Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema 9780231555272

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SHORT CUTS INTRODUCTIONS TO FILM STUDIES

SHORT CUTS INTRODUCTIONS TO FILM STUDIES FOR A COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN THE SERIES, PLEASE SEE PAGES 155–156.

FAT E I N F I L M A DETERMINISTIC APPROACH TO CINEMA

THOMAS M. PUHR

WA L L F L OWE R N E W YO R K

Wallflower Press is an imprint of Columbia University Press Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2022 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 9780231203913 (trade paperback) ISBN 9780231555272 (ebook) LCCN: 2022014292

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover image: A24/Photofest

For my parents, to whom I owe my love of film and literature

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: “You’ve Always Been the Caretaker”

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PART I. MYSTERIOUS APPEARANCES: THE ILLUSION OF AGENCY IN IDENTITY FORMATION 1

Jonathan Glazer’s Identity Trilogy

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The Greek Influence

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PART II. FAMILY SWALLOWS EVERYTHING: YOU ARE WHAT PRECEDED YOU 3

On Display

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4

A New Family Emerges

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vii

CONTENTS

PART III. FALSE FREEDOM IN SOCIETY: BREAKING THE CYCLE ONLY REINFORCES IT 5

Fate Remade

85

6

Goodbye to Symbols

104

Conclusion: Beyond the Screen

Notes

131

Bibliography Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A shorter version of chapter 1 was published in issue 15.2 of Film International; passages of chapters 2–4 first appeared in Big Picture Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal, and Beneficial Shock! Thanks to these publications for allowing copyright retention. My gratitude to Ryan Groendyk for his incisive feedback and guidance.

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FAT E I N F I L M

INTRODUCTION “You’ve Always Been the Caretaker”

When introducing compatibilism, my undergraduate philosophy professor drew a crude maze on the blackboard with a stick figure at its entrance. She traced the figure’s possible paths with diverging sets of arrows and explained how it had, say, a choice between left or right at a given T-junction (free will), but was prohibited from continuing straight (determinism). As this simple exercise illustrates, compatibilism’s deliciously ambiguous response to whether or not we have free will can be boiled down to: “Well, sort of yes, sort of no.” This “answer” epitomizes what I find occasionally frustrating but immensely gratifying about philosophical inquiry, especially when applied to cinema. But here’s the thing: many films espouse a decidedly deterministic worldview, be it narratively, stylistically, thematically, or any combination of the above. This tendency speaks to a broader implication: that the medium embodies, as both physical object and cultural artifact, determinism. Here and elsewhere, I refer to determinism as the concept that everything past, present, and future is guided by external causes (societal, hereditary, paranormal, etc.) we cannot change.1 In terms of its narrative preoccupations and very physicality, cinema grapples with a primal human fear: that we do not control our lives nearly as much as we hope, that forces beyond our control—or even our comprehension—dictate our thoughts, (inter)actions, and notions of selfhood. Nowhere is this essential nature clearer than in horror and science

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INTRODUCTION

fiction films, wherein malevolent forces inexorably pull the protagonist and narrative toward their mutual demise. As an object, film (analog or digital) physically manifests this predetermination: its beginning, middle, and end coexist simultaneously, prepackaged and rolled up into one circular object—be it a DVD, computer hard drive, film reel, or even the inner reels of a VHS tape. In Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002), a cursed VHS tape not only dictates the characters’ gruesome deaths, but also selfreflexively acknowledges the film’s (that is, The Ring’s) boundedness to its medium. A similar message underlies the final scene of John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness (1994), wherein protagonist John Trent (Sam Neill) watches In the Mouth of Madness in a dingy movie theater (the marquee outside even features a poster with the tagline: “New Line Cinema Presents a John Carpenter Film”). By confining us within a digital screen’s boundaries, computer-based found footage films—such as Unfriended (2014) and Host (2020)—remind us that all films do the same, albeit less explicitly. Of course, film’s literal self-containment has been commented on before, as has its natural capacity for philosophical inquiry; none other than Andrei Tarkovsky extolled cinema’s “ability to capture the actuality of time ‘in its factual forms’ as well as to preserve it ‘in metal boxes for a long period of time.’ ”2 But my purpose is to trace these ontological qualities from the latter half of the twentieth century to the present day in order to illustrate their pervasiveness among films often shrugged off as mere genre or stylistic exercises. Unlike Mary  M. Litch’s Philosophy Through Film or Robert B. Pippin’s Filmed Thought, which similarly grapple with philosophical questions through close readings of film, Fate in Film is the first text of its kind to focus solely on deterministic themes and elements. My goal, then, is not to break new ground but to delve deeper into preexisting territory. The forest has already been mapped—a peerreviewed journal, Edinburgh University Press’s Film-Philosophy, is devoted to exploring the intersections between film and philosophy—so Fate in Film should be approached as an opportunity to pause and closely examine just a few of its trees. Before I outline the ensuing chapters and examine a number of films that illustrate what I’ll call deterministic cinema, let’s briefly consider

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INTRODUCTION

three examples—two modern and one contemporary—of what I see as an inherent aspect of the medium. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) always calls that philosophy lesson to mind, especially when Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) gazes into the hedge maze replica displayed in the Overlook Hotel’s great room. An overhead shot (presumably from his point of view) reveals Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and Danny (Danny Lloyd) walking inside the model. Jack smirks, and we wonder: Is the replica imbued with a supernatural power that allows him to see his wife and son in real time, or is Kubrick dramatizing a hallucination? This surreal moment defies logical explanation and leads to a variation of the above conclusion: both, sort of. Or neither. Or maybe it doesn’t even matter. Many have analyzed the visual parallels between the hedge maze’s paths and the hotel’s corridors (mostly due to the analogous tracking shots that “map” them), but another, more revealing maze must be considered: the grid of photographs featured in the final sequence. The white wall spaces separating the symmetrical frames resemble a labyrinth’s pathways, and, just as he slowly zoomed in to the central image of Wendy and Danny in the model, Kubrick now creeps, via a series of fade-ins,

Fig. 0.1: The hedge maze model in The Shining.

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INTRODUCTION

Fig. 0.2: Another maze: The Shining’s final photograph display.

to the central frame for his big reveal: Jack, beaming front and center, in  a  photograph dated from 1921. Since there is no “before” shot of a Jack-less photograph, which would have granted viewers some closure (“Aha, he has entered the hotel for good now!”), a disturbing implication pervades this sequence: that Jack has been in the photograph, unnoticed, since 1921. His presence in this final maze’s center collapses past and present, beginning and end, and nullifies the possibility that the narrative could have turned out any differently. What felt like a symbol for compatibilism (freedom to choose within inherent constraints) reveals itself as one for determinism. Things have always been this way, it suggests, and there’s nothing anyone could have done to alter their course. Prior choices prove inconsequential, for all paths lead to one inevitable endpoint: Jack’s physical (his body grotesquely frozen in the snow) and metaphysical (his ageless image in the photograph) petrification. It makes sense that Kubrick cut a denouement in which authorities fail to locate Jack’s frozen body, for such a revelation would imply physical change (melting, decomposition). But Jack’s body, like a photographic image that ages without changing, must remain in a state of immutability, of diffusion across all time. After all, is a photograph not a ghost of sorts, an ageless image of someone who may be long dead?

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The Shining’s circular structure takes us back to the beginning, or, to be more precise, before the beginning, into the far past. “You’ve always been the caretaker,” Ullman (Barry Nelson), one of the film’s few literal ghosts, warns Jack. Indeed. Kubrick wasn’t the only director to employ this framing device. Four years earlier, Roman Polanski’s The Tenant tapped into similar existential dread. Its protagonist, Trelkovsky (Polanski), finds himself transposed not into a place but a person: Simone (Dominique Poulange), his apartment’s former resident, who attempted suicide by jumping off her balcony. Out of curiosity and perhaps some guilt, he visits a convalescing Simone in the hospital. Wrapped head to toe in bandages, she emits a ghastly scream when she sees him and then dies soon after. In the ensuing narrative, Trelkovsky adopts Simone’s life, starting with banal habits (buying “her brand” of cigarettes from a nearby shop, first out of necessity and then out of habit) and ending with utter psychosis (dressing in her clothes, going by her name, and, ultimately, reenacting her suicide attempt). Though it has something of a cult following, The Tenant remains divisive, its climax having incited Roger Ebert’s wrath upon its Cannes premiere: “In an ending that must rank among the most ridiculous ever fashioned for an allegedly reputable movie, he [Trelkovsky] dresses in drag, hurls himself from the same window the former tenant used, fails to kill himself, climbs back upstairs and throws himself out again.”3 Though ridiculous (it features more self-aware black humor, however, than I think Ebert gave it credit for), this ending does follow a warped logic. Whether or not the building’s other occupants are actually manipulating him to “become” Simone (as he claims), Trelkovsky jumps the second time because he believes he has to die as she did. Like Kubrick, Polanski pulls the rug out from under us in a denouement that underlines petrification. After his second jump, a bandaged Trelkovsky awakens in the hospital and screams at his former self, from the earlier scene, staring down at him. The end is again the beginning, leaving us to question Trelkovsky’s agency. Similar to Jack, his “frozen” state (constrained by gurneys, unable to move) carries disturbing implications. Is he caught in a horrific riff on Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, doomed to watch and then become the faceless screamer over and over again? It’s worth noting that Jack Torrance’s last utterance is also an incoherent, primordial scream, what Pauline Kael famously described as

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INTRODUCTION

an inversion of 2001’s evolutionary trajectory: “The bone that was high in the air has turned into Jack’s axe, held aloft, and Jack, crouched over, making wild, inarticulate sounds as he staggers in the maze, has become the ape.”4 In any case, just as Jack has always been the caretaker, Trelkovsky has always been Simone. Still imagery further illustrates this emphasis on stasis. Trelkovsky’s late-night glimpses of other tenants in the communal bathroom across from his apartment window call to mind The Shining’s revelatory photograph. “They just stand there for hours, you know? Absolutely dead still,” he explains to a friend, unknowingly alluding to his future (or past?) self in the hospital bed. His use of the word “dead” implies a supernatural, even ghostly, influence. Trelkovsky is both haunted by Simone’s ghost and a ghost himself (perhaps of the dying figure in the hospital), just as Jack is  both haunted by figures from the Overlook’s past (Grady, Lloyd the bartender) and a part of that very same past. Given The Tenant’s themes of isolation and petrification, preoccupation with breaking the past/ present dialectic, and ambiguous characterizations, rumors that the film may have directly inspired Kubrick’s stab at horror should come as no surprise. Contemporary cinema, such as Ben Wheatley’s uncategorizable Kill List (2011), has often adopted this narrative model. Skipping with a ferocious energy from family drama, to crime thriller, to folk horror, Wheatley and cowriter Amy Jump’s spare plot (even by horror standards) concerns former soldier/hit man Jay (Neil Maskell). Strapped for cash, he accepts a job from a shady organization with hints of occult involvement (it’s a bit of a red flag when a blood oath finalizes the contract). Jay and his old partner, Gal (Michael Smiley), must execute everyone on the titular kill list provided them, and that’s really about it as far as plot goes. But Wheatley seems far less concerned with story mechanics than with palpable dread, esoteric symbology, and ruthless violence. The finished product resembles more of a cult myth transposed to modern England than a crime thriller. Before its first shot or even the opening credits, Kill List’s recursive nature announces itself through a symbol sketched on the black screen: a cross and triangle encompassed by a circle. Similar to The Tenant, its first few minutes reveal the last scene, during a sequence in which Jay has a mock sword fight with his family in their backyard. The three laugh as Jay’s

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INTRODUCTION

son, Sam (Harry Simpson), sits on his wife’s back and swings a foam sword. The game ends when Jay knocks them to the ground and “stabs” his wife, Shel (MyAnna Buring). This thirty-second montage anticipates the shocking final act. After being captured by the cult organization that had hired him, Jay is pushed into a fiery circle and forced to fight a cloaked and masked figure, called “The Hunchback.” He successfully defeats the creature, stabbing it to death, before realizing that his wife and son are beneath the costume. In a nod to, and inversion of, The Shining, Jay succeeds in killing his family but only after being tricked into doing so. One may contest that the backyard sword fight merely foreshadows Jay’s (and his family’s) tragic fate, but other early moments point to outside forces carefully orchestrating what follows. Consider the presence of Fiona (Emma Fryer), Gal’s girlfriend, who carves the aforementioned symbol into the back of Jay’s bathroom mirror (which happens to be circular), as if preparing for a ritual, or the rabbit left mutilated in the same area of the backyard where the mock sword fight occurred. In the final scene, Wheatley provides a freeze frame (again “petrifying” a moving image) of Jay’s face as the cult members crown him and clap with approval. He has always been the king, but now it is official. Before the closing credits, the circular symbol flashes across the screen once more, perhaps announcing the completion of his true mission. Implications and Scope The above correlations would be of minimal importance, beyond a superficial appreciation of three directors employing similar narrative and stylistic devices, if it weren’t for their shared philosophical focus: namely, the notion that the characters’ predetermined roles nullify their choices’ significance. I opened my discussion with these examples for three reasons: (1) they capture basic deterministic themes (fate, predestination) and elements (foreshadowing, circular storytelling); (2) their use of still imagery speaks to how certain filmmaking techniques embody deterministic concepts; and (3) their release dates and common plot elements illustrate how this thematic obsession largely came to pass in the later twentieth century and has resurfaced in contemporary releases, especially in genre efforts. Of the nineteen films discussed in this book, half can quite comfortably be labeled horror (the rest at least flirt with science

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INTRODUCTION

fiction, thriller, or fantasy tropes) and nine were released between 2010 and 2020. Of course, circular narratives are not the only way filmmakers explore determinism, and the remaining chapters will address some of these other methods. In part 1, I focus on the individual. Chapter 1 addresses Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast (2000), Birth (2004), and Under the Skin (2013), which together comprise what I call Glazer’s “Identity Trilogy.” The British auteur’s increasingly minimalist style—one that complements his protagonists’ failure to maintain new personae—is juxtaposed with Robert Bresson’s conception of actors as “models.” Chapter  2 explores the mythological underpinnings of characters who are defined (and constrained) by their jobs in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) and the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). The latter’s protagonist is an inverted riff on Odysseus, the former’s on Sisyphus. Both films draw from classical archetypes and poetics (Aristotle’s elements of tragedy) to explore “modern man” adrift. Part 2 moves the conversation beyond the individual to focus on family. Chapter 3 focuses on tableau imagery containing entire narratives in Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019) as well as Jordan Peele’s Us (2019). A hermetically sealed, unalterable reality may or may not be true in the real world (physicist Brian Greene will offer a possible answer to this question), but it certainly is true in these directors’ meticulously constructed worlds—wherein nefarious external forces dictate the characters’ lives—and in the very nature of moviegoing itself. Chapter 4 looks at doppelgangers and hybrid families in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) and Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy (2013). Parallels emerge between each story’s central couple; when the halves merge, chaos ensues. Here, I employ Erving Goffman’s framework of role-play—of the self as a “front”—to analyze these character arcs. Such films beg the question: How can one exercise free will if their “other half” operates externally from them? In part 3, I revisit the notion of circular storytelling to consider stories of broader societal disintegration. Chapter  5 investigates obsessively faithful remakes, namely Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (1998) and Michael Haneke’s American Funny Games (2007), as physical manifestations of filmic determinism. By definition, they limit the freedoms of the actors and their fictional counterparts, those behind the camera and how they realize another’s (or, in Haneke’s case, his own) vision. Chapter 6 draws

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from deconstructionist and Marxist theories to consider how the symbolic systems of language and currency exert an oppressive, deterministic pull in Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017). Freedom—or, even more generally, movement of any kind—is illusory, and those who manage to escape from one set of circumstances quickly find themselves entrapped by another. For instance, colonialism’s vast, indifferent machinery consumes oppressors and oppressed alike in Zama. The concluding chapter examines how this trend in genre cinema does the following: speaks to current anxieties (stasis, entrapment); illustrates filmic and human “life cycles” as fixed and finite objects; collapses temporal boundaries; and ultimately provides catharsis through its (sometimes) despairing narratives. A brief case study examines how this trend has already seeped into the new decade, with the major studio release of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (2020). Such examples speak to this trend’s ubiquity in contemporary releases, including tentpole blockbusters. The three case studies from this introduction exemplify the range of films to which we can apply a deterministic lens. Classics like The Shining—so ubiquitous in both popular culture and academic studies— reveal unexplored critical channels; such is the case with Persona and Psycho. The complex undercurrents and narrative structures of others, like The Tenant, are often dismissed as affected opacity; the same may be said for Inside Llewyn Davis or Zama. And the likes of Kill List point to how contemporary horror outings can offer much more to inquisitive viewers than a nostalgic kinship with their predecessors; Under the Skin and Midsommar are two of the many examples studied herein. I believe cinema functions as one of our primary modes of philosophical inquiry and that it encourages the global exchange of ideas on a scale largely absent in other artistic mediums. By synthesizing close readings with diverse critical methodologies and thinkers (from philosopher Jacques Derrida, to social critic bell hooks), the following analyses will provide a new lens through which to critically watch and interpret modern film. I’m concerned neither with offering definitive interpretations (they don’t exist) nor arguing determinism’s veracity in real life (I’ll leave that to the professional philosophers and scientists, some to whom I will desperately cling in the ensuing pages), but with exploring how these narratives tap into what many fear to be true about life, so-called fate, and whatever it is that waits for us in the maze’s center.

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1

JONATHAN GLAZER’S IDENTIT Y TRILOGY

Through a trio of seemingly unrelated films, writer-director Jonathan Glazer has proven himself contemporary cinema’s preeminent examiner of the soul. On the surface, his three features could not seem any more different in terms of their plotting and style. The slick, blackly comic Sexy Beast contrasts with the austere, solemn Birth, both of which seem to occupy entirely different cinematic universes than the surreal, guerillastyle Under the Skin and its rainy Glasgow streets (the same may be said for their respective soundtracks: Sexy Beast, true to Brit Pop crime conventions, sports a punk rock aesthetic, as in its humorous incorporation of the Stranglers’ “Peaches”; Alexandre Desplat’s score for Birth is full of lush piano movements; and the shrieking violins of Mica Levi’s Under the Skin score unsettle as much as the director’s abstract visuals). However, a thematic through line unites all three; each, in its singular way, examines the ambiguities of identity and features a protagonist who tries (and ultimately fails) to be symbolically reborn into a new persona. With this common thread in mind, the films’ structures and visual motifs are not so disparate after all, congealing into what I will refer to as Glazer’s “Identity Trilogy.” Sexy Beast follows Gal (Ray Winstone), a master safecracker enjoying his retirement years at a posh, sunbaked Spanish villa with wife Deedee (Amanda Redman) and old friends Aitch (Cavan Kendall) and Jackie (Julianne White), another married couple. Gal is drawn back into a life of crime

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when fellow criminal Don (Ben Kingsley) unexpectedly arrives at his doorstep with an invitation (i.e., demand) for Gal to do one last heist in England. However, Sexy Beast is less a heist caper (the robbery and its immediate aftermath comprise about fifteen minutes of its runtime) than a prolonged confrontation between Gal and Don, the latter hammering the former into compliance. Their tense verbal (and sometimes physical) duel begins in Gal’s home, spills over into a nightclub and seashore, and culminates with Don bursting into his host’s bedroom in the middle of the night, violently demanding he accept the job.1 Seemingly banal encounters with Don carry a palpable, physical menace. Engaging with him in any way—or even being in his presence—is akin to entering combat. In one darkly humorous scene, Don joins Gal and company at the poolside. Oddly enough, he is the one who attempts to break the conversation’s many awkward silences; however, thanks to Kingsley’s terrifying performance, lines as innocuous as “you got very nice eyes, Deedee” come across as thinly veiled threats. Each guest returns to the house (Gal, the one for whom Don has come, is the first to make a break for it), leaving Don alone on the patio; Jackie—whose incredulous stare at her husband as he leaves her alone with Don says it all—exits as soon as their strange guest opens his mouth. We then see the exhausted husbands and wives hiding out in the kitchen, as if they need a break from simply being near Don. The latter, meanwhile, stands before the pool and sips his drink. Despite killing—with the help of Deedee, Aitch, and Jackie—and disposing of Don, Gal is sucked back into his old life. Back in London to do the job—so as to avoid suspicion for his role in Don’s disappearance—Gal reunites with lead gangster Ted (Ian McShane). Shortly after the heist goes off without a hitch, an exasperated Gal pleads, “I’m not into this anymore, Ted.” Any hopes of returning to a genuine retirement are dashed, however, when Ted casually announces his plan to “drop in sometime. Pay my respects.” The relative peace leading to this inevitable visit (and its implicit expectation of more work) proves tenuous when we learn that Don is buried under Gal’s pool. The past is just below the surface, be it of a pool or of the subconscious. Don continues to exert his presence, even from beyond the grave; his physical permanence—he is now built into Gal’s home—a constant reminder of Gal’s inescapable past life. Despite some surrealistic flourishes that hint at Glazer’s subsequent work, Sexy

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JONATHAN GLAZER’S IDENTITY TRILOGY

Beast can quite comfortably be labeled a crime thriller. This initial adherence to genre conventions makes his follow-up all the more surprising. A baroque melodrama tinged with the supernatural, Birth chronicles the upending of a wealthy New York family after the soon-to-be-wed Anna (Nicole Kidman) becomes convinced that a child is the reincarnation of her dead husband, Sean. This boy, “Young Sean” (Cameron Bright), indeed knows some shockingly private information about Anna (“We did it on your sofa,” he admits to the dead man’s brother-in-law). Although he  often seems to directly channel the dead husband—as when he coldly  tells his worried mother, “I’m not your stupid son anymore”—he sometimes exhibits a childish lack of awareness; when visiting Anna and her bemused-cum-infuriated family, he unironically asks for a glass of milk. Thus, while the narrative is often framed as one of reincarnation, it is perhaps more akin to possession. On separate occasions, both Anna and Young Sean’s mother refer to him as being under a “spell.” In one scene, unsettling in its simplicity, he appears to go into a trance and lose control over his body: Oblivious to a friend shouting his name from outside, he sits upright in bed—rubbing his shirt cloth between his fingers—and stares silently into space. Later, he faints when Anna walks away from him after he refuses to say he’ll leave her alone. Sean himself compares his ability to recall past memories to déjà vu. “I’ll know them when I see them,” he says, as if the sight of someone triggers certain thoughts, feelings, and memories. This information “comes to” him, his body and mind being conduits to another self. Much of the film follows Anna and Young Sean as the former gradually accepts his fantastic claim and attempts to navigate a problematic (to put it lightly) relationship. Their interactions, which begin innocently enough—walks in the park, even a visit to a playground—culminate with Anna seriously considering running off with (i.e., kidnapping) Young Sean. Ultimately, Young Sean retreats to his life as a child after Clara (Anne Heche), with whom the adult Sean had an affair, confronts him about “their” relationship. Does Young Sean rescind his story because he doesn’t want Anna to know about his infidelity, or is he a fraud, his knowledge gleaned from love letters he found between Clara and Sean? Genuine reincarnation or not (contrary to popular opinion, this central mystery is never definitively answered), the film ends with a distraught Anna—clad

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in a wedding dress and about to marry Joseph (Danny Huston), a man she doesn’t love—wandering a beach shore. Nearly a decade passed until the release of Glazer’s third, most radical work yet: Under the Skin. The film begins with an extraterrestrial assuming the outward appearance of a human seductress (Scarlett Johansson). Glazer implies the character’s assumption of a new identity by showing “her” donning human clothes, applying makeup, and practicing the English language.2 She shows no remorse in early scenes, picking hitchhikers up in her van and luring them into an opaque pool of black liquid—wherein they sink and are seemingly harvested—without hesitation. Toward the beginning of her journey, she abandons an infant on a rocky beach after witnessing both of his parents’ watery deaths. However, later scenes, such as one in which she lets a lonely, disfigured man free after luring him to the black pool, suggest that she has developed some sense of empathy—if not of right versus wrong—toward her target. She gradually comes to identify with humanity, experimenting with her adopted form. The minor infraction of trying a piece of chocolate cake at a restaurant (the punch line of which is one of the film’s few moments of levity) eventually leads to a full-blown relationship with a man she meets on a bus. Unlike the leering, sex-obsessed men who populate the rest of the film, this man proves to be a decent creature, offering her food, shelter, companionship, and, most importantly, kindness. It is to this man that she briefly surrenders, nearly making love with him before running off the next day. In contrast to her early predatory encounters with men, she comes across here as confused, emotional, and vulnerable; in other words, she seems like a real human being. If we consider being human as having a conscience, one may argue that she becomes human as the film progresses. Despite having developed some fondness for humanity, the alien sheds its false skin when a man brutally assaults her and rips a hole in her disguise; soon after, she is burned alive by the same attacker. The last shot—an upward angle of snowflakes accumulating on the alien’s smoldering remains—echoes the low-angle shot of the sun that opens Sexy Beast: a fitting, if bleak, coda to three uniquely interrelated projects. Superficial differences aside—Glazer’s exploration of identity has yielded increasingly abstract and experimental results—each film illustrates the same unsettling implication: Despite one’s efforts, it is impossible to

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JONATHAN GLAZER’S IDENTITY TRILOGY

successfully assume an identity that conflicts with one’s fundamental nature. In this respect, the director’s output has been consistently fatalistic; these characters are what they are, he seems to suggest, be it a gangster, child, or extraterrestrial. Try as they might, there is nothing they can do about it. Identity (Dis)integration Revealing parallels occur within seconds of each film’s beginning. The opening shots of Sexy Beast and Under the Skin are nearly identical: darkness punctuated by a blinding light.3 It’s immediately apparent in the former—thanks to the surrounding blue sky and sounds of cicadas—that we’re outside, staring into a sweltering sun. The setting of the latter is far more ambiguous: A pinprick of white in an otherwise black void expands slightly, explodes into a starlike configuration, and then morphs into concentric, orblike rings (because the volume of Levi’s violins intensifies throughout this progression, we get the sense that something is traveling toward us). Both images, however, may call to mind the old saying that the “light at the end of the tunnel” one experiences at death is in fact the end of a birth canal as one is reborn (perhaps into the same life). Although Birth’s first shot does not exactly repeat this image, it certainly echoes it. A gorgeous tracking shot, which clocks in at over two minutes, follows Sean as he jogs into a symbolic womb: a pitch-black tunnel, its terminus illuminated by bright snow. His black clothing and hooded figure (we never clearly see his face) also foreshadow his impending death. All three films, then, immediately associate light bursting into darkness with the emergence of a new life, be it literal (Birth) or figurative (Sexy Beast, Under the Skin). There’s a self-awareness to these openings, too. What is a film’s beginning, after all, if not a birth of sorts? These similarities extend well beyond the first shot. Under closer inspection, each entry’s opening scene begins in much the same way, introducing the audience to a character who is undergoing (or has recently undergone) a drastic identity change. Gal—an overweight, sunburnt retiree, glistening beside his pool—is the first person we see in Sexy Beast. He appears nearly catatonic as he cooks in the sun (“you can fry an egg on my stomach,” he quips) and comically struggles to sit up from his pool chair. Anticipating Don’s arrival, a boulder forebodingly plummets

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into the middle of the pool—missing Gal’s head by inches—and shatters the heart-shaped tile design at its bottom.4 His time of rest and relaxation is over, the boulder embodying the violent past finally catching up with him. Birth’s character transformation is more explicit. Before the aforementioned tracking shot, Sean (voiced by Sean Oliver) lectures over a black screen (he seems to have been an academic; a writer or professor, perhaps) about his disbelief in reincarnation. It would take a talking bird, he jokes, to make him a believer. Immediately after Sean’s death under the bridge, Glazer cuts to Young Sean’s water birth, a juxtaposition that suggests at least the possibility of authentic reincarnation. Under the Skin’s identity change is simultaneously the trilogy’s most literal and abstract: a fusion of the cosmic with the microbial. The opening “starburst” shot is followed by a mystifying arrangement of shapes floating through a void. They overlap, their concentric circles akin to the opening shot’s. The sequence ends with an abrupt shift from ambiguity to physicality: What may initially be construed as footage of outer space reveals itself as the construction of the alien’s human eyeball. We’re seemingly inside the creature’s head as it dons its human visage and practices its new mode of communication (it’s over this footage that we hear Johansson practicing her Scottish dialect, carefully enunciating words like “field,” “pills,” and, perhaps in a nod to her fate, “failed”). One may be tempted to say she’s naked when later shown standing in a white space, looking down at a woman whose clothes she takes. However, she is already “clothed” in human skin, her true form concealed from the beginning. The articles of clothing she strips from the unnamed woman are merely a second layer. Each film’s incorporation of water or liquid during key scenes further underlines this theme of (re)birth. In addition to the aforementioned pool, Sexy Beast includes an extended, underwater heist sequence in which the ne’er-do-wells drill into a vault from a pool next door to a bank, flooding the vault in the process. Besides the water birth of Young Sean, Birth also has its (unfairly) notorious scene in which Anna joins Young Sean in a bathtub, thus expressing her acceptance of his new identity. Under the Skin, by the very nature of its Scottish setting, incorporates water throughout. The first Earth-based shot is of a roiling river. Later, after abandoning its predatorial mission, the alien ditches its car5 and enters a dense fog, the emergence from which symbolizes not only its assimilation into

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Fig. 1.1: The constructed human: Abstract orbs become an eye in Under the Skin.

humanity but also its rejection of its past life. The closing scenes, which culminate in its violent death, are saturated with rain and snow, most notably in the aforementioned final shot. Under the Skin’s black pool extends this visual motif further, into the realm of the uncanny. When the viewer is finally allowed a peek beneath its surface, the big reveal is nothing short of horrific: naked, fetuslike men float in a silent, blue void.6 These images, certainly the most surreal in any of his feature-length work, are also Glazer’s most explicit and subversive

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Fig. 1.2: A Brakhage-like dip into the avant-garde in Under the Skin.

examination of the relationship between birth and death; the male victims return to an extraterrestrial amniotic sac wherein they are consumed and destroyed rather than reborn. Fittingly, this glimpse under the surface is when Glazer includes his second abstract sequence, a deathly inversion of the opening scene’s. As opposed to the eye-construction sequence, here the explicit becomes abstract; footage of viscera moving along a conveyor belt segues into a red-hued montage right out of a Brakhage short film. A common interpretation is that we’re staring into the human furnace as it churns the harvested meat, but we can’t know for sure; maybe the aliens’ purposes are simply beyond our perception. More than anything, this short excursion into the avant-garde reminds me of vitreous eye floaters and portends the creature’s destabilizing identity crisis. If all three protagonists are similarly conceived, they’re also similarly stripped of their assumed personae. Glazer’s strategic foreshadowing points to their reversion. Even before Don—his clean-shaven head resembling a rock in itself—crashes into Gal’s cushy complacence, the latter’s reversal of both fortune and identity is sealed. Consider an early scene in which Gal, Aitch, and Enrique (Alvaro Monje)—a local Gal has hired as a pool boy—go shooting. They appear foolish, fumbling across the desolate landscape, their outing little more than an excuse to goof around (none of them seem to know how to properly operate a hunting rifle).

