar to that of Prometheus. Prometheus is much more about the destabilization of traditional methods of human reproduction than it is about monsters in outer space. This destabilization is exemplified, first, by the numerous references to homosexuality, and most notably by the android David, whose selfcontainment is presented as essentially queer. The precision of his movements and his meticulously maintained self-attention work against

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the disheveled ungainliness of the “real” men on board and mark him as ontologically superior to mere humans. This dynamic recreates the relationship between Lawrence of Arabia and the “beasts” among whom he achieved his queer self-fashioning in the Far East. Moreover, in Prometheus the almost anorexically thin bodies of Charlize Theron in the role of Meredith Vickers and Noomi Rapace, who plays Elizabeth Shaw, are images of female bodies that have apparently foregone reproduction just as they have rejected consumption. The captain’s response to Vickers’s rejection of his playfully put but serious sexual advances is to ask the question that one suspects has been on the audience’s mind since her first appearance on screen: the question of whether she is, in fact, an android instead of a “real girl.” The fact that she responds by curtly scheduling an appointment for sex with him is her way of both answering and avoiding the question. She does this by signaling her (ironic) understanding that no “real” man could possibly care whether a woman who made herself sexually available to him was or was not actually human. On the other hand, her counter in the film, Elizabeth Shaw, is not a “real girl” because, as she tearfully reveals midway through the film, she cannot have children, which is, the film implies, the ultimate act of selffulfillment for a woman. Shaw’s infertility sheds new light on the scenes of the explorers in their bubble-headed white oxygen suits depicted as sperm-like entities traveling through the alien ship’s essentially fallopian tunnels (a basic marker of the Alien series) in search of an egg to fertilize. Shaw’s quest to find her Creator becomes readable as a stand-in for her inability to perform the godlike gesture of giving birth. The act of childbirth that Shaw does eventually perform—a do-it-yourself Cesarean section inside the medical pod, complete with staple-gun sutures—is so horrific that it actually seems to be punishing her for having had sex while knowing that she was incapable of having a baby. The alien invasion begins when Charlie Holloway is infected by some primordial sludge with which David spikes his drink. Holloway then has sex with Shaw, who miraculously becomes impregnated with the alien spawn where human sperm had been unable to do the trick. The creature she extracts from her body, which has matured by three months over the

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course of just ten hours, is a human-sludge hybrid, seemingly bypassing Holloway’s DNA altogether, which acts as little more than a host for the sludge’s paternal DNA (though it must be said that the child bears a closer resemblance to its father’s side of the family than to its mother’s). Similarly, the film’s penultimate scene shows the now fully grown sludge creature wrapping itself around the last remaining human-DNA’d engineer and thrusting its long, octopus-like protrusion into his mouth; the final scene shows the gelatinous product of this romantic encounter bursting out of the engineer’s chest, evoking the chest-bursting scene in the first Alien film (Ridley Scott, 1979). The genealogy of the alien, then, is a métissage between humans and sludge. Within the alien (the other, the outside), there lurks a little bit of “us” (the same, the inside)—and vice versa. This hybrid model of procreation, of an “inside” that is constituted by its “outside,” is analogous to the transductive, or mutually constitutive, relationship between human beings and technology, which is also invoked in the film’s title. In the Greek myth, Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus (literally afterthought or hindsight) were charged with the task of creating life on Earth. However, Epimetheus, whose job it was to bestow positive attributes on all the creatures, ran out by the time he got to humans. Because of this forgetful omission, which Stiegler (2011) calls the “fault” of Epimetheus, Prometheus was obliged to endow humans with the capacity to make tools to supplement their originary lack. The use and creation of tools, of course, is what traditionally defined humanity according to anthropologists. The prosthesis therefore supplements the human, which is to say that, in the logic of the supplement, it makes us human. If humans are actually posthuman—in other words, so successful at using the tools that identify them as human that they begin to merge with technology—then technology is posttechnological, that is, so perfectly achieved that it begins to acquire “human” traits. Technology performs tasks once performed by humans, from surgery (e.g., the medical pod in Prometheus) to locomotion (comically rendered in Wall-E with the hoverchairs that do away with the need for humans to walk, to feed themselves, or even to turn their heads to speak to the people whizzing along right

