Passionate Detachments: Technologies of Vision and Violence in American Cinema, 1967-1974 1438465416, 9781438465418

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Passionate Detachments

Also in the series William Rothman, editor, Cavell on Film J. David Slocum, editor, Rebel Without a Cause Joe McElhaney, The Death of Classical Cinema Kirsten Moana Thompson, Apocalyptic Dread Frances Gateward, editor, Seoul Searching Michael Atkinson, editor, Exile Cinema Paul S. Moore, Now Playing Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann, Ecology and Popular Film William Rothman, editor, Three Documentary Filmmakers Sean Griffin, editor, Hetero Jean-Michel Frodon, editor, Cinema and the Shoah Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Constantine Verevis, editors, Second Takes Matthew Solomon, editor, Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination R. Barton Palmer and David Boyd, editors, Hitchcock at the Source William Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, Second Edition Joanna Hearne, Native Recognition Marc Raymond, Hollywood’s New Yorker Steven Rybin and Will Scheibel, editors, Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis, editors, B Is for Bad Cinema Dominic Lennard, Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors Rosie Thomas, Bombay before Bollywood Scott M. MacDonald, Binghamton Babylon Sudhir Mahadevan, A Very Old Machine David Greven, Ghost Faces James S. Williams, Encounters with Godard William H. Epstein and R. Barton Palmer, editors, Invented Lives, Imagined Communities Lee Carruthers, Doing Time Rebecca Meyers, William Rothman, and Charles Warren, editors, Looking with Robert Gardner Belinda Smaill, Regarding Life Douglas McFarland and Wesley King, editors, John Huston as Adaptor R. Barton Palmer, Homer B. Pettey, and Steven M. Sanders, editors, Hitchcock’s Moral Gaze Will Scheibel, American Stranger Nenad Jovanovic, Brechtian Cinemas Steven Rybin, Gestures of Love

Passionate Detachments Technologies of Vision and Violence in American Cinema, 1967–1974 • Amy Rust

Cover: Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde (Warner Bros.–Seven Arts, 1967) Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2017 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production, Eileen Nizer Marketing, Fran Keneston Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rust, Amy, 1974– author. Title: Passionate detachments : technologies of vision and violence in American cinema, 1967–1974 / by Amy Rust. Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2017] | Series: SUNY series, horizons of cinema | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016031447 (print) | LCCN 2016047975 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438465395 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438465418 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Violence in motion pictures. | Motion pictures—United States. | Motion pictures—Social aspects—United States. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.V5 R87 2017 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.V5 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/6552—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031447 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Scott

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: The Technology of Film Violence, or, Figuring the Sense in Sensation 1

2

3

4

ix xiii

1

A Parallax View: The Violent Synchrony of Multiple-Camera Montage

25

Violence Incarnate: Squibs, Artificial Blood, and Wounds That Speak

55

Hitting the “Vérité Jackpot”: The Ecstatic Profits of Freeze-Framed Violence

83

Extraction and Exchange: The Zoom and Environmental Intension

115

Conclusion: Passionate Detachments

145

Notes

163

Works Cited

167

Index

183

Illustrations

Figure I.1. Figure I.2.

Figure I.3. Figure 1.1.

“Seeing more” violence (The Passion of the Christ, 2004)

2

Graphic, corporeal violence at the end of the Hollywood Production Code (The Wild Bunch, 1969)

3

“Why Are We Suddenly Obsessed with Violence?” (Esquire, 1967)

5

Robert Rauschenberg’s Bonnie and Clyde (Time, 1967)

26

Figure 1.2.

Still (Reels [B+C]) (Robert Rauschenberg, 1968)

27

Figures 1.3 and 1.4.

Close-ups give way to wider views of Clyde and Bonnie (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967)

29

Figure 1.5.

Long-shot framings reveal the couple’s position at the end of the sequence (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967)

30

Figure 1.6.

Three-camera technique (I Love Lucy, 1951–1957)

41

Figures 1.7 and 1.8.

Photographs recall Depression-era works by Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967)

43

Figures 1.9, 1.10, and 1.11.

Single-camera close-ups introduce abrupt shifts that prefigure multiple-camera montage’s mix of incongruity and unity (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967)

45

Figure 2.1.

NBC footage of the “Saigon Execution,” part of the Huntley-Brinkley Report’s coverage of the Tet Offensive on February 2, 1968

56

ix

x Figure 2.2.