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A rabbit they encounter (and comically fail to kill) proves symbolically significant. Gal’s ensuing nightmare—in which a monstrous, humanoid rabbit interrupts his dinner and points a gun at him—foreshadows Don’s disruptive arrival. Gal—initially comfortable, charming, and confident— becomes the rabbit to Don’s huntsman. Fittingly, the rabbit creature reappears (this time as a daydream, as if the nightmare haunts Gal’s waking thoughts) when Ted confronts him in London about Don’s mysterious disappearance. Here, the rabbit again points a gun at our protagonist before morphing into Ted’s image. Gal has escaped one predator only to come into the crosshairs of another (the same can be said for Under the Skin’s alien, which eludes its motorcyclist overseers only to be chased, assaulted, and destroyed by a human man; Glazer’s characters often escape one trap only to fall into another identical one). In a surreal flourish as tragic as it is comic, Gal continues to argue with Don’s “spirit,” which calmly smokes a cigarette in its underground tomb. Accompanying Don’s ghost, naturally, is the human-sized rabbit. Both figures, symbolic “intrusions” into Gal’s assumed identity, continue to wreak havoc just beneath the surface. It’s obvious throughout Birth that Young Sean’s agenda to be with Anna doesn’t stand a chance. A telling interaction with Anna occurs, of all places, at an ice cream parlor (where else could they meet: a bar?); when she facetiously asks him if he’s ever made love to a woman, he says “you’d be the first,” rather than something along the lines of, “yes, with you.” Sometimes he’s Sean, sometimes he’s Young Sean; the latter is inhabited by the former rather than an embodiment of him, to return to the aforementioned framing of his situation as one of possession rather than reincarnation. Thus, Young Sean’s transformation may be beyond his control, which makes his final scene—in which he glumly poses for his school portrait—all the more tragic. That this scene is juxtaposed with Anna’s wedding photo shoot, however, indicates that the two may remain not only inextricably linked despite their separation, but also similarly “frozen” in their current circumstances (I’ll return to photographic stillness in chapter 3). This synchronicity—since Anna met the original Sean at the beach, her beachfront wedding is less an escape from her dead husband as it is a return to him—points to Anna’s equally significant failure to assume a new identity: that of the loving, “peaceful” (to borrow her description)

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wife. Even her palindromic name hints at this interpenetration of beginning and end, past and future. She openly acknowledges—to her fiancé, no less—her inability to get Sean “out of her system.” As saccharine as it may sound, love itself may be the deterministic factor guiding these characters, “forcing” them to act against their better judgment and common sense. Although Anna begs Joseph to take her back, she also denies responsibility for having nearly run off with a child. It was not her fault, she claims, because she couldn’t have possibly behaved any differently. Despite not wanting to, she found herself falling in love with Sean all over again, and she maintains to the end that these feelings were out of her hands. We get the impression she’ll always remain his wife, just as Young Sean describes his love’s permanence: “I love Anna, and nothing is going to change that. Nothing,” he asserts. “That’s forever.” Just as Sean’s identity crisis intensifies one already boiling within Anna, Gal is not the only character attempting to mask their true self in Sexy Beast. Deedee was once a porn star, a past life to which Don frequently (and spitefully) refers. Even Don alludes to a past in which he was (at least superficially) more humanlike: he used to work a “normal” job at an office, and scenes in which he displays lingering romantic feelings for Deedee’s friend, Jackie, are the closest he gets to betraying a vulnerable side. In one unexpectedly touching moment, he looks in the mirror (a motif echoed in Under the Skin, discussed below) and reprimands himself for having revealed these feelings to Gal. More often than not, however, he is closer in spirit to Under the Skin’s protagonist. Don seems to be from another world in that he resembles an unknowable monster. We never see him sleep (when he receives the first call about the heist, he is shown sitting bolt upright in his bedroom, staring dispassionately at  a glowing television), and he often repeats what others say with bewilderment, as if struggling to understand their human emotions and responses. The failure of Under the Skin’s creature to become human is embedded within the very same scene in which we first see her. In Alien in the Mirror, Maureen Foster reconsiders the identity of the woman Johansson strips in the white space: “We wonder about . . . this discarded, abducted, or murdered girl—a runaway, or prostitute, both?—but in time it seems feasible that she is in fact Laura’s [the alien’s] predecessor.”7 She is, in effect, standing over her own future; by assuming her new identity, she’s

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also enacting its destruction, the unnamed woman over whom she stands alluding to her own “unclothing” in the forest, beneath the predatorial male. A simple gesture—that is, the exchange of clothes—thus conflates birth and death, not unlike our peek beneath the black pool. Later, a subtle shift in dialogue announces the alien’s reversed role. When her attacker asks if she is “out here alone,” we recall a similar question she posed to potential victims: “Do you live alone?” She (and the viewer) recognizes the insinuation.8 Perhaps this understanding is why she takes refuge in a rest-stop cottage, which “may be as much his lair as the black space was hers.”9 Indeed, the dank entrance of this location—wherein the man first assaults her—evokes the darkened doorways through which her victims had crossed; by the same token, the dream into which she briefly escapes—her sleeping body superimposed over windswept trees—calls to mind the oneiric world under the black pool’s “skin.” To say that Glazer portrays these characters as fools for trying to change, however, would be a gross oversimplification. Rather, he shows a deep compassion and even respect for their Sisyphean attempts to start anew. After all, these central characters are consistently the most sympathetic figures in their respective films: Gal, though certainly not morally upright, is a saint compared to the insane, ranting Don; Young Sean, though quite possibly a manipulative sociopath, is still just a child (at least physically) and pales in comparison to Clara’s duplicitous relationship with Anna, her lover’s wife; the alien, though responsible for multiple graphic deaths, is still not as malevolent as the male-bodied aliens constantly keeping tabs on it, especially after it tries to save one of its intended victims. These conflicting characteristics (Johansson’s and Kingsley’s vulnerable predators, Kidman’s and Heche’s morally dubious adults) are not the result of carelessness on Glazer’s part but a natural outcome of grappling with some major philosophical issues, namely: What does it mean to be human? How much of this identity is predetermined? How much is malleable? Can individuals (and by extension, humanity) truly, permanently change? Although Glazer seems not so much interested in providing clear-cut answers to these questions (by their very nature, they are incapable of having one solution) as he is in contemplating their various implications and possibilities, the implied answer is an unambiguous “no,” considering the protagonists’ recursive fates.

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Beneath the Mask, the Ineffable It is perhaps only natural that Glazer’s exploration of these questions has yielded increasingly abstract results. Each film has about half as much dialogue as its predecessor, Under the Skin being about as close to a silent film as one can get.10 Landscapes, body movements, and surreal images are the fundamental tools with which Glazer communicates with his audience in the trilogy’s final entry; here, the simple act of Johansson drumming her fingers along to music has complex implications. Each successive film also conveys less interest in story (Sexy Beast, the earliest, is by far the most plot-centered) and more interest in its characters’ internal evolutions. Yes, Glazer’s films have become cooler, quieter. But to equate coolness with detachment is a miscalculation. His last two films are like lakes whose surfaces remain calm and untouched so we can better see our reflections in them. While it has significantly more dialogue than Under the Skin, Birth is more spiritually aligned with it than Sexy Beast, especially in terms of how the director conveys the characters’ realizations to his audience. Birth is a film of unspoken revelations. Consider Joseph’s shocked realization—while touring an open house alone—that he is losing his fiancé to a child. Or Anna’s visit to the opera, in which we experience her conflicting emotions while Wagner’s Die Walküre thunders in the background. The latter example is especially illuminating, as it mirrors Young Sean’s aforementioned “spell” in his bedroom; both sequences begin with a sweeping dolly shot (of the opera audience and Sean’s neighborhood, respectively) and culminate with a slow zoom toward each character’s face. Similar to Anna, the alien takes a long, hard look at itself in a mirror before deciding to spare one of the men it has captured. Later, seconds before being killed, the alien holds its detached human head in its hands, and the two personae stare at one another. This image encapsulates the trilogy’s fundamental area of interest; two faces belonging to the same being gaze back at one another, and neither the viewer nor the character can be certain which one expresses its true nature. Such moments, composed of extended, wordless close-ups, convey more through facial expressions than other films are able to accomplish through pages of dialogue.

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It comes as no surprise, then, that Glazer’s work is often compared to that of Stanley Kubrick, an influence the director has acknowledged (one can’t help but think of Jack Torrance’s rubber ball when Young Sean bounces a ball in the lobby of Anna’s apartment). Under the Skin has inevitably been compared to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which perplexes many viewers to this day with its glacial pacing and image-centric storytelling. Also like 2001, Under the Skin has earned equal measures of praise and disdain from audiences and critics alike. However, I believe the films are quite different in their purposes. While Kubrick’s urges us to wonder at humankind’s evolutionary future and its position in a vast universe, Glazer’s prompts us to consider what it means to be a “human,” and not necessarily on just a biological level; Kubrick’s looks outward, Glazer’s inward (in this sense, Under the Skin is more closely aligned with Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, 1972). As the title implies, being human is far more complex than surface-level details. What is under the skin? What awesome, incomprehensible truths lurk beneath those black pools within us all? Like another auteur, Robert Bresson (A Man Escaped [1956]; Au Hasard Balthazar [1966]), Glazer uses his actors (and the few words they utter) minimally in order to plumb depths that risk obscuration when dressed in flowery dialogue and exposition. Bresson, who notoriously referred to his actors as “models,” expresses similar sentiments in his Notes on the Cinematograph: Where not everything is present, but each word, each look, each movement has things underlying.11 A model. Enclosed in his mysterious appearance. He has brought home to him all of him that was outside. He is there, behind that forehead, those cheeks.12 Sexy Beast and Birth take a figurative approach to the concept; Gal is a model in that he assumes the appearance of a pampered retiree (while not artificial, his conspicuously tanned skin is part of this new “costume”), and Young Sean is a model in that he assumes the mentality of a grieving woman’s dead husband (or—if we believe his reincarnation story—he becomes a model at the end of the film, when he goes back to his “normal” life as a child). However, in Under the Skin, Bresson’s observations are literalized. Much has already been made of Glazer’s guerilla tactics while filming,

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namely his decision to plop a disguised Johansson into public places and  secretly record her interacting with real people. Glazer himself has pointed out the interesting parallels between Johansson and her character: “Shooting the way we did was about understanding that the methodology and the narrative were the same thing, and they were equivalent.”13 Both actor and character are wearing a costume; just as Johansson had to assume a new identity by adopting an English accent and donning a black wig, her alien character assumed a new outward appearance. The alien actually is a model that is enclosed in the “mysterious appearance” of a human body (just as the actor is “enclosed” in his/her role). What stops this approach from merely being a neat experiment, though, are the questions that it provokes in a viewer regarding the nature of selfhood. After all, everyone can relate to feeling a harsh dichotomy between one’s outward appearance and inward feelings. On some level, everyone has the experience of putting on different social “costumes,” be it at a job interview or family dinner. Indeed, Bresson’s words—if taken to their logical conclusion—may just as easily be applied to all of humanity. We are all bound by our various (and seemingly incompatible) mysterious appearances. The persona one reveals to friends is usually much different than those shown to one’s family, boss, or lover. Inevitably, the question becomes: Which version of “me” is the real me? Who am I, really, when no one else is looking? There must be something there, however ineffable. The real question, then, may not so much be, “can people change?” as it is, “can people know who they are in the first place?” By no means are these novel philosophical questions, but Glazer’s ongoing exploration of them has yielded some of the most challenging, thematically dense films of the past few decades. Be it a crime thriller, supernatural melodrama, or abstract science fiction piece, the fundamental question remains the same: What’s behind all of those foreheads and cheeks?

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Sometimes a character’s destination is less an arrival than a return. Their future is predetermined in that they’ve already seen it. They’ve already been there. It’s the narrative equivalent of the snake eating its tail—the end from which each beginning must emerge. The archetypal examples of this archetype are, of course, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, especially the latter’s chronicle of Odysseus’s prolonged return to Ithaca after the sacking of Troy. In his Poetics, Aristotle wrote of a plot’s need for “a single, unified action—and one that is also a whole.”1 It’s no wonder, then, that the philosopher considered Homer an “outstanding poet of the serious kind.”2 Homer knew that effectively recounting the Odyssey demanded not only focusing on a single character, but also on eliminating extraneous plot elements: “He did not include everything which happened to Odysseus . . .  e.g. the wounding on Parnassus and the pretense of madness during the mobilization”3 (such comments also imply that poetry is not an element of mythology, that the latter in fact predated artistic renderings). Not all stories—including those of Aristotle’s contemporaries—follow this notion of unified action, but it’s easy to understand his preference for its discerning approach. Sometimes a few carefully selected moments encapsulate a life better than its totality. Unified action also dovetails with circular storytelling and its inherent  determinism; I’m not suggesting that all myths are circular or that

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Aristotle understood them as such, but that these two concepts complement one another as applied to both the Odyssey and the films explored herein. Rather than following a straight line with no clear terminus, the people and events in these narratives travel toward one thing only: their contemporaneous endings/beginnings. Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours are doubly indebted to this framework: Each New York–set film not only embodies this conception of unity, but also centers around a protagonist whose analog can be found in a character from Homer’s Odyssey. If the epic poem is about a man trying to go home, then Inside Llewyn Davis is about a man desperately trying to escape his—sixties-era Greenwich Village—first by way of fame as a folk musician, then by anonymity as a sailor. As such, Llewyn (Oscar Isaac) represents an inverted, decidedly modern Odysseus. On the other hand, After Hours’ Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne)—an office drone if there ever was one—exemplifies Sisyphus through his futile efforts to return home after a late-night excursion into Soho to meet the mysterious Marcy Franklin (Rosanna Arquette) becomes a living nightmare. Because Llewyn and Paul fit the mold of preexisting characters— especially ones as integral to literature as Odysseus and Sisyphus— predetermination is built into the very fabric of their respective journeys. The centuries-old rhetorical situation to which the Coens and Scorsese contribute delineates what can and cannot happen in their films. In order to fully appreciate these characters’ mythological antecedents, as well as the deterministic themes inherent therein, I will analyze them through the prism of Aristotle’s conceptions of character and plot. Character Symbolic Imitation

Imitation is not synonymous with duplication. “An imitation need not be a straightforward copy of the object imitated,” notes Malcolm Heath, in his introduction to Poetics: “The similarity between the object and its likeness may reside in a more oblique and abstract correspondence.”4 Both Inside Llewyn Davis and After Hours feature symbols with which their protagonists directly interact; crucially, the presence of these imitations

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reinforces the stasis that defines their lives. This interpenetration of signifier and signified further underlines each narrative’s indebtedness to mythological archetypes. Though Homer’s epic most explicitly inspired the Coens’ 2000 musical-comedy, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Inside Llewyn Davis best lends itself to the present analysis—not because it’s particularly faithful to the source material, but because it engages with Odysseus’s exploits in a more nuanced, probing fashion. Indeed, the directors explicitly refer to the Odyssey only once in their 2013 film, when we learn that the cat that has followed the folk musician for part of his misadventures is named Ulysses (the Roman equivalent of Odysseus). “That’s its name?” Llewyn asks, as if incredulous at the Coens’ on-the-nose allusion. One may be tempted to equate him with the cat—trying to assure a friend that “Llewyn has the cat,” he is misheard over the phone as saying “Llewyn is the cat”—but to do so would neglect a key difference. Just as his literary forebear ultimately finds his way back to Ithaca, little Ulysses returns to the Gorfeins (Robin Bartlett and Ethan Phillips)—the academics who let Llewyn crash at their place on occasion—after escaping from their apartment. Though we never see the cat’s adventures, its cross-country trip is alluded to when Llewyn later stops in front of a theater to examine a poster for Disney’s The Incredible Journey (1963). Above an illustrated cat reads the tagline, “nothing could stop them—only instinct to guide them across 200 perilous miles of Canadian wilderness!” Llewyn’s journey, on the other hand, never really starts; he wants to go to sea but keeps getting pulled back to shore. He is Odysseus if the latter never left for the Trojan War but still complained about how great he would have been had he gone. The oft-cited shot in the subway—in which Ulysses, perched over Llewyn’s shoulder, gazes out the window, his uncannily emotive face reflected in the glass—embodies this contrast. As Llewyn focuses on the inside of the train—observing, with some embarrassment, the various passengers staring at him—the cat juts his head from side to side as the station signs pass by, as if he’s reading them. The stops flash across the window with increasing speed until Ulysses, perhaps itching to explore the world beyond (fittingly, a nondiegetic “Fare Thee Well” accompanies this scene), hops down and scurries toward the doors before Llewyn catches him. Indeed, Llewyn is not the cat. Ulysses wants to move, but his temporary owner stays put.

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If Llewyn’s imitation can be found in an appropriately named pet, Paul’s can be traced to a recurring, startling prop: plaster sculptures of humans, forever frozen in anguish. These sculptures figure prominently in two of the film’s dizzying number of locations and function as more than mere symbols of entrapment. The first is Marcy’s loft, where her bohemian roommate, Kiki Bridges (Linda Fiorentino), works on the aforementioned sculpture. Paul takes an instant liking to the project, comparing it to Munch’s The Scream. The second appears at the end of his journey, when he encounters another mysterious woman named June (Verna Bloom), who also happens to make human figures in her basement apartment. In order to evade a violent mob looking for Paul, June hides him inside one of her statues. The pose in which he finds himself stuck—hunched over, hands clutching his head—echoes his earlier reference to Munch, and, in a moment of panic-inducing horror, she refuses to let him out of the cast after the mob leaves. Paul has become the symbol, trapped inside the piece of art.5 Scorsese and screenwriter Joseph Minion’s paradoxical conflation of man and art echoes the work of René Magritte, especially the surrealist’s stone and statue paintings. Though one may view statues as attempts to immortalize organic material (including people), Fischer clarifies in Cinemagritte how the artist “evidently considered the state of petrification as dreadful. . . . He ‘did not regard [it] as a process, but as a kind of catastrophe, like that at Pompeii, when lava transfixed the world and brought all movement to a halt.’ ”6 Paul would likely agree with this negative connotation; his insertion into the artwork doesn’t imply immortalization, but entrapment. And while he is freed when his body-casted self falls out of the back of a truck and smashes open on the ground (his relationship with the symbol is, in this sense, quite the opposite of Llewyn’s: Whereas the latter’s imitation escapes him, the former escapes his), he still faces entrapment when he finds himself back at the stultifying office from whence he fled. A Demoralized Odysseus

It has become something of a cliché to refer to a character’s “Odyssean” arc. The archetypes to which this label often refers—journeys home, unexpected detours and obstacles along the way—are applicable, however

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tangentially, to almost any narrative. Nevertheless, I can’t help but add to this tried and true literary allusion, especially considering the Coens’ relationship with Homer’s text. While promoting O Brother, the directors claimed (perhaps facetiously) they had never read the Odyssey in its entirety. With Inside Llewyn Davis, I suspect they may have finally buckled down and given it a read—not to imitate, but to subvert. Consider how they portray their protagonist’s personal life. Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, remains unremittingly loving—no other man has set foot in their bedroom since his departure—and welcomes his return with joy: “That bed, / that rest is yours whenever desire moves you, / now the kind powers have brought you home at last.”7 Jean (Carey Mulligan) is far less warm toward her ex-boyfriend and occasional lover, and with good reason. Her pained monologue about the possibility that Llewyn is the father of her unborn child—indeed, about the notion of his being a father to anyone—is about as removed from the devout Penelope as one can get: “You should be wearing condom on condom, and then wrap it in electrical tape. You should just walk around always inside a great big condom, because you are shit.” Ironically, Llewyn later discovers he already has a child: a two-year-old about whom the mother, Diane, never told him. He assumed she had an abortion—an assumption she never bothered to correct—which says all there is to say about how reliable the women in his life find him. Another central figure in Llewyn’s life is his father, Hugh (Stan Carp). Wasting away in a retirement center, he may conjure memories of Laertes toiling in his farm, “racked, bowed under grief.”8 However, a quick visit from Athena restores Laertes to his former “magnificent” and “clearheaded” self. The mere mortals of Inside are afforded no such luxuries. This stark realism is best exemplified during Llewyn’s farewell visit to Hugh. Before shipping off with the Merchant Marines the next day for a fresh start, he sings “Shoals of Herring” to the old man. As his son sings of the seafaring life, Hugh seems to tear up. Has the song granted the father, a former sailor himself, a rare moment of clarity? “Wow,” Llewyn says, twice, after finishing. Unknowing audiences may think he has reached a desperately needed moment of anagnorisis, but, in a heartbreaking reversal, we learn the true inspiration for his utterance: Hugh has soiled himself. “Could I trouble you?” he asks an orderly. “My father had, um . . . He needs to be cleaned.”

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Unlike Odysseus, Llewyn is not pining for loved ones from distant shores; his relationships are marked not by separation, but alienation. He sees them frequently, often grudgingly, his presence anything but welcome. Jean—the closest analogue to Penelope, if we accept the Llewynas-Odysseus metaphor—wants nothing to do with him. His father hardly remembers him. Diane has settled in Ohio with their child. Telemachus risked his life to try and find his father, Odysseus, even after most others had written him off as long dead. Llewyn’s child probably doesn’t know he exists. When he does manage to venture beyond New York’s borders, Llewyn’s anticlimactic adventures only emphasize his entrapment. In another sequence that’s arranged to feel like a buildup to an epiphany, he travels to Chicago in hopes of persuading famed manager Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham) to sign him. After Llewyn’s emotional rendition of “The Death of Queen Jane,” Bud’s deadpan “I don’t see a lot of money here” squashes any remaining aspirations the former may have had for a successful music career. More painful is how matter-of-factly Bud elaborates: “You’re okay . . . you’re no front guy.” Meaning he’s no leader; he doesn’t have that ineffable energy or charm that draws people to him. In short, Llewyn belongs in the background, which is indeed where he remains. It may be more appropriate to compare him to, say, Elpenor (that pathetic, oft-forgotten crew member who falls off the boat in a drunken stupor) than to Odysseus, the headliner. Llewyn’s second “adventure” ends before it begins, when a series of Kafkaesque bureaucratic loopholes thwart his attempts to start over at sea. After spending all of his money on dues for getting back on the shipping roster, he “loses” his license (actually, he told his sister to throw it out) and can’t refund his dues to buy a new one. Without the license, the dues are useless; without the dues, the license is. He can’t afford both, and walks away from the situation with a useless receipt and short 148 dollars. Interestingly, the name of the ship on which he hoped to embark, the Maid of the Gate, bears a striking resemblance to the Gate of Horn, Grossman’s music venue. The concert hall and ship are gateways (one to potential fame, the other to some steady work), each to which he is denied access. And though the film ends with a return, explored below, it’s quite unlike Odysseus’s triumphant homecoming to Ithaca.

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A Defiant Sisyphus

Although Sisyphus is referred to only once in the Odyssey, he leaves a considerable impression on Odysseus, who describes his encounter with the man in Hades thusly: Then Sísyphos in torment I beheld being roustabout to a tremendous boulder. . . .  he heaved it toward a height, and almost over, but then a Power spun him round and sent the cruel boulder bounding again to the plain.9 Sisyphus’s punishment in and of itself is a perfect crystallization of predetermination—he must roll the boulder up the hill, it must fall down, and he must roll it up again. Absolutely nothing else could possibly happen. To make matters worse, Sisyphus seems well aware of his situation; it’s not like his memory is erased each time he resumes the impossible task. The character has therefore become synonymous with the futility of human endeavors, yet not all thinkers have associated his plight with abject despair. “Sisyphus is the absurd hero,” Albert Camus proclaims in “The Myth of Sisyphus”: “He is, as much through his passions as through his torture.”10 Paul’s torturous experiences are exceedingly, often painfully clear. The upending of his life begins with a chance meeting in a diner. There, he strikes up a conversation with the alluring Marcy, who provides her phone number and later urges him to visit her loft. It is useless to even attempt to outline the misadventures that follow, which involve Paul losing his money, being falsely identified as a notorious thief, and being implicated in a death. Over the course of this night, he makes his way through a labyrinth of restaurants, bars, clubs, and apartments, all in an effort to just get some change for the subway. Since the escapist promises of his late-night excursion prove fruitless (not to mention nearly fatal), it’s only fitting that Paul’s journey ends with a return to office drudgery. Though superficially pessimistic—here, Paul embodies Camus’s conception of the absurd hero as a “futile laborer”— this ending also showcases the unexpected dignity with which he

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accepts his fate. With the arrival of the new workday, he begins pushing his boulder again by restarting his computer. “Good morning, Paul,” the screen reads. It may as well read, “start pushing.” This message, however unsettling, is oddly comforting. Sure, it suggests the computer has been coolly awaiting his return, but it also pays him a common courtesy—a simple hello—largely absent from the previous night’s hostile encounters. A significant detail is the fact that even after being stolen by two recurring scrappers (Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong)—who mistake his statued self in June’s basement as a piece of art—he does not shout out for help. Why doesn’t he? After all, his mouth is not literally plastered shut. This curious inaction conveys a significant message: that through his silence—he has no dialogue for the remainder of the film—Paul shows acknowledgement and acceptance. “Crushing truths perish from being acknowledged,”11 Camus asserts, and this is what makes After Hours oddly optimistic compared to Inside Llewyn Davis. The latter’s protagonist fights (literally fights, as will be explored below) against his fate until the very end. Paul, on the other hand, exudes strength through surrender (we will see a similar acceptance in chapter 6). For Camus, Sisyphus’s heroism is most apparent—that is, most heroic—when he walks downhill, alone, after the rock has rolled back onto the flat plain. This moment is when Sisyphus acknowledges his plight and is consequently “superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.”12 Paul too is stronger than his rock when he dusts himself off (not just euphemistically; he’s covered head to toe in plaster dust), steps through the parting gates of his office building, and gets back to work. It’s telling that—upon falling out of the van and emerging from his plastic body cast—he does not react at all when he realizes where he’s landed. Rather than screaming (as he did in some of the earlier Soho escapades,  such as his despairing “what do you want from me?!” directed toward an indifferent night sky), he responds with a stoicism that’s almost admirable. At first glance, this nonreaction may be interpreted as catatonic hopelessness, but his return to the daily grind is more akin to Camus’s acknowledgment (he carries himself with an air of dignity, of stubborn defiance, during his solitary elevator ride up to his cubicle). The character’s

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seeming acceptance of struggle calls philosopher Simone Weil’s reframing of success and failure to mind: If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension. Without our knowing or feeling it, this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul.13 Whether or not we arrive at an “answer” (be it to a math problem or an existential crisis) matters less than our willingness to struggle through— and subsequently learn from—a given problem. In this sense, the act of pushing the rock is the answer. Paul seems to understand this. One must not forget that he doesn’t have to go back to work. No one drags him through those gates and to his desk. He could just as easily have turned around and fled to his apartment. Given the preceding night’s surreal chaos, perhaps the office’s dependable banality offers its own comforts. Or maybe he recognizes that this place is his true home. “One always finds one’s burden again,”14 Camus writes in his brief essay’s powerful closing lines. By accepting his burden with silent grace, Paul owns his fate. He sees the inherent value of the problem itself. One-View Plots Aristotle’s definition of unity in epic poetry as being “able to take in the beginning and the end in one view”15 summons images of an explorer on a clifftop, overlooking a grand view of nature. The panorama on display is beautiful precisely because we can see the whole thing at once. A random close-up of a crevice in the Grand Canyon pales in comparison to taking in the whole thing. Underlying this phrasing of the experience as “one view” is the implication that the entire story—from start to finish—already exists. Although the Odyssey begins and ends in different physical locations—Calypso’s island and Ithaca, respectively—Odysseus’s climactic reunion with his

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family and kingdom closes the spatial loop of his quest, which began in the Iliad. Inside Llewyn Davis intensifies this recursion. It’s not just that its first and last scenes can be seen within the same view; they are the same view. In them, Llewyn performs at the Gaslight Café, apologizes to the manager, Pappi (Max Casella), for causing a disruption the previous night, and is beaten by a disgruntled audience member whose wife Llewyn drunkenly heckled. These two sequences are a little too similar, so much so that I wonder if they’re not in some sense literally the same. Their near interchangeability in terms of dialogue and action is most apparent when seen side by side. Consider Llewyn’s two discussions with Pappi (bolded words indicate those not in the second exchange; all other words are the same): pappi: You and Mikey used to do that song. Boy, you were some mess last night. llewyn: Yeah, sorry, Pappi, I’m an asshole. pappi: I don’t give a shit. It’s just music. Your friend is out back. llewyn: My friend? pappi: Said he was a friend of yours. Guy in a suit. Or his confrontation with said “friend,” who—in each case—is concealed behind a fedora and leans against a brick wall, smoking (bolded words are not in the final scene; italicized words are not in the first): friend: You a funny boy, huh? llewyn: What? friend: Had to open your big mouth, huh, funny boy? llewyn: I had to what? That’s what I do for a living. Who . . . who are you? friend: What you do. What you do. Make fun of folks up there? llewyn: I’m sorry, what . . . what did I— (friend punches llewyn) friend: You sit there in the audience last night, yelling your crap. llewyn: Oh, for Christ sake. You yell stuff, man, it’s a show. (friend punches llewyn again; llewyn falls to the ground) friend: It wasn’t your show. llewyn: It’s not the opera, jackass. It’s a fucking basket house—

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(friend kicks llewyn) friend: We’re leaving this fucking cesspool. You can have it. What you do. My wife up there trying to sing. (friend exits; llewyn limps to the end of the alley) llewyn: Au revoir. Both characters’ syntactic choices suggest a lack of agency on Llewyn’s part. The friend doesn’t ask “why did you open your big mouth?” which would imply that Llewyn chose to behave that way. Instead, his phrasing of the question (the sentence wouldn’t be a question, if not for the ensuing “huh, funny boy?”) as “had to open your big mouth” has the opposite effect; Llewyn had to do it. By nature, it’s simply what he does (notice how the man’s inflection makes “what you do” a statement rather than a question). Llewyn also defers responsibility when he speaks in the second person (“you yell stuff”) to account for something he did. Strangely, none of the characters involved—including Llewyn—seem aware of this repetition between the above exchanges. It’s as if they’re caught in some nightmarish loop, mindlessly going through the motions. Even the shot compositions are identical, as seen in the below example (each is a wide shot, with the characters slightly off-center). This lack of a clearly demarcated start or finish announces itself within seconds of its runtime. In addition to having no opening credits—a title card, “The Gaslight Café 1961,” provides some context—a small auditory detail immediately disorients: Before any of the production company logos flash on the screen, we hear the soft murmurs of the café audience. Just as the Odyssey begins in medias res at Calypso’s island, this film doesn’t begin as much as it lets us in after having already begun. The first song Llewyn sings, “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me,” is—as its title suggests—about death: the ultimate end of a journey. The song’s recurring line, “I’ve been all around this world,” ironically anticipates Llewyn’s failure to escape his surroundings. His first spoken line of dialogue—“you probably heard that one before. If it was never new, and it never gets old, then it’s a folk song”—similarly foreshadows his recursive journey; indeed, by the end of the film we have literally seen and heard this all before. This first scene then culminates with the directors’ most conspicuous stylistic flourish: a dissolve that overlaps the “friend” exiting the alley with Ulysses walking down a hallway in the Gorfeins’ apartment. Unlike Llewyn, both of these figures successfully leave.

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Fig. 2.1: Identical compositions from Inside Llewyn Davis’s opening and closing sequences.

The final scene contains two key additions. Firstly, Llewyn’s beating follows an unnamed Bob Dylan—cheekily referred to as “Young Bob” in the end credits—performing after the former’s set. Dylan obviously won’t be stuck in the Gaslight Café much longer, his presence further emphasizing Llewyn’s stasis. The alley friend was right; this isn’t Llewyn’s show, but Dylan’s. Secondly, the Coens now follow Llewyn as he stumbles to the mouth of the alley after his beating and watches the mystery man speed off in a cab. Like Dylan (and Ulysses), the disgruntled fan is moving on.

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Fig. 2.2: The alley friend and cat dissolve in Inside Llewyn Davis; unlike Llewyn, both escape.