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beside them). A number of philosophical, cultural and literary theories of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries articulate, in various ways, how humans are embedded in symbolic and technical systems. One example of this imbrication of humanity and technology is the fact that it has become increasingly difficult to tell the difference between people and screens. Interface has become intersection, which in turn has become fusion. Stiegler’s contention that consciousness is structured like cinema is partially echoed by Jonathan Beller’s theory of cinematic consciousness (Beller 2006), and by Alison Landsberg’s Prosthetic Memory, which posits that individual memories are being replaced by mediatized images of historical events (Landsberg 2004). We (humans) have screens for brains, while the contents of our brains are uploaded to computer databases; we walk around in a fog, while anything we are moved to express is shot up into the Cloud. At the same time, much recent film theory has been taken up with haptic cinema (the landmark work in this respect being Laura U. Marks’s The Skin of the Film, first published in 2000), which engages with senses beyond the visual. But this work on cinema and sensation, when read in conjunction with work on cinematic consciousness, points to the idea that sensation is actually coming to be processed through screens rather than through the human body. In other words, the human body and the screen have merged to such an extent—either through the phenomenon of prosthetic memory or through the projection of memories on to screens—that phenomenology itself is something that is mediated by screens. For example, in Prometheus, when we see images of a little girl playing a violin on a big screen that the characters watch, we are not sure if these are Shaw’s actual memories or simply representations of her memories (and what, in fact, is the difference?). And when the laser-image of long-dead alien creatures passes over David when he is in the cave and he shudders with pleasure, the line between cinema and sensation seems completely blurred. What if the body is increasingly coming to experience sensation, not as an effect (or affect) of watching a screen, but through screens, to the extent that any sensation that body might experience can be mediated by screens? Scott Bukatman notes that virtual reality “significantly extends the sensory address of the existent media to provide an alternate and manipulable space. . . . In an

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ecstatic exaggeration of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological loop, world and body comprise a continually modifying feedback loop, producing a terminal identity without the terminal: a cybersubject” (Bukatman 1993: 187; original emphasis). It is not necessary to deny the very real presence, agency, and importance of human bodies in order to recognize that perception and experience are coming to be increasingly prostheticized by, and interchangeable with, screens. A similar supplementary logic drives the relationship between center and periphery in globalization. Hello Dolly tells the tale of the American Dream, of enterprising European immigrants (Dolly from Ireland, Horace from Eastern Europe) who build successful businesses and become the very emblem of American capitalism. Lawrence of Arabia, while purporting to depict the central role played by a British officer in the Arabs’ fight against the Turks, ends up telling the story of how Arabia changed a British officer and, by extension, how the empire exerted a reciprocal influence on the colonial metropolis. Both Lawrence of Arabia and Hello Dolly underline the role of the “outside” in constituting the “inside”—in the case of Lawrence of Arabia, the role of the empire in creating Britain; and, in the case of Hello Dolly, the role of immigrants in creating the wealth and alliances (both mercenary, through Horace’s enterprise, and dynastic, through Dolly’s matchmaking) that made the United States the globally dominant country of the twentieth century. But such enfolding of the “outside” into the heart of power inevitably triggers a counterdefense. The initial role of cinema, according to Stiegler, was to provide a common ideal around which the various immigrant groups in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could coalesce: “Because it was permanently necessary to project the American ‘model’ to newly arrived immigrants, as well as to the Southern states that, following the Civil War, had to be kept in the Union, the United States became the country born of cinema” (Stiegler 2011: 105; original emphasis). This exchange between center and periphery is not only represented in cinema; it is also enabled by it. On a far more modest level, this exchange plays out between Hollywood blockbusters and French philosophy, and between French art cinema and (largely) North American film theory.

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As watching films, even bad ones, extends our vision of the world, what we see (and hear) courses through us, globalizing our consciousness. If consciousness is structured like cinema, then each viewer has become at once the most deep-seated and the most far-flung outpost of globalization. What Wall-E and David ultimately show us is that cinema, in making us human, makes us global subjects. Cinema supplements us, showing us what we’re missing.

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Filmography

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Dir. Stanley Kubrick, UK/USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Stanley Kubrick Productions. À Bout de souffle (1959) (Breathless), Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France: Les Films Impéria, Les Productions Georges de Beauregard, Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie. À la conquête du Pôle (The Conquest of the Pole) (1912), Dir. Georges Méliès, France: Star-Film. Alien (1979), Dir. Ridley Scott, UK/USA: Brandywine Productions, Twentieth-Century Fox Productions. Alien 3 (1992), Dir. David Fincher, USA: Twentieth-Century Fox Film Corporation, Brandywine Productions. Alien Resurrection (1997), Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, USA: Brandywine Productions, Twentieth-Century Fox Film Corporation. Aliens (1986), Dir. James Cameron, USA/UK: Twentieth-Century Fox Film Corporation, Brandywine Productions, SLM Production Group. Alphaville (1965), Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France/Italy: Athos Films, Chaumiane, Filmstudio. L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) (Last Year in Marienbad), Dir. Alain Resnais, France/Italy: Cocinor, Terra Film, Cormoran Films. Avatar (2009), Dir. James Cameron, USA/UK: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Dune Entertainment, Ingenious Film Partners. Barbarella (1968), Dir. Roger Vadim, France/Italy: Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica, Marianne Productions. Battlestar Galactica (1978) [Television series], Dir. Richard A. Colla, USA: Glenn A. Larson Productions, Universal Television. La Belle et la bête (1946) (Beauty and the Beast), Dir. Jean Cocteau, France: DisCina. La Belle vie (1963) (The Good Life), Dir. Roberto Enrico, France: Les Films du Centaure. The Big Bang Theory (2012, Season 5, no. 14, “The Beta Test Initiation”) [Television series], created by Chuck Lorre, Bill Prady, USA: Chuck Lorre Productions, Warner Brothers. The Big Sleep (1946), Dir. Howard Hawks, USA: Warner Brothers. The Big Store (1941), Dir. Charles Reisner, USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Dir. James Whale, USA: Universal Pictures.