Illustrations Squib exploding with artificial blood (The Wild Bunch, 1969)

56

An April 1970 CBS Evening News report avoids graphic depictions of wounded Americans (“Courage Under Fire,” The Vietnam War with Walter Cronkite, Volume 1)

62

A wounded Sergeant Floyd smiles and smokes a cigar in a December 1965 CBS Evening News report (“Courage Under Fire,” The Vietnam War with Walter Cronkite, Volume 1)

64

Figures 2.5 and 2.6.

Dutch’s fatal wounding (The Wild Bunch, 1969)

68

Figure 2.7.

A soldier questions Eileen/Bloom (Medium Cool, 1968)

69

Red, slippery organs are offered to the spectator (Blood Feast, 1963)

70

CBS coverage of the Tet Offensive reserved its most graphic images for Vietnamese bodies (“The Tet Offensive,” The Vietnam War with Walter Cronkite, Volume 1)

77

Wet, slippery blood leaps through Johnny Boy’s fingers (Mean Streets, 1973)

80

A broken hydrant figures the fluidity of wounds (Mean Streets, 1973)

80

A Steenbeck rerolls the previous scene’s footage as a frame within the frame (Gimme Shelter, 1970)

88

“There’s the Angel right there with the knife.” (Gimme Shelter, 1970)

89

Magick, the Rolling Stones, and the British Hell’s Angels (Invocation of My Demon Brother, 1969)

95

Rock music: one of the era’s many rituals of authentication (Gimme Shelter, 1970)

97

Figure 2.3.

Figure 2.4.

Figure 2.8. Figures 2.9 and 2.10.

Figure 2.11. Figure 2.12. Figure 3.1.

Figure 3.2. Figure 3.3. Figure 3.4. Figures 3.5 and 3.6.

Night of the Living Dead conjures scenes of racialized brutality from Emmett Till, to

Illustrations

Figures 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3. Figure 4.4. Figure 4.5. Figures 4.6 and 4.7.

Figure 4.8.

Figure 4.9.

Figure 4.10.

Figure 4.11.

Figure 4.12.

Figure 4.13.

Figure 4.14.

xi

Birmingham, to historical lynching souvenirs (1968)

107

The conclusion to McCabe and Mrs. Miller gathers and separates three lines of action (1971)

116

A zoom to McCabe’s body tumbling through brush and snow (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971)

119

A snap zoom to the bullet McCabe fires into Butler’s skull (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971)

119

Zooms inward mark urgent advantages for McCabe, including a steeple-cum-watchtower and mineshaft retreat (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971)

126

When Butler shoots the town’s minister, a snap zoom travels against the bullet’s path to arrive at killer rather than victim (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971)

127

Zooms outward point to McCabe’s tenuous grasp on makeshift shelters and boardwalks (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971)

128

Immediately after its leap to the church, a zoom retreats from this space, revealing the unprotected expanse McCabe must traverse (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971)

128

Zooms pull back from violence to suggest McCabe’s haplessness in the face of his environment (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971)

128

The zoom’s flatness heightens correspondences among trees, bridge supports, and humans (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971)

131

M*A*S*H’s operating-room scenes typically begin with zooms out to situate doctors and patients, bodies and instruments, within broader milieus (1970)

136

Zooms then press in to hospital staff, their faces obscured (M*A*S*H, 1970)

136

xii Figure 4.15.

Figure 4.16. Figure 4.17. Figure 4.18. Figure 4.19. Figure C.1.

Illustrations Finally, the film drifts or cuts to bodily cavities into and from which doctors push and pull various tools (M*A*S*H, 1970)

137

Dirty Harry’s introductory zoom pulls back to a sniper’s scope (1971)

138

The Conversation zooms in, mimicking aural surveillance (1974)

138

Harry dons a pair of binoculars and spies a naked woman (Dirty Harry, 1971)

139

Harry’s gaze thus mirrors the killer’s look at the film’s first victim (Dirty Harry, 1971)

140

Cinema’s dangerously sadistic spectator (A Clockwork Orange, 1971)