Llewyn’s return to the music venue is not one of triumph after a battle well fought but of defeat. He has been running in place and will continue to do so. We can easily imagine another friend waiting for him the next week, or another morning idled away in the Gorfeins’ apartment. The friend’s bitter remark that Llewyn can keep this cesspool for himself assumes an ironic undertone. As if he has a choice in the matter. Does Inside Llewyn Davis’s ending perpetually feed back into its beginning? If this is the case—if the entire film has “happened” before that opening title card appears onscreen—then how can we ascribe any freedom to Llewyn? Maybe this is why the Coens provide no credits (or title announcement, for that matter); such a device, by its very nature, establishes a clear starting point, one preceded by “nothingness.” Llewyn’s future and past, having thus merged, lose their boundaries and therefore their significance. The lyrics to “Fare Thee Well,” the final song Llewyn sings, conjure images of flight, rivers, and departures, which more accurately describes Ulysses’s journey (the cat’s as well as the Greek hero’s). The contrast is almost too painful. Llewyn isn’t going anywhere. After Hours exacerbates this notion of what I’ll call the one-view plot through its temporal specificity; if Aristotle extolled Homer’s decision to

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“not even try to treat the war as a whole, although it does have a beginning and an end,”16 we may similarly praise Scorsese’s ability to illuminate an entire life by paradoxically homing in on a few hours. Just as the plot can easily be “taken in” as a whole, so can Paul’s character, given the lack of background information Minion’s script provides. And yet, due to the film’s breathless pacing—which is largely indebted to editor Thelma Schoonmaker—it’s easy to overlook how little we actually come to know about him. Indeed, Paul doesn’t seem to have any friends or family; we’re not even afforded glimpses of them—via photographs, for example—when he opens his wallet or lounges in his apartment. The only characters who are named (i.e., given identities) are those from the rogues’ gallery of misfits he meets in Soho: neighborhood watch crusader Gail (Catherine O’Hara), for example, or Monkees fanatic Julie (Teri Garr). His coworkers—those he presumably sees every day—remain strangely anonymous. The only colleague with whom he actually interacts is the new trainee (because of his position, we can assume they’re strangers to one other). “It’s temporary,” the trainee warns him, as if to justify his halfhearted attempts to learn the program. “I do not intend to be stuck doing this for the rest of my life.” Oblivious to having insulted Paul—he may as well have said “I’m not a loser like you”—the trainee then expounds on a literary magazine he hopes to publish. That we know Paul no better than these random people highlights Minion’s spartan characterization; though not literally nameless, Paul may as well be. We never learn the name or purpose of his place of employment—let alone the specifics of his job there. It’s precisely because of Paul’s nondescript nature that we sympathize with him and project our own anxieties and desires upon this tabula rosa of late-twentieth-century man. He comes to embody both our worst fears (entrapment, death) and loftiest aspirations (escape, transcendence). In this way, the “slice” of Paul’s life we witness comes to represent our collective whole; in fact, it comes to represent the whole better than the whole itself because of its focus. Nowhere is this synecdochic quality more apparent than in Scorsese’s first and last camera movements. One may argue that Paul’s climactic return to the office undercuts any notion of release, that he has merely swapped one “shell” (the body cast) for another. This interpretation, while tempting—the recurring

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setting naturally calls Llewyn’s beating in the alley to mind—ignores the substantial differences between these parallel scenes. Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus pull us in with the opening shot: an impossibly fast dolly zoom across the frenzied office space that stops in front of Paul. The visual effect is that of a shooter getting a victim in their crosshairs. An introductory montage of him squeezing past his office building’s cell-like gates right before they close (it’s almost as if the maintenance workers have forgotten him, as if they’ve come to associate him not just with the building but as a part of it) and absentmindedly flipping through television channels at home (one digital screen replacing another)—all of which is accompanied by Bach’s melancholic Air Overture no.  3 in D Major—further portrays a life of confinement. The last shot reverses this progression, pulling away from Paul and weaving freely around the office via Steadicam. An oft-cited detail is that Paul seems to have “disappeared” when the camera circles back to his work station. Granted, there may be a logical explanation to his absence; maybe he went to the bathroom to wash the plaster dust from his ruined suit. But it’s difficult to accept a quotidian explanation for such a conspicuously baffling detail. The bleakest interpretation of this change is also the most obvious: The building has symbolically absorbed him, anonymizing him to the point that he ceases to exist as a full-bodied human. However, his disappearance may suggest corporeal escape. The roaming Steadicam doesn’t just set us free, but Paul too. This final camera movement implies a sense of freedom; a smooth, gliding exploration of the environment replaces the sharp, harsh dolly zoom that initially jolted us into Paul’s world. It’s as if we’re floating through the office. These bookending shots establish an interesting dialectic: The claustrophobic dolly zoom coincides with his leaving work, the exploratory Steadicam with his returning to it. The resulting theme may appear paradoxical: Escape can confine, and stasis can release. An important distinction emerges, therefore, between corporeal and spiritual movement, and it places much more stock in the latter. To return to Camus, Paul transcends his fate by acknowledging it; the ease with which he leans back in his chair shortly before the Steadicam pull-away implies stoic acceptance rather than bleak resignation, catharsis over despair. Could it be that this

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is why his body disappears, that the office’s shell-like physicality can’t suppress him? Coda Although Inside Llewyn Davis and After Hours share some superficial similarities, what’s crucial here is how they exhibit an understanding that the protagonist must be delivered back to his point of departure: It is his fate. This return is crucial to the films’ common purpose of elucidating characters trapped in a hostile, unforgiving world. And while Llewyn and Paul would likely scoff at the notion of a god or gods pulling the strings, their respective voyages illustrate a definite lack of power. Aristotle explicitly uses the word “fate” only once in Poetics, but he does echo this lack of agency when he suggests that certain occurrences “are beyond human knowledge . . . since we grant that the gods can see everything.”17 The only thing humans can control, it seems, is their reaction to the single panoramic view in which their lives play out. In these films, each man is the center around which everyone else— including Dylan himself—orbits. And yet this emphasis on the individual has a paradoxical effect; rather than offering intimacy, it underlines their (and, by extension, our) impenetrability. Grossman’s request to “play me something from Inside Llewyn Davis,” for example, carries a double meaning; yes, he wants to hear a live performance of one of Llewyn’s songs, but he is also asking the young artist to reveal himself. Said performance offers no deeper understanding of the musician. Grossman understands this, as do we. By the time the end credits roll, we still haven’t clearly seen inside Llewyn Davis. The same may be said for Paul; besides basic animalistic urges (hoping for a late-night tryst with Marcy, struggling to get out of Soho) and superficial interests (enjoying Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer), his identity remains opaque. One is left with the sneaking suspicion that we don’t know these men precisely because they don’t know themselves. Maybe they can’t know themselves. But why can’t they? What most separates Llewyn and Paul from their Greek ancestors is the individualism that dominates their respective journeys. We fail to really see these characters because of their disconnection from the outside world. One man encased in a cast, another a bloodied heap in an alley. Trapped within selves they fail to understand, these

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characters long to escape others as much as they do physical spaces. If Llewyn and Paul don’t understand or want to understand that which drives their lives, then how can either claim agency? A natural solution to such destructive individualism would be to regain some control (and identity) by adhering to a group, and what more fundamental group is there than that of the family unit? “The basis of the social structure is the family,” philosopher Kitarō Nishida reminds us. “It is the origin of human society.”18 However, as we shall see in the next section, this expansion of focus—this return to our collective “origin”—comes fraught with its own deterministic constraints.

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Tableau imagery often amplifies deterministic themes in recent genre films. The montage of near-still images that begins Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) includes a disturbing composition: a mother—her son clinging to her shoulders—trudging through a darkened golf course, the path of her footprints embedded in the swamplike green. The characters’ slowed gestures are barely discernible in these moments leading to von Trier’s apocalyptic centerpiece: the titular planet crashing into Earth. Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013) features a number of literal tableaux vivants wherein the slightest movement—a wavering finger, drifting fog— betrays the actors’ “live” poses. In one such arrangement, the men—a ragtag group of defecting soldiers in search of buried treasure—surround a wooden post, around which a thick rope has been ritualistically wrapped. These strange images are not just showy dips into the avantgarde; they intensify the characters’ overwhelming sense of entrapment. If these cinematic tableaus convey their characters’ stasis in visual terms, then many family-centered narratives—especially those of the horror variety—also do so in terms of their central relationships. The films of focus in this chapter—Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar, and Jordan Peele’s Us—do both, weaving tableau imagery into their dark portraits of contemporary American families at their worst. Collectively, this triptych of films exemplifies the age-old truth that family is forever. Sure, one may renounce familial ties (as many, unfortunately, have every reason to), but

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the biological link can never be severed. Whether known or estranged, beloved or despised, dead or alive, blood is blood. Aster and Peele know and exploit this unnerving fact of life. Hereditary and Midsommar Hereditary’s stunning first shot unfolds like a Russian nesting doll of alternate realities. We begin with a view through a window, looking out at a tree house; in an ominous touch of foreshadowing, a fly flicks against the windowpane. The camera then pans right, revealing the artist’s workshop of Annie (Toni Collette), before resting in front of a large and imposing dollhouse. The camera slowly zooms into the dollhouse until one of its bedrooms encompasses the entire frame. Then, Annie’s husband, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), unexpectedly walks through the miniature bedroom door to wake his son, Peter (Alex Wolff ), and ask him if he has seen his sister, Charlie (Milly Shapiro). As it turns out, the latter is sleeping in the tree house, a detail that tidily brings the opening sequence full circle. On a superficial level, this shot concisely introduces the members of a particularly dysfunctional family. It establishes Annie as the eccentric artist, Steve as the soft-spoken voice of reason, Peter as the somewhat airheaded and angsty teenager, and Charlie—through her nonpresence—as the mysterious loner (her room, stationed atop its own flight of stairs, even resembles a tree house). All of these characters share a seeming ambivalence toward the recent death of Annie’s manipulative and controlling mother, Ellen Taper Leigh (Kathleen Chalfant). We are also provided an overview of the story’s two primary settings: the family home and the tree house. If movement defines Hereditary’s first shot, stasis defines Midsommar’s. Accompanied by a flourish of strings right out of a Disney cartoon prologue, an elaborate painting—partitioned into five sections—maps the narrative’s major developments: Dani’s (Florence Pugh) immediate family being murdered by her sister (who poisons both herself and her parents with exhaust fumes)1; Dani’s boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor), attempting to console her; Dani, Christian, their friends, and Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) arriving at the latter’s remote commune, Hårga, for the titular celebration; the group witnessing the gruesome Ättestupan ceremony (in which two elders plunge off a cliff to their deaths); and the climactic

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Fig. 3.1: Spatiotemporal simultaneity in Midsommar’s opening shot.

dancing contest around the maypole (which ends with a victorious Dani being crowned May Queen). Pictorial details hint at characters’ roles and fates: the anthropomorphized sun beaming (literally) over the final section anticipates Dani’s smile in the last shot, while the bear and jester hat in the fourth “partition” anticipate Christian’s and Mark’s (Will Poulter) respective deaths. As with Hereditary, this opening concisely introduces us to key people and places. Unlike that of Aster’s debut, its simultaneity is reminiscent of “the medieval tradition [wherein] the story was often illustrated, scene following scene, as in a strip cartoon.”2 These words, from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, illustrate how—in the case of a painting—everything is before the spectator’s eyes at once. Berger, it must be noted, saw this feature as unique to painting: “In a film the way one image follows another, their succession, constructs an argument which becomes irreversible.”3 Midsommar’s first shot provides a persuasive counterargument. The painting is a window into the preset narrative, the whole film an exploration of that which has already been seen. Literal windows also figure prominently; a snow-swept window operates as a portal into the film’s delayed opening credits, which end with the camera pulling back into Dani’s apartment (again, through the window) from a sunny skyline. Aster forces his audience to question the nature of his stories’ realities within seconds. In Hereditary, the tree house (itself an artificial,

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microcosmic house) transitions to the fake dollhouse, which in turn seamlessly morphs back into the “real world.” The painting in Midsommar splits down the middle, curtainlike (sliding sounds accompany the two halves as they pull apart), and we enter a wintry landscape reminiscent of the first partition’s snow-spewing skull. These are neat tricks that any genre filmmaker would surely envy. However, such introductory tableaus are much more than stylistic flourishes. They’re key to understanding the films’ unsettling narrative structures and comment, I believe, on the nature of the medium as well as its relation to a deterministic worldview. In her essay, “Chris Marker: Memory’s Apostle,” Catherine Lupton dissects the paradox underlying the still-photographic method of the everinfluential La Jetée (1963): “The use of still photographs distills the essence of cinema’s appeal and its impossibility: the desire to fix that which is forever in motion. . . . the willful suspension of disbelief that will create the illusion of reality from a projected stream of immobile representations.”4 Cinema, therefore, is not a mirror to reality, but a rapidly moving succession of discrete images. Physicist Brian Greene similarly envisions time not as a flowing river but as a frozen one, an apt metaphor for a physical filmstrip: “Each moment in spacetime—each time slice—is like one of the still frames in a film.”5 A film may appear to move on the screen, but the thousands of individual frames comprising it are forever frozen in the same place. Any moviegoer intuitively knows that a film’s future already exists—that some crew is not scrambling to finish what the audience has not yet seen. This hermetically sealed, unalterable reality may or may not be true in the real world, but it certainly is in the worlds of Hereditary and Midsommar and in the experience of moviegoing itself. Just as the film canister contains an entire “world” before it even enters the projector, its characters’ fates are sealed before they (or we) are remotely aware of it. This inherent artificiality is a key theme to Hereditary’s and Midsommar’s aforementioned first shots. Like Hamlet’s play within a play or Bergman’s footage of himself directing in Persona, they are blunt reminders that what we are watching is completely and utterly fake. Hereditary’s sets and actors are Aster’s model houses and dolls, one may say. As if to emphasize this point, the major characters are given miniaturized, uncanny counterparts, as created by Annie. These figurines are displayed

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in model rooms of the house, their configurations echoing earlier scenes and sometimes anticipating later developments. Annie’s miniatures fill her family’s abode; a pillar next to the main staircase is made from stacked model homes, suggesting that these delicate, tiny artworks are part of the house’s very structure. Midsommar’s opening is even more transparently artificial. The two-dimensional painting—with its disproportionately sized figures, dancing skeletons, and smiling sun—doesn’t even attempt to be a realistic simulacrum of the events that follow. Even so, to see the ensuing narrative as not “simultaneous”—to borrow Berger’s term—is to be fooled by cinema’s false flow, to mistake the frozen river as a flowing one. Annie isn’t the only artist in the family, nor is Midsommar’s partitioned painting the only narrative map. Charlie also creates figurines; crafted from tin containers, pill bottles, wires, screws, and animal parts, they’re her paganistic response to Annie’s lifelike creations. One of Charlie’s models has a real-world counterpart, too. Of the many figures displayed on her bedroom desk, the only one that vaguely resembles a  human sits on the right side of the frame; seated under an artist’s magnifying glass, it appears to be Charlie’s rendition of her mother at work. Vivid, ritualistic illustrations also recur in Midsommar. The cloth illustrations hanging on the clothesline foretell the rituals Maja (Isabelle Grill), one of the cult members, follows in order to seduce Christian and bear his child: the flower-picking ceremony, the pubic hair in his food and menstrual blood in his drink, and the bed of flowers on which they have sex. Most significantly, a large canvas in Dani’s apartment—of a crowned girl facing a large bear—announces hers and Christian’s respective fates. Pawel Pogorzelski’s cinematography reinforces this unreal atmosphere. Hereditary’s establishing shots of “exteriors” are often conspicuously model replicas. By pairing these images with natural sounds (wind, squawking birds), however, Aster and Pogorzelski make the viewer doubt what he or she is seeing. Interior footage feels similarly off-kilter and is often framed so that the camera encompasses a room’s entire fourth wall, as if the audience is peering into an exposed dollhouse room. The camera not only replaces walls, but also goes “through” them; near the end of the film, the camera dollies past the cut-off “wall” separating the upstairs hallway from a storage room containing Ellen’s belongings. While filmmakers commonly use CGI to bypass physical barriers (David Fincher’s

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“single-take” from 2002’s Panic Room—in which his camera floats through ceilings, a keyhole, and even the opening in a coffeepot handle— comes to mind), Aster exposes his world’s artificiality. Sets are left “incomplete” to allow for freer movement. Midsommar’s surreal cinematographic choices are subtler but no less significant. Much has been written about the films’ dialectical relationship of night (Hereditary) and day (Midsommar), but I believe they are in dialogue with one another in a deeper sense. If Aster’s debut draws attention to how an audience looks into a film, his follow-up turns the tables; the characters often look outside, toward us, as exemplified in a number of shots in which they stare into the camera.6 An obvious example is the aforementioned close-up of Dani smiling as Christian burns in the bear suit (as it does in Hereditary, fire plays something of a “purifying” role here).7 Earlier, during Dani’s nightmare sequence, a quick shot of her parents’ bedroom shows her mother smiling toward the camera and clasping her hands together, as if in prayer.8 Interestingly, her mother reappears during the maypole dance—again looking into the camera, which has assumed Dani’s point of view—and functions as a symbolic bridge to Dani adopting her new “family.”9 The superficial joy this second family provides is conveyed through a montage in which overlapping shots of the dance merge into a bright light (not unlike Under the Skin’s “golden montage”—wherein acts of human kindness are superimposed over a glowing close-up of Johansson—this scene is something of an awakening for Dani: albeit, a deluded one). An intriguing (and easily overlooked) example occurs during the Ättestupan ceremony. A dolly shot follows the white-robed onlookers— their faces upturned in perverse anticipation of the ritualistic suicide to follow—and stops before a visibly nervous Dani, Christian, and Josh (William Jackson Harper), all of whom stand behind the cultists and appear out of place because of their dark clothing. Aster then cuts to the clifftop at which they are staring. A young cultist in the right-hand foreground turns and looks behind him, toward the camera, before again facing forward. Intuitively, we think the young man is glancing back at Dani and company, perhaps relishing their ignorance of what’s about to happen. However, the three are actually stationed far ahead of him, barely noticeable in the background of the frame’s left corner. The young man isn’t looking at them but at us. By breaking the fourth wall and acknowledging

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Fig. 3.2: A seeming shot/reverse shot masks a breaking of the fourth wall in Midsommar.

our presence, this gaze implicates us as voyeurs of the violent spectacle and reminds us, again, of the film’s self-awareness. That it can easily be mistaken for a reverse shot makes the moment doubly unsettling. The film “watches” us (in broad daylight, no less) without our knowing. But how does this metacommentary connect to determinism? In his essay “Luck Swallows Everything,” philosopher Galen Strawson defines the concept as “the view that everything that happens in the universe is necessitated by what has already gone before, in such a way that nothing

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can ever happen otherwise than it does.”10 Although Strawson endorses what may be called a limited compatibilist outlook (essentially, we do have freedom of choice in day-to-day situations, but these decisions are guided by predetermined factors that are ultimately out of our control: i.e., cultural upbringing, genetic makeup, etc.), he does concede that “there is a sense in which we human beings can’t experience our choices as determined, even if determinism is true.”11 Humans, in other words, are incapable of comprehending the frozen river of time—if indeed it is frozen—and are stuck experiencing its false flow. Aster’s dialogue occasionally (and playfully) hints at time’s ineffability. “Is it tomorrow?” Dani asks after awakening from her bad mushroom trip. “I mean, from yesterday’s perspective,” Christian responds. It’s an odd exchange—the logical way to phrase the question would be “what day is it?”—one in which Dani unintentionally conflates present (is it) and future (tomorrow). The future isn’t something for which we can plan if it is here—right now—as her dazed question implies (once again, present and future loop into one another; time becomes a circle rather than a straight line). In a similar vein, Hereditary offers a quick primer on fate versus free will when Peter’s English class discusses time’s role in Greek tragedies. One of his classmates rather clumsily argues that it is more tragic if a character cannot escape their fate, especially if the “signs” anticipating their impending doom go unnoticed.12 Aster seems to agree; his recurring crown imagery and claustrophobic settings (Hereditary primarily takes place indoors) create a theatrical atmosphere, summoning comparisons to the inexorable tragedies of ancient drama. Sophocles’s Oedipus the King is especially applicable, given its shared preoccupations with the human head. The most obvious (and notorious) example is the shocking sequence in which Charlie is decapitated during a car accident, but other allusions pepper the narrative. One can’t help but recall Oedipus’s fate when drawings of Peter with his eyes scratched out materialize in Charlie’s sketchbook long after her death. Near the end of the film, a possessed Annie shares a similar fate to her daughter when she saws her own head off with a piano wire (foreshadowed, a bit cheekily, by a headless mannequin glimpsed in a storage room). Charlie, Peter, and Annie often touch and grab their faces, the latter pressing her palms against her mouth or covering her eyes in disbelief as her life unravels.

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Aster’s recurring juxtaposition of Charlie’s and Peter’s heads foreshadows their ultimate fusion into one body. Such instances range from the mundane (Peter exhaling pot smoke through his open bedroom window as Charlie exhales misty air from the frigid tree house) to the grotesque (a jump-cut from Peter’s near-catatonic face to Charlie’s severed head, swarming with ants, on the side of the road). When the ants reappear during Annie’s dream sequence, it’s Peter’s face that’s crawling with them. Peter’s “self-hanging” pose in the classroom (chin wedged into his shoulder, hand raised and bent at the wrist) mimics the pose of the wooden statue—adorned with his sister’s decomposed head—displayed in the climactic tree house tableau. One parallel is linguistic in nature: Both siblings say “my throat is getting bigger,” Charlie after accidentally eating peanuts (to which she is fatally allergic) moments before her death, Peter while smoking with his friends shortly after the tragic accident, for which he feels responsible. Many have pointed to Midsommar’s similar preoccupation with “smashing people’s skulls”13 and “visceral head trauma.”14 It’s arguably more pronounced here than in his feature debut, as Aster employs bright lighting and slow motion to linger on the brutal Ättestupan deaths: first, a woman’s head nearly exploding after she lands face-first on a boulder; then, an immense hammer smashing a man’s skull after his jump off the cliff fails to kill him. Facial imagery plays a subtler (and less gruesome) role in earlier scenes. A black-and-white photograph of an elderly man holding his face bisects Dani and Christian during their argument about his unannounced trip to Sweden, as if he’s hiding in embarrassment while the two fight. Artistic depictions of heads also appear in Christian’s apartment—among the collagelike artwork decorating his living room walls—as hand-drawn portraits (these are visible when Dani joins Pelle on the couch to look at photographs of his community). That these renderings resemble X-rays complements Aster’s heightened interest in the human head’s very physicality (later, during Dani’s dream sequence, he reverses the male victim’s crushed head back to its original state). Also like poor Oedipus, Aster’s characters are embedded in a world replete with royal and religious iconography. Crown and altar imagery connects Charlie with her grandmother. When a bird flies directly into a window at her school, the bush on which it lands—square-shaped and neatly flattened at the top—resembles an altar. Everything Charlie does to

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the dead bird anticipates an element of her ultimate role: Decapitating it with scissors foretells her physical (but not spiritual) death, drawing its crowned head in her sketchbook her resurrection and crowning—through Peter’s body—as King Paimon, and affixing the head to a metal figurine her head’s reappearance atop the statue in the climactic tree house ceremony. She carries the bird head—delicately holding it in both hands, like an offering—toward a vision she has of her grandmother seated on a patch of grass, surrounded by a square of fire. This vision reverberates into the narrative’s past and future, echoing the altarlike bush while foreshadowing a late-night incantation’s flame-spouting candle, Steve’s death by fire, Annie’s nightmare of burning Peter, and the tree house’s conversion into a perverse church. Even the family crest—with its horizontal base and vertical columns—resembles a crown (or altar) in and of itself.15 Crowns play an analogous role in Dani’s personal journey to becoming the May Queen and adopting her surrogate family. Aster visually “crowns” her not only before she leaves for Sweden, but before she even appears in the flesh. When Dani leaves the voicemail for her soon-to-be-murdered parents, who are asleep in bed, the camera pauses on a framed portrait of her, behind which rests a bouquet of yellow and white flowers (her parents’ bedsheets and pillowcases, as well as the wallpaper, follow the same color scheme), making it appear as if they are resting on her head.16 She is again crowned at Christian’s apartment; as she speaks with Pelle, three lights glow above her, halolike (greenery also appears to rest atop Pelle, perhaps alluding to the laurel crown he dons in the closing scenes). Such foreshadowing adds a conspiratorial edge to the most innocuous of scenes. Hereditary’s dollhouse imagery similarly conveys a sense of tragic inevitability. Characters go about trying to alter the course of their projected fates, but to no avail; their ultimate destinations are set, their movements as restricted as their toylike counterparts. Charlie seems especially attuned to this fatalistic outlook. Shortly after her grandmother’s funeral, she asks Annie what will happen to her when (not if, but when) Annie dies. It’s an unsettling question—one that presupposes that  Annie will die before Charlie is a grown woman who can care for herself—and Annie, rather than saying something like “don’t worry, that won’t happen for a long time” (a go-to evasion for parents, both on and

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off the screen), reassures her that Steve or Peter would be there for her. It’s as if Annie expects a premature death. Eventually, we learn who has been arranging this metaphorical dollhouse. “Accidental” moments prove to have been carefully planned and executed by Joan (Ann Dowd)—the cult’s unofficial puppet master, who insinuates herself into Annie’s life at a grief therapy session—and her fellow Paimon worshippers. Indeed, one of the joys of rewatching Hereditary is in spotting how early Joan interferes with Annie’s life. Consider the tabernaclelike box mounted on her apartment wall. Each of its three appearances exposes more of the extent of her involvement: its two doors are closed the first time (though it still stands out as an odd décor choice), one of the two is ajar the second, and both are wide open—revealing a copy of the family crescent—the third. Other odd details hint at supernatural intervention; for example, the blue paint that spills in Annie’s workshop and causes her to notice Joan’s phone number appears to tip itself over. Most unsettling, though, is that the family’s house seems to have been broken into and tampered with on several occasions. Early on, Annie notices that the door to her mother’s room is ajar; clearly an unusual occurrence, as she asks her husband to lock it up.17 When Annie, Peter, and Steve perform the late-night incantation to summon Charlie’s spirit (Joan emphasizes how important it is that everyone participates in the ceremony, likely because they all have to be in the tree house for the final crowning), Steve notices with some irritation that the living room window is open, and Peter hears creaking noises upstairs; is this the work of Charlie’s/Paimon’s spirit, or of the cultists arranging Ellen’s excavated body in the attic? Either way, there is clearly a presence in the household, one to which Annie is particularly sensitive. The ending vindicates every seemingly unexpected occurrence or twist as having been strategically planned out long before any of the film’s events transpired. It is telling that the tableau on display in the finale briefly morphs into a duplicate miniature before the end credits, reversing the first shot’s progression; this ending has always existed, carefully arranged in its shoeboxlike setting, just waiting for its moment of revelation.18 Dani’s fate to become May Queen is not Midsommar’s only preordained outcome. Mark, the culturally insensitive loudmouth who swaggers around the commune with his vape pen and urinates on the ancestral

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tree, seems to have been tailor-made for the proverbial “skinned fool”— stuffed with straw and fitted with a jester’s hat—required for the final sacrifice. Scarecrows appear twice in the group’s shared apartment: a painting of the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz (1939) rests above their fridge (Aster has somewhat grudgingly acknowledged this inspiration in an interview with writer-director Robert Eggers, declaring, “I hereby designate Midsommar ‘The Wizard of Oz for perverts.’ That was not my intention. It was the first thing I said, and now it’s the last word”19), and two scarecrow dolls can be spotted on a bookshelf near their bathroom. Though more tongue-in-cheek than Hereditary’s visual allusions, they, like the painting, indicate that the characters’ roles have been consciously assigned to them, presumably by Pelle. Hereditary’s and Midsommar’s deterministic outlooks are apparent in their titles and character names, respectively. Something hereditary is passed down to posterity, all without their foreknowledge or approval; an unborn child has no say in what color eyes it will have, what its allergies may be, or what its baseline personality or predispositions will be. This inevitability may be why the family unit is such ripe terrain for the horror genre; the supernatural “evil” in a family’s history often insidiously infects the innocents of the present in many a horror story, Hereditary being no exception. Dani’s last name, briefly visible in email exchanges with her sister, is Ardor. Given the film’s medieval imagery and cultural motifs, it’s easy to imagine that Aster chose the name for its Latin ancestor, “ardere,” which literally means “to burn.” The connection to the film’s fiery climax is all too obvious. Aster embraces the otherworldly in both films; that is, his female protagonists are not delusional (although it takes some time to be sure20), and the devilish conspiracies in which they find themselves entangled are all too real. Annie’s criticism that her family fails to accept responsibility for their horrific actions may just as easily apply to Midsommar’s opening murder-suicide. However, each film’s overarching design begs the disturbing question: How could, say, Peter feel responsible for Charlie’s death or Dani’s sister for her parents’ (as well as her own) if these events have been orchestrated by forces beyond their control? The dollhouse and figurines, the narrative paintings: these are Aster’s frozen rivers of time.

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Us With Us, Jordan Peele presents a vision far more sweeping than that of his directorial debut, Get Out (2017). The opening shot of a televised advertisement for the 1986 “Hands Across America” social event establishes his central tableau: the human chain. A number of visual cues echo this image: a car decal of a family’s cartoon likenesses; toy animals neatly aligned in a sandbox; a paper cutout of connected stick figures. The final shot skewers the commercial’s rhetoric by subversively reenacting this public display of so-called solidarity on a massive, apocalyptic scale. As warped mirror images of one another, these two shots underline the confinement inherent to interconnection, the loss of freedom that goes hand in hand with binding the collective human family too closely together. Peele imagines a United States riddled with subterranean labyrinths full of people’s twins: a failed government effort to control those in the “real world” through puppetlike counterparts. However, he directs his attention primarily toward Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong’o), the matriarch of an archetypically nuclear American family: husband Gabe (Winston Duke), daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), and son Jason (Evan Alex). His choice to centralize a woman character—one who is an intelligent, multifaceted leader—challenges what philosopher bell hooks has described as “sexist representations of black womanhood, particularly those that are created by black male . . . thinkers who have access to mass media”21 and reinforces the narrative’s consideration of those subjugated within (or underneath) already marginalized groups. Since childhood, Adelaide has kept secret a chance run-in with her doppelganger, known only as “Red,”22 in a carnival house of mirrors. Inside the rundown attraction, appropriately entitled “Vision Quest: Find Yourself,” she finds herself staring at the back of her double’s head in a shot reminiscent of Magritte’s Not to Be Reproduced. Rather than looking at a reflection of her contemporaneous self, she appears to be looking at the backside of her future self—a self that is located seconds in the future, just a few steps ahead. This encounter haunts Adelaide and resurfaces when her double begins a revolution to take over the surface world and free herself from those above.