198

Filmography

Bridesmaids (2011), Dir. Paul Feig, USA: Universal Pictures, Relativity Media, Apatow Productions. Le bourreau turc (The Terrible Turkish Executioner) (1904), Dir. Georges Méliès, France: Star-Film. Bulles de savon animées (Animated Soap Bubbles) (1906), Dir. Georges Méliès, France: Star-Film. The Carrie Diaries (2013–14) [Television series], created by Amy Harris, USA: Fake Empire, A. B. Baby Productions, Warner Bros Television. Les Cartes vivantes (The Living Playing Cards) (1904), Dir. Georges Méliès, France: Star-Film. La Cité des enfants perdus (1995) (City of Lost Children), Dir. Marc Caro, JeanPierre Jeunet, France: Club d’Investissement Médias, Eurimages, Studio Image, Canal +. Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961), Dir. Agnès Varda, France/Italy: Ciné Tamaris, Rome Paris Films. The Cocoanuts (1929), Dir. Robert Florey, Joseph Santley, USA: Paramount Pictures. Delicatessen (1991), Dir. Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France: Constellation, Union Générale Cinématographique, Hachette Première. The Devil Wears Prada (2006), Dir. David Frankel, USA: Fox 2000 Pictures, Dune Entertainment, Major Studio Partners. Duck Soup (1933), Dir. Leo McCarey, USA: Paramount Pictures. Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Houdin (The Vanishing Lady) (1896), Dir. Georges Méliès, France: Star-Film. Eve of Destruction (1991), Dir. Duncan Gibbins, USA: Nelson Entertainment. Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (Amélie) (2001), Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France: Claudie Ossard Productions, Union Générale Cinématographique, Tapioca Films. Fantômas (1913–14), Dir. Louis Feuillade, France: Gaumont. Fausse alerte (1945) (The French Way), Dir. Jacques de Baroncelli, France: Flag Films. The Fifth Element (1997), Dir. Luc Besson, France: Gaumont. La Fille sur le pont (1999) (The Girl on the Bridge), Dir. Patrice Leconte, France: Canal +, France 2 Cinéma, Les Films Christian Fechner, Sofica Sofinergie 5, UGCF. La Grande illusion (1937) (Grand Illusion), Dir. Jean Renoir, France: Réalisations d’Art Cinématographique. Hello Dolly (1969), Dir. Gene Kelly, USA: Chenault Productions, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. The Help (2011), Dir. Tate Taylor, USA/India/United Arab Emirates: DreamWorks SKG, Reliance Entertainment, Participant Media. Her (2013), Dir. Spike Jonze, USA: Annapurna Pictures. L’homme à la tête en caoutchouc (The Man with the Rubber Head) (1901), Dir. Georges Méliès, France: Star-Film. Les illusions funambulesques (Extraordinary Illusions) (1903), Dir. Georges Méliès, France: Star-Film.

Filmography

199

It Happened One Night (1934), Dir. Frank Capra, USA: Columbia Pictures. Jules et Jim (1962), Dir. François Truffaut, France: Les Films du Carosse, Sédif Productions. Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Dir. David Lean, UK: Horizon Pictures. Love Happy (1949), Dir. David Miller, USA: Artists Alliance. M (1931), Dir. Fritz Lang, Germany: Nero-Film AG. Le mélomane (The Melomaniac) (1903), Dir. Georges Méliès, France: Star-Film. Le merveilleux éventail vivant (The Wonderful Living Fan) (1903), Dir. Georges Méliès, France: Star-Film. Malcolm X (1992), Dir. Spike Lee, USA: 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks. Metropolis (1927), Dir. Fritz Lang, Germany: Universum Film. Micmacs à tire-larigot (2009) (Micmacs), Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France: Épithète Films, Tapioca Films, Warner Brothers. Mission Impossible (1996), Dir. Brian De Palma, USA: Paramount Pictures. Modern Times (1936), Dir. Charles Chaplin, USA: Charles Chaplin Productions. Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (1963) (Muriel, or the Time of Return), Dir. Alain Resnais, France/Italy: Argos Films, Alpha Productions, Éclair. My Fair Lady (1964), Dir. George Cukor, USA: Warner Brothers. A Night at the Opera (1935), Dir. Sam Wood, USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. A Night in Casablanca (1946), Dir. Archie Mayo, USA: Loma Vista Productions, Inc. Nikita (La Femme Nikita) (1990), Dir. Luc Besson, France/Italy: Gaumont, Les Films du Loup. Nosferatu (1921), Dir. F.W. Murnau, Germany: Jofa-Atelier Berlin Johannisthal, PranaFilm GmbH. Nuit et brouillard (1955) (Night and Fog), Dir. Alain Resnais, France: Argos Films. Les Oliviers de la justice (1963) (The Olive Trees of Justice), Dir. James Blue, France: Société Algérienne. L’Opéra-mouffe (1958) (Diary of a Pregnant Woman), Dir. Agnès Varda, France: Ciné Tamaris. Le Petit soldat (1963) (The Little Soldier), Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France: Les Productions Georges de Beauregard, Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie. La Photographie électrique à distance (Long Distance Wireless Photography) (1908), Dir. Georges Méliès, France: Star-Film. Princesse Tam-Tam (1935) (Princess Tam-Tam), Dir. Edmond T. Gréville, France: Productions Arys. Prometheus (2012), Dir. Ridley Scott, USA/UK: Twentieth Century Fox, Dune Entertainment, Scott Free Productions. Les Quatre cents farces du diable (The Merry Frolics of Satan) (1906), Dir. Georges Méliès, France: Star-Film. Safety Last (1932), Dir. Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor, USA: Hal Roach Studios. Sex and the City (2008), Dir. Michael Patrick King, USA: New Line Cinema, Home Box Office, Darren Star Productions.