146

Acknowledgments

In many ways, passionate detachments describes my experience of writing this book. Devoted to my technological approach to film violence, I nonetheless suffered the consequences of a charged topic, an uncommon method, and the mundane tasks of writing and writing and writing. Still, I remain attached to the project and its interventions, thanks in no small part to the many advisers, colleagues, friends, and family members who offered guidance and support along the way. Among these are my mentors at UC Berkeley, where this book began as a dissertation and, before that, a seminar paper for Linda Williams. Later, as my chair, Linda proved an exacting yet generous guide, knowing when to press my claims and when to let me discover them. She is, moreover, one of the most capacious interlocutors I know, ever open to methods of investigation that are not necessarily her own. So, too, Carol Clover, whose influence lingers in each moment of this text. Carol let writing be hard but insight easy and, along with Linda, proved both ally and advocate. I owe much to Martin Jay and Kaja Silverman as well. Marty kept me honest in matters intellectual and historical. Kaja inspired me with the aesthetic and theoretical beauty of her own work. Indeed, there are many to acknowledge from my time at Berkeley, including faculty members such as Mark Sandberg, Anne Nesbet, Jeff Skoller, and Kristen Whissel, as well as fellow graduate students and friends who shaped me professionally and personally through their intellect, creativity, humor, and care. Among the latter, Jonathan Haynes, Erica Levin, Irene Chien, and Norman Gendelman proved insightful readers of the present project. Additional support—academic and otherwise—came from Meredith Hoy, Irina Leimbacher, Mona Bower, Kris Paulsen, Stacey Moran, James Harker, Ara Osterweil, Scott Combs, Sylvia Chong, Tan Hoang Nguyen, Julie Napolin, Libby Anker, Yannik Thiem, Andrew Weiner, Diana Anders, Ben Wurgaft, Nima Bassiri, Steve Choe, Anu

xiii

xiv

Acknowledgments

Kapse, Damon Young, Brooke Belisle, Todd Barnes, Jen Malkowski, Kris Fallon, Chris Dumas, Will McBride, Ben Coleman, and Désirée Pries. Moving to Tampa, I have been lucky and thankful to find an equally inspiring and supportive crew of colleagues and friends. These include fellow faculty in the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida, many of whom are dear friends: Dan Belgrad, Andy Berish, Maria Cizmic, Brendan Cook, Bill Cummings, Jim D’Emilio, Sara Dykins Callahan, Benny Goldberg, Christie Rinck, and Brook Sadler. However formally or informally, each has helped me complete this work through readings, discussions, professional advice, and emotional support. So, too, the wonderful friends I have made during my time in Florida, including Julia Irwin, Steve Prince, Darcie Fontaine, Aaron Walker, Brian Connolly, Gena Camoosa, Annette Cozzi, Sari Altschuler, Chris Parsons, Jan Awai, and Devon Brady, among others. Generous funding assisted me throughout this project. At UC Berkeley, I received a William T. and Helen S. Halstead Grant, Townsend Center for the Humanities Dissertation Fellowship, and Dean’s Normative Time Fellowship in addition to other funds from the Department of Rhetoric. At USF, a Creative Scholarship Grant from the College of Arts and Sciences and Summer Grant from the Humanities Institute subsidized additional research, writing, and revision. I have the Humanities Institute to thank for a trip to the Robert Altman Archive in the Special Collections Library at the University of Michigan, where I uncovered materials for chapter 4 of the book and enjoyed the hospitality of Berkeley friends Zeynep Gursel and Tung-Hui Hu. At conferences and other venues, I have had opportunities to share the book’s arguments and receive valuable feedback from fellow panelists and audience members. These include papers presented at meetings of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies as well as the Film and Philosophy conference at the University of Florida, the Real Things conference at the University of York, the Cultures of Violence conference at UC Irvine, and the Berkeley Symposium. I appreciate, too, invitations to share my work in public lectures at the University of Central Florida and Miami University in Ohio. Editors and manuscript reviewers have strengthened the project. I want to thank James Peltz at SUNY Press for recognizing its promise and Rafael Chaiken and Eileen Nizer for their support along the way. As series editor, Murray Pomerance helped steer the work from dissertation to book. I am grateful for his astute and compassionate advice. A version of chapter 3 appeared as “ ‘Hitting the Vérité Jackpot’: The Ecstatic Profits of Freeze-Framed Violence” in Cinema Journal 50:4 (Summer 2011): 48–72 (© 2011 by the University of Texas Press, all rights reserved). I