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The only chance for survival in Us is to accept a surreal situation’s deterministic logic. The connection between humans and their look-alikes is the story’s most overtly supernatural element. Those aboveground possess a tenuous control over those below; they are, as Red puts it, “tethered” together (Gabe jokingly calls his wife’s double “the mirror girl” after Adelaide confides in him about her traumatic childhood memory). Golden scissors, the doubles’ weapon of choice, symbolize their decision to cut the link to their earthly counterparts and gain their independence. This connection sheds light on the film’s title—which cleverly hints at the interconnectedness between individual families and the dubious perception of America as one big family (cue “Hands Across America”)—and highlights many Americans’ insular, self-satisfied lifestyles: a selfdeception that the world’s plight somehow doesn’t exist or matter. “There exists, all around us,” warns Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me, “an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much.”23 Ursula K. Le Guin warned of a similar complacency in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” with its vision of a so-called utopian society depending on the ignored suffering of a single child. Interestingly, the neglected child of Omelas is also subterranean—living “in a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings”24—and ignored by those who refuse to face the ugly truth that ensures their superficial happiness. How free is a freedom that hinges on  another’s abject despair, be it the fictional martyr of Omelas or the constantly assaulted black body of which Coates writes? Are the surface people of Us not enslaved (albeit, to a lesser extent) because of their connection to those below?25 Adelaide does not inquire too much; she already knows the insidious answers to such questions. Indeed, Red’s family functions as a warped simulacrum of Adelaide’s. She has a lumbering, mute husband, Abraham, whom she does not love; a girl, Umbrae, who is “a little monster”; and a boy, Pluto, who crawls on all fours and has a burned face. While the Wilsons enjoy the luxuries of a summer lake house (boat rides, trips to the beach), the doppelgangers live an impoverished lifestyle in the subterranean realm. Red’s opening monologue to Adelaide and her family outlines this extreme inequality: “Once upon a time, there was a girl. And the girl had a shadow. The two were connected, tethered together. When the girl ate, her food was given

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to her warm and tasty. But when the shadow was hungry, she had to eat rabbit, raw and bloody.” Despite these superficial differences, the two worlds are simultaneously connected to and in parallel with one another. The families share some revealing similarities, besides the obvious fact that they are portrayed by the same actors. Jason and Pluto both wear masks; Zora and Umbrae are skilled runners. Peele visually reinforces this synchronicity through a number of images, including a toy ambulance foreshadowing the family’s escape via ambulance and a Frisbee landing perfectly in line with a beach blanket’s circular pattern. All of these visual cues occur within the film’s first half hour, anticipating the shadow people’s attack and hinting at Adelaide’s duplicitous identity. Initially, Adelaide and her family appear to maintain total physical and mental control over their doubles. When Gabe adjusts his glasses with his index finger, his double imitates the gesture (though he wears no glasses). Later, Jason defeats his by walking backward, thus making his twin walk into a raging fire (Pluto’s death by fire is predetermined, its inevitability written quite literally on his face). Jason also saves his family when he intuits Pluto’s plan to explode their car with them in it. However, the tether goes both ways, the “normal” humans equally susceptible to their counterparts’ actions and thoughts. Consider how Jason clutches a weapon—both hands around it, held before his chest— while fending off an attacker, his odd pose echoing how the shadow people hold their golden scissors. And while Adelaide’s life largely dictated Red’s, the latter exerts control over the former when she anticipates—with minute precision—each of her opponent’s movements during their climactic, dancelike fight (though—on the other hand—Red would never have “learned” how to dance if Adelaide had not taken lessons as a child). She seems to know what Adelaide will do before Adelaide does. “They think like us,” Adelaide warns her family. “They know where we are.” She’s right, it turns out, since Red and company come knocking at their hideout soon after. To further illustrate this interconnection, Peele relies on recurring spider/spiderweb imagery and allusions; Red whistles “Itsy Bitsy Spider” in multiple scenes and drums her fingers against her cheeks with spiderlike rapidity as she interrogates Adelaide; Pluto scurries—insectlike—on all

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fours; the glass top of a coffee table, against which Adelaide’s head is pushed, splinters into a weblike formation; and a real spider emerges from between the legs of its toy counterpart. In the still-standing funhouse, we can also hear a narrator reference a primordial “spider woman” in his storybooklike voice (which is barely discernible without the help of subtitles). Subtler allusions are peppered throughout the narrative, as when family friend Kitty Tyler (Elisabeth Moss) offhandedly mentions how she had an “itsy bitsy little thing” (i.e., Botox) done to her face. These references are not just so-called Easter eggs, as they point to how the aboveand belowground inhabitants are inextricably linked to one another; they may be on different parts of the web, so to speak, but the actions of one reverberate across the web and directly affect the other. Although Peele has been pretty vocal about Us being first and foremost a horror film, it’s hard not to see his central family’s relationship with their white friends, the Tylers, as a racially tinged keeping up with the Joneses, especially in terms of Gabe’s friendship with Josh Tyler (Tim Heidecker), who—naturally—has twin daughters. Gabe often compares himself—much to Adelaide’s chagrin—to Josh, who has a posh, modern summer home and an expensive boat (the sole reason, we infer, that Gabe rented one himself). “You saw their new car, right?” Gabe asks his wife. “He had to do it. He just had to get that thing to fuck with me, too.” Gabe has arguably bought into white America’s conceptualization of the Dream hook, line, and sinker, embodying hooks’s description of “the longing to have access to material rewards granted whites (the luxury and comfort represented in advertising and television).”26 Indeed, he seems to have dedicated his entire social life to proving his family’s upper middle-class standing. The American Dream (and its inherent materialism) exerts a deterministic pull all its own, one that crosses both racial and socioeconomic lines. If Josh indeed bought the new car just to play mind games with his supposed friend, then have his decisions not in some way been molded by an ideology that promotes excessive consumerism and perceived racial superiority? Does Gabe—by renting that boat—not vindicate the very same ideology? By the same token, the shadow people are no less guilty of falling under the Dream’s spell. They seem to enjoy—rather than be infuriated by—the luxuries afforded to their privileged counterparts: Abraham steals Gabe’s glasses; Dahlia (Kitty’s double) admires herself in a

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mirror after applying some makeup; and Tex (Josh’s double) absurdly saunters about in his likeness’s extravagant kimono. Characters from both worlds are unable to resist the allure of that which they claim to hate. Gabe may scorn his friend, but we get the impression that he’s itching for a new car, too; Red may hate the surface world, but that doesn’t stop her from feeling entitled to reclaim it. These parallels between the two worlds are emblematized through the number eleven, which pops up repeatedly in early scenes: Young Adelaide chooses prize number eleven when her father wins a carnival game; a homeless man’s handwritten sign urges passers-by to consult Jeremiah 11:11 (his doppelganger has the same Bible chapter and verse carved into his forehead); a clock in the Wilsons’ summer house reads 11:11; and a sports recap on television references an 11–11 score.27 The number assumes a metonymic quality—“things line up,” Adelaide explains to an oblivious Kitty—its straight, parallel lines representing the relationship between characters and their doubles: identical, in close proximity with one another, yet not quite touching. Red reinforces this notion when—before her climactic fight with Adelaide—she cuts apart two paper figures holding hands and places them side by side. As with the web, this symbol illustrates a world guided by “coincidences” that are actually traces of people’s ineffable links to their others. If, as Red surmises, her and Adelaide’s “soul remains one, shared by two,” then they each exercise at least some control over the other, simultaneously (and paradoxically) limiting the other’s agency by exercising their own. Given this mutually constraining relationship, Us’s bleak implication is that all of its characters (above and below) are not much different than those rabbits to which Peele frequently alludes. A number of images directly equate rabbits with humans, the earliest example being the slow zoom-out from their neatly arranged cages during the opening credits. Later, after Red and her army have successfully broken free and occupied the space above, the rabbits wander around, released from their cages (in a surreal flourish reminiscent of the aforementioned spider emerging from the toy, a rabbit hops away from a likeness of itself painted on the funhouse wall). Zora’s rabbit-illustrated T-shirt and Adelaide’s stuffed childhood rabbit (stored, fittingly, in the summer house’s basement28) likewise associate “normal” people with the entrapped animals and underline the tenuous line separating the two

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groups of humans. The fact that Peele’s characters are both equated with and revealed to have eaten rabbits suggests that humans—through societal labels—engage in a sort of self-cannibalism. But the question remains: Why rabbits? Even within Peele’s surreal narrative framework, they’re an odd choice for sustenance. It doesn’t make much sense that the U.S. government would breed rabbits and feed them raw to its experimental clones. There’s something more to their presence: a magical quality. Indeed, the animal’s prevalence throughout the film is reminiscent of the white rabbit that lures Lewis Carroll’s Alice into Wonderland, or of the many anthropomorphized animals populating the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Likewise, Red’s remark that the shadow people “all went mad” in their underground realm calls to mind the Cheshire Cat’s observation that “we’re all mad here.” Us, however, inverts Alice’s journey; rather than wandering through an off-kilter, duplicate reality, Adelaide finds her own world invaded by the surreal inhabitants of Peele’s “Wonderland.” On a far more sinister note, the rabbits’ perfectly aligned, identical cages and ubiquitous white fur point to a bleak homogeneity suffusing American culture. It’s not that all American families are as indistinguishable as the rabbits, but that they’re expected to be—even black Americans, who carry “the extra burden of your country telling you the Dream is just, noble, and real, and you are crazy for seeing the corruption and smelling the sulfur.”29 Coupled with rabbits’ association with rampant reproduction, the message of the so-called nuclear ideal becomes clear: A good citizen stays in their socioeconomically and racially demarcated cage, makes lots of babies, doesn’t do anything to make them stand out too much, and—most importantly—takes as a given the goodness of the life they’ve been assigned. We’re all caged, albeit to vastly different extents. With this framework in mind, Peele’s twist ending of Adelaide having been the original doppelganger all along (she is the real “shadow,” having forced her earthly twin underground after their initial confrontation in the funhouse) brings this motif full circle.30 Occurring seconds before the end credits, Peele’s final revelation doesn’t merely “trick” us into sympathizing with someone who would have been—in a lesser genre exercise— the villain; it forces us to see ourselves in the stigmatized Other. If Adelaide was able to adapt to “real life”—get married, have children, love and

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fear for her family, etc.—then is she (and, by extension, all of the shadow people) not human? If Red is technically human but was imprisoned and molded by the underworld’s surreal framework, then what exactly does that make her? She’s both the arbiter of vengeance and the sacrificial lamb. Despite Red’s death, her successful invasion plan marks an uncertain future for both humanity and Adelaide’s family. The power wielded by those above is cancelled out by that of those below; neither group is as powerful (or free) as it hopes. Jason’s observation that “they’re us” could be reframed as “we’re them” (or, as Red herself broadly puts it, “we’re Americans”).31 Indeed, Jason seems more attuned to this truth than his sister or father; he’s the one who sees (and later draws) the lone man on the beach, makes sand tunnels by the shore while the other, “normal” children play, and seems to intuit—in that final scene—his mother’s true identity. He and Zora— being “hybrids” of both the upper and lower people—embody this collapsed dichotomy. They “belong” fully to neither world, which is why they appear as outcasts to the Tyler twins, who pick on Jason for being “weird.” The brother’s and sister’s fluid identities challenge the longstanding vilification of the Other, a concept Lucy Williams, Sandra Walklate, and Barry Godfrey explore in their essay, “Monstering Madness.” The authors cite Stephen Asma’s “history of monsters as a concept and as an embodied collection of fears and anxieties about ‘others’ ” who are “merely the shadow of ourselves.”32 The operative word here, of course, is “shadow,” which Peele literalizes both thematically (Red’s label of the underground people as shadows) and visually (an overhead shot of Adelaide and her family’s elongated shadows following them as they walk along a beach).33 Ultimately, the film’s most disturbing implication is that no one has much control over anything. If the upper and lower versions of humans mutually constrain one another, then one may point to the shadowy government forces behind the experiment as the true puppet masters. But even this interpretation collapses upon further inspection; Us is not a political conspiracy thriller in which humans find themselves at the government’s mercy. After all, the experiment failed (hence the shadow people being left, abandoned, in their underground bunker). Who, then, holds the power? The answer, at least for Red, transcends all earthly shackles. “God brought us together that night,” she tells Adelaide, regarding their chance meeting in “Vision Quest.” Given the abrupt shift

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in weather—the sky clouds over and explodes with lightning, and the ensuing rainstorm forces Red to take shelter in the funhouse—which led to their crossing paths as children, she may very well be right. Both characters, the human and her “incomplete” counterpart, are trapped in the same house of mirrors (or rabbit cage; either metaphor will suffice). Their meeting was beyond their control, guided by unseen, alien forces; the funhouse narrator’s proclamation to “create life of all kinds and set it in motion according to my plan” alludes to mystical forces pulling the characters’ strings. Perhaps all humans (including those stigmatized and othered by the majority) are in an analogous situation, our various wanderings dictated by the trick walls and mirrors surrounding us. The true gatekeeper may be akin to that narrator’s voice crackling throughout the funhouse speakers. “In the world, there is no joyful movement,” it intones during the opening sequence. The human chain that bookends the proceedings encapsulates this lack of joyful movement. The participants in this chain don’t even have a choice as to where they can go  within it. During the family’s first visit to the beach, Jason sees the homeless man’s red-cloaked doppelganger standing completely still, his arms outstretched like a scarecrow. His position is set; this exact spot is his designated space, one in which he must remain, unwavering, until his chain partners assume their assigned positions. Alas, even a massive statement of solidarity and rebellion only underlines a collective, mutual entrapment.

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Two women seek mental clarity in a secluded beachfront home, only to find their identities fusing in one another’s presence. A young professor stalks his doppelganger—a wannabe movie star—and each man becomes entangled in the other’s life until we (and they) realize they are the same person. Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy explore the inevitable chaos that ensues when two dialectically opposed characters (or character traits, if both figures are indeed cut from the same cloth) merge. On one side is the artistic: famed stage actress Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann) and small-time film actor Anthony (Jake Gyllenhaal). On the other is the rational: nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson) and history professor Adam (Gyllenhaal). As these relationships imply, roles—those we assume with one another as well as those with which we define ourselves—figure prominently in these narratives. Considering Persona’s age—it’s nearly twenty years older than any other film discussed herein—Bergman’s avant-garde staple may seem an odd choice. However, I’ve included it in this chapter for two key reasons. First, although it is not a cut-and-dry genre outing (especially compared to the director’s 1968 follow-up, the horror-tinged Hour of the Wolf ), it has given birth to a distinct offshoot of psychological thrillers: what I’ll call the “two women drive each other insane in a secluded lake house” subgenre (see Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth [2015]; Colin Minihan’s What Keeps

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You Alive [2018]; and Lara Gallagher’s Clementine [2019]). Second, its deterministic themes and elements have resurfaced in a number of modern thrillers, Villeneuve’s being an emblematic example for its analogous focus on the family unit and performative identities. People’s ongoing “performances” are the central conceit of sociologist Erving Goffman’s seminal work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. The title says it all: “presentation” connoting a carefully packaged act; “self”—not “the self”—a fluid identity; “everyday” a banal omnipresence. In keeping with this performative framework, Goffman quotes Robert Ezra Park’s Race and Culture in his opening pages: “ ‘It is probably no mere historical accident that the word person, in its first meaning, is a mask. It is rather a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role. . . . It is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves.’ ”1 To live is to act. Elisabet’s and Alma’s performances are motivated by attempts to  escape (the former by fleeing her husband and son) or nullify (the latter by having an abortion) motherhood, Adam’s and Anthony’s fatherhood (by having an extramarital affair and pursuing a new, “glamorous” career). In abandoning one family, these characters consequently seek reassurance from surrogate siblings: Alma, having grown up only with brothers, mentions how nice it is to have a “sister” in her new friend; Anthony, during his first meeting with Adam, suggests they might be twin brothers who’ve been separated at birth. Beneath these films’ surreal visuals and complex structures is a simple, yet profound, shared theme about family: the uncertainty (if not the terror) of starting one as well as the futility of fleeing to an easier-tocontrol surrogate. In Bergman’s and Villeneuve’s worlds, all roads lead back home. Surfaces Ironically, Elisabet is tired of acting at the beginning of Persona. The first time we clearly see her—during a performance of Electra—she cuts herself off midsentence, perhaps realizing that her rehearsed actions are no different than those of her life off the stage. Soon after, she stops talking altogether. Indeed, we never see Elisabet being “herself.” Throughout the

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film, she is either literally onstage or adhering to this self-imposed silence. Even when alone—in a hospital, staring in horror at televised Vietnam footage—she maintains this affectation. Her behavior seems odd at first, but it underlines Bergman’s point that nonacting is a form of acting in itself. Elisabet embodies this fundamental truth through her very efforts to escape it. “You can cut yourself off, close yourself in,” warns her unnamed doctor (Margaretha Krook), who may be the only reasonable character in the story. “So you might think . . . [but] your hiding place isn’t watertight enough. Life oozes in from all sides. You’re forced to react.” In this case, the life oozing in is that of Alma, the nurse assigned to watch over her at the lake house. Despite the latter’s efforts, the two become inextricably linked, their personalities overlapping to the extent that their individual selves (initially conveyed through a number of extreme close-ups) evaporate. It helps that Ullmann and Andersson look uncannily alike, literalizing John Berger’s notion that a woman “is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.”2 The doctor twice refers to masks—she describes Elisabet’s “constant hunger to be unmasked once and for all” as well as her desire to not “play any roles, wear any masks”—during her attack on Elisabet’s futile effort to bridge the “chasm between what you are to others and what you are to yourself.” Goffman couldn’t have put it any better himself. Persona is largely about surfaces and what they conceal. Elisabet’s presence on the stage—she wears a wig, heavy makeup, and a costume— emphasizes this idea. Everything in Bergman’s riddle of a film is a surface, including the camera itself, upon which a spider crawls and toward which Jörgen Lindström reaches during that magnificent prologue (this sequence—a cryptic shell covering the narrative—is conspicuously exterior to the film proper). When we see—via a reverse angle—what Lindström is trying to touch, we realize it is a filmlike screen projecting the protagonists’ interweaving faces/masks (before we even know who these women are, Bergman primes us to understand them as one being). This reveal is uncannily claustrophobic; a visual embodiment of the abyss that stared back at Nietzsche, the film reaches out toward us, only to touch itself. Is this paradox not also true of humans, our efforts to reach “outside” only emphasizing the limits of our corporeality? Self-containment defines both a film and a human body, a notion exacerbated by the

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narrow aspect ratio (1.37:1) in which Bergman’s longtime collaborator, Sven Nykvist, shot Persona. This aesthetic choice similarly closes in on— to paraphrase the doctor’s words—Elisabet and Alma. A similar metacommentary permeates Adam and Anthony’s everevolving relationship. It’s within a film that Adam discovers his double: first as a bellhop in a romantic comedy, then as a victim—head pressed against the hood of a car—in a war film (indeed, Anthony wears many masks, playing thankless bit parts like “Man on Train”). Both men, however, perform in “real life,” as well. Adam wears oversized sunglasses as a “disguise” while following in Anthony’s footsteps, and the latter dons a  professorial button-down shirt and jacket when wooing Adam’s girlfriend, Mary (Mélanie Laurent). Anthony’s transparently showy stage name is “Daniel Saint Clair.” Are these not costumes, too, ones devised to conceal? Although Enemy’s focus on surfaces and repetition is not as blatant or self-referential as Persona’s, its downtown Toronto setting—shot in monochromatic, beige tones throughout—emphasizes analogous motifs. Reflective surfaces figure prominently in interior (carefully placed mirrors that capture characters’ actions outside of the frame) and exterior (a chic office building’s glass façade, swinging glass doors, wall-sized windows) footage alike. This focus both illustrates how the two men mirror one another (as when Anthony practices a planned confrontation with Adam by screaming and pounding at his reflection in a bathroom mirror, foreshadowing how he is only lashing out at himself) and reinforces an overarching thematic occupation with cultural vapidity. Entertainment itself is a carefully orchestrated distraction, Adam explains during one of his lectures. Dictators have historically utilized this tactic to keep the populace from seeing the rampant inequality and exploitation hidden beneath certain “treats,” such as circuses. It’s ironic, then, that he dreams of being a movie star, as the film screen itself can symbolize superficial distractions. He desires that which he claims to hate. Enemy’s baffling prologue—which shows a group of men emotionlessly watching a strip show in what appears to be a secret sex club—also presents a warped vision of entertainment. A woman opens a silver tray, from which a tarantula emerges. The men’s attention turns from the naked women on display to this creature. One of the women extends her

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high-heeled foot over the spider, threatening to crush it. Are Villeneuve and screenwriter Javier Gullón addressing the male gaze? Are we to equate the creature with these men (the manner in which Adam holds his face— looking through his v-shaped fingers—gives him an arachnid quality)? With their fear of being dominated, confined, or even destroyed by an imposing female figure? As dense and uncategorizable as Persona is, Bergman’s careerspanning fascination with the most revealing of surfaces—that of the human visage—remains abundantly clear. Early on, when the doctor asks Alma for her first impressions of Elisabet, the young nurse goes straight to describing her patient’s “soft, almost childish” face. At the end of the film, the director’s famous combination of Elisabet’s and Alma’s faces demonstrates how one’s identity cannot exist in total isolation but is always influenced and molded by others. This visual trick has an unnerving effect on the viewer; by amalgamating features from both actresses, Bergman transforms their faces into a single, nonhuman mask. The boundary separating these two characters is as hazy as the sheer curtains separating the beach house’s rooms.

Fig. 4.1: Elisabet and Alma’s composite face in Persona.

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Although this image may be interpreted as a logical endpoint for two characters springing from the same creator—Bergman himself implies this in The Magic Lantern, when he writes that “one day I found that one of them was mute like me, the other voluble, officious and caring, also like me”3—it also points to a maddening contradiction.4 While Bergman suggests that a human persona cannot exist in a vacuum and inevitably contains fragments of outside forces, the resulting mask creates something alien in nature. The human visage becomes an artificial object, a thing; as such, it only conceals the unknowable truth behind it.5 Having absorbed both women, Bergman’s looks outward—that is, toward us. A face can’t see itself, after all. Are we, the audience, its true mirror? “Is it possible to be one and the same person at the very same time?” Alma asks. “I mean, two people?” Persona suggests this outcome is not just possible, but unavoidable. “Control,” Adam says, in Enemy’s first line of dialogue. “It’s all about control.” Though superficially about history—he’s giving a lecture on dictatorships—the line cleverly announces one of the narrative’s key themes and offers a variation on the film’s unattributed, foreboding title card: “Chaos is order yet undeciphered.” But that which is seemingly random and chaotic—like someone discovering their perfect doppelganger in the background of a cheesy romantic comedy—has a logical, ordered explanation: in this case, that Adam and Anthony are two personified sides of the same human being, a metaphysical representation of one consciousness. Indeed, despite its looplike structure and myriad ambiguities (certain moments—like one in which Anthony’s wife tells her husband that she followed Adam to work and was shocked by their uncanny resemblance—point to them being perceived as two distinct people), it’s ultimately revealed that they are literally the same person (in which case, “Daniel Saint Clair” becomes a pseudonym of a pseudonym). The most convincing piece of evidence— fittingly enough, given Bergman’s similar visual obsessions—is a torn photograph Adam carries around, the complete version of which is framed and displayed in Anthony’s chic apartment. If we accept these men as being one and the same, a new narrative comes to light. Adam/Anthony is cheating on his pregnant wife, Helen (Sarah Gadon), with Mary. Most of his time with the latter is spent in bed:

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Their sex is sometimes passionate, other times awkward or even painful. There’s no love here. It’s important to remember that the “real” Adam is with Mary for a majority of the film, the “fake” Anthony with Helen. What does this incongruity reveal (the everyday man with his mistress, the alter ego with his wife), if not the self-deception inherent in believing that we share our true selves only with those closest to us? However, there is a tenderness—a narcissistic self-love—between Adam and Anthony. When they meet for the first time (in a hotel room, of all places), they look each other up and down while awkwardly circling the bed, like hesitant lovers. Having not been so explicitly combined in the frame until this point, they eye one another—each the other’s mirror. Though not a part of the film proper, designer Jay Shaw’s yellowtinged poster for Enemy anticipates this mirror motif. The male figures at its center—their heads affixed to the top and bottom of a shared torso— are faceless, their features dissolving into what looks like dust or sand (that these particles blow in opposing directions implies that we’re looking at a mirror image). Though visually quite different than Bergman’s amalgamated mask, the idea is the same: fusion as erasure. Another image from Persona calls this poster to mind: that of Alma, upset after reading Elisabet’s gossipy letter about her, walking along the edge of a small pond, her inverted image reflected in the still water (the first clear image in the film, an upside-down cartoon of a woman splashing herself with water, anticipates this moment). Bergman’s facial close-ups have been studied thoroughly, but hands prove equally important to Persona’s architecture. Before the opening credits, they are emphasized in a number of startling ways. An early flash cut shows them writhing over a table (foreshadowing Alma frantically pounding her fists on a desk). A nail is hammered into a palm. A limp hand hangs over the side of a morgue slab. And then there’s the aforementioned Lindström, caressing the wall-encompassing, out-of-focus visages of Elisabet and Alma. This ritualistic action effectively merges Bergman’s obsession with both body parts. Hands factor into the main narrative, too; they are often the means by which characters are introduced and interact with one another. Bergman’s use of a quick downward tilt to Elisabet peeling a fruit with a knife mirrors an earlier camera movement that reveals Alma’s hands dutifully crossed as she listens to a briefing on her new patient (such visual

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parallels hint at their interconnection and anticipate their ultimate fusion). Before their first “conversation” at the beach house, Elisabet grabs and inspects Alma’s hands; in lieu of saying “hello,” this is her form of getting acquainted with someone. “Don’t you know it’s bad luck to compare hands?” Alma asks (this is her first line of dialogue at the lake house). Sometimes hands are shields, as when Elisabet holds her face in agony while listening to the radio in her hospital room, covers her mouth while watching the Vietnam footage, or reaches out in horror when Alma threatens her with boiling water. Other times, they function as a mode of  communicating certain emotions. Elisabet exudes warmth when she caresses Alma’s cheek or brushes aside a lock of her hair, hostility when she slaps her caretaker for allowing her to step on shattered glass. Hands can also pierce barriers that separate physical objects, as when Alma claws at her own forearm and Elisabet sucks the dripping blood; in  this violent encounter, their bodies—not just their fluid identities— comingle, too. Unlike Bergman, Villeneuve primarily works with medium close-ups. As a result, Gyllenhaal’s beard, sunglasses, and motorcycle helmet become loci of attention (however, what convinces Adam that Anthony is  his exact doppelganger is a rare close-up of the latter’s screaming face, featured in the aforementioned war movie). Ultimately, Villeneuve’s incorporation of hands aligns most closely with Bergman’s symbolic use of them. When the two meet in person in the hotel room, Anthony’s first words are “Show me your hands, man.” It’s an odd statement, as if he puts more stock in their aligned fingertips than in their perfectly identical faces. Though it lacks the uncanniness of Bergman’s mask, Villeneuve’s image is compositionally analogous. Both feature points of convergence in close-up, wherein body parts “reach” toward one another. Just as the two halves of Elisabet’s and Alma’s faces create one uncanny visage, Adam’s and Anthony’s hands reach into a shared, ambiguous space. In each case, a liminal boundary is crossed, and the line separating each character from their double becomes harder to locate. After all, doesn’t the very notion of a double—that is, of an identity existing in separate, simultaneous bodies—challenge any sense of independent freedom? These self-reflecting images also underline the protagonists’ narcissism. Not once does Elisabet interact with her son or husband (the fact

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Fig. 4.2: Mirrored hands in Enemy.

that neither is named indicates their peripheral roles in her life). Adam/ Anthony’s conversations with Helen are—in keeping with Enemy’s color palette—cold and impersonal. He never explicitly addresses (let alone expresses any emotions about) Helen’s pregnancy. Raising a child requires putting another life first, and neither Elisabet nor Adam/Anthony seem prepared to make this sacrifice. They reach out not to touch their loved ones, but themselves. Performances Alma is Elisabet’s one-woman audience, the beach house their shared stage. But “the impression of reality fostered by a performance is a delicate, fragile thing,” Goffman reminds us, one which “can be shattered by very minor mishaps.”6 Through violence, Alma twice gets her counterpart to break her front (I use this word purposefully, as it is part of Goffman’s terminological toolbox; broadly speaking, he defines front as “that part of the individual’s performance which regularly functions in a general and fixed fashion to define the situation for those who observe the performance”7). A shard of glass Alma leaves on the ground provokes Elisabet to yelp in pain; Alma later raises the stakes when she threatens her patient with a pot of boiling water, prompting a fearful “no, don’t!” Bergman suggests simultaneously (and paradoxically) that actors and their roles are indeed different (both in terms of dramatic performances and the little “performances” we give in day-to-day life) but that the

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former would be nonexistent without the latter. Elisabet tries with all her might to be unrestricted by any roles—especially those of wife and mother—but to no avail. Her stoic silence is an affectation, one that can be broken like any other. Her entire façade crumbles, after all, as soon as Alma threatens her with that water. We need to act and speak. Our bodies practically demand it, if we wish to survive. Elisabet’s doctor knew this truth from the very beginning, when she advised her patient to “play this part until it’s played out. . . . Then you can drop it, just as you eventually drop all your other roles.” Fundamental to this need to act is a lack of self-control, and Alma discusses this feeling at length. She talks aloud in her empty bedroom, speculating about what she sees as her fate to get married, have children, and leave her career. Even her job, which she claims to love, seems to have been prescribed; her mother was also a nurse, we learn. “It’s all decided,” she says. “It’s inside me. I don’t even have to think about it.” Such confinement allows, she admits, a comforting sense of security. Elisabet also “speaks” about control through a letter from her husband, in which he quotes her: “ ‘You’ve taught me that we must see each other as two anxious children full of goodwill and the best of intentions but governed by forces we can only partially control.’ ” Both women confront this outside force, but in markedly different ways. Whereas Elisabet silences herself (which increases her power over others), Alma seeks refuge through words (which only diminish her sense of identity and sanity). Though she speaks most of the dialogue—in a sense, the film’s bulk is one epic soliloquy delivered to a silent (albeit calculating) audience—she’s the least self-assured of the duo. The women’s shared reality is a fragile thing, relying—to borrow Goffman’s words—on accentuation and concealment.8 Elisabet’s position is predominantly that of the silent witness. Alma is the obvious observer of this performance, but she is also a performer herself, given the increasingly intimate personal details she relates to her patient. Elisabet’s abovementioned breaking of character is mirrored by Alma’s assumption of a new role: confessor. Her surface performance—that of the dutiful, accommodating nurse—crumbles during her first extended monologue to Elisabet, in which she describes at length a sexual tryst from her youth that she has kept secret from her fiancé, Karl-Henrik.

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Alma’s recollection of this experience calls Goffman’s summation of therapeutic psychodrama to mind: “In these psychiatrically staged scenes . . . [the patient’s] own past is available to them in a form which allows them to stage a recapitulation of it.”9 In a moment of wild abandon, and perhaps influenced by the sunny seclusion (one thinks of Meursault’s murderous impulse on that sunny Algerian beach in Camus’s The Stranger), Alma and her friend Katarina had sex with two random boys while tanning nude on a beach. As she shares her story, Alma doesn’t recall the event; she relives it. She traces with her finger an imaginary straw hat on her head, addresses Elisabet as if talking to her friend in real time (“There’s a couple boys looking at us,” she says, shooting a worried look toward Elisabet), and practically folds herself into a corner of the couch when describing Katarina’s blithe reaction to the “Peeping Toms.” Such moments may explain why Persona is frequently (albeit somewhat lazily) labeled a “psychodrama.” Even the scene’s blocking casts Alma as a vulnerable patient, Elisabet her coolly observant therapist. The former—curled up on a couch for much of the monologue—stares into space while the latter watches from behind, her arm leisurely draped across a pillow. As Alma squirms on the couch, paces the room, and eventually collapses on the bed in tears, Elisabet remains on the bed—still and silent—her only movements being the occasional drag from a cigarette, a barely suppressed smile, or a tentative caressing of Alma’s face. When this “session” ends, Alma’s claim that “I’ve been talking nonstop while you’ve just listened. How boring for you” sounds like something an embarrassed patient would say to their doctor after revealing an intimate story. This crucial reversal also illustrates the depth of Elisabet and Alma’s homoerotic relationship. They caress each other, share a bed, and exchange secrets. It’s during these moments that they most resemble lovers (or perhaps the sisters of Alma’s fantasies). It’s also through this very intimacy that their relationship diverges from Adam and Anthony’s. The latter’s exchanges are marked by hostility—they make physical contact once, when Anthony pushes Adam against a wall and accuses him of sleeping with Helen—and distance; unlike Alma and Elisabet, who meet minutes after Persona’s prologue, Adam and Anthony aren’t in the same shot until nearly an hour into Enemy. No other character ever sees or even

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experiences them together. In one playful moment, Helen calls her husband after speaking with Adam, who disappears around a corner right before Anthony answers the phone. If Alma reenacts through confession, Adam does so through strict adherence to routine. In an early montage, footage of him delivering the aforementioned lecture on dictatorships (“This is a pattern that repeats itself throughout history,” he explains, seemingly oblivious to the ironic applicability to his own life) is crosscut with recurring tram rides back to his apartment and increasingly passionless sex with Mary. Such repetitions extend beyond Adam’s quotidian experiences and lend cohesion to  the characters’ complex, interpersonal relations. As Shaw’s poster implies, Enemy consists of two halves, each of which distortedly reflects the other. In this sense, the film’s second act is a reenactment of its first. The narrative circles back on itself: Anthony Google searches Adam, just as the latter did in earlier scenes; like Mary, Helen—neglected by her preoccupied husband—awakens in an empty bed; Anthony spies on his double, his motorcycle helmet echoing Adam’s sunglasses disguise. Like Alma, Adam tries to understand his situation through language and rationality. Also like those of his Persona counterpart, his efforts prove fruitless; he stutters, repeats himself, touches his forehead in search for the right words (Adam is also an actor, the students his captive audience). His warning about how philosophers fear “that this century will be a repetition of the previous one” accompanies overhead shots of interchangeable apartment complexes and foreshadow his own “return” to Helen after his extramarital fling. This century may or may not repeat itself, but Adam’s life certainly does, to such an extent that his past and future coalesce into an indistinguishable loop. Persona’s and Enemy’s central couples frequently switch roles in order to best accommodate a given context. Goffman describes this process as a movement from “being the person that he was to being the person that others were for him.”10 Alma becomes a patient, Elisabet a therapist. Adam becomes Anthony as he retraces the latter’s steps, speaking with his wife as well as the security guard at his talent agency; Anthony becomes Adam when he insists on playing the professor in order to have sex with Mary. This amorphous exchange between the two men (that is, the one man) mirrors Bergman’s fused faces. We have an actor

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(Gyllenhaal) pretending to be a professor (Adam) who’s pretending to be an actor (Anthony) who later pretends to be Adam. This layering of identities—nearly Shakespearean in its convolution— encapsulates the depth of Adam’s self-delusion. It’s no small detail that the first time Adam and the viewer see Anthony is when the latter is acting. As Adam watches the film on his computer, we’re introduced to what we think is a new character but is actually someone we have already come to know quite intimately. As with Persona’s precredits sequence, the movie screen becomes a mirror, and Adam’s seeming obliviousness to the fact that he’s looking at himself speaks to a larger truth; just as he doesn’t recognize his own performance, we may not be conscious of the personae we  adopt. Everyone may be an actor, but that doesn’t guarantee they’re aware of the stage on which “this wide and universal theater”11 plays out. So, why do these characters try to escape, or at least delay, their roles of lovers and parents? Perhaps it has to do with the perceived loss of freedom. But to betray those most dependent on us (be it a spouse, a young son, or an unborn child) is to betray ourselves, these films suggest. A telling glimpse into Elisabet’s life outside the lake house occurs when Alma meets Mr.  Vogler (Gunnar Björnstrand). In this strange sequence, Bergman synthesizes his recurring visual (hands, faces) and thematic (ambiguous identities, the fear of parenthood) concerns. Alma hears Mr. Vogler (we never get his first name) before she sees him, his faint voice intermingling with the sounds of her radio, as if it’s being broadcasted from the outside world. The first we see of him is his hand, which reaches out and startles Alma as she searches the house. He addresses Alma as “Elisabet,” despite the former’s repeated assertions that she is not his wife. Undeterred by these statements, he shares his struggles as a newly single father: “The hardest part is explaining to your little boy.” Alma stops denying she is Elisabet when the latter appears in the frame and guides Alma’s hand toward the man’s face. It’s as if she has possessed Alma and is speaking through her. “Tell our little boy Mommy will be back soon, that Mommy’s been ill, but she longs for her little boy,” Alma assures the man. Is this how Elisabet wishes she could feel? Soon after, we hear Mr. Vogler asking—over a close-up of Elisabet’s face—if he

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is good in bed. Elisabet turns, as if to answer him, only to reveal him lying on top of Alma; it’s she to whom he speaks. Whether this scene occurs in the film’s reality or is a fantasy of either woman remains unclear, but one thing is certain: Elisabet struggles to reciprocate her husband’s love. Perhaps this is why Alma does it for her. “I don’t know what to do with my tenderness,” Mr. Vogler tells Alma-as-Elisabet. In this moment, the real Elisabet doesn’t seem to know what to do with it, either. Alma understands this and confronts Elisabet with her abandonment during the aforementioned face-merging sequence: “You let your husband impregnate you. You wanted to be a mother. When you realized it was definite, you became frightened. Frightened of responsibility, of being tied down, of leaving the theatre. Frightened of your body swelling up. But you played the role. The role of a happy, young, expectant mother.” Elisabet maintained this façade until she could put the baby under others’ care and return to the theater. She found herself incapable of feeling the child’s “unfathomable love,” a love that she created; “you think he’s disgusting with his thick mouth and ugly body,” Alma sneers. As we know, Elisabet’s return to the stage provided little solace, which speaks to the futility of attempting to retreat into one’s old life after having a child. This scene, then, is doubly important, in terms of both its imagery and repeated monologue, the latter of which interweaves the film’s obsessions with sex, the theater, motherhood, and identity; the fact that we hear it twice—first-time watchers may experience déjà vu before realizing they’re hearing the exact same lines—feels deterministic in and of itself. We know what Alma is going to say because she has already said it. There can be no variation. However, Elisabet’s relationships with her husband and son are far more nuanced than Alma suggests in her scathing monologue. Regarding Mr.  Vogler, a look of anger—perhaps even jealousy—crosses her face when she sees him and Alma embracing one another. And while Alma emphasizes Elisabet’s visceral disgust with her son—we learn that she had attempted to induce a miscarriage—Elisabet does exhibit something like love or longing for her absent child. For example, a photograph of him—which she tore up earlier in the film—reappears during this sequence, carefully taped back together and concealed under her hands as they rest on the table. The detached wife/mother is yet another role Elisabet has tried (and failed) to assume.