200

Filmography

Sex and the City 2 (2010), Dir. Michael Patrick King, USA: New Line Cinema, Home Box Office, HBO Films. S1M0NE (2002), Dir. Andrew Niccol, USA: New Line Cinema. La Sirène (The Siren) (1904), Dir. Georges Méliès, France: Star-Film. La Sirène des Tropiques (1927) (Siren of the Tropics), Mario Nalpas, Henri Étiévant. France: La Centrale Cinématographique The Social Network (2010), Dir. David Fincher, USA: Columbia Pictures, Relativity Media, Scott Rudin Productions. La statue animée (The Drawing Lesson) (1903), Dir. Georges Méliès, France: Star-Film. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), Dir. J. J. Abrams, USA: Lucasfilm. Les Statues meurent aussi (1953) (Statues also Die), Dir. Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, France: Présence Africaine, Tadié Cinéma. The Stepford Wives (1975), Dir. Bryan Forbes, USA: Palomar Pictures. The Stepford Wives (2004), Dir. Frank Oz, USA: Paramount Pictures. Trois couleurs: bleu (Three Colours: Blue) (1993), Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski, France/ Poland/Switzerland: MK2 Productions, CED Productions, France 3 Cinéma. Un homme de têtes (The Four Troublesome Heads) (1898), Dir. Georges Méliès, France: Star-Film. Un Long dimanche de fiancailles (2004) (A Very Long Engagement), Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France/USA: Warner Brothers, Tapioca Films. Une bonne farce avec ma tête (Tit for Tat) (1903), Dir. Georges Méliès, France: Star-Film. Les Vampires (1915–16), Dir. Louis Feuillade, France: Gaumont. Wall-E (2008), Dir. Andrew Stanton, USA: Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar Animation Studios. Les Yeux sans visage (1960) (Eyes without a Face), Dir. Georges Franju, France/Italy: Champs-Élysées Productions, Lux Film. Zouzou (1934), Marc Allégret, France: Les Films H. Roussillon, Productions Arys.

Index Abel, Richard 19, 96, 132 A Bout de souffle (1959) 93 Abraham, Nicolas 112 acousmachine 157–8 acousmêtre 152, 156–7 Adamowicz, Elza 93, 131 Aimard, Gustave 19 A la Conquête du Pôle (1912) 135 Algerian War 18, 21–2, 68–9, 80, 82, 88, 93 Alien (1979) 172 Alien Phenomenology (Bogost) 11 Alien Resurrection (1997) 133, 164 allochronism 42 Alphaville (1965) 133, 140 Altman, Rick 149 ambient intelligence 14 American Indian Apache tribe 19 Americanness 168 Anderson, Benedict 28, 69 androids 25, 29, 172–4, 177–8 Animal Crackers (1930) 115, 121, 128 anthropocene 12 anti-Semitism 113 Apple 148 Arendt, Hannah 92 Ars Amatoria (Ovid) 137 artificial intelligence 4, 6, 8, 14, 74, 148, 159, 172. See also digital encoding/ virtual reality artificial women. See women, as objects assembly-line techniques 116 automatic filmmaking 107 autonomous reality 11 Avatar (2009) 27–8, 159–72 Ayme, Jean 104, 109 Babbage, Charles 166 Bacall, Lauren 55 Baker, Josephine 20–1, 68–79, 119 Banville, Théodore de 137

Barbarella (1968) 133 Barthes, Roland 153 Bataille, Georges 55, 62 Battlestar Galactica (1978) 151 Baudelaire, Charles 86, 137–8 Baudrillard, Jean 9, 12–13, 87, 114, 123 Bauman, Zygmunt 17, 31, 44 Belle Epoque 133–5, 139, 141 Beller, Jonathan 57, 180 Bellour, Raymond 145 Benjamin, Walter 44, 54, 70, 80, 93, 135, 150 Bennett, Jane 6, 12, 14, 32 Bergson, Henri 115–16 Berkeley, Busby 115 Bernheimer, Charles 102 Bersani, Leo 91–2 Besson, Luc 133, 139 Beugnet, Martine 13 Beyoncé 37 Bhabha, Homi 79 Big Bang Theory, The (2012) 151 “Big Bertha” 99 Big Sleep, The (1946) 55, 59–60 Big Store, The (1941) 22–3, 96–7, 113–15, 117–18, 121–3, 125–6. See also Marx Brothers (Groucho, Harpo, and Chico) and ethnic stereotyping sequence in 121–8 mirror scene in 125–6 and “Sing While You Sell” (song) 117–20 Binoche, Juliette 140 biotechnology 164 bizutage (French tradition) 84 black body image 20 Blade Runner (1982) 157 body “black body” image 20 racialized 20