Acknowledgments

xv

am thankful to its anonymous readers and to Erica Levin for making it a stronger contribution to the book as a whole. Finally, I am grateful for my family, whose love made this endeavor not only possible but also endurable. There are my parents, Robert and Jeanne Rust, who supported my intellectual inclinations from the start. In fact, mom—like few moms I know—has read every word contained in these pages. My siblings, Anne Rust and Paul Rust—and their families, Alexis Madsen and Lesley Arfin—have taught me that, though we pursue our own things, we still meet where we should meet. I love them and my parents dearly. So, too, Frank, Lisa, Lauren, Jeff, Aiden, and Preston, who have proven a warm and welcoming second family. Then there are my boys: Elias, who came when the work commenced; Aubrey, who arrived near its end; and Scott, my best friend and constant companion, who has been with me for what seems like always. It is to you, Scott, that I dedicate this book, as my partner in life, scholarship, and love. Thank you for your unflagging support and for my beautiful children. The three of you are my greatest passions.

xv

Introduction The Technology of Film Violence, or, Figuring the Sense in Sensation

The movie is 126 minutes long, and I would guess that at least 100 of those minutes, maybe more, are concerned specifically and graphically with the details of . . . torture and death. . . . This is the most violent film I have ever seen. —Roger Ebert on The Passion of the Christ (2004), Chicago Sun-Times But then comes the carnage, full tilt and with no holds barred, filmed in gory slow motion—just like Bonnie and Clyde—that records every agonizing moment. . . . [This film] must surely contain the bloodiest battle ever recorded on film. —Jeanne Miller on The Wild Bunch (1969), San Francisco Examiner

I

2004, MEL GIBSON’S The Passion of the Christ earned a place of privilege in the history of cinematic brutality when, as Roger Ebert suggests in my first epigraph, it permitted spectators to see more corporeal brutality than did most films. Other critics agreed. “Then comes the Crucifixion,” writes the New Yorker’s David Denby, “dramatized with a curious fixation on the technical details—an arm pulled out of its socket, huge nails hammered into hands.” Adds A. O. Scott at the New York Times: “By rubbing our faces in the grisly reality of Jesus’s death and fixing our eyes on every welt and gash on his body, this film means to make literal an event that . . . tends to be thought about somewhat N

1

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Passionate Detachments

abstractly.” Privileging immediate, physical sensation over contemplative distance, this literalness apparently threatened Passion’s broader meaning and value. “Gibson has provided . . . a visceral idea of what the Passion consisted of,” notes Ebert. “That his film is superficial in terms of the surrounding message . . . is, I suppose, not the point” (Ebert, “Passion”). The point, implies Ebert, was seeing more, which according to most assessments of Passion, lay at the intersection of four mutually reinforcing tendencies: multiplication, explicitness, duration, and proximity. At issue, in other words, were the iterative possibilities of montage (Scott’s “every welt and gash”); graphic special effects (what J. Hoberman calls “filigreed and caramelized blood”); protracted images of torture and pain (“The scourging,” writes David Ansen, “goes on endlessly.”); and incisive depictions of brutality (“unflinching, blood-soaked close-ups,” according to Joseph Morgenstern). For those who found it objectionable, this more offered a dangerously unmanageable and twofold excess. Not only did spectators see too many images of violence, but the graphic quality of these views also meant they saw too much. Still, as Jeanne Miller makes clear in my second epigraph, these responses to what one might call the visual code of contemporary cinematic brutality are hardly new. Instead, they are indebted to a history of seeing more that goes back to Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969), and the circumstances of another code’s, the Production Code’s, demise. Before its reduction to a set of ten general guidelines in 1966, or total conversion to a G-M-R-X rating system in 1968, the Production Code sought to restrict images of what its administrators called “brutality and possible gruesomeness”—images that underscored the graphic, corporeal effects of physical violence. Hence the

Figure I.1. “Seeing more” violence (The Passion of the Christ, 2004).