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Although Enemy, by contrast, has much less dialogue and no extended monologues, we also get the sense that Adam’s pipedreams of movie stardom are a last-ditch effort to be young and free, escape his routinized life and impending responsibilities as a father, and create an “easier” family with Mary. This emphasis on familial relations is apparent from Enemy’s opening seconds; the first line of dialogue—“Hello, darling. It’s your mother”—is from a voicemail left by Adam’s mother (Isabella Rossellini) and is immediately followed by a shot of a naked Helen, thereby fusing the men’s seemingly separate lives. “I’m worried about you,” she says after having seen his new apartment (presumably the nearly empty one—the majority of its “furniture” being unopened moving boxes—where he has his rendezvous with Mary). “How can you live like that?” she continues, with barely suppressed incredulity. These opening lines, however, seem to exist at the end of the story; after reconciling with Adam, Helen notifies him that his mother left a message—presumably the one we hear in the beginning. The narrative, then, collapses binaries of both character (Adam and Anthony) and time (beginning and ending). Anthony’s scar, which he describes to Adam during their hotel meeting, seems to be the result of the car accident he has at the end of the film, while arguing with a distraught Mary (she noticed the tanned outline of his missing wedding ring during sex). The scar somehow exists before the accident. This temporal conflation—not unlike that of Inside Llewyn Davis or Midsommar—sets the stage for what appears to be a return to “normal” for Adam, who is back in the home where he’s needed, as both a husband and soon-to-be father. However, themes of deceit and temptation pepper Enemy’s enigmatic denouement. Right before encountering the giant spider on the bedroom wall, Adam receives a new key to the men’s club, runs into another frequenter of the secret society in the elevator (who asks him if he can get  him back in), and starts making excuses to Helen that he is “busy” that night. The simultaneous reappearance of the spider and key (first established in the opening club sequence) suggests their meaning as manifestations of extramarital temptations and infidelities that—with their long, probing legs—continue to insinuate themselves into domestic complacency, even after someone has apparently “learned their lesson”

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and returned home. It’s no wonder the spider appears in a bedroom, that most intimate of marital settings.12 Whereas Aster’s and Peele’s visions emphasize external, often supernatural forces manipulating—or even directly controlling—their characters’ lives, Bergman’s and Villeneuve’s emphasize internal deterministic forces; namely, the inescapability of role-play both with others and with oneself. Similar to those in Glazer’s identity trilogy, Persona’s and Enemy’s protagonists want to escape themselves. However, unlike Under the Skin’s alien or Sexy Beast’s Gal, their desire is to escape familial obligations in order to live more freely.13 Both films underline how difficult—if not impossible—it is to “escape” family, how selfish it is to try to “go back,” regardless of the effect it might have on those closest to us. Just as Elisabet runs away from her husband and son only to become a sister/mother to Alma, Adam runs away from Helen and their imminent child only to entangle himself in a less meaningful relationship with Mary. The constructed family is as constraining as the biological one, and far less fulfilling. I’ll conclude with a telling detail that emerged during my research for this chapter. Although Jörgen Lindström goes uncredited in Persona, the end credits to the 2011 restoration cite him as “Elisabet’s Son.” I hesitate to unequivocally accept this designation (if Bergman wanted the boy’s identity to be certain, he would have made it so), but it does open the door to a new interpretation—one that pertains to my area of focus—of the prologue: A child reaches for his mother, and her face fades away.

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A remake is inherently deterministic. By definition, its goal is less to make something new than to make it again. It arrives with a built-in sense of remove, like looking at a photograph of a photograph (or a film within a film, for that matter1). It’s déjà vu incarnate. Given its ubiquity and common defining traits, the remake has become a genre unto itself, replete with a range of subgenres.2 The most common is what I’ll call the “remix,” which is packaged to meet certain expectations: that the story arc, characters, and visuals be relatively analogous to the original yet tweaked just enough (but not too much) in order to generate suspense; that it will simultaneously respect and reinvent the source material, feel both familiar and new. No small feat. The results vary wildly, from the instantly forgettable (too many to name, but any early twenty-first-century horror reboot would suffice), to those few that usurp their ancestors (Cukor’s Gaslight, 1944; Carpenter’s The Thing, 1982). A less common subgenre is the “redo”; that is, a film remade by the same director. Where mid-twentieth-century examples are often arguably superior (Ozu’s Good Morning, 1959; Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1956), modern and contemporary attempts are largely forgettable (Sluizer’s The Vanishing, 1993; Moland’s Cold Pursuit, 2019). The redo often contains significant alterations, be they technical (Ozu added sound and color—among other things—to his abovementioned reworking of 1932’s I Was Born, But . . .) or plot-based (Sluizer notoriously traded in

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his 1988 Vanishing’s gut-punch of an ending for a happier resolution in which the bad guy gets what’s coming to him). Perhaps the rarest of all subgenres, however, is the shot-for-shot remake. Let’s call this a “carbon copy.” Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Michael Haneke’s American Funny Games—the focus of this chapter—are among the most obvious (and divisive) examples. Not only do they exacerbate—through minute adherence to their antecedents—the deterministic themes of remakes in general, but they also convey cinematic determinism through their respective narratives, characters, and styles. It’s also through these examples that a different kind of cinematic determinism emerges, one that extends beyond a film’s content and guides the actions of those responsible for its very production. To participate in such a remake—as a cast or crew member—is to enact, in real life, the deterministic themes inherent to the films themselves. Therefore, it’s impossible to fully appreciate these particular remakes in isolation, so I will analyze them in tandem with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Haneke’s Austrian Funny Games (1997). We must now consider the freedom (or lack thereof) of those behind the camera, too. Psycho So much has already been written about Alfred Hitchcock’s classic that to add to this discourse almost feels arrogant. We all know the story. Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins)—manager of the dilapidated Bates Motel— stabs unsuspecting guest Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) to death in what is universally acknowledged as “the shower scene.” In a twist copied by countless genre films since, we learn he has a split personality and murders under the guise of his dead, domineering mother. Those who haven’t even seen the film could probably give the above synopsis, so ubiquitous are its narrative, thematic, and stylistic elements. With this caveat in mind, I’ll still take a crack at bringing something new to the interpretive table. Like all great works, Psycho is open to constant reevaluation and reinterpretation, especially given the unique circumstances under which it was remade. In order to avoid echoing prior analyses, I’ll narrow my focus to one claim: that the original, through its first-act rupture of Marion’s murder, initiates not one but two recursive

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narrative arcs. Hitchcock’s film, in other words, can be seen as something of a “self-remake.” After Norman disposes of Marion’s body and car, a new heroine begins her own journey into (and, in this case, out of) the killer’s orbit: Lila Crane (Vera Miles), Marion’s plucky younger sister. Lila’s subsequent trip to the motel—with Marion’s lover, Sam Loomis (John Gavin), in tow— replicates her sister’s in terms of the basic ingredients: signing in, exploring the motel room, interacting with the socially awkward Norman. Of course, Lila’s stay ends with a significant variation: this time, the “woman in distress” gets away.3 It’s as if the narrative has “corrected” itself so that the villain is caught and his intended victim (again female, one even related to the first victim) escapes unscathed. Though central, Lila’s “remake” is not the only one. We mustn’t forget the private investigator sent to find Marion (and the $40,000 she stole from her employer): Arbogast (Martin Balsam). His death in the Bates house provides the film’s second and final murder scene. Psycho is therefore structured around recurring visits not only to the motel, but to the Bates house. Each visit takes us a bit closer to the truth; Marion only sees the house (and hears “Mother”), Arbogast makes it inside but is swiftly disposed of, and Lila successfully explores the entire house before discovering Mother’s decomposing corpse in the fruit cellar. After each death, screenwriter Joseph Stefano restarts the clock and follows a new character from the outside world to the macabre realm of the Bates property.4 The only way out of this cyclical narrative structure is through it—by exposing, explaining, and then containing Norman’s evil nature. Until he is locked up and Lila and company are able to move on with their lives, the narrative is locked inside the same murderous loop. Under this interpretation, the final shot’s excavation of Marion’s car from a swamp signals how things are no longer stuck in place. However, this denouement is far from a happy ending. Although the narrative arguably breaks free, its key players are still trapped within themselves. Norman Bates and Marion Crane’s conversation in his parlor—surrounded by those imposing, stuffed birds—is Psycho’s most revealing sequence in that it outlines this deeply pessimistic view of the self. “People never run away from anything,” Norman says in a rare moment of transparency. “I think that we’re all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and claw,

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but only at the air. Only at each other.” There’s much more going on here than Norman simply justifying his horrific actions, and the fact that these lines are delivered by a madman doesn’t make their central message any less true: We can’t escape our lives because we can’t escape ourselves. His earlier claim that he was “born in” his particular trap (i.e., life) applies as much to his troubled past as to his physical body; indeed, he embodies this notion when—at the film’s end—we learn that Mother’s persona has completely subsumed his. Norman’s entrapment becomes increasingly claustrophobic, as he devolves from being stuck on the family property (his bedroom, still decorated for a child, indicates this arrested development) to being imprisoned within his own body. As Mother delivers her interior monologue about how “she wouldn’t even harm a fly,” we’re reminded that Norman is still in there somewhere, trapped in his own mind. Of course, this deterministic theme of entrapment manifests itself in a number of subtler ways throughout the narrative: Marion’s futile (and illegal) attempt to start a new life with the quick fix of money; Sam’s inability to escape his prior marriage and live happily with Marion; and even the motel’s stagnant existence in an otherwise abandoned stretch of road. Marion’s attempt to get out of her self-made trap is of course thwarted when she’s murdered, but one gets the sense that independence would have continued to elude her even if she had made it back to Phoenix and returned the money she stole. She may have avoided prison—that is, if Arbogast’s dubious claim that she would avoid charges is true—but not the social constraints within which we find her in the first few scenes. If anything, the guaranteed stigma of her mistake would have made her life even more unbearable upon her return. The best we can hope for, it seems, is being able to choose which trap defines our lives. By choosing to remake Psycho, Van Sant placed himself in a trap not unlike those of his adopted characters. If Hitchcock’s Psycho is deterministic in that it is a self-remake, then Van Sant’s is doubly so in that it is a self-remake orchestrated by an artist who has remade himself in order to fit his predecessor’s mold. With some significant exceptions, Van Sant’s experiment is more or less a colorized facsimile of Hitchcock’s film—arguably a remake in its purest form, as the contemporary director seldom veers off the road so carefully

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paved by the first adaptation of Robert Bloch’s novel. As such, 1998’s Psycho exemplifies filmic determinism both behind and in front of the camera, its creative parameters restricting Van Sant’s decisions (blocking, camera placement, lighting, music) as well as those of his actors/ actresses (body movements, facial expressions, line deliveries). Van Sant acknowledges his inability to tamper significantly with Psycho in two sly moments. The first directly precedes Marion’s death and is one of the few times he removes something from his source; namely, Bernard Herrmann’s iconic screeching violins during the shower scene. Here, the musical cue begins after Marion’s scream (in the original, it accompanies Norman as he pulls aside the shower curtain). The effect is strangely unsettling, like an auditory hiccup. Nevertheless, the endgame remains the same: Norman murders Marion. The second example occurs right after her death. Before Norman tosses the folded newspaper in the trunk, he pauses and almost opens it. But he doesn’t; that is, he can’t. If he did, then he would discover the hidden money, and the plot would have to shift in an entirely different direction. So the paper remains folded, and the money again ends up at the bottom of the swamp. This approach, it must be noted, was Van Sant’s choice; the writerdirector has openly acknowledged that his reproduction is more of a formal exercise than anything else. His description of a meeting with studio executives—who, in the midst of his mid-nineties string of hits, urged him to tackle a remake—says it all: “ ‘I said, “What you guys haven’t done is try to take a hit and remake it exactly. Rather than remake it and put a new spin on it, just remake it for real,” because I’d never seen that done yet as an experiment.’ ”5 These comments suggest Van Sant wanted to see how much he could get away with after the immense success of 1997’s Good Will Hunting. Evidently, the answer was a lot. In the remake, Marion (Anne Heche) and Norman’s (Vince Vaughn) aforementioned dinner conversation becomes a metacommentary on both the film’s self-constrained nature and Van Sant’s inability to escape it. And it’s important to consider how—despite his coy insistence to the contrary—he does indeed try a few new things, beyond the obvious difference of colorization.6 Some of these changes are practical attempts to “correct” technical limitations; thanks to a helicopter and CGI magic, he realizes Hitchcock’s conception of the opening shot as one uninterrupted movement across the city and into Marion and Sam’s (Viggo Mortensen)

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hotel room. Others are simple narrative streamlining; Dr. Simon’s (Robert Forster) laborious explanation of Norman’s illness is nearly two minutes shorter (but still pretty laborious). Notable visual differences include flash cuts during the two murders: Exterior shots of storm clouds interrupt the shower scene, while Arbogast’s (William H. Macy) death is intercut with grainy S&M porn as well as—most inexplicably—footage of a cow standing in the middle of a road.7 Such changes—knifelike in their abrupt puncturing of the “real” film—speak to a playfulness on Van Sant’s part; why else would he drastically alter the two most iconic sequences amidst an otherwise obsessively faithful reproduction? A sly humor is also at work in his selective updating of anachronisms; Marion’s stolen $40,000 becomes $400,000, yet Mrs. Chambers (Anne Haney) still goes through a switchboard operator to contact Norman from her home. Far subtler are the ways in which Van Sant remakes how we listen to  Psycho. Besides the notorious addition of masturbation sounds to the peephole scene,8 buzzing flies and flapping bird wings permeate the soundtrack as early as Marion and Sam’s opening rendezvous in the Phoenix hotel. When Sam asks if Marion will eat her lunch, Van Sant cuts to a close-up of a fly on her sandwich (a clever allusion to the fly Mother refuses to swat). Buzzing sounds coincide with Norman putting Marion’s body in her car trunk as well as Arbogast’s and Lila’s separate journeys into the Bates house. Fluttering wings and chirping accompany Marion as she packs her bag before fleeing with the money (a bird even lands on a branch outside her window) and Lila (Julianne Moore) when she discovers Mother in the fruit cellar.9 Human sounds are similarly amplified. Echoing, ghostly voices— presumably in Norman’s mind—whisper throughout the parlor conversation and subsequent peeping scene, Norman’s return to the house shortly before Marion’s death, and Mother’s relocation to the fruit cellar. Perhaps most gratuitously, children’s giggles accompany Lila as she sneaks around the Bates house. Norman’s (that is, Mother’s) interior monologue consists of overlapping voices: hers, Norman’s, and those of the aforementioned echoes. The ever self-aware Van Sant underlines his auditory revisions through the Walkman Lila constantly carries around, Mortensen’s exaggerated Southern drawl, a cameo by Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers as Sam’s coworker at the hardware store, and Slim

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Whitman’s “Indian Love Call” playing faintly when we first glimpse Mother in the window. Rather than being indicative of Van Sant’s unique vision, however, these new sounds paradoxically reinforce entrapment. They anticipate what must happen (that is, what has already happened in the original film). This Psycho knows its future and embeds this knowledge into its “present,” via foreshadowing. The echoing voices—an obvious indication of Norman’s insanity—brazenly reveal a character trait Hitchcock went to great lengths to conceal. Ironically, Van Sant’s most obvious alteration occurs when the film is technically over. As the end credits play, the camera dollies up from the car being pulled from the swamp and rests above the crime scene so viewers can see and hear the distant highway that led to the motel’s demise; this shot is accompanied by a twangy, acoustic reworking of Herrmann’s score. But Van Sant isn’t including a new scene as much as he is keeping the camera rolling longer than Hitchcock; the result is elongation rather than addition. Once the credits end, the shot continues without any music, the only sounds being humming crickets and distant cars. In a sense, this is the closest we get to a shot aligned more with Van Sant’s aesthetic—the “actionless” long take prefigures the extended silences of his “Death Trilogy” (Gerry, 2002; Elephant, 2003; Last Days, 2005)—than Hitchcock’s. Fittingly, his most personal touch—the moment during which we can confidently say, “ah yes, that’s a Van Sant shot”—occurs once the experiment has been successfully replicated. But even here a sense of entrapment prevails. The stationary camera lingers over the swamp as if there is nowhere else to go. If Van Sant’s reimagining of the opening shot is an attempt to realize Hitchcock’s original vision, then his extension of the closing shot is a recognition that there’s no need to venture far beyond it. As with the original, the narrative’s self-remakes reach their terminus when Norman Bates is caught. There’s nothing left to see here, Van Sant’s shot of the barren landscape seems to say. Indeed, the director announces his self-imposed confinement within seconds. “FRIDAY, DECEMBER THE ELEVENTH,” the title card reads. “TWO FORTY-THREE P.M.” The exact same time as the original. There’s no room for deviation. Not even by a minute.

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Fig. 5.1: The terminal swamp of Psycho and its remake.

Funny Games Michael Haneke’s Funny Games remake is in a league of its own. Not only  is it an example of a director revisiting a film from earlier in his career—in  this case, his generally well-regarded 1997 film of the same name, about two teenage boys who torture and murder a bourgeois family at their secluded summer home10—but it’s also a carbon copy, the only

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substantial difference between the two being linguistic (all dialogue is in English rather than Haneke’s native German). The question becomes: Why would a director at the height of his artistic powers—bookending this odd detour are 2005’s Caché and 2009’s The White Ribbon, what many would consider his masterpieces—bother to meticulously recreate, nearly frame for frame, a comparatively minor work (it earned a Palme d’Or nomination, but also prompted some walkouts)? Haneke has provided something of an answer in interviews: When I did the first Funny Games it was intended to be for a public of violence consumers in the English-speaking world, [but] because [it was in] the German language the film stayed always in the arthouses and so didn’t reach the public that it would need to have. I had this proposition from Chris Coen to [remake] it with an English-speaking cast, and for this reason I said “O.K.” Maybe now the film will come to the right public.11 Haneke, alas, was wrong in thinking his message would finally reach its intended audience. His first American film had a quiet, limited release before disappearing from both theaters and the public consciousness. Conspicuously absent in discussions of the writer-director’s work (Bilge Ebiri’s essay for the original’s Criterion release mentions, politely dismisses, and then ignores it), it’s now shrugged off as a well-intentioned mistake, a glitchy footnote in an otherwise revered filmography. But Haneke’s above justification seems willfully incomplete, especially considering his known aversion to explaining meaning and motive. There’s something else going on, I think, in the American version. Obsessively faithful remakes like 2007’s Funny Games are physical manifestations of filmic determinism; by definition, they limit the freedoms of the actors and their fictional counterparts, the filmmaker and how he goes about realizing (or, in this case, duplicating) his prior vision. Both films’ self-reflective narrative structures and metacommentaries on spectatorship further complicate this underlying sense of inevitability to the extent that rather than referring to Funny Games (1997) and Funny Games (2007), perhaps we should simply refer to Funny Games—an

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entity that, through (re)production and narrative alike, exhibits an uncanny timelessness. My initial plan was to watch the films—from beginning to end—in tandem and without pause; however, this approach proved impossible, for a difference of even a second can throw off the overlay effect. Generally, the remake moves a bit faster (more on this below), though I had to pause the original to let the newer version “catch up” as well. So, is the remake a perfect mimesis? Of course not. The simplest action (let alone a featurelength film) can’t avoid slight—if nearly imperceptible—variations when repeated. Even so, the overall effect is impressive, and Haneke’s attempt at pure self-replication—he figured his message was  “more up-to-date than 10  years ago so I had no need to change something”12—is often seamlessly achieved. We must explore a new way to process Haneke’s unique cinematic experiment. After all, the filmmaker has been adamant that the remake “is not done for those audiences [who have seen the original], it is done to reach audiences who didn’t see the original movie in the USA,”13 the implication being that to see the movie and experience its harsh message once is enough. In a way he’s right, at least in terms of watching one of the two films. Despite their artsy, European aesthetic, both versions are ultimately “shockers”; they lose much of their power after the big surprises no longer, well, surprise. Therefore, Funny Games postshock is best appreciated as diptych; I dare say his decade-in-the-making experiment is more intellectually stimulating when considered as a whole, simultaneously. Scene 1: Anna/Ann (Susanne Lothar, Naomi Watts) works in the kitchen— Peter (Frank Giering, Brady Corbet) borrows and drops four eggs—Anna/ Ann cleans the mess. The first of this sequence’s five shots immediately reveals a stark difference. In the original, we first see the dog bowl; Lothar14 then steps toward it, turns, and pours the food. In the remake, the shot begins with Watts pouring the food into the bowl.15 This one-second (if that) difference illustrates the former’s decidedly Bressonian pacing (1959’s Pickpocket, wherein Bresson’s camera lingers on a door before it opens and after it closes, comes to mind) and the latter’s tendency to compress its action.

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Fig. 5.2: Bressonian empty space and a lack thereof in Funny Games.

We see this hurriedness in the remake’s performances, too. In Corbet, waiting impatiently for Watts to grab paper towels with which to clean the eggs, clutching his hands behind his back, and eyeing his surroundings. By contrast, Giering saunters about, his hands comfortably resting in his pockets. Watts’s first, rushed attempt to clean the eggs leaves most of the yolk on the floor, while Lothar’s methodical wiping leaves little to be picked up with the second paper towel.16 These details may appear

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insignificant, but they demonstrate Haneke’s consistent acceleration of action in the remake. Despite their identical framing and editing, the films also exhibit markedly different color schemes. Jürgen Jürges’s cinematography for the original favors earthy tones and bold color contrasts, whereas Darius Khondji’s is awash with antiseptic whites and silvers. Through the family’s screen door—golden-hued from the sun—we clearly see Giering’s boyish face, while an overwhelming white light distorts Corbet’s. It’s a startling contrast, the latter resembling a staticky television screen. The kitchens also echo this stylistic difference: Lothar’s surroundings—brown cabinets adorned with dried red peppers, a blue refrigerator—feel homey; Watts’s—white cabinets, glowing curtains, a stainless-steel refrigerator— are right out of a sleek, home-décor magazine. In terms of editing, performances, and set design, this short scene crystallizes key aesthetic differences between each film—differences that continue all the way to the end credits. Scene 2: Anna/Ann sits in silence, her son dead—she hops to the television, turns it off, and frees her tied hands—she gets a knife from the kitchen, consoles her husband, Georg/George (Ulrich Mühe, Tim Roth) and lifts him up from the floor—they move toward the kitchen. Again, a question of duration. The original sequence, done in one exquisite take, is about 10.5 minutes long; the duplicate, also one take, is nearly a minute shorter. This extra minute includes not physical action but time for shocked silence and despair. Haneke’s camera, for example, lingers much longer on Lothar’s bowed head as she stares, almost catatonically, at nothing. Her head is so still that if not for the car race playing on the television in the frame’s right foreground (a cruelly dynamic counterpoint to the scene’s tableaulike setup), one might mistake it for a freeze frame. When she returns from the kitchen to embrace her husband, they are again still, statuelike. Haneke lets this mother and father grieve; he gives them time, so much so that the scene feels like a perverse reprieve, a break before the killers return and the madness resumes. The remake may be shorter, but it has more “stuff,” literally. In a sense, this sequence is the inverse of the egg scene’s kitchen setting in that the original is now spatially starker. Here, picture frames and tables— one in front of the couch, another (atop which rests a model boat:

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Fig. 5.3: Anna/Ann grieves during a long take in Funny Games.

perhaps an allusion to Watts’s fate) in the far right corner—fill the space: None of these objects appear in the first iteration. Haneke focuses more  so on physical movement, dedicating extended time to Watts’s struggles to ease an injured Roth to his feet. The scene is still far from “action-packed,” but might this shift of attention to physical struggles be a (small) concession to impatient American viewers? Perhaps unintentionally, Haneke lets us focus on logical practicalities and ignore (if we so

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choose) the son’s crumpled, lifeless body.17 Like Watts and Roth, we’re given just enough wiggle room to redirect our attention from the horrific crime scene. Neither Lothar and Mühe nor the original’s audience are afforded such a luxury. Surprisingly, the original’s violence is more gratuitous, verging on the exploitative. We see the son’s head, exploded by the killers’ shotgun blast; by contrast, the television stand covers his head in the remake. Was this censorship the filmmaker’s choice, or was he constricted by a larger studio’s R-rating (the original is unrated)? I suspect the former, since Haneke also conceals Watts’s face behind her long hair. Lothar’s despair, on the other hand, is fully visible, brightly illuminated by an overturned lamp. Scene 3: Anna/Ann kills Peter with a shotgun—Paul (Arno Frisch, Michael Pitt) rewinds the scene with a remote and prevents his partner’s death. Quite possibly the most notorious sequence in Haneke’s oeuvre, the remote scene has been the focus of many an analysis. And rightfully so; it’s a shocking reversal that both nullifies the film’s one cathartic moment and revels in the medium’s inherent artifice. As critic Bilge Ebiri puts it, “if the it’s-only-a-movie-ness of it all [like Paul’s early wink to the audience] was previously secretly reassuring, it now becomes enraging and tragic: it’s only a movie, so we can rewind and redo this scene.”18 Like Hitchcock’s Psycho, the ’97 Funny Games essentially remakes itself. Therefore, the 2007 version, especially during this sequence, is less a copy than a copy of a copy. Even so, simultaneous viewing reveals intriguing variations. As with the pouring of the dog food, Haneke exerts some control in terms of where and when to begin a shot. The remake’s freeze frame after the rewind exhibits a higher emotionalism, even a theatricality; Pitt smiles widely, teeth bared, eyes wide as if anxious to take advantage of this second chance. His smile, of course, is also a nod to the audience. Is he (and, by extension, Haneke) laughing at unsuspecting American viewers for having pulled a fast one on them? Is he laughing at the absurdity of repeating a scene about repetition? Perhaps the answer is much simpler and can be boiled down to Pitt’s (admittedly limited) performance choices. In any case, the difference is startling; his clownishness is far less disturbing than Frisch’s implacable mask of a face. The latter is downright stoic, by

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Fig. 5.4: Two very different reactions to violence in Funny Games.

contrast: calm, unsmiling, mouth slightly open. He almost seems sophisticated, debonair. Watts’s reactions match Pitt’s heightened emotionalism. She shakes her head, blinks rapidly, looks at her torturer with unfettered disgust, and even spits at him. Lothar’s is just as subdued as Frisch’s. She moves far less, her eyes largely downcast and still. Similar to her pose in front of the upturned lamp, she appears catatonic.