202 and voice 147–58 Bogart, Humphrey 55, 59 Bogost, Ian 11 Bonnot gang 19 Boon, Dany 55, 59 Boscagli, Maurizia 10, 16 Bounoure, Gaston 89 Bradshaw, Carrie 15, 33–4 Braidotti, Rosi 3, 6, 12, 62 Brexit 7 Brialy, Jean-Claude 83 The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) 25 Bridesmaids (2011) 17, 31, 44–53 Britton, Celia 90 Brown, Bill 9, 12, 116 Bryant, Levi R. 11 Buck-Morss, Susan 176 Bukatman, Scott 143, 146, 148, 180–1 Bulles de savon animées (1906) 139 Bushnell, Candace 33 Butler, Judith 142 camera-projector 130 Cameron, James 159, 161–4, 170 “carré blanc” (blank screen) 73, 91 Carrie Diaries, The (2013-2014) 33 Cartwright, Lisa 131 castration fantasy 22–3, 25, 97, 102–3, 105–6, 109–10, 112, 126, 132, 135, 141, 147, 152–3, 156 Cattrall, Kim 34 Cayrol, Jean 92 censorship 21–3, 80, 90–1 CGI (computer-generated imagery) technology 26, 146, 168, 176 Champreux, Jacques 108 Chaplin, Charles 114, 116–17 Chion, Michel 150–2, 156–7 Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong 169 Churchill, Winston 64 cinéma colonial 21, 171 cinematic exoticism and Baker, Josephine 69–79 and masks in Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) 79–85 multidirectional memory in Muriel 88–94 overview 18–22, 67–9

Index City of God (St. Augustine) 162 Civil War 49, 181 Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) 69, 82–5 Cléopâtre (1909) 19 Clifford, James 19–20, 65, 160 Clover, Carol 132 Cocoanuts, The (1929) 126 Cocteau, Jean 139 cognitive capitalism 4 Colbert, Claudette 42 Cole, Andrew 15 Coleman, Beth 166 collage cinématographique 107 comedy 112–28. See also Marx Brothers (Groucho, Harpo, and Chico) composite memories 80 computer binary code 143 Confessions (Rousseau) 38 Confessions (St. Augustine) 162 Connor, Steven 1, 10 consumer capitalism 4, 15, 32 consumerism 15, 38, 117 consumption 2–4, 7–9, 15, 17, 28, 31–2, 39–41, 44–5, 47, 50, 54, 66, 81, 117, 146, 178 convergence 28, 81, 131, 163, 165 Cooper, James Fenimore 19 Coppélia (1870) 25 Corbett, John 34 Critchley, Simon 126 Critical Inquiry 9 crystal-images 56–7, 64 crystal-objects. See reused objects Culture of the Copy, The 141 curiositas 162 cyberspace 170–1 d’Alcy, Jehanne 131 de-acousmatization 152, 157 de Beauharnais, Josephine 74 de Bergerac, Cyrano 148 de Gaulle, Charles 77, 88 de la Fenouillet, Nicolas Thibault 60, 64 Deleuze, Gilles 56, 68, 85, 166 Delicatessen (1991) 59 Derrida, Jacques 2, 55, 61, 65, 151, 152, 154 Descartes, René 141 desemitization 114

Index Devil Wears Prada, The (2006) 16, 31, 40, 47 diegetic universe 20, 83, 85, 162–3 “the difference engine” 166 digital divide 166 digital encoding/virtual reality 26–7, 160–72. See also artificial intelligence digital utopia 28, 161, 163–5, 168, 170 disaster capitalism 4 disposable bodies 17 Doane, Mary Ann 25, 150–1, 154–5 Dolar, Mladen 148 Downey, Robert, Jr. 5 Doyen, Eugène-Louis 130, 132, 135 Dracula (Stoker) 98 Duck Soup (1933) 117, 125–7 Dumbrille, Douglas 118 Dumont, Margaret 118 Duncan, Alastair 92 Duplessis, Paul 19 Duras, Marguerite 151 Dussollier, André 59 Dutoit, Ulysse 91–2 Dyer, Richard 145, 150 d’Zan, Bout 102 “Eloge du maquillage” (essay) 137 Elsaesser, Thomas 161, 163, 171 Epimetheus 30, 179 Epstein, Jean 20 Ernst, Max 107 Escamotage d’une dame chez RobertHoudin (1896) 131 Essai sur l’exotisme 87 Eve of Destruction (1991) 25 Evian Accords 80 Execution of Mary Queen of Scots, The (1895) 132 exoticism. See cinematic exoticism Exposition anticoloniale 84 Exposition coloniale of 1931 84 Fabian, Johannes 42 Fables (La Fontaine) 99 faciality (visagéité) 85–7 Fall of France 74 Fanon, Frantz 83–4, 168