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Ultimately, the English-speaking actors convey emotion to us, whereas their Austrian counterparts urge us to read their muted gestures.19 These subtle variations, like a song played in a slightly different key, make a world of difference. If 1997’s Funny Games shows, then 2007’s tells. “So everything is its mirror image,” Peter tells Paul during their last discussion. This line, about a movie Peter recalls watching, is obviously a metacommentary on how Funny Games holds the mirror up to its audience: “The final close-up, of Paul staring and smiling into the camera again as he prepares to attack his next victims, is no longer a confrontation,” Ebiri claims. “It is a reflection.”20 By remaking his own work in this way, Haneke extends this reflection further. Funny Games mirrors itself. If the original is the predetermined path conceived of and laid out by Haneke, then the remake is the journey along a worn path, its travelers (on both sides of the camera) retracing their own steps toward a doom they (and we) have already endured. Although Haneke’s stature as an auteur may have allowed him to retain his signature style for a major studio film, his reputation as a “serious,” “important” artist may have closed as many creative doors as it opened. Indeed, Haneke’s experiment is something of a catch-22: to alter the original would be to sell out, to make a challenging film more palatable for a general audience (I’m again reminded of Sluizer’s Americanized Vanishing); to turn a prior work into a blueprint to self-mimicry, however, is equally fraught. The latter, his chosen path, results in a self-imposed determinism: a master architect tracing over an older design. If Haneke is the God presiding over the original (he created the characters, the story, the framing, etc.), then the remake is a God presiding over everyone making it. Haneke becomes an actor himself, reenacting his earlier creative choices. Viewer as Pavlovian Dog A sort of cognitive dissonance sets in after watching a few simultaneous minutes from both versions of Psycho or Funny Games. The awareness that I’m looking at two distinct films evaporates under the strange feeling that they’re a singular object. Rather than illuminating freedom (or at least the impossibility of perfect mimesis), the abovementioned

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differences only exacerbate the remakes’ constrictions. Variant inflections and gestures, or shot lengths and framings, ultimately amount to nothing. Watts’s Ann and her family are still brutally murdered in the exact same way, as are Heche’s Marion and Macy’s Arbogast. The outcomes remain unchanged, regardless of the miniscule changes preceding them. However, both of these case studies are much more than examples of artistic provocation or abstract philosophizing. What emerges is a sort of layered determinism, beginning within the films themselves, continuing outward toward their creators, and extending to those sitting in front of the screen. Narratively speaking, both films depend on self-regenerating stories. Hitchcock’s Psycho can’t end until we know the responsible party; hence, the recurring journey—or “self-remakes”—toward the heart of Norman’s house (and the source of his madness). Funny Games also hinges on a repeated journey, though this time it is the villains whom we follow from one house (and unsuspecting family) to another. If the “right” outcome doesn’t occur, Peter and Paul can always rewind and start again, just as Psycho starts again with each new arrival at the motel. Although Van Sant’s deterministic constraints are comparatively obvious, Hitchcock too began with a preordained path: Robert Bloch’s source novel. The well-known story of the director’s attempts to buy out all copies of the book reveal nothing if not his indebtedness to a story’s predetermined twist ending. Though an original story, 1997’s Funny Games conspicuously fulfills the characteristics of a so-called festival film, the (largely Western) history of which exerts its own deterministic pull. That is, Haneke’s style aligns with what Vania Barraza calls “the aesthetic of emotional containment, detachment, and (dis)location” many have come to associate with global arthouse cinema, an industry that “appeals to transnational audiences and to an international market niche.”21 Even in their initial forms, Psycho and Funny Games explore how audiences react to—and vicariously participate in—violence. By priming viewers to feel Norman’s anxiety when Marion’s car stops sinking in the swamp, or Anna’s excitement when she shotguns Peter, Hitchcock and Haneke exploit a collective attraction to violence. But they don’t stop there. Instead of providing guiltless catharsis, both directors confront audiences with this id-like reflex: the car starts sinking again, and we’re shocked—maybe even a little ashamed—to feel relief over a madman

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getting away with murder; Paul rewinds his coconspirator’s death, and we’re disappointed when the preceding mayhem is reversed. One may argue that the latter scene is categorically different in that it is an act of justified revenge or self-defense rather than cold-blooded murder; Anna isn’t allowed to rewind her son’s or husband’s deaths, so viewer outrage is understandable. But the fact remains that Haneke provokes relief—if not joy—at the sight of a teenager being shot in the chest and hurled against a wall. Although these films subvert their viewers’ attraction to cinematic violence by first inflaming it, their intentions diverge significantly; Hitchcock and Van Sant provide a playful ribbing, Haneke a stern—arguably patronizing—talking-to (indeed, the American Funny Games hinges on the assumption that its target audience knows nothing about the original).22 Those infuriated by the latter’s clinical finger-wagging should keep in mind that Peter’s death is the only one actually shown onscreen; we’re spared the grisly sight of the husband’s and son’s murders. Haneke knows what his audience wants—namely, for the bad guy to get his bloody comeuppance—and he gives it to them, but not without subsequently critiquing the hypocrisy underlying this desire. Differences notwithstanding—ultimately, Psycho is a piece of popular entertainment, Funny Games a consciously arthouse exercise—the swamp and remote sequences expose how easily manipulated film viewers can be, or, to generalize one step further, how easily manipulated human emotions are as a whole. Just as the characters can’t control their fates, we struggle to contain our reactions to them. Our Pavlovian responses to violence betray a lack of control over the most base, animalistic of impulses. Such reactions, it seems, are no more or less under our control than a knee jerking in response to a doctor’s carefully applied reflex hammer. They’re built into our DNA, and have been for millennia. “Everyone knows that what slows down the highway traffic going past a horrendous car crash is not only curiosity,” Susan Sontag admits in Regarding the Pain of Others: “It is also, for many, the wish to see something gruesome.”23 This wish, Sontag reminds us, is not a “rare aberration,” but “a perennial source of inner torment.”24 Though concerned with war photography (both real and staged), Sontag’s recognition that repulsion and attraction often go hand in hand will surely strike

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a chord with any so-called gorehound. Psycho and Funny Games are not afraid to confront this undeniable allure head-on. Whether we approach these films as cynical exercises or opportunities for cathartic reflection, there’s no denying their ability to expose our tenuous emotional control. Like an observer wowed by a magic trick that has been explained to them, we overlook their “it’s only a movie-ness”25 even after the rug has been so conspicuously pulled out from under us. When Anna/Ann reaches for a knife shortly before her death, we can’t help but hope she’ll get away this time (though we should certainly know better at this point). Even to the bitter end, it’s difficult to swallow the remote control’s harsh lesson. The same goes for Psycho; any lingering guilt from the swamp scene dissipates by the time the next major set piece—Arbogast’s attack at the top of the staircase—again elicits our perverse pleasure in the grotesque. It’s hard to look away, even—perhaps especially—when we’ve seen it all before.

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Despite its remote setting and slippery representation of time, Lucrecia Martel’s Zama offers a prescient metaphor for modern expectations of upward socioeconomic mobility: a prisoner running headfirst into a wall immediately upon his release. Freedom—or movement of any kind—is illusory, and those who manage to escape one set of circumstances quickly find themselves entrapped by another. From his collapsed position on the floor, the prisoner recites—unsolicited—the following parable: “There’s a fish that spends its life swimming to and fro. Fighting water that seeks to cast it upon dry land. Because the water rejects it. The water doesn’t want it. These long-suffering fish, so attached to the element that repels them, devote all their energies to remaining in place.” Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a military officer wasting away in an unnamed Spanish outpost, is one such fish; the prisoner’s explanation that these fish can be found near the banks is followed by a cut to Zama standing at a riverbank (this tableau is also the opening shot), motionlessly gazing toward that which he will never reach: home. He’s so still that he may as well be posing for a portrait, his stiff demeanor subtly announcing Martel’s motif of mental and physical stagnation. A struggle indicates movement (even Sisyphus gets to enjoy some exercise during his eternal journey up and down his hill), but Martel’s sobering metaphor robs us of even this nominal solace. In her world, one struggles—like the proverbial fish—to remain still in a hostile environment (unlike her

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characters, however, she embraces stillness; the majority of her and cinematographer Rui Poças’s compositions are static shots, including the abovementioned riverbank pose). While previously discussed films (Inside Llewyn Davis, After Hours) collapse time through circular narratives, Zama embodies collapsed time through external factors as well, such as the means by which it was physically made and its literary influences. Though a historical piece, Zama is contemporary by nature in that it was shot with a digital camera (a first for the writer-director).1 The film also looks to the future; in his book-length analysis of the Argentinian writer-director’s oeuvre, Gerd Gemünden notes how Martel made Zama after efforts to adapt El Eternauta—a futuristic graphic novel by Héctor Germán Oesterheld—fell through.2 Science fiction elements notwithstanding, the latter work’s themes overlap with those of Zama’s source material, Antonio Di Benedetto’s 1956 novel of the same name; both “revolve around a male protagonist lost in time and space. While we will never know what her adaptation of the graphic [novel] would have looked like, we do get an inkling by watching Zama.”3 Martel conjures an otherworldly atmosphere by eliding many sociohistorical details, thus universalizing her protagonist’s pained struggle toward enlightenment. Viewers can’t even ascertain how long he has been in his position. When, deep into the narrative (and deep into the jungle), he’s asked how long he’s been “here,” his answer says everything and nothing: “A long time now.” Such opacity toward the most fundamental of facts may be frustrating, but Martel is aiming for more than provocation. For Gemünden, “the [source] novel’s distinct three-part structure, indicated by the headings ‘1790,’ ‘1794,’ and ‘1799,’ delineates a set timeline that the film intentionally blurs and indeed collapses . . .  reproducing in them [the viewers] Zama’s declining grip on reality.”4 Luciana (Lola Dueñas), an acquaintance of Zama’s, hints at this temporal stasis when she observes that time doesn’t seem to pass at the outpost, since there are no winter months. Just as Martel rewrites Di Benedetto’s novel as a timeless parable, she also flirts with—and then upends—the genre conventions of period pieces and swashbuckling adventures. Though far from a clear-cut genre outing, her loose adaptation contains many elements that would be right at home in one: a military man navigating a “strange,” dangerous land, encountering violent tribespeople, and even getting embroiled in a treasure hunt

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with a legendary bandit. Just as her feature debut, La Ciénaga (2001), added a healthy dash of the uncanny to familial melodramas, Zama’s period piece framework contains moments that seem to have been beamed not just from another movie, but from another planet entirely.5 Consider the filmmaker’s disorienting juxtaposition of sound and image, a technique she has explored throughout her career. Through their simultaneity, they create a meaning that would be reduced—if not lost entirely—if presented in isolation. If one were to watch Zama with the sound (and subtitles) off, the basic story—a man of military rank goes through a series of (mis)adventures—would still come through, muddled though it may be. Conversely, Spanish or Portuguese speakers may understand the gist of the film by only listening to it (Martel, after all, is among the most innovative directors in terms of her complex soundscapes, claiming that “I define the image on the set. What I do not decide there, because I have mapped that very carefully already, is the sound”6). The result is a cinematic embodiment of what Berger calls “this alwayspresent gap between words and seeing.”7 Either experiment, however, would result in the loss of innumerable nuances. The surreal nature of Zama’s encounter with the son of a character nicknamed “the Oriental” (Carlos Defeo) would elude viewers- and listeners-only alike: those reading the subtitles without sound would likely attribute some of the boy’s utterances—specifically, his ironic description of “Don Diego de Zama, vigorous, in charge. The pacifier of Indians,” which he telepathically delivers without opening his mouth—to an offscreen character, while those from the latter group would assume the lines are simply spoken aloud. In both cases, the scene’s sonic dip into magical realism would go unnoticed, and unappreciated.8 It’s precisely because of this mise-en-scène that—despite being set hundreds of years in the past—the film feels strangely modern, an aesthetic that complements Martel’s sociopolitical commentary. Throughout the film, two (largely symbolic and arbitrary) systems seen as fundamental to any society—namely, language and currency—function as deterministic forces that consistently thwart our titular hero. It’s as if the same institutions that give us the ability to function (and through which we understand ourselves and others) simultaneously—and paradoxically— inhibit it. These systems, after all, saturate our daily experiences to such

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an extent that it’s nearly impossible to conceive of a life without them; existence would be especially unbearable without a shared language. So, how might we (or at least Zama) reconcile these conflicting perspectives toward the symbols—be they linguistic or economic—upon which societies are built and maintained? Futile Symbols Language

Essential to my interpretation is a basic understanding of deconstructionist linguistics, as defined by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology. The philosopher defined this field as “linguistics that works for the deconstruction of the constituted unity of [the] word.”9 The inherent arbitrariness behind both words and sentences plays an important role in much twentieth-century literature and philosophy. Although this now-standard assumption may be traced as far back as John Locke, it is most often associated with Ferdinand de Saussure, who described thought as “ ‘a swirling cloud, where no shape is intrinsically determinate. No ideas are established in advance, and nothing is distinct, before the introduction of linguistic structure.’ ”10 Language, therefore, imposes an arbitrary structure on abstract human thought, trapping the “swirling cloud” of human consciousness with a few pen strokes. Published a year before Derrida’s seminal text, Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences traces a fundamental shift in the understanding of language—one that divided the sixteenth century from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and laid the groundwork for the “swirling cloud” model. According to Foucault, sixteenth-century thought emphasized the interconnection between words and the things they represent; by extension, language was seen as following the same essential theory of similitude that guided that era’s so-called scientific understanding of the natural world.11 This harmonious understanding of the world and its representative signs broke down in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (roughly the same time as Zama’s escapades, oddly enough): “Resemblances and signs have dissolved their former alliance; similitudes have become deceptive and verge upon

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the visionary or madness . . . words wander off on their own, without content, without resemblance to fill their emptiness.”12 Much like these philosophical paradigm shifts, Martel’s vision repeatedly undercuts language’s tenuous grasp on reality. Severed correspondences repeatedly alienate Zama, who spends much of the film trying to convince his superiors to write a letter to the king requesting a transfer to Lerma so he can reunite with his wife, Marta. He also eagerly awaits a letter—one that never arrives—from her. Of course, a letter doesn’t allow for truly seeing into someone or something—even the most intimate of writings are approximations of people’s lived realities—but Zama isn’t even allowed the minor solace these items afford. As if to emphasize the insurmountable disconnect between signifier and signified, Martel never shows his distant family members or home. Because of this absence, it’s almost as if these things don’t exist—or that they exist only on paper. Painfully ironic twists of fate twice diffuse Zama’s efforts to be reunited with what has otherwise been reduced to words on a page. When he physically attacks colleague Ventura Prieto (Juan Minujín) for being insubordinate, the latter’s “punishment” is a relocation to, of all places, Lerma. Zama’s superior rank as “the Crown’s magistrate, a functionary” paradoxically requires him to stay where he is. “The deported gets to choose his destination and gets a recommendation?” he asks the first governor (Gustavo Böhm)—who also soon leaves—with disbelief.13 More power means less freedom. Likewise, efforts to ascertain exactly what it is he needs to do to go home are met with oblique answers, such as: “To free oneself of one’s position, one must first take care of it.” Zama (and, likely, those giving the orders) doesn’t quite understand these directives. The second instance occurs when the second governor (Daniel Veronese) rescinds his offer to write a transfer recommendation after he catches Zama’s scribe, Fernández (Nahuel Cano), writing a novel during work hours (this despite the fact that the governor gambles with friends in his office). Zama reluctantly agrees to write a damning report of the incident (the result of which is Fernández’s transfer to, you guessed it, Lerma14) in order to persuade the governor to finally write the letter. The shocked disbelief on Zama’s face when he learns that this letter is to be followed up a few years later by another request—“his majesty doesn’t consider these matters until the second time,” he’s told—is palpable.

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That to which he has attached all hopes for escape is a meaningless formality; the unshackled prisoner has just rammed his head into a wall. Centering on Zama’s encounters with a notorious bandit, Vicuña Porto (Matheus Nachtergaele), the closing act includes Martel’s most aggressive assault on language. Like fate or even death itself, Porto seems indestructible. In one scene, the Oriental is notified that the thief has been “killed 1,000 times,” a statistic that doesn’t offer much solace. Despite this oxymoronic claim—along with the fact that the second governor wears what he claims to be Porto’s severed ears around his neck (a grotesque trophy, not to mention a synecdochic representation of indigenous bodies being reduced to objects)—Zama’s climactic mission is to find and kill the dead man. This mission is ultimately geared toward profit; eliminating the near-mythical figure is not for ensuring the public good but for “reactivating commerce,” as the third and final governor (Rodolfo Prantte) brazenly puts it. Paradoxically, the man around whom the entire mission revolves— Zama is strictly forbidden from returning without Porto’s corpse, a stipulation that further underlines his lack of agency—is hidden in plain sight,  among the searchers. Porto has been taking part in the hunt for himself; he has, in effect, already been “caught.” This ironic reveal also points to the mission’s hypocrisy: Zama—himself a representative of an invasive force—has been tasked with destroying an invasive force (invasive, that is, to the colonizers). After revealing his identity and capturing Zama, Porto discusses the infamy attached to his name. “The Vicuña Porto they talk about doesn’t exist,” he tells his captive, as the two bathe in a river.15 “It’s not me. It’s no one. It’s a name. A name. Understand?” And yet, he doesn’t seem to have taken his own advice to heart. He waxes poetic about the meaninglessness of such labels and revels in his mythical notoriety, yet relies on Zama’s name and rank to help him find a legendary treasure: much sought-after “coconuts” (gem-filled rocks), the location of which he believes Zama knows. “My men want to get rich,” he unironically tells his prisoner. “My men want to be rich. I promised them it would be so.”16 A  fundamental question—one never answered let alone addressed— remains unsolved: Why does Porto even want this treasure, and what would he do with it? He seems to enjoy his mythical status and the power

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it entails, so it’s difficult to imagine him taking advantage of the fact that many think him dead and retreating to a life of anonymity. Is it possible that he—who so eloquently speaks out against a name—relies on this label of “bandit”? Does he know who he is without the tenuous power this name has allotted him? For Porto, Zama’s very name becomes a symbol for material wealth, and his dependence on such symbology betrays his obliviousness and greed. By way of its association with the coconuts, the word “Zama” itself thus attains a metonymic quality. Porto may think he has transcended language, but he is seemingly unaware that “we cannot even discuss the concept of [linguistic] play without using seriously the very language we critique.”17 In a sense, he isn’t any freer than his captive: neither from the connotations of the latter’s name, nor from his own vices and materialistic greed, nor—as we shall see in this chapter’s final section—from his role as a catalyst for Zama’s painful journey toward enlightenment. Currency

Because Porto and his gang put all their stock in Zama’s reputation, the prisoner reclaims some power when he tells them the stones (which they never find) are worthless: “I do for you what no one did for me. I say no to your hopes.”18This short line carries heavy implications, pointing not only to both men’s hopeless ambitions,19 but also to the colonizers’ declining grip over the land’s rightful occupants. A network of invasive forces (be it a bandit or a government) are all vying for the same basic thing—wealth, even if acquired at the cost of the indigenous people’s lives and culture— but their efforts have been doomed from the start. In his aforementioned essay, Gemünden considers the increasingly squalid physical appearances of Zama and others like him: “There is no hope for this caste. By contrast, healthy indigenous children abound, and we sense the future will be theirs.”20 The aspirations of both the invasive humans (finding treasure, going home) and the imperialist institutions to which they belong (opening trade routes, boosting commerce) crumble in the face of the natural world. With this contrast in mind, an overarching theme emerges: the futility of attempting to commodify nature and rewrite the primal rules by which it operates. Nature’s deterministic power supersedes that of both the individual and the body collective.

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Through their respective quests, Zama and Porto have been seduced by what Foucault deemed the “paradox of value.” This paradox comes to light when one considers “the useless dearness of the diamond to the cheapness of the water without which we cannot live.”21 A piece of paper (and, by extension, the written word) is precious to Zama for its promise of escape. By means of their interminable deferment, the letters assume the quality of currency—not because they have any intrinsic worth, but because of the expectations they embody. Similarly, a literal rock (the quintessence of uselessness) represents for Porto the promise of material riches; for Foucault, however, “gold is precious because it is money . . .  not the converse.”22 These objects do not contain value in and of themselves; their power is therefore subject to change, their attainability evershifting. Just as gold is not valuable until we deem it as such, a word (or sentence, or paragraph, or letter) has no inherent meaning until it’s assigned one; it doesn’t even exist until we create it and accept it as a part of the lexicon. In a similar—though far more insidious—vein as the letters and rocks, the indigenous inhabitants themselves are objectified. Within Luciana’s garish living quarters, they function as things (furniture, specifically) rather than people, hand-cranking a ceiling fan for the sigñora as she complains to Zama that “there’s no occasion for elegance here.” This scene’s stark, almost humorous juxtaposition of an out-of-place bourgeoisie (a recurring visual gag shows their dark, damp hair popping out from under their wigs) with their largely ignored, yet omnipresent (they are, after all, essential for maintaining the invasive force’s comfort) victims calls to mind Marx and Engels’s conception of laborers as “a commodity, like every other article of commerce.”23 For the likes of Luciana, a wider gulf separates her from the nameless man silently fanning her than that separating him from the much-discussed shipment of brandy arriving courtesy of the Oriental, whose decrepit appearance epitomizes a hopeless caste. Ironically called “a man who has seen the future” by his admirers, the sickly merchant—first seen hunched under a parasol—can barely walk and must be carried around (by an indigenous person, no less) in a sedan chair. He may have “seen” the future of international trade, but he won’t experience much of it. Thus, Zama is largely concerned with transactions of physical things. Although “society can . . . be thought as an economic mechanism, because

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it is necessarily through and through material-productive,”24 the film perverts this economic necessity within its first ten minutes, triangulating three forms of “currency”—words, people, and market goods—into a warped system of valuation. Upon the Oriental’s arrival at the ironically titled “Getaway Beach,” Zama negotiates the terms of unloading the ship’s liquid cargo with the vessel’s captain, Indalecio (Germán de Silva). “We have to unload the Oriental’s brandy. He’s made a fortune in Montevideo. Now he wants to expand his business upriver,” Indalecio explains, as anonymous slaves—chairs strapped to their backs—prepare to haul the Oriental and his son up a rocky hillside. Zama’s immediate response— “did Marta give you a letter for me?”—implies a quid pro quo exchange: He will let the ship unload its goods as long as the captain guarantees him the letter. Liquor for words, quite literally. The entire negotiation is, of course, absurd, and we must consider how the Oriental—who will soon die of cholera—has bastardized the river, using it as a tool for acquiring his fortune; as Zama and Indalecio haggle, the still, implacable water waits behind them. Although the slaves are mostly in the background throughout this scene—as they are in much of the narrative—Martel foregrounds their presence during a short sequence in which a single word’s symbolic weight makes or breaks a “transaction” involving dozens of human lives. Zama and Ventura hear an appeal from a local family of settlers. “We chased the Indians from these lands,” the patriarch says with some pride, but now he wants forty “tame Indians” as encomienda for his daughter allegedly having been kidnapped by them (how she escaped is never explained). Ventura takes issue with his superior’s decision to grant the family their wish (this is what ultimately leads to their fight and Ventura’s subsequent “punishment”) not because it’s barbaric but because he doesn’t think the family’s name, “Irana,” holds enough status to warrant accommodating their steep demands. All of these exchanges—especially those involving human bodies— inevitably call to mind European imperialism, which victimized those on either end of the sword. Portuguese political scientist Paulo Freire deconstructs this complex relationship between the oppressed and their oppressors in his seminal 1968 work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Though primarily about educational best practice, the text yields wide applications, thanks to Freire’s overarching focus on oppression, its myriad

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causes and effects, and how to go about meaningfully overcoming it. As an emissary of an invasive force—one that brutalizes and exploits the land’s indigenous population—Zama obviously represents the colonizing oppressor. This brutal relationship is most evident in his sexual abuses of power; in an early scene, he hits a woman after she confronts him for spying on her while she bathed, and we later learn he has fathered (and abandoned) a child with another indigenous woman, Emilia (María Etelvina Peredez), whom he avoids. In his mind, these women (like the land and its resources) are there for the taking, to be used and discarded according to his whims. As for the child, Zama barely acknowledges his existence other than when it serves to help him, as when he uses his newly announced fatherhood as leverage to try and expedite his transfer (here, too, we see the human body degraded to little more than a form of currency). When he visits the boy, he struggles to pick him out among a group of children and barely conceals his disgust when he notices that the child is struggling to walk and talk.25 Once he learns that the child is of little transactional use to him (the second governor doesn’t technically consider Zama a new father, since the boy was born out of wedlock), he avoids the mother and son entirely. In a particularly disgraceful moment, he effectively ends their relationship by giving Emilia a bed, which he seems to consider adequate recompense. Readers of Freire’s work, however, will know that these complex relationships transcend simple delineations between occupier and occupied, good and evil. “Dehumanization . . . marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen” he explains, “but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it.”26 Similar to Foucault’s paradox of value, Freire’s “oppressor-oppressed contradiction” exposes the arbitrary designations separating the haves from the have-nots (John Berger taps into a similar paradox when he observes how “these relations between conqueror and colonized tended to be self-perpetuating. The sight of the other confirmed each in his inhuman estimate of himself”27). Zama is something of a victim, too; in robbing others of their freedom (their land, their culture, their bodies), he cheapens his own. Though undeniably a part of the problem, he functions as no more than a cog in imperialism’s vast machine. His continually deferred return home is proof positive of this limited role. Where, then, can genuine independence be found if even those “in

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charge” lack it? The answer, paradoxically, is through those whom he exploits, “who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors.”28 Indeed, it’s not Zama’s system that brings him salvation, but that of the land’s rightful inhabitants. He doesn’t escape by going home, but by immersing himself even further into his adopted environment. Freedom Through Surrender One of the most precious things in existence—water—surrounds these characters throughout. It’s the unacknowledged treasure right under their feet, one that Zama initially recognizes only for its utility in bringing him back to his family (the indigenous women and children, by contrast, are shown bathing in the river and walking along its shoreline; they respect that which is inherently valuable).29 But water—both symbolically and literally—does not transport him to his destiny; it is his destiny. His (eventual) acknowledgment of this distinction leads to something resembling wisdom—or at least acceptance. Once Zama embarks on his journey to find Porto, Martel’s landscapes shift dramatically; the dusty, windswept outpost—emblematic of the colonizers’ pitiful attempts to tame nature—gives way to a dangerous expanse of jungle. In a painterly establishing shot, the ragtag crew sloshes through

Fig. 6.1: A lush natural world envelops the humans of Zama.

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a vibrant swampland, the water nearly touching their dangling feet as they ride on horseback. Later, after he captures and imprisons the crew captain, Porto offers the man some water to drink and then promptly has  him drowned to death. It’s a brutal moment—a gesture of seeming beneficence undercut by abrupt death—made all the more striking for its dialectical commentary on water. These moments suggest another interpretation of the fish tale; that of a creature being stifled, or even destroyed, by that which is most essential to its survival. The captain’s murder also stands out because it directly precedes Zama’s reckoning with death. In a horrific moment that crudely emphasizes Zama’s loss of agency, Porto cuts off both of his captive’s hands with a machete when they’ve reached the end of their fruitless journey. Zama then regains consciousness in the bed of a canoe, two indigenous people having rescued him from almost certain death (the fact that we don’t see how or when he is saved gives his awakening a mystical quality). A little boy asks him, “do you want to live?”—a strange question, given the circumstances—and Zama nods yes. This small gesture, easily overlooked by a casual viewer, is Zama’s moment of true anagnorisis. He finds transcendence by casting off any precepts of freedom, by no longer relying on that over which he has no control. It’s telling that Zama—lying in the canoe bed—can’t clearly see what’s ahead of him. The future—the river’s unalterable course—is

Fig. 6.2: Salvation through surrender at the end of Zama.

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there, but he can neither see nor control it. The fact that Zama doesn’t speak (a clever inversion of his first line of dialogue, “he’s not talking”) further emphasizes this surrender, and the film ends on an oddly hopeful note in its suggestion that he has found some closure by accepting his mission’s futility. This scene is also the first and only time we see him on a boat; he is finally traveling by water, just not in the way he expected. It’s during this moment—lost, disfigured, and nearly dead—that Zama seems most at peace. Having been stripped of the aforementioned symbolic systems, the unknowable mental terrain in which he finds himself in the film’s final moments seems most akin to Derrida’s conception of “trace”: “The just-vanished, never-quite present sense of the real world that always disappears just before we can actually conceive it. . . . [it] is ‘the evidence of things not seen,’ even unseeable and unthinkable apart from language.”30 Drifting through a swamp, Zama is no longer lost because he is no longer trying to go anywhere. He’s not entering a presymbolic void as much as he is finally accepting that he has always been in one. Silence, then, is wisdom rather than stupidity.31 A man who once plodded through the water now glides along its quiet surface. In interviews, Martel has articulated this “happy ending” thusly: “When I now watch the film, I see a man who feels trapped, gets sick, is mutilated, and who at the very end says, ‘Yes, I want to live.’ ”32 His small nod paints him as an unusual hero—one who, in choosing to continue struggling, exercises his last vestige of freedom. He no longer needs language, let alone a letter. A simple nod will do. Perhaps this is how peace can be found: not by fighting the currents of time and space, but by allowing them to carry us to a place where words are no longer needed, where silence grants safe passage.

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CONCLUSION Beyond the Screen

New Decade, Same Fears The river of time flows both ways in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, one of several 2020 releases to directly address deterministic themes and questions.1 The entire narrative hinges on an intriguing assumption: that the future is a concrete thing—that it already exists somewhere “out there”— rather than a network of branching possibilities. The characters are more or less waiting for its unalterable form to get here—that is, to their present. This plot device reminds me of another Brian Greene metaphor: that of space-time as a loaf of bread. “Even if you and I were to imagine slicing up a loaf of bread in two different ways, there is still something that we would fully agree upon: the totality of the loaf itself,”2 he writes in The Fabric of the Cosmos. One can slice up the loaf in any number of ways, yet there is only one way for them all to fit back together. In this way, the loaf is no different than The Shining’s maze, the pieces of which comprise but one finished product: “If I were to imagine putting all of my slices together and you were to imagine doing the same for all of your slices, we would reconstitute the same loaf of bread.”3 Wherever (or whenever) the characters in Tenet are, they’re all ultimately part of the same integrated loaf. Early on, “Protagonist” (John David Washington) learns that a future  society is sending objects both simple (a bullet) and complex

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(components of a doomsday weapon) back to the present day—making a future of their collective past—through a technique of “time inversion,” which essentially boils down to an object/person moving forward from their perspective but backward from ours. A bullet spins on a table and bounces into Protagonist’s hand; later, it emerges from a wall and flies back into the barrel of his gun. We watch—first with bemusement, then with exasperation—as these and other metaphysical quandaries are explained (and, often, reexplained) to Protagonist. But a simple question underlies this short scene: Hasn’t Protagonist already dropped the bullet and fired the gun if he’s able to experience them in reverse? And if effect precedes cause, then isn’t cause predetermined? For the characters populating Tenet, it’s not a matter of when in the time loaf they are but of where. Such moments illustrate how—despite his characteristically labyrinthine and exposition-heavy narrative structure4—Nolan is grappling with a basic implication: that things (including people and the objects they manipulate) exist on a physical plane outside of (and contemporaneous with) the present day. To extrapolate this conceit further, consider the following question: If, say, a descendent of mine already exists two hundred years from now, then how much of a say do I really have in the sequence of moments, decisions, actions, etc. which must inevitably lead to their conception? The film’s centerpiece action sequence—in which Protagonist survives a car chase, goes through a time inversion machine, and experiences the same events in reverse—perfectly illustrates this frozen-river (or bread-loaf; pick your metaphor) conception of time. During the initial chase, he encounters an inverted (i.e., backward-moving) car, which plays a crucial role in his encounter with the main villain, Sator (Kenneth Branagh). After our intrepid hero goes through the “turnstile” and retraces the chase in the opposite temporal direction, he (and the viewer) realizes it was his inverted self who was driving the mysterious car. His future proves integral—is, in fact, a necessary part of—his present survival. If he’s able to interact with his physical self from minutes in the future, then haven’t those intervening moments already happened? Due perhaps to its sheer ambition, Nolan’s project integrates aspects from all three of the present text’s sections: individual, family, and society.

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Fig. 7.1: Two temporal rivers converge in Tenet.