203

Fantômas films 19 fashion 16, 19, 31, 33–4, 37–42, 47, 53, 65, 69, 79, 81, 108, 119, 135, 137, 145, 156, 177–8 Fassbender, Michael 29, 172 Fausse alerte (1939) 21, 68, 70, 72–5, 77 Ferrier, Julie 56 Ferry, Gabriel 19 fetish 8, 15, 20–1, 23–5, 38–9, 54, 67, 78–9, 84, 94–5, 97, 103, 105, 110–12, 126–7, 129, 152–3, 157 Fetishism and Curiosity (Mulvey) 97 Feuillade, Louis 19, 22–3, 95–9, 102–4, 107, 109, 112 Fifth Element, The (1997) 25, 133, 138–40 First World War 7, 19–20, 22–4, 65, 88, 95, 97–9, 102, 112, 124 Fischer, Lucy 137 Fix, Charlene 97 Flaig, Paul 126, 174 Flanagan, Mary 143–4, 146 Fleming, Victor 37 Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy 81, 123 Foster, Hal 25 Foucault, Michel 170–1 Franco-Prussian War 98 freeze frames 85, 175 French cinema 1, 7, 20–1, 24, 68, 96, 132 French New Wave (1958–62) 21–2, 68, 79–83, 87–9, 93 French Way, The. See Fausse alerte (1939) Freud, Sigmund 22–5, 94, 103, 126, 132, 147, 156, 174 Garland, Judy 37 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Butler) 142 globalization 1–7, 14–15, 17–18, 27–8, 31, 41, 45, 55, 64–7, 69–70, 129, 181–2 Godard, Jean-Luc 80, 83, 87, 93, 133 Gordon, Rae Beth 131, 134 grammatization/exteriorization 57, 61 Grande illusion (1937) 124 Great War. See First World War Greene, Naomi 91 Grossman, Wendy A. 81

204 Grosz, Elizabeth 26 Groucho, Harpo, and Chico Marx. See Marx Brothers (Groucho, Harpo, and Chico) Guattari, Félix 85 Gunning, Tom 116, 162 Hansen, Mark 165 Haraway, Donna 5 Harman, Graham 11 Harvey, David 171 Hathaway, Anne 40 Hayles, N. Katherine 3 Hello Dolly (1969) 29, 173–7, 181 Help, The (2011) 17, 31, 44–53 Her (2004) 26, 142, 147–58 heterosexual male gaze 147 heterotopia 170–1 Higgins, Lynn A. 88, 90 historical fallacy 149 Hitler, Adolf 97, 113 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 25 Hollywood 1, 7, 8, 22, 24, 34, 35, 37, 45, 50, 69, 113–14, 130, 142, 144, 153, 159, 173–5, 181 Holocaust 87, 92–3, 112, 167 Huyssen, Andreas 25 hybrid materiality 10 hyperconsumption 1, 3, 8, 31, 66 imagined communities 28, 67 intentional objects 11 interactivity 165 intercultural hybridity 165 Internet 166, 169 Internet of Things 13–14 It Happened One Night (1934) 42 Iverem, Esther 167 Jazz-Age modernism 68, 70 Jess-Cooke, Carolyn 163 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre 18, 32, 54–7, 59, 62, 133–4 Johansson, Scarlett 26, 142, 149–51, 153–4 Johnson, Barbara 152 Jonze, Spike 148–51, 154, 156–7 Jordanova, Ludmilla 131

Index Jules et Jim (1962) 22, 69, 85–8 Jünger, Ernst 98 Kaes, Anton 98 Kaplan, E. Ann 107 Karina, Anna 83 Kawash, Samira 169 Kelly, Gene 175 Khanna, Ranjana 17 King, Rob 116 Klein, Melanie 95 Kristeva, Julia 49 Kubrick, Stanley 157 Kyrou, Ado 107 La Belle et la bête (1946) 139–40 La Cité des enfants perdus (1997) 59 La Fille sur le pont (1999) 133 La Fontaine, Jean de 99 L’Âge d’homme (Leiris) 107 “La Môme Caoutchouc” 56, 65 Landsberg, Alison 58, 180 Lane, Anthony 149 L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961) 88 La Part maudite (Bataille) 55 La Photographie électrique à distance (1908) 136 La Revue de Paris (1899) 115 La Sirène des tropiques (1927) 60, 68, 70, 72–4 La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (1895) 24 La Statue animée (1903) 136 late capitalism 4 “La tête coupée” episode 100–3 La Tête d’obsidienne (Malraux) 81 Latour, Bruno 6, 9–12, 14, 27 Lawrence of Arabia (1962) 29, 43, 168, 172, 177, 181 Le Bourreau turc (1904) 102 Leconte, Patrice 133 “Le Cryptogramme rouge” 98 Le Décapité récalcitrant (1891) 102 Left Bank School 68 Leiris, Michel 107 Le Journal de Zouzou 69 Le Mélomane (1903) 102 Le Pompier des Folies Bergère (1928) 71