Protagonist’s conspicuously opaque name lends the character a singular, synecdochic quality. He is not a hero but the hero, an individual not because of his uniqueness but his generality. Nolan also tackles the familial through a subplot regarding Sator’s wife, Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), who stays with the villain not just for self-preservation, but for the safety of her only son. Lastly, any globetrotting espionage thriller is societal in nature—its hero crossing cultural, geological, and linguistic divides in order to save the day—but Tenet takes matters a step further in that it concerns a future society attempting to defer its extinction by manipulating time and reinserting itself into our present. If we return to our basic definition for determinism—that forces beyond all human control shape our lives—then Tenet’s constraining force is time itself; past, present, and future are all positioned as having already passed. Chronology, therefore, loses any significance; at one point, military man Ives (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) warns Protagonist to quit his worldsaving mission “if you can’t stop thinking in linear terms” (he seems to have read up on Greene, too). It’s only fitting that Protagonist’s partner, Neil (Robert Pattinson, who has openly acknowledged not understanding most of the movie), says “what’s happened happened” in reference to a future event: his own death, it turns out. His past is Protagonist’s future,

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his future Protagonist’s past. How can free will possibly factor into such a convoluted equation? I’d like to close by mapping out some overarching themes shared by the films discussed herein. By no means is this list meant to be exhaustive; rather, I intend for it to lend further cohesion to the book—both within and  across its three sections—and promote an awareness of how the medium consistently taps into our collective fears, anxieties, and needs. As both mainstream genre releases and the discourse surrounding them  continue to directly explore (or indirectly illustrate) deterministic themes, the below list will expand and transform accordingly. If Tenet is any indication, these philosophical preoccupations aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Trapped in the Finite As with Nolan’s film, many of the diverse narratives examined herein contemplate the possibility that the future may feed back into the past. The end is not an arrival but a return: “The endless rotations of finitude, the circular process of finitude itself,” philosopher Keiji Nishitani advises us, “is an endless pilgrimage of finite existence.”5 Llewyn journeys to the past when he relives his alleyway beating, Jack Torrance when he enters the decades-old photograph, and the murderous Paul when he reaches for that remote control and turns back the clock. In each case, we get the sense that these characters’ returns are not just symbolic; they appear to have quite literally stepped back into an earlier experience. Contemporary scientific theory dovetails with this thematic entrapment. In his discussion of the light cones that constitute space-time, theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli describes Einstein’s realization that gravitational waves can distort these cones’ structure, causing them to oscillate.6 As a result, the future of one oscillating cone may hypothetically move into the past of another: “There is no logical contradiction entailed by the existence of closed temporal lines or journeys to the past; we are the ones who complicate things with our confused fantasies about the supposed freedom of the future.”7 Rovelli clarifies these perceptual barriers when he explains how “the notion of ‘the present’ refers to things

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that are close to us, not to anything that is far away. Our ‘present’ does not extend throughout the universe. It is like a bubble around us.”8 We are bound, essentially, by our subjective experience of time’s passage. We struggle through trees and underbrush, oblivious to the unchanging forest surrounding us. As with human perception, films’ seeming consecutiveness masks an ultimate stillness. Enemy offers a peculiar case of collapsed time. While the Adam/Anthony dichotomy operates primarily as metaphor (and a pretty straightforward one at that: An adulterer becomes another person while having an affair), one may also interpret the situation not as two “people” (figuratively or literally speaking) occupying the same time but as one person simultaneously occupying multiple times—which overlap, like Rovelli’s cones—from his life. Like cards from a scattered deck, adjacent scenes may very well take place in two entirely different periods of Adam/Anthony’s life. Other films discussed in the preceding chapters explicitly—sometimes confrontationally (as with Persona’s infamous penis flash shot)—call attention to stillness through freeze frames (Funny Games’ remote control) or tableaulike setups that may as well be freeze frames (Zama staring at the water’s placid surface). The technical term in itself—freeze frame— feels like a misnomer; to become frozen, after all, something must first be malleable, and a film rolled up in a canister (or stored in a computer) is anything but. We may therefore argue that a freeze frame is in fact the most genuine distillation of the medium, the “moving” image the most artificial. It comes as no surprise that some directors—from Robert Bresson to David Lynch, two visionaries as far opposed on the stylistic spectrum as one can get—began their artistic careers as painters. Both mediums simulate movement through stillness. Just as its movement proves static and finite, a film’s means of presentation is also limited in that it requires screens and images. Even if somehow projected on a body of water, the moving image would still be enclosed within its frame. In other words, film is dependent on physical surfaces, which it turns into screens by proxy. While this observation may seem painfully self-evident, consider how the distinction limits film in a way that, say, literature isn’t. A book is not surface-bound. It can be memorized, recited, and enjoyed by audiences without a physical vessel (besides the speaker), and none of its content would technically be

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missing; film has no analogous conduit and—in this respect—is more constrained than literature.9 Avant-garde exercises cannot escape the need for images on surfaces, either. One may point to Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) as an exercise in imageless cinema, but its unchanging, solid color is not so much an absence of imagery as it is a single, extended image (in this sense, Blue condenses cinema to its purest form by underlining the photographic stillness inherent to all so-called moving pictures). If a picture says a thousand words, then a film says (or, more precisely, contains) thousands upon thousands of pictures. Imagine Van Sant taking those few seconds of empty swampland at the end of Psycho’s credits, printing and displaying all of the short sequence’s hundreds of individual frames, and deeming it a meticulous photography experiment; the boundary separating it from photography would evaporate, the difference becoming one of quantity rather than of essence. The result would be a catalog of a space unchanged by time’s passage, a visual mimesis of Heidegger’s conception of “now”: “In every ‘now’ the ‘now’ is now and therefore it constantly has presence as something selfsame, even though in every ‘now’ another may be vanishing as it comes along. Yet as this thing which changes, it simultaneously shows its own constant presence.”10 Film documents this constantly regenerating—yet never quite grasped— now. To watch those few seconds of empty swampland is to witness hundreds of new “nows,” each virtually indistinguishable from the rest and replaced by another before we have time to process it. Indeed, temporal ambiguity is embedded so deeply in film that savvy viewers hardly notice it. We don’t bat an eye when a movie compresses time (2011’s The Tree of Life traces billions of years—from the big bang to the emergence of dinosaurs—in minutes) or expands it (Source Code, also released in 2011, follows a man who relives variations of the same few minutes on a train). Even conventional editing techniques make unannounced—but implicitly understood—jumps in time; suddenly, we’re in the next week, day, or year. Ironically, films that don’t play with our subjective experiences are deemed “experimental.” Consider the single-take subgenre, which perhaps reached its apex with Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria (2015); consisting of one genuinely uninterrupted shot (no editorial tricks discreetly merge multiple takes), it realistically captures our “bubblelike” experience of a ceaseless temporal flow. That

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which is closest to our lived experience seems radical when projected on the screen. “I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I’m in constant movement,”11 boasted Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov in 1923. This proclamation—grandiose, yet sincere—befits an artist engaging with a newly conceived art form. Early cinema’s utopian promises of freedom and true movement now seem quaint, having given way to ambiguity, and many directors—modern and contemporary alike—instead illustrate and question the medium’s false flow. Indeed, cinema is a perfect conduit for replicating the sensation of being stuck in a self-contained, selfperpetuating loop; what is a film (be it digital or analog) if not a wholly complete, “fossilized” object, one whose rapid repetition of still images only mimics actual change? Of course, pretending films spontaneously generate themselves before us can be part of the allure, as the contemporary obsession with “spoiler alerts” so vividly illustrates. Consider this century’s deluge of superhero franchises, which—despite the theatrical secrecy by which they’re produced and released—strictly adhere to their source materials. Fans may shout “don’t tell me what happens!” when they fear someone is about to reveal too much about a new release—even when they already know what will happen. That Superman will die (and subsequently be resurrected) in a DC movie should come as no surprise to any casual comic book reader, but woe to those who dare reveal that the caped crusader kicks the bucket in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016). Such responses are both an admission that we know a film’s “future” is preset (but like to pretend otherwise) and a reflection of our desire to “go with the flow” of a temporal river that we very well know is frozen. Where some films ask us to ignore their inherent boundedness, others revel in it, embedding it into their narratives. Consider the recent resurgence of stories inspired by Groundhog Day (1993), in which characters mysteriously relive a single day from their lives. This formula has crossed genre boundaries, from horror (Happy Death Day, 2017), to science fiction (Edge of Tomorrow, 2014) and soapy melodrama (Before I Fall, 2017). It took little more than a month for the trend to spill into the new decade, with Ian Samuels’s The Map of Tiny Perfect Things premiering on Amazon Prime in February of 2021. This plot device has become so

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prevalent as to embody the recursiveness it portrays; like its stock characters, we find ourselves experiencing the same story, ad nauseam. What distinguishes this subgenre—and perhaps accounts for its popularity, especially among its target audience of teenagers—is the special brand of hope it offers: The protagonist often escapes their spatiotemporal prison as the result of some spiritual anagnorisis. In Happy Death Day, Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) solves—and consequently prevents—her own murder mystery by reliving the last day of her life. Though superficially despairing (similar to Groundhog Day, a darkly humorous sequence shows her repeatedly committing suicide), Tree’s journey offers an enticing form of wish fulfillment: having the opportunity to relive a crucial day until it can be done just right. Implicit to this conceit is the notion that all prisons—even the ultimate prison of death itself—are surmountable. Here, determinism is reconfigured as a tool for self-actualization; without exception, the protagonist comes out the other side a better person. As is often the case with genre cinema, the examples analyzed throughout this book speak to current global anxieties, chief among them being a sense of stasis and entrapment. Though films often exploit this theme literally,12 I have focused on those that take a metaphysical, self-referential approach. The circular narratives identified in the introduction, as well as those in Inside Llewyn Davis and After Hours, track characters who end where they begin, their intervening adventures (or lack thereof) being conflated and nullified by a common endpoint. Other characters are trapped by past lives from which they cannot escape (Glazer’s Identity Trilogy), skeletons in the familial closet (Us), malignant external forces (Hereditary), themselves (Enemy), or even their creator (Persona). Haneke’s Funny Games saga is a rare example wherein the creator retraces—like Danny Torrance in The Shining—his prior steps; albeit, in a maze of his own making. The obvious antithesis of entrapment is escape, and many of these films dangle something akin to it in front of their characters (and us) before snatching it away: Paul flees his lonely apartment and dull work routine in After Hours only to find himself petrified in a statue; Dani distances herself from family trauma in Midsommar but is manipulated into joining a murderous surrogate family; Zama finally earns that letter of recommendation for reassignment but learns it is a meaningless formality.

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It’s too easy to compare these thematic concerns with the global fallout of COVID-19, in which even the wealthiest of societies came to a grinding halt and experienced mass death on an unthinkable scale. And while the analogs are clear and thought-provoking (masses of people around the world found themselves stuck in the same place for months, their physical bodies replaced by online video footage13), the sense of stagnation had been permeating the industrialized world far before the pandemic; after all, the films studied here were produced, at the latest, about a year before the word “coronavirus” entered our lexicon. Decades earlier, Susan Sontag tapped into this feeling when she wrote that “photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote.”14 A photograph (and, by extension, a film) may artificially entrap reality, but it also captures the common feeling of being bound by the latter’s ever-shrinking nature. It’s another way of trying to grasp that ever-elusive now. In his piercing Age of Anger: A History of the Present, Pankaj Mishra addresses modern globalization’s paradoxical effect of intensified isolationism, tribalism, and hate-fueled scapegoating.15 Rather than freeing humankind, technological interconnectedness has underlined our increasing powerlessness and social malaise: In place of society or nature, the individual confronts a new indecipherable whole: the globe, in which multiple spaces and times bewilderingly overlap. Enmeshed in its various dense networks, including an electronic web mediating his relationship with reality, the individual can act satisfactorily neither upon himself nor upon the world, and is reminded frequently and humiliatingly of his limited everyday consciousness and meagre individual power.16 The “freedom” (i.e., social mobility) promised by globalization has in fact led to disillusionment, alienation, and—in extreme cases—violence. Nowhere is this “bewildering overlap” more apparent than Zama, wherein the emissary of an industrialized Spain becomes increasingly alienated from both his immediate surroundings and distant loved ones. These recurring themes speak to subtler forms of enclosure (Nishitani claims that “the body-and-mind, reason, or personality constitutes a

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self-enclosed confinement and self-entangled unity”17). By enclosure, I simply mean the acknowledgement of—and occasional conflict with— life’s boundaries, both external (work, family, society) and internal (mental capacity, perception, consciousness). Internal boundaries are far more slippery, as they combine the physical and metaphysical; enclosed within a single, bounded object—the brain—the human mind is capable of seemingly infinite thought and invention.18 Notions of selfhood and independence, so complex in their webs of meaning, are hard to imagine without the skin that separates us from everything—and everyone—else. Film—not a film, but the medium itself—is similarly enclosed. It contains so many things (in the best cases, things we’ve never seen or imagined before), yet all of these phenomena are constrained by the physical limitations of the screen, camera, and computer, not to mention by what the human brain is capable of imagining and perceiving. The physical world’s totality—as well as our collective need to work within its finitude— reminds me of William Carlos Williams’s declaration to “say it, no idea but in things.”19 Ultimately, things are all we have. And they exist because they are separate, discrete. Part of their identity consists of what they are not: that from which they are physically separate. Among the films examined herein, none better encapsulates this idea of finitude than Persona: specifically, the geometric figures—almost cosmically abstract—of its opening shot. For a few seconds, we’re unsure of what we’re looking at; the grey square and thimble-shaped sphere— penetrative in their respective positioning—could be unfathomably large objects in deep space as much as they could be the microbes lining someone’s insides. Before they glow, make contact, and spark the inner workings of a projector, they appear as no more than shapes in a dark void. It’s the big bang in microcosm. Through heat, light, and movement, a filmstrip’s tiny images hurtle onto the screen before ending with a similar singularity: the compacted roll, the empty screen, the oblivion that precedes one’s birth. Catharsis Is our only option to look on these works and despair? Allow me to distill the short answer (no) into two codependent claims: (1) the films discussed

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Fig. 7.2: The genesis of film (and life) in Persona.

in this text can be, indeed must be, appreciated for their aesthetic pleasures, and (2) they ultimately offer catharsis rather than genuine pain. As I’ve noted in the introduction, by no means do I intend the above interpretations as definitive, since all of the films lend themselves—as any great artworks do—to diverse readings. Feminist approaches to Under the Skin and Midsommar have already yielded insights unexplored in my analyses, as can ethnocriticism with Zama, or deconstructionism with Persona, to name but a few possible critical avenues. Regardless of one’s approach, however, we must not lose sight of a work’s complex aesthetic structures and the experiences they elicit. It’s difficult for me to articulate the sensation of experiencing something in the theater that I instantly recognize as being new, of realizing—in a room full of people—that I haven’t encountered anything quite like Under the Skin’s opening eye-construction sequence or Midsommar’s mushroom-infused dance around the maypole. Indeed, the 2010s was a golden age for genre cinema, and the pleasure one can derive from their sheer craft can transform despairing material into something thrillingly, unsettlingly fresh.

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In his review of 2005’s The Descent—which, retrospectively, appears to have been a harbinger of the ensuing horror renaissance—Jim Emerson beautifully captured the sensation I felt after first watching Hereditary: “Finally, a scary movie with teeth, not just blood and entrails—a savage and gripping piece of work that jangles your nerves without leaving your brain hanging. And so, for a change, you emerge feeling energized and exhilarated rather than enervated, or merely queasy.”20 Amid all this talk of theory, it’s important not to undervalue the impact of visceral reaction— the exhilaration of seeing something new, even if it is horrific. “At the heart of the theory of catharsis,” writes sociologist T. J. Scheff, “is the process of emotional discharge which brings relief to emotional tension.”21 The operative word here is “discharge,” for we often feel emotionally lighter—perhaps elated—when we walk out of a movie theater. It’s a purgative experience, one that allows us to witness and react to terrible (and terrifying) things without having to deal with the nasty business of actually experiencing them. Part of this power comes from the release of watching something to which so many cling in real life crumble or selfdestruct, be it family (Hereditary), marriage (Enemy), gender (Under the Skin), religion (Midsommar), the so-called civilized world (Zama), or art in and of itself (Funny Games). Crucial to their success is the necessary distance we have from such narratives. Regardless of how immersive a film is, we can always reassure ourselves that what we are seeing isn’t real. On the other hand, theaters provide the necessary intimacy—dark and confined, to the point “that the action appears to the viewers to be taking place (psychologically) right in their laps”22—to not allow for too much of an emotional and physical remove. “The kind of [cathartic] ritual that is needed,” Scheff distinguishes, “may be one which evokes less, rather than more, distance from distress.”23 The theater, therefore, offers the best of both worlds. Its simultaneous immediacy and distance allows us to have a visceral reaction to a giant hammer smashing open a man’s head in Midsommar without succumbing to hysterics. Here I must note that this perverse enjoyment of misery is by no means unique to cinema. In a piece about his experiences as a video game writer, author Joe Dunthorne describes a subset of gamers who delight in their opportunity to vicariously experience—or cause—mayhem: “On YouTube

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you can watch videos of these kinds of players squealing as they throw grenades at the hostages they are supposed to be saving.”24 The same primordial urge may be traced to twentieth-century artists like Ed Ruscha, who—in the sardonically titled Royal Road Test (1967)—documented the effects of tossing a typewriter from a speeding vehicle: “There is no homage here,” Russell Ferguson notes about the experiment, “no overt political critique, and no dark night of the soul either. Instead there is exuberance, fun, and a new, decidedly post-war willingness to waste, to break things just for the hell of it.”25 Although we can’t actively control them as we can video games (or a typewriter)—and while it may be a stretch to call some of them “fun” to watch—these films tap into the same latent desires. Keep in mind that none of them are truly nihilistic; that is, they do not promote annihilation outside the confines of the movie theater.26 Most people probably (hopefully) do not finish Funny Games and feel inspired to torture a family, just as one doesn’t leave a performance of Oedipus Rex with the urge to gouge their eyes out. But there is a certain attraction, however masochistic, to watching destruction precisely because we can go on living our normal lives (perhaps a bit wiser; we learn from these shadows on the wall) after exiting the theater. Even Haneke’s tightly controlled mise-en-scène invokes a sort of perverse pleasure, like watching a shiny, efficient torture device. Producing an aesthetically “ugly” movie is clearly not one of his goals (regardless of his message), nor is it the aim of any of the featured directors. The ultimate catharsis of watching any movie, I think, is in being able to witness a birth, life, and death that aren’t in any sense real. This progression applies to the most saccharine of movies, not because they directly confront these issues but because they—in their very nature, as images that return to the dark void from which they sprang—embody the life cycle itself. But the darkness that punctuates a movie is not permanent. We leave the theater and enter daylight, reborn: an apt metaphor for our desire that something, anything, awaits us on the other side. Fated or not.

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Introduction: “You’ve Always Been the Caretaker” 1. Of course, determinism’s many variations (both philosophical and scientific) are far more complex and nuanced than my rudimentary definition implies. However, for clarity’s sake, I’ll operate under the common assumption that determinism and free will are mutually exclusive. After all, if external factors cause all events, how can one claim to be truly free? 2. Sergey Toymentsev, “Does Tarkovsky Have a Film Theory?,” in ReFocus: The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, ed. Sergey Toymentsev (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 58. 3. Roger Ebert, “The Tenant,” Chicago Sun-Times, September 27, 1976. 4. Pauline Kael, “The Shining: Devolution,” New Yorker, June 9, 1980.

1. Jonathan Glazer’s Identity Trilogy 1. The exchange by the seashore—in which Don confronts Gal in a black void, their faces illuminated only by car headlights—immediately calls Under the Skin’s “interrogation” sequences to mind. Like the silent biker who inspects Johansson’s alien, Don is sizing Gal up and reasserting his dominant role in the gangster “food chain.” 2. Some critics have been quick to assess Under the Skin as a feminist statement, which is understandable, if not completely justifiable. Indeed, it features a “female” character (the alien’s gender is never actually clarified) navigating a male-dominated Earth. She does not have a single conversation with a female character and is eventually abused and destroyed by a man. This victimization at

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3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

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the hands of men is likewise reflected through her partners in crime, a questionable group of male motorcyclists who are constantly keeping a suspicious eye on her as she completes her mission. Yet, to see the film merely as a comment on gender inequality undermines its universal application to the nature of identity, be it a man’s or a woman’s, as a whole. Here is a film that provokes introspection and asks the viewer to question his or her true identity: a mental process that, like the narrative, offers no easy solutions. This dichotomy, so brazenly announced, is reminiscent of Persona’s first shot, which captures the spark of light that brings a projector to life. See chapter 4. Those who criticize Glazer for being too clinical, too detached, should look no further than Gal’s utterly sincere love for Deedee and its relation with the director’s recurring heart imagery: a heart-shaped smoke ring through which she seems to walk; her heart-shaped earrings, a gift from Gal. Oddly enough, the visual representation of the van’s interior—with its sloping, angular windshield—makes the vehicle resemble a cockpit. This is the closest we get to seeing the interior of a “spaceship” (a common sci-fi trope) in Glazer’s world, though we do briefly see a UFO’s revolving lights—barely discernible in a foggy sky—when the alien first arrives on Earth. Gal and his pool boy pantomiming underwater as they probe the boulder prefigures the male victims reaching toward one another in Under the Skin’s black abyss, and a low-angle POV shot of Deedee looking down into the pool calls to mind a similar shot of the alien. While not nearly as abstract as those in Under the Skin, such moments are early indicators of what would become one of Glazer’s ongoing visual motifs: bodies floating in ambiguous spaces. Consider Gal and his wife embracing over the Spanish cityscape, or Don’s bloodied body materializing, phantomlike, before Gal’s eyes during the underwater heist sequence. Maureen Foster, Alien in the Mirror: Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Glazer, and Under the Skin (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2019), 8. Foster, Alien in the Mirror, 53. Foster, Alien in the Mirror, 54. Sexy Beast, by contrast, bursts with dialogue. Consider an early scene in which Gal, still rattled by his near-death experience with the boulder, tells Deedee what to order at a restaurant: “They got mussels. You like mussels. Have the mussels.” It should come as no surprise that Sexy Beast is the only one of Glazer’s films for which he gets no writing credit; the staccato dialogue comes courtesy of writing duo Louis Mellis and David Scinto. Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematograph, trans. Jonathan Griffin (New York: New York Review Books, 2016), 18. Bresson, Notes on the Cinematograph, 12. Jonathan Glazer, “Director Jonathan Glazer on Under the Skin’s Complex Honesty,” interview by Scott Tobias, Dissolve, April 4, 2014.

NOTES

2. The Greek Influence 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (New York: Penguin Classics, 1996), 15. Aristotle, Poetics, 7. Aristotle, Poetics, 15. Malcolm Heath, introduction to Poetics, by Aristotle, trans. Malcolm Heath (New York: Penguin Classics, 1996), xiv. Paul functions as another symbol in the film’s illustrated poster. Two large fingers squeeze and twist his head, which has replaced the crown of a pocket watch. Paul is the watch and, by extension, time itself (a clock, after all, is no more than a symbol for time, a physical representation of intangible temporality). This motif also aurally informs the film; a ticking clock figures prominently in Howard Shore’s original score. Lucy Fischer, Cinemagritte: René Magritte within the Frame of Film History, Theory, and Practice (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2019), 127. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1963), 437. Homer, The Odyssey, 452. Homer, The Odyssey, 204–205. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 89. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, 90. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, 89. Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009), 106. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, 91. Aristotle, Poetics, 39. Aristotle, Poetics, 38. Aristotle, Poetics, 25. Kitarō Nishida, Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness, trans. Robert Schinzinger (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 199.

3. On Display 1. The tubes through which they’re asphyxiated resemble umbilical cords, merging birth and death. How fitting for a film to begin—to be “born”—through such imagery. 2. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1977), 48. 3. Berger, Ways of Seeing, 26. 4. Catherine Lupton, “Chris Marker: Memory’s Apostle,” The Criterion Collection, February 27, 2012. 5. Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (New York: Random House, 2004), 140.

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6. This inward-outward dialectic extends into the narrative arcs themselves. Where Hereditary’s Annie is largely “stuck” at home, Midsommar’s Dani spends most of the film attempting to escape hers, only to be enmeshed in a new home(land)— one perhaps worse than the last. 7. An earlier scene foreshadows this juxtaposition. After the Ättestupan suicides, a dissolve combines the victims’ burning remains with Dani in a field; as a result, she briefly appears to be sitting in the fire. 8. We know little about Dani’s parents (besides their ambiguously troubled relationship with her sister), so this glimpse into their private lives provides tantalizing information. The mother’s central placement in the frame first grabs our attention. Light from an adjacent room, presumably a bathroom, illuminates her powder-blue nightgown (which resembles the blue dresses worn by many women in the commune), and the yellow-flowered wallpaper behind her reminds us of the film’s pastoral setting and of Dani’s flower dress. The curtains are also yellow, as is the lamp affixed to what appears to be an architect’s desk to her left. Most intriguingly, she is not alone in the room. The picture frames on the right-hand wall reflect an image of the father sitting on the bed, his back to us. That Aster would pack so many bizarre details into a shot that lasts less than one second carries some interesting implications. Since it’s all but impossible to notice—let alone analyze—anything besides the mother’s presence without pausing the film and closely scrutinizing the frame’s peripheral details, I can’t help but wonder if Aster wants us to stop his film at certain points in order to get the full picture. This may seem self-defeating (pausing a film arguably breaks its “spell”), but by prompting us to do so, he again reminds us that we are watching an artificial construct—a meticulously staged one, at that. 9. Earlier in the film—before she embraces her new home—the word “family” in and of itself has a poisonous effect on Dani, as its utterance is what causes her mushroom-induced anxiety attack. 10. Galen Strawson, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc.(New York: New York Review Books, 2018), 93. 11. Strawson, Things That Bother Me, 107. 12. When the English classroom reappears in the final act, the teacher’s note on the board that “punishment brings wisdom” points to Annie’s imminent revelations about her mother. 13. Tom Nicholson, “ ‘Midsommar’ Director Ari Aster Explains Why He Keeps Smashing His Characters’ Heads In,” Esquire, July 17, 2019. 14. Meagan Navarro, “Examining Ari Aster’s Use of Head Trauma and Close-up Gore in ‘Hereditary’ and ‘Midsommar,’ ” Bloody Disgusting, July 5, 2019. 15. It is also, we learn, a symbol from the esoteric language featured in the grandmother’s book of witchcraft. This symbology also factors into the set design; even the house’s wallpaper calls these strange figures to mind. 16. An essential visual motif, yellow appears in a number of significant times and places: It’s the color of the T-shirt Dani’s sister wore the night of her suicide, the flower path that leads them to the commune, Christian’s last-minute bungle of a

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17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

birthday gift (a mound cake), the drug-infused drink Dani takes before the maypole dance, the sacred temple in which all of Dani’s friends are burned in sacrifice (a neat editing trick alludes to the temple’s destruction by fire: When Dani blows out her birthday cake candle, Aster jump cuts to the triangular temple, which, in shadow and surrounded by muted, brown buildings, almost looks ablaze in the encroaching dusk), and a number of props (Dani’s apartment lampshade, the sun-shaped walkway through which she first enters the commune, and the wooden planks beneath her throne when she chooses Christian for the sacrificial burning). Other odd details about this room emerge upon repeat viewings. A teacup left on the windowsill anticipates Annie’s tea time with Joan, and the triangle etched into the floor (Annie doesn’t react to this symbol, so we can infer she was at least partially aware of her mother’s occult interests) draws our attention to the shape’s recurrence elsewhere: the triangular shape of the ceiling in Charlie’s room and of the attic roof under which her grandmother’s body is placed, the pyramid posters adorning the walls of Peter’s history classroom, and even (this last one is a bit of a stretch, I know) the triangular pattern on the garage door. This fatalistic outlook is one of Aster’s many nods to Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968). The latter’s American debut also revealed minor occurrences as meticulously plotted pieces of a vast conspiracy (poor Hutch’s missing glove and the absent picture frames come to mind). Aster similarly fetishizes obscure, leatherbound texts of the occult (a mysterious book of spells, Notes on Spiritualism, echoes All of Them Witches and anticipates Midsommar’s sacred Rubi Radr library) and other totemic objects; Annie’s necklace of her family crest, for example, is a clever riff on Rosemary’s tannis root necklace. Although its allusions abound, Hereditary feels remarkably singular. While Polanski’s film is bathed in sunlight and splashy, sixties-era colors (in this sense, it’s more closely aligned with Midsommar), Aster’s focuses on blue and brown color schemes; the Ira Levin adaptation is full of tongue-in-cheek dry wit, whereas the latter is largely humorless (although some high school stoner hijinks are thrown in for good measure). Nevertheless, all three tales pull off the remarkable feat of somehow twisting bleak denouements into perversely optimistic celebrations. Ari Aster and Robert Eggers, “Deep Cuts with Ari Aster & Robert Eggers,” July 17, 2019, in The A24 Podcast, produced by A24, 10:05, https://a24films.com/notes /2019/07/deep-cuts-with-robert-eggers-and-ari-aster. Yet another echo of Rosemary’s Baby. bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995), 85. Like Aster, Peele uses color to further interlace his narrative and thematic threads; a close-up of a strawberry or a sandbox’s glossy red interior calls to mind, for instance, the doubles’ matching red jumpsuits. The same could be said for Peele’s dialogue. In one scene, a horrified onlooker—observing a gang of shadow people—says on a newscast that “we saw red,” which ironically (and, on her part, unintentionally) comments on the doubles’ hunger for bloody revenge.

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23. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 8. 24. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real (New York: Saga Press, 2016), 333. 25. This implication that the oppressor is in a sense also among the oppressed will be explored further in chapter  6, which draws from Paulo Freire’s radical pedagogy. 26. hooks, Killing Rage, 110. 27. Peele also duplicates the numbers fifteen and five, albeit to a lesser extent than eleven. Fifteen minutes, for example, is both the amount of time young Adelaide went missing at the carnival and the amount of time needed for the police to arrive at the besieged home: another example, perhaps, of things from the past and present “lining up.” Elsewhere, Luniz’s “I Got 5 On It”—which has since become synonymous with Peele’s film—plays in the family car right before Adelaide’s flashback to her father angrily shouting “5 minutes!” Perhaps the lyrics caused this unpleasant memory of Adelaide’s to resurface. 28. The basement also has a wall-length ballet mirror—as in the funhouse, the emphasis is again on characters observing themselves. 29. Coates, Between the World and Me, 106. 30. Subtle costume choices—such as a pair of sandals Adelaide wears that are quite similar to those worn by the shadow people—hint at this revelation. 31. Peele’s dialogue is suffused with references to this interconnection. Even a corny joke (“Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” “You.” “You, who?” “Yoohoo!”) echoes the opening funhouse scene (“Find Yourself”) and anticipates Jason’s “they’re us” epiphany. When Red and her family arrive at Adelaide’s house, it is indeed “herself” knocking on the door. 32. Lucy Williams et al., “Monstering Madness: Criminal Lunatics in Broadmoor 1863– 1913,” in Monsters, Law, Crime: Explorations in Gothic Criminology, ed. Caroline Joan “Kay” S. Picart (London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2021), 122. 33. The argument could be made, of course, that Peele relies too heavily on tropes that equate physical deformity with evil. Consider Red’s distorted voice, Abraham’s lumbering gait, Pluto’s burn scars, or Umbrae’s pockmarked face. Although these characters—or, at least, Red—eventually earn some sympathy, audiences are clearly meant to side with Adelaide and her family.

4. A New Family Emerges 1. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), 19. 2. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London, British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1977), 46. 3. Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern, trans. Joan Tate (New York: Penguin, 1989), 206. 4. I’m reminded of Us; Elisabet and Alma mirror both one another and—cumulatively— Bergman, just as Adelaide and Red are one soul in two discrete bodies. 5. In a juxtaposition that calls to mind the statues in After Hours, a close-up of a head sculpture (foregrounded when Alma leaves the beach house for the last

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

time) jump cuts to a close-up of Elisabet’s face, frozen during her disastrous Electra performance. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 56. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 22. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 67. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 72. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 72. William Shakespeare, As You Like It (New York: Signet Classics, 1998), 43. In an earlier Bergman film, Through a Glass Darkly (1961), the mentally unstable Karin (Harriet Andersson) believes she has seen God emerge from a doorway and attempt to rape her: “The God that came out was a spider. . . . The whole time I saw his eyes. They were cold and calm.” Her description is more vivid and terrifying than any visual representation could possibly be. Persona takes the exact opposite approach; no one explicitly speaks of spiders, but we do see the one that crawls across the camera. Is this the God to which Karin referred five years prior? Us again comes to mind. Peele’s vision of interconnecting, subterranean tunnels is reminiscent of a web and summons images of what may be called a “network of suffering,” one on a much larger scale than the intimate portraits of Enemy and Persona.