Index Les Belles Poupées (Banville) 137 Les Illusions funambulesques (1903) 135 Les Quat’cents farces du diable (1906) 134 Les Statues meurent aussi (1953) 84 Les Vampires (silent film serial, 191516) 19, 22–3, 95, 97–112, 128 absent fathers in 100–1 and castration fantasy 109–10 “La tête coupée” episode 100–3 “Le Maître de la foudre” 101 “Les noces sanglantes” 111 “Les Yeux qui fascinent” episode 101, 104, 110 Les Yeux sans visage (1960) 133 Leubas, Louis 104 Leutrat, Jean-Louis 102 Levesque, Marcel 98 L’Homme à la tête en caoutchouc (1901) 102 lieux de mémoire (sites or realms of memory) 169 L’Image-temps (1985) 68 Lionnet, Françoise 165 Lloyd, Harold 114 logocentrism 151–2 L’Oiseau de feu (1910) 19 L’Opéra-Mouffe (1958) 87 Louis XVI 64, 124 Louvish, Simon 113 Love Happy (1949) 117 Lucas, Matt 48 Lumière, Auguste 130 Lumière Brothers 7, 24, 130, 134, 136, 175 Lumpenproletariat 44 Lury, Celia 4 McLuhan, Marshall 41, 57 McReynolds, Leigha 172 Macready, John Douglas 61 Malraux, André 81 Manford, Steven 81 Marey, Etienne-Jules 75 Marker, Chris 84 Marks, Laura U. 13, 180 Marshall Plan 55, 62 Martin, Tony 118, 124 Marx Brothers (Groucho, Harpo, and

205

Chico) 22–3, 96–7, 117–18, 123–4, 128. See also The Big Store (1941) Mathé, Edouard 98, 104 Matisse, Henri 64 Mayne, Judith 83 mechanization 12, 115–16 “Medusa’s Head, The” (Freud) 103 Méliès, Georges 24–5, 102, 129–30, 134–7, 139 Mémoires de Joséphine Baker (Sauvage) 71 Metropolis (1927) 25 MGM 117 Micmacs à tire-larigot (2009) 18, 32 re(f)use economy in 54–66 Microsoft 166 Miller, Daniel 10 Minnelli, Liza 37–8 Miranda, Carmen 73 miscegenation 165 mise-en-abîme effect 59, 105, 145 Modern Prometheus, The 177 Modern Times (1936) 15, 114, 116–17 Monroe, Marilyn 64, 150, 154 Moreau, Jeanne 138 Moreau, Yolande 59 Mori, Masahiro 150, 161 Morton, Samantha 150, 154 multidirectional memory 22, 69, 87 in Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour (1963) 88–94 Mulvey, Laura 24, 35, 97, 129, 147 Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour (1963) 22, 69 multidirectional memory in 88–94 Murnau, F. W. 98 Musidora 97, 104, 109 Musser, Charles 96, 113, 115 Nakamura, Lisa 166 Napoleonic War 107 Na’vi 28, 159–72 Negrophilia discourse 20 networking ads 166 New Imperialism 7 New Yorker 149 Niccol, Andrew 146 A Night at the Opera (1935)

117, 128

206 A Night in Casablanca (1946) 117 Nikita (1990) 138 Noire et blanche (photograph) 81 Nora, Pierre 169–70 North, Michael 115, 117 Nosferatu (1921) 98 Noth, Chris 34 Nouvelle vague feature films 68–9 Nuit et Brouillard (1955) 92 Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) 11 O’Brien, Virginia 119–20 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) 132, 145 Of Grammatology (Derrida) 154 O’Hagan, Andrew 34 Old Imperialism 7 “On Cannibals” (essay) 67 online identity 165 ontological fallacy 149 OOO. See Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) operation film 131–2 O’Toole, Peter 29, 173 Ovid 137 Paquin, Jeanne 19 Parliament of Things 14 Peau noire, masques blancs (1952) 83 Pepperell, Robert 6, 57 “the phallic legacy” 103 Phelps, Martha 118 “Phony War” 21, 74 Pinon, Dominique 56, 59 Pixar Studios 174–6 planned obsolescence and Bridesmaids (2011) 31, 44–53 cosmopolitanism 42–4 and The Help (2011) 17, 31, 44–53 and human waste 44–53 and Micmacs à tire-larigot 54–65 overview 31–2 and Sex and the City 2 (SATC2) 32–5 Plato 151 Poiret, Paul 19 Poster, Mark 170–1 Princesse Tam-Tam (1935) 68, 70–5 Prometheus (2012) 29, 159–60, 172–4, 177–82

Index Prometheus myth 29–30, 179 prosthesis 2, 3, 4, 14, 30, 53, 58, 65, 142, 144, 145, 179 Prosthetic Memory (Landsberg) 180 Pygmalion/My-Fair-Lady (play) 138 quasi-objects

9

race/racial difference/racism 18, 69, 165, 166, 168, 169 racialized body 20 Rancière, Jacques 116 Rapace, Noomi 178 Ray, Man 81 Rebillard, Éric 72 Regnault, Félix 75, 78 Renoir, Jean 124 Resnais, Alain 69, 84, 88–9, 91–2 reticulated capitalism 4 reused objects 56, 54–66 Rhodes, Cecil B. 48 Rimbaud, Arthur 61–2 Rivière, Joan 81 Roberts, Rachel 144 robots 3, 29, 120, 123, 139, 143, 160–1, 172–4 “Rock-a-bye baby” (lullaby) 119 Roentgen, Wilhelm 131 Rony, Fatimah Tobing 20, 75 A Room of One’s Own (2004) 145 Rosen, Philip 28, 161, 163 Ross, Kristin 68 Rossi, Tino 64 Rothberg, Michael 22, 69, 85, 87 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 37, 154 Safety Last (1923) 114 St. Augustine 160, 162 Saldana, Zoe 168 Sauvage, Marcel 71 Schwartz, Vanessa 7 Schwartz, Hillel 141 Scott, Ridley 29, 172–3, 177, 180 Second World War 8, 22–3, 68–9, 88–9, 92, 96, 112–13 Segalen, Victor 87 Serres, Michel 9 Sex and the City (2008) 15, 31–3, 37–8,

Index 43–4, 47 Sex and the City 2 (2010) 16, 31–5, 38, 40, 43–4, 62, 66 Sexual Visions (Jordanova) 131 Shalmaneser I 64 Shéhérazade (1910) 19 Shelley, Mary 177 Showalter, Elaine 131 Silverman, Kaja 103, 141, 153–5 Silverman, Maxim 79, 92 Simpson, Marge 149 “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” (song) 37 “Sing While You Sell” (song) 117–21, 123–4 Siren of the Tropics, The 73 Siri 148 Sjogren, Britta 153 Skin of the Film, The (Marks) 180 Skladanowsky brothers 7 slapstick 116, 176 Sloterdijk, Peter 5 S1M0NE (2002) 26, 142–7 Sobchack, Vivian 144, 175–6 Society of the Spectacle 117, 119 Sorlin, Pierre 96 spectatorship 13, 161–3 Speculative Realism. See Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) Stacey, Jackie 24, 152, 155 Star Wars films 28 Stepford Wives, The (1975) 25 Stiegler, Bernard 2, 6, 29–30, 35, 38, 57–8, 60–1, 160, 179–81 Stockett, Kathryn 49 Stoker, Bram 98 Stora, Benjamin 80 Streisand, Barbra 173, 175 stuff, definition of 10 Stuff Theory (Boscagli) 10 substitutions 104–5 Suchman, Lucy 24, 152, 155 “super-panopticon” 171 supplement 1–5, 8, 15–16, 18, 24, 30–3, 35, 37–9, 47, 54, 64–6, 127, 129, 142, 149, 154–5, 172, 179, 181–2 Surgical Therapeutics and Operative Technique (Doyen) 135

surplus labor pools 15, 17 synthespian 26 System of Objects, The (Baudrillard)

207

9

Taransky, Viktor 142 Taylor, Ella 33 technologization 6, 12–13, 160–72 “Tenement Symphony” (song) 124 Théâtre Robert-Houdin 24 Theron, Charlize 178 things, definition 9 Toffoletti, Kim 26 Torok, Maria 112 “Total Mobilization” 98 transnationalism 1–3 Trois couleurs: Bleu (1993) 140 Truffaut, François 59, 69 Tudor, Deborah 176 2001 (1968) 155, 157 uncanny valley 24, 150, 161 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McLuhan) 57 Une Bonne farce avec ma tête (1903) 102 Ungar, Steven 84 Un Homme de têtes (1898) 102 Vadim, Roger 133 vampire film genre 97–9 Varda, Agnès 54, 69, 79, 83–5, 87 Vargas, José Antonio 162 Village Voice 33–4 Virilio, Paul 62 Vogue 34 voice and body 147–58 Wall-E (2008) 29, 159–60, 173–7, 179, 182 Warner, Marina 140 Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (Bauman) 44 Waugh, Rob 167 Weaver, Sigourney 159, 164 Wikipedia 11 Williams, Linda 136 Wilson, Emma 89 Wilson, Rebel 48 Winokur, Mark 113–14, 121, 125

208 Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey 171 Wizard of Oz, The (1939) 37–8 Wolfe, Cary 3 women, as objects cutting/splicing 26, 130-7 Her (2004) 147–58 makeup 137–41 S1M0NE (2002) 142–7 Woolf, Virginia 145 “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The” 135

Index World War First 7, 19–20, 22–4, 65, 88, 95, 97–9, 102, 112, 124 Second 8, 22–3, 68–9, 88–9, 92, 96, 112–13 Young, Robert 165 YouTube 57, 61

Žižek, Slavoj 126–7, 168 Zouzou (1934) 68–70, 72–6