5. Fate Remade 1. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time . . . In Hollywood (2019) is one recent example that examines the film-within-a-film trope. Rather than wade through the director’s dizzying self-referentiality, consider one scene that embodies this mimesis: Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) attending a showing of The Wrecking Crew (1968). There’s something uncanny, even disorienting, about seeing a character watch a film (one in which she costars, no less) in a theater—all while in a theater oneself, as the viewer. One big-screen experience is nested in the other. 2. Though not technically remakes, consider the “spiritual remakes” by filmmakers who obsessively revisit the same basic narratives, characters, and themes (Ozu, Bergman, and Fellini come to mind, as do contemporary auteurs like Wes Anderson and Sang-soo Hong), or the “reboot remakes” so prevalent in the Marvel canon (Spiderman and the Hulk, for example, have been played by no fewer than three different actors within the past few decades). 3. Van Sant attempts to update this trope when he has Lila deliver the final blow to Norman in the fruit cellar, rather than scream helplessly and be saved by Sam (who’s a bit of a dolt in the remake). 4. Here, the motel’s synecdochic function (Earth in microcosm) emerges: People come and go, but it remains. 5. Adam Chitwood, “Gus Van Sant Explains Why He Remade ‘Psycho,’ ” Collider, July 23, 2018. 6. Unfortunately, he and cinematographer Christopher Doyle do little with the unlimited possibilities color affords them. Two exceptions come to mind: Mother’s pink

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

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dress matching the pink outfit Marion wears in the office (perhaps hinting at Marion’s “threat” to Mother as an influential female presence in Norman’s life) and the white bathroom in which Marion is killed. When Norman flicks on the light to show her the bathroom, it practically glows (white light also proves crucial to the Funny Games remake). Elsewhere, subtleties are lost by the inclusion of color. Hitchcock’s stark juxtaposition of Marion’s white and black undergarments—a much-discussed motif that expresses her moral corruption after having decided to steal the money—is not replicated here. However, Van Sant does add a prop—a parasol Marion carries around at the car dealership—to similarly convey her desire to conceal. The remake is more explicit, but not in the ways one would expect. For example, the shower scene replicates Hitchcock’s careful avoidance of any nudity or gore (though we do, briefly, see two bleeding gashes on Marion’s back, after her limp body slumps out of the shower). On the other hand, the original’s sexual insinuations are here explicitly announced. In the opening hotel scene, the moans of a couple having sex in the adjacent room accompany Marion and Sam’s conversation, and Marion glimpses at her lover’s bare—but still concealed—midriff when she says “I’ll lick the stamps.” Van Sant shows female nudity (likely what earned the film its R-rating), but does so in a throwaway moment: Lila flips through a pornographic magazine in Norman’s bedroom. I must emphasize that this revision is purely auditory. We hear Norman undo his belt buckle and unzip his pants, but we see neither action. Van Sant steadfastly maintains Hitchcock’s framing. In a glaring emulation of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991)—particularly of Buffalo Bill’s labyrinthine basement—the fruit cellar is presented as a macabre sideshow, with Mother’s rotten body displayed in front of a crude aviary. Haneke’s family lives in a gated community: an intentional exile. On the other hand, Bates’s insular existence is involuntary; his world is one of a crumbling business and of borderline poverty. Both narratives’ isolated settings, however, subtly comment on socioeconomic status, albeit from diametrically opposed ends of the spectrum. Michael Haneke, “Michael Haneke, Funny Games U.S.,” interview by Nick Dawson, Filmmaker, March 14, 2008. Haneke, Filmmaker interview. Michael Haneke, “Interview: Michael Haneke (Funny Games U.S.),” interview by Barbara Celis, IONCINEMA, March 17, 2008. For clarity, I will refer to characters by their respective actors’ names in this section, after introducing them. Even the design of the bowl itself is “busier” in the remake, its cartoonish dog paws contrasting with the original’s solid, light-brown bowl. The near fetishism with which the broken eggs are framed also echoes Bresson’s tight focus on objects. I’m reminded of the hazelnut-picking scene in L’argent (1983); the sequence differs from Funny Games, however, in that it portrays a

NOTES

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

moment of serenity before meaningless death, whereas the shattered eggs portend it. Lothar wears a nightgown throughout this sequence, Watts a bra and underwear. The cynic in me wonders if the remake intends to titillate its audience with this slight—but conspicuous—variation. Bilge Ebiri, “Funny Games: Don’t You Want to See How It Ends?,” The Criterion Collection, May 14, 2019. The Austrian actors’ performances align more closely with Bresson’s conception of “models,” as discussed in chapter 1. Ebiri, “Funny Games: Don’t You Want to See How It Ends?” Vania Barraza, “Intimacies and Global Aesthetics in Vida de Familia by Alicia Scherson and Cristián Jiménez,” in Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World, eds. Vania Barraza and Carl Fischer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020), 212. Interestingly, Hitchcock and Haneke—so preoccupied with violence and its implications in the United States—both hail from different countries (England and Austria, respectively). Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 95–96. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 96. Ebiri, “Funny Games: Don’t You Want to See How It Ends?”

6. Goodbye to Symbols 1. Gerd Gemünden, Contemporary Film Directors: Lucrecia Martel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 106. 2. Gemünden, Contemporary Film Directors: Lucrecia Martel, 89. 3. Gemünden, Contemporary Film Directors: Lucrecia Martel, 105. 4. Gemünden, Contemporary Film Directors: Lucrecia Martel, 107. 5. Despite these otherworldly flourishes, Martel’s condemnation is geared toward very real humans and their exploitative institutions. When Zama stays at a supposedly “haunted” inn, he sees what appears to be a box dragging itself across the ground outside. He’s told, however, that it’s just a child in there, though the worker claims that “I wish it were the inexplicable.” Similarly, the film’s conflicts can’t easily be foisted onto a supernatural presence. 6. Quoted in Gemünden, Contemporary Film Directors: Lucrecia Martel, 138. 7. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1977), 7. 8. Zama’s lack of control is also on full display when the son inexplicably brandishes the man’s sword without having taken it from him. For a detailed analysis of this scene, refer to Gemünden. 9. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 21.

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10. Quoted in Roy Harris and T. J. Taylor, “Saussure on Language and Thought,” in Landmarks in Linguistic Thought I: The Western Tradition from Socrates to Saussure, ed. T. J. Taylor (New York: Routledge, 1989), 209. 11. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 35. 12. Foucault, The Order of Things, 48. 13. Zama works under three Governors throughout the years; while these men come and go, he stays. 14. It is symbolically significant that the scribe’s “proper” use of language—as a means for creating art, rather than as a form of currency—is what earns him his ticket to Lerma. 15. The latter’s imprisonments become increasingly dangerous; he begins as a metaphorical prisoner of his bureaucratic position, is later shackled—literally—by Porto, and then is doubly imprisoned when an indigenous tribe, the Guanáes, captures and tortures Porto’s gang. 16. If anything, material goods are more valuable to Porto than human life. Earlier in the crew’s mission, before the revelation of his true identity, the bandit stumbles across a corpse in a tree. “No silver?” he’s asked. “Nothing,” Porto deadpans, “only a dead man.” 17. David L. Cowles, “Deconstruction and Poststructuralism,” in The Critical Experience: Literary Reading, Writing, and Criticism, ed. David L. Cowles (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1994), 113. 18. In a moment of rare foresight, Zama expresses the same opinion of the stones toward the second governor, who’s obsessed with finding more. “This is worthless,” he tells the man, but the governor is undeterred: “Coconuts are worthless, right? Doesn’t matter. I’ll keep it anyway.” He seems well aware that they lack an inherent value but all too eager to take advantage of the value others attach to it. 19. Both men are thieves, though Zama has the added privilege of governmental support. When they observe a group of wandering indigenous people—blinded as a form of punishment for some unknown crime—he asks if Porto was behind it. “Maybe by you people,” the bandit responds. The underlying question is hard to miss: Is there really much of a difference between these two invasive forces? 20. Gemünden, Contemporary Film Directors: Lucrecia Martel, 127. 21. Foucault, The Order of Things, 167. 22. Foucault, The Order of Things, 176. 23. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore (New York: Verso, 1998), 42–43. 24. Kitarō Nishida, Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness, trans. Robert Schinzinger (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973), 201. 25. The son’s unexplained condition ironically foreshadows Zama’s regression to an infantlike state—speechless, unable to walk—in the final scene. 26. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 44. 27. Berger, Ways of Seeing, 96.

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28. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 56. 29. Of course, just because water is inherently valuable doesn’t mean it can’t be exploited and commodified, as various water crises—like that of Flint, Michigan— have made all too clear in the last decade. 30. Cowles, “Deconstruction and Poststructuralism,” 109–110. 31. Here, viewers may be reminded of Malemba (Mariana Nunes), Luciana’s slave who later buys her own freedom; she’s not literally mute, as Zama assumes, but chooses not to speak, perhaps as an act of agency in a world otherwise devoid of choice. “She has her tongue,” a bitter Luciana says. The same may be said for the second governor’s mute assistant, Faltito (Marcelo Sein), who seems to be a fool before we hear his voice through an eloquent internal monologue about the severed ears. 32. Quoted in Gemünden, Contemporary Film Directors: Lucrecia Martel, 147.

Conclusion: Beyond the Screen 1. Two other memorable examples are Amy Seimetz’s She Dies Tomorrow and Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor. The former is an apocalyptic drama in which the existential dread of knowing exactly when one will die proves contagious, the latter an exercise in extreme body horror about an assassin who assumes control of people’s minds and bodies—via VR-inspired headgear—in order to carry out her assigned killings as them. Although superficially disparate in terms of scale, genre, and target audience, these films (like Tenet) tackle issues of free will and predestination through their unconventional narrative structures and stylistic choices. 2. Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (New York: Random House, 2004), 58. 3. Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos, 58. 4. It’s a bit amusing how—despite its references to the likes of Richard Feynman, which are peppered in the dialogue primarily to cover plot holes most won’t even notice (Nolan doesn’t give us time to notice)—formulaic Tenet ultimately is. With its unequivocally evil villain, requisite woman in trouble, and central brotherly partnership between Protagonist and his partner, it’s not nearly as “highconcept” as its packaging implies. 5. Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, trans. Jan Van Bragt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 172. 6. Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, trans. Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (New York: Riverhead, 2018), 52. 7. Rovelli, The Order of Time, 53. 8. Rovelli, The Order of Time, 43. 9. On the other hand, physical books’ enclosure is arguably more pronounced than films’ (especially when the latter are experienced in a theater). To hold a physical book is to constantly be reminded of “where” one is in the text. “How far are you in X book?” we frequently ask others, as if the book is less an object than a journey. But unless a reader is so rapt by the text that they lose all awareness of the

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10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

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physical world (how many of us have truly experienced such transcendent immersion?), it’s impossible to not notice the text’s weight incrementally shifting leftward. In this sense, film has the upper hand in embodying temporal relativity; without physical markers (or a glance at the clock), it can be hard to tell when a movie is nearing its end credits. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 475. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1977), 17. The single-location (sometimes single-person) thriller, the roots of which can be traced to the likes of Sorry, Wrong Number and Rope (both released in 1948), has had a resurgence this century. Films like The Mist (2007) and The Descent (2005) pit small groups of people in enclosed spaces (a grocery store and underground cave, respectively) against supernatural forces (and, ultimately, each other), while semi-realistic examples include star vehicles like Ryan Reynolds’s Buried and James Franco’s 127 Hours (both 2010) as well as borderline parodic schlock like ATM (2012), Frozen (2010), and 247°F (2011). This sub-subgenre is alive and well today, thanks to releases like Centigrade (2020) and Oxygen (2021). It took less than a year for the horror genre to tap into this unprecedented selfconfinement via the computer screen, with Shudder’s 2020 release of Host. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 2001), 163. Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 329. Mishra, Age of Anger, 339. Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 103. The mind-brain distinction is, of course, still a subject of debate, but I write with the assumption that the former cannot exist without the latter. I acknowledge that many would respectfully disagree on this point and, in all sincerity, their guess is as good as mine. William Carlos Williams, Paterson (New York: New Directions, 1995), 6. Jim Emerson, “Into the Maelstrom,” RogerEbert.com, August 3, 2006. T. J. Scheff, Catharsis in Healing, Ritual, and Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 47. Scheff, Catharsis in Healing, Ritual, and Drama, 137. Scheff, Catharsis in Healing, Ritual, and Drama, 146. Joe Dunthorne, “Diary,” London Review of Books 43, no. 13 (2021): 37. Russell Ferguson, “The Show Is Over,” in Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950, ed. Deborah E. Horowitz (New York: Prestel, 2013), 125. One may be tempted to point to Funny Games as being nihilistic. While its amoral killers certainly are, the film (and its director) are not; Haneke himself has spoken of his desire to jolt audiences into an awareness of their complicity toward cinematic violence. He is not just scolding us for lapping up violence; he’s trying to get us to see what we have become as consumers of violent media and rethink how we respond to it.

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Navarro, Meagan. “Examining Ari Aster’s Use of Head Trauma and Close-up Gore in ‘Hereditary’ and ‘Midsommar.’ ” Bloody Disgusting, July 5, 2019. Nicholson, Tom. “ ‘Midsommar’ Director Ari Aster Explains Why He Keeps Smashing His Characters’ Heads In.” Esquire, July 17, 2019. Nishida, Kitarō. Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness. Trans. Robert Schinzinger. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973. Nishitani, Keiji. Religion and Nothingness. Trans. Jan Van Bragt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Rovelli, Carlo. The Order of Time. Trans. Simon Carnell and Erica Segre. New York: Riverhead, 2018. Scheff, T. J. Catharsis in Healing, Ritual, and Drama. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. New York: Signet Classics, 1998. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Picador, 2001. ——. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Strawson, Galen. Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc. New York: New York Review Books, 2018. Toymentsev, Sergey. “Does Tarkovsky Have a Film Theory?” In ReFocus: The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, ed. Sergey Toymentsev, 46–63. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Trans. Emma Craufurd. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009. Williams, Lucille, et al. “Monstering Madness: Criminal Lunatics in Broadmoor 1863– 1913.” In Monsters, Law, Crime: Explorations in Gothic Criminology, ed. Caroline Joan “Kay” S. Picart, 121–137. London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2021. Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. New York: New Directions, 1995.

145

INDE X

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate a figure on the corresponding page. action differences in remakes, 96–98 After Hours (1985), 8, 28, 33–35, 39–43 Age of Anger (Mishra), 125 Amazon Prime, 123–124 American Dream determinism, 62 Andersen, Hans Christian, 64 Aristotle, 28, 35, 39–40, 42 artistic depictions of heads, 55 Aster, Ari, 8, 47, 49–50, 52–66 avant-garde themes, 20, 20, 47, 67, 122 Ballhaus, Michael, 41 Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), 123 Benedetto, Antonio di, 105 Berger, John, 49, 113

Bergman, Ingmar, 8, 9, 50, 67–82, 71 Between the World and Me (Coates), 60 Birth (2004), 8, 15–26 birth/rebirth themes, 18 black womanhood representations, 59 Bloch, Robert, 89, 101 Blue (1993), 122 body movements, 24 Bresson, Robert, 25–26, 121 Caché (2005), 93 Camus, Albert, 33–34 carbon copy remake, 86, 92–93 Carpenter, John, 2 Carroll, Lewis, 64 catharsis, 126–129 character doubles, 60–63

147

INDEX

characters: in circular narratives, 28–35; Odyssean arc of, 30–33; Sisyphus, as character arc, 33–35. See also dialectically opposed characters “Chris Marker: Memory’s Apostle” (Lupton), 50 circular narratives: After Hours (1985), 8, 28, 33–35, 39–43; characters in, 28–35; Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), 8, 9, 28–32, 35–39, 38, 39, 42–43; introduction to, 7–8, 27–28; one-view plots, 35–42; symbolic imitation, 28–30 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 60 Coen, Ethan, 8, 28, 31, 38 Coen, Joel, 8, 28, 31, 38 cognitive dissonance of viewer, 100 collapsed time, 105 color scheme differences in remakes, 96 compatibilism, 1, 4, 54 computer-based found footage films, 2 contemporary cinema, 6, 13 crime thrillers, 6, 15, 26 crowns, as journey symbols, 56 currency symbols, 110–114 deceit themes, 81 deconstructionism, 9, 127 Derrida, Jacques, 107, 116 Descent, The (2005), 128 Desplat, Alexandre, 13

148

determinism/deterministic themes: American Dream determinism, 62; defined, 93, 119–120; dialectically opposed characters in, 68; entrapment theme, 88, 91, 120, 124–125; future, as concrete, 117–118; human choices in, 54; implications and scope, 7–9; internal deterministic forces, 82; introduction to, 1–9; remakes and, 85, 100–103; as self-actualization tool, 124; surrealism and, 60; tableau imagery in, 47–48 dialectically opposed characters: control and, 72; Enemy (2013), 8, 67–68, 70–82, 75; introduction to, 67–68; performances of, 75–82; Persona (1966), 8, 9, 50, 67–82, 71; surfaces and, 68–72 Disney studio, 29 dollhouse imagery, 56–57 dysfunctional families in film, 48 Easter eggs in film, 62 Ebert, Roger, 5 Ebiri, Bilge, 98 editing jumps in time, 122 Eggers, Robert, 58 El Eternauta (Oesterheld), 105 emotionalism, 99–100 Enemy (2013), 8, 67–68, 70–82, 75

INDEX

entrapment theme, 88, 91, 120, 124–125 ethnocriticism, 127 European imperialism, 112, 113 Fabric of the Cosmos, The (Greene), 117 facial close-ups, 73 facial imagery, 55 family themes, 68, 80–81, 119 Field in England, A (2013), 47 Filmed Thought (Pippin), 2 Film-Philosophy (journal), 2 Fincher, David, 51–52 finitude, 120–122 Foucault, Michel, 107–108, 111 fourth wall, breaking of, 52–53, 53 freedom: another’s abject despair and, 60; behind the camera, 86; of the future, 120; globalization and, 125; as illusory, 9, 104; implications of, 41; independent freedom, 74; within inherent constraints, 4; limited compatibilist outlook, 54; loss of, 59, 79, 113; power and, 108; through surrender, 114–116; utopian promises of, 123 free will, 1–2, 8, 54, 120 Freire, Paulo, 112–113 Funny Games (1997), 86, 92–94 Funny Games (2007), 8, 86, 92–103, 95, 97, 99, 129 futile symbols, 107–114 future, as concrete, 117–119

Gemünden, Gerd, 105, 110 genre cinema, 9, 47, 86, 124, 127 Get Out (2017), 59 Glazer, Jonathan, 8, 13. See also “Identity Trilogy,” of Jonathan Glazer globalization and freedom, 125 Godfrey, Barry, 65 Goffman, Erving, 8, 68, 69, 76, 77, 78 Good Will Hunting (1997), 89 Greene, Brian, 50, 117 Groundhog Day (1993), 123 Gullón, Javier, 71 hand close-ups, 73–74 “Hands Across America” social event (1986), 59, 60 Haneke, Michael, 8, 86, 92–103, 95, 97, 99, 129 Happy Death Day (2017), 124 hate-fueled scapegoating, 125 heads, artistic depictions of, 55 Heath, Malcolm, 28 hedge maze model in The Shining, 2–5, 3, 4 Heidegger, Martin, 122 heist capers, 13–14 Hereditary (2018), 8, 47–58, 128 Hitchcock, Alfred, 86–87, 91 Homer, 28, 33, 35–37, 39–40 homoerotic relationships, 77 hooks, bell, 59, 62 horror films, 1–2, 7–8 Host (2020), 2 human chain tableau, 59

149

INDEX

“Identity Trilogy,” of Jonathan Glazer: Birth (2004), 8, 15–26; (dis)integration of identity, 17–23; introduction to, 8, 14–16; Sexy Beast (2000), 8, 13–26; Under the Skin (2013), 8, 9, 13, 16–26, 19, 20 imagery and stasis, 6 Incredible Journey, The (1963), 29 independent freedom, 74 in medias res, 37 Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), 8, 9, 28–32, 35–39, 38, 39, 42–43 internal deterministic forces, 82 In the Mouth of Madness (1994), 2 ironic twists of fate, 108 isolationism, 6, 71, 86, 106, 125 Jarman, Derek, 122 journeys home arc, 30–31 Jürges, Jürgen, 96 Kael, Pauline, 5–6 Khondji, Darius, 96 Kill List (2011), 6–7, 9 Kubrick, Stanley, 3–5, 25 La Ciénaga (2001), 106 La Jetée (1963), 50 landscape images, 24, 114–115, 114 language symbols, 107–110 Le Guin, Ursula K., 60 Levi, Mica, 13 Lindström, Jörgen, 82

150

Litch, Mary M., 2 “Luck Swallows Everything” (Strawson), 53–54 Lupton, Catherine, 50 Lynch, David, 121 magical realism, 106 Magritte, René, 30 male gaze, 71 Map of Tiny Perfect Things, The (2021), 123–124 Martel, Lucrecia, 9, 104–116 Marxist theory, 9, 111 medium close-ups, 74 Melancholia (2011), 47 melodramas, 15, 26, 123 Midsommar (2019), 8, 9, 47–58, 49, 53 Minion, Joseph, 30 mirror motifs, 73, 74–75, 75 mise-en-scène, 106, 129 Mishra, Pankaj, 125 “Monstering Madness” (Williams, Walklate, Godfrey), 65 monster metaphors, 65 movement in opening shots, 48–49 music and emotions, 24 “Myth of Sisyphus, The” (Camus), 33 narrative streamlining, 90 Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, 5 Nishitani, Keiji, 120, 125–126 Nolan, Christopher, 9, 117–120 Notes on the Cinematograph (Bresson), 25

INDEX

numbers, as metaphor, 63 Nykvist, Sven, 70 O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), 29, 31 obstacles along the way arc, 30–31 Odyssean arc of characters, 30–33 Odyssey (Homer), 28, 33, 35–37, 39–40 Oedipus the King (Sophocles), 54 Oesterheld, Héctor Germán, 105 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 107 “Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, The” (Le Guin), 60 one-view plots, 35–42 opening shots, 17, 48–49 oppressor-oppressed contradiction, 113 Order of Things, The (Foucault), 107 the Other, 65 Panic Room (2002), 52 paradox of value, 111 Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire), 112–113 Peele, Jordan, 8, 47, 59, 62 period genre, 105–106 Persona (1966), 8, 9, 50, 67–82, 71, 126–127, 127 Philosophy Through Film (Litch), 2 photographic image, 4 Pippin, Robert B., 2 Poetics (Aristotle), 42 Poetics (Heath), 28 Pogorzelski, Pawel, 51

Polanski, Roman, 5–6 predetermination, 2, 7, 23, 27, 54, 61, 100–101, 118 Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, The (Goffman), 68 Psycho (1960), 86–89, 91 Psycho (1998), 8, 9, 86–91, 92, 100–103, 122 psychodrama, 77 psychological thrillers, 67 rabbits, as metaphor, 64 Race and Culture (Park), 68 redos, 85–86 remakes: carbon copy remake, 86, 92–93; deterministic constraints, 100–103; Funny Games (2007), 8, 86, 92–103, 95, 97, 99; introduction to, 85–86; Psycho (1998), 8, 9, 86–91, 92; shot-for-shot remake, 86; viewer reactions, 100–103 remixes, 85 Ring, The (Verbinski), 2 role-play framework, 8 Rovelli, Carlo, 120–121 Royal Road Test (1967), 129 Ruscha, Ed, 129 Samuels, Ian, 123–124 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 107 Scheff, T. J., 128 Schipper, Sebastian, 122–123 science fiction films, 1–2 Scorsese, Martin, 8, 28–30, 40–41

151

INDEX

self-actualization, 124 self-awareness in opening shots, 17 self-containment theme, 69–70 selfhood, 1, 26, 126 sexist representations of black womanhood, 59 Sexy Beast (2000), 8, 13–26 Shaw, Jay, 73 Shining, The (1980), 2–7, 3, 4, 9, 117 shot-for-shot remake, 86 silent films, 24 Sisyphus, as character arc, 33–35 slave symbology, 112 slice-of-life in film, 40 Sontag, Susan, 102, 125 Sophocles, 54 sound close-ups, 90–91 sound-image juxtaposition, 106 space-time theory, 120 spatiotemporal prison plots, 123–124 spider/spiderweb imagery, 61–62 spoiler alerts, 123 stasis in opening shots, 48–49 Stefano, Joseph, 87 still-photographic method, 50 Strawson, Galen, 53–54 surreal images, 24, 30, 52 swirling cloud model, 107–108 symbolic imitation, 28–30 symbolism: currency symbols, 110–114; freedom through

152

surrender, 114–116; futile symbols, 107–114; introduction to, 104–107; language symbols, 107–110; Zama (2017), 9, 104–116, 114, 115 tableau imagery: Hereditary (2018), 8, 47–58; introduction to, 47–48; Midsommar (2019), 8, 9, 47–58, 49, 53; Us (2019), 8, 47, 59–66 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 2 technological interconnectedness, 125 temporal ambiguity, 122–123 temptation themes, 81–82 Tenant, The (1976), 5 Tenet (2020), 9, 117–120 therapeutic psychodrama, 77 time: collapsed time, 105; editing jumps in time, 122; finitude and, 120–122; as frozen river, 50; future, as concrete, 117–119; representation of, 104–105; space-time theory, 120; spatiotemporal prison plots, 123–124; temporal ambiguity, 122–123 trace, defined by Derrida, 116 transcendence theme, 115–116 tribalism, 125 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), 25 Under the Skin (2013), 8, 9, 13, 16–26, 19, 20

INDEX

unexpected detours arc, 30–31 Unfriended (2014), 2 unity in epic poetry, 35 Us (2019), 8, 47, 59–66 utopian society theme, 60 Van Sant, Gus, 8, 9, 86–91, 92, 100–103, 122 Verbinski, Gore, 2 Vertov, Dziga, 123 Victoria (2015), 122–123 viewer reactions to remakes, 100–103 Villeneuve, Denis, 8, 67–68, 70–82, 75

visceral gore, 55, 128 von Trier, Lars, 47 Walklate, Sandra, 65 Ways of Seeing (Berger), 49 Weil, Simone, 35 Wheatley, Ben, 6, 47 White Ribbon, The (2009), 93 Williams, Lucy, 65 Williams, William Carlos, 126 YouTube, 128–129 Zama (2017), 9, 104–116, 114, 115, 127

153

SHORT CUTS INTRODUCTIONS TO FILM STUDIES BRITISH SOCIAL REALISM: FROM DOCUMENTARY TO BRIT GRIT , SAMANTHA LAY NEW GERMAN CINEMA: THE IMAGES OF A GENERATION , JULIA KNIGHT AVANT- GARDE FILM: FORMS, THEMES AND PASSIONS , MICHAEL O’PRAY PRODUCTION DESIGN: ARCHITECTS OF THE SCREEN , JANE BARNWELL MELODRAMA: GENRE, STYLE, SENSIBILITY , JOHN MERCER AND MARTIN SHINGLER FEMINIST FILM STUDIES: WRITING THE WOMAN INTO CINEMA , JANET MCCABE FILM PERFORMANCE: FROM ACHIEVEMENT TO APPRECIATION , ANDREW KLEVAN NEW DIGITAL CINEMA: REINVENTING THE MOVING IMAGE , HOLLY WILLIS WOMEN’S CINEMA: THE CONTESTED SCREEN , ALISON BUTLER FILM EDITING: THE ART OF THE EXPRESSIVE , VALERIE ORPEN THE HORROR GENRE: FROM BEELZEBUB TO BLAIR WITCH , PAUL WELLS THE STAR SYSTEM: HOLLYWOOD’S PRODUCTION OF POPULAR IDENTITIES , PAUL MCDONALD SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA: FROM OUTERSPACE TO CYBERSPACE , GEOFF KING AND TANYA KRZYWINSKA EARLY SOVIET CINEMA: INNOVATION, IDEOLOGY AND PROPAGANDA , DAVID GILLESPIE READING HOLLYWOOD: SPACES AND MEANINGS IN AMERICAN FILM , DEBORAH THOMAS THE WESTERN GENRE: FROM LORDSBURG TO BIG WHISKEY , JOHN SAUNDERS NEW CHINESE CINEMA: CHALLENGING REPRESENTATIONS , SHEILA CORNELIUS, WITH IAN HAYDN SMITH COSTUME AND CINEMA: DRESS CODES IN POPULAR FILM , SARAH STREET ANIMATION: GENRE AND AUTHORSHIP , PAUL WELLS PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CINEMA: THE PLAY OF SHADOWS , VICKY LEBEAU MISE- EN- SCÈNE: FILM STYLE AND INTERPRETATION , JOHN GIBBS EARLY CINEMA: FROM FACTORY GATE TO DREAM FACTORY , SIMON POPPLE AND JOE KEMBER THE MUSICAL: RACE, GENDER, AND PERFORMANCE , SUSAN SMITH FILM NOIR: FROM BERLIN TO SIN CITY , MARK BOULD TEEN MOVIES: AMERICAN YOUTH ON SCREEN , TIMOTHY SHARY ITALIAN NEOREALISM: REBUILDING THE CINEMATIC CITY , MARK SHIEL WAR CINEMA: HOLLYWOOD ON THE FRONT LINE , GUY WESTWELL THE NEW HOLLYWOOD: FROM BONNIE AND CLYDE TO STAR WARS , PETER KRÄMER DOCUMENTARY: THE MARGINS OF REALITY , PAUL WARD FILM GENRE: FROM ICONOGRAPHY TO IDEOLOGY , BARRY KEITH GRANT DISASTER MOVIES: THE CINEMA OF CATASTROPHE , STEPHEN KEANE SPECTATORSHIP: THE POWER OF LOOKING ON , MICHELE AARON ROMANTIC COMEDY: BOY MEETS GIRL MEETS GENRE , TAMAR JEFFERS MCDONALD THE FRENCH NEW WAVE: A NEW LOOK , NAOMI GREENE CRIME FILMS: INVESTIGATING THE SCENE , KIRSTEN MOANA THOMPSON SHAKESPEARE ON FILM: SUCH THINGS AS DREAMS ARE MADE OF , CAROLYN JESS- COOKE CINEMA AND HISTORY: THE TELLING OF STORIES , MIKE CHOPRA- GANT GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST CINEMA: THE WORLD OF LIGHT AND SHADOW , IAN ROBERTS RELIGION AND FILM: CINEMA AND THE RE- CREATION OF THE WORLD , S. BRENT PLATE FILM AND PHILOSOPHY: TAKING MOVIES SERIOUSLY , DANIEL C. SHAW CONTEMPORARY BRITISH CINEMA: FROM HERITAGE TO HORROR , JAMES LEGGOTT BOLLYWOOD: GODS, GLAMOUR, AND GOSSIP , KUSH VARIA

THE VAMPIRE FILM: UNDEAD CINEMA , JEFFREY WEINSTOCK HERITAGE FILM: NATION, GENRE, AND REPRESENTATION , BELÉN VIDAL QUEER CINEMA: SCHOOLGIRLS, VAMPIRES, AND GAY COWBOYS , BARBARA MENNEL THE SPORTS FILM: GAMES PEOPLE PLAY , BRUCE BABINGTON THE HEIST FILM: STEALING WITH STYLE , DARYL LEE INTERNATIONAL POLITICS AND FILM: SPACE, VISION, POWER , SEAN CARTER AND KLAUS DODDS FILM THEORY: CREATING A CINEMATIC GRAMMAR , FELICITY COLMAN BIO- PICS: A LIFE IN PICTURES , ELLEN CHESHIRE THE GANGSTER FILM: FATAL SUCCESS IN AMERICAN CINEMA , RON WILSON POSTMODERNISM AND FILM: RETHINKING HOLLYWOOD’S AESTHETICS , CATHERINE CONSTABLE FILM PROGRAMMING: CURATING FOR CINEMAS, FESTIVALS, ARCHIVES , PETER BOSMA THE ROAD MOVIE: IN SEARCH OF MEANING , NEIL ARCHER ADVENTURE MOVIES: CINEMA OF THE QUEST , HARVEY O’BRIEN PRISON MOVIES: CINEMA BEHIND BARS , KEVIN KEHRWALD SILENT CINEMA: BEFORE THE PICTURES GOT SMALL , LAWRENCE NAPPER THE CHILDREN’S FILM: GENRE, NATION, AND NARRATIVE , NOEL BROWN TRASH CINEMA: THE LURE OF THE LOW , GUY BAREFOOT FILM AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT: ELEMENTS AND ATMOSPHERES , ADAM O’BRIEN THE HOLLYWOOD B- FILM: CINEMA ON A SHOESTRING , KYLE EDWARDS SUBURBAN FANTASTIC CINEMA: GROWING UP IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY , ANGUS MCFADZEAN FILM CENSORSHIP: REGULATING AMERICA’S SCREEN , SHERI CHINEN BIESEN TWENTY- FIRST- CENTURY HOLLYWOOD: REBOOTING THE SYSTEM , NEIL ARCHER THE CONTEMPORARY SUPERHERO FILM: PROJECTS OF POWER AND IDENTITY , TERENCE MCSWEENEY NARRATIVE AND NARRATION: ANALYZING CINEMATIC STORYTELLING , WARREN BUCKLAND THE STARDOM FILM: CREATING THE HOLLYWOOD FAIRY TALE , KAREN MCNALLY THE POP MUSICAL: SWEAT, TEARS, AND TARNISHED UTOPIAS , ALBERTO MIRA