Introduction

3

Figure I.2. Graphic, corporeal violence at the end of the Hollywood Production Code (The Wild Bunch, 1969).

clichés of classical Hollywood brutality: shadow-play shootings, clutchand-fall deaths, strategic cutaways, and symbolic environmental damage. With the Code’s fall amid war, political assassinations, and social unrest, not to mention film industry recession, corporate conglomeration, and the solicitation of a freshly conceived “youth market,” a new philosophy of visibility emerged, one that, for many critics, spectators, and cultural watchdogs, precipitated another “fall” into the too many and too much of today’s purportedly unredeemable ultraviolence. In fact, as scholars Stephen Prince, J. David Slocum, and Martin Barker have variously argued, “violence”—whether in society or on the screen—only arose as a “thing-in-itself” at this historical moment (Classical Film Violence; “ ‘Film Violence’ Trope”; “Violence Redux”). Before the 1960s, filmmakers, censors, and policymakers spoke of brutal acts and behaviors but not violence per se. After the 1960s, differences among physical, psychological, and ideological exertions of power were increasingly subordinated to a conception of violence as perceptible bodily assaults. Only with this abstraction did violence become something that could, according to James Kendrick, be “defined, categorized, quantified and, most importantly, understood and therefore controlled” (Film Violence 7). To wit, Lyndon B. Johnson established the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence in 1968, the organization before which Jack Valenti, then president of the Motion Picture Association of America, defended Hollywood’s increasingly graphic images of brutality against charges of gratuitous excess. Returning to this past, the present work investigates historical conjunctions between abstraction and concreteness, excess and control,

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Passionate Detachments

for the ways in which they define film violence after the Code. Indeed, as my epigraphs suggest, meetings between sense and sensation continue to shape depictions of and responses to on-screen brutality today. To get at these meetings, I examine four technologies adopted by commercial American cinema during the late 1960s and early 1970s: multiple-camera montage, squibs (small explosive devices) and artificial blood, freezeframes, and zooms. Drawn from avant-garde and exploitation filmmaking, European art cinema and television, as well as classical Hollywood, these technologies established the popular aesthetics of post-Code violence, including the multiplication, explicitness, duration, and proximity for which it became known. More important, they organized perception and representation in ways that influenced efforts to understand and control physical brutality on and off screen. This is the age of civil rights, Vietnam, and Watergate, after all, events that stoked public distrust for perceptible appearances and found Americans across the political spectrum demanding, however paradoxically, visual—and increasingly violent—demonstrations of presumably “authentic” realities. In my view, multiple-camera montage, squibs and artificial blood, freeze-frames, and zooms evince a similar passion for the revelatory possibilities of demonstrative violence. Leaning on cinema’s capacity for documentation, they upend everyday visibility with material force. The result corroborates fantasies of authenticity that prove brutal for military and counterculture alike. It also challenges them, however, since the technologies point, however unwittingly, to the violently classed, gendered, and racialized blind spots that obstruct these visions. To trace the work of these technologies, I read multiple-camera montage, squibs and artificial blood, freeze-frames, and zooms as figures that assemble and disassemble authenticity. The devices are more than tools, in other words; they are interfaces, places where perception and representation meet. Part practice (techne¯ ), part discourse (logos), they organize relationships to corporeal brutality that comprise yet do not contain the shapes they lend to it. As with all figures, the technologies are fundamentally irreducible. Abstract yet concrete, they join sensuous sights to sites of significance for an era self-consciously and, by many accounts, perilously preoccupied with violence. There are, for instance, numerous reports from the period that declare its brutality exceptional. “The 1960s [were] considerably more violent than the several decades preceding it,” notes a 1970 report from the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. “The United States is the clear leader among modern, stable democratic nations in its rates of homicide, assault, rape, and robbery” (xxv). In the popular press, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. warned of America’s demoralizing “pornography of violence,” while Esquire magazine asked readers, “Why

Introduction

5

Are We Suddenly Obsessed with Violence?”1 Probing this question, the latter’s authors note how “our heroes and our leaders arrive and depart in violence; our films and plays and books sing its song; our newspapers report its progress; our artists glorify its style” (39). Eliding differences

Figure I.3. “Why Are We Suddenly Obsessed with Violence?” (Esquire, 1967).

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Passionate Detachments

between reality and representation, the cover story, with its digest of brutal newspaper leads and graphic photographs, anticipates links that would soon be drawn between the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the events of Tet and My Lai, and the releases of Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch. The piece also testifies, with its frequently salacious address, to the mix of fascination and condemnation that marked period relationships to violence and violent media in particular. This mix further revealed itself in the era’s pursuit of violent aesthetics alongside research into their typically negative effects. These effects, notes Barker, often construed media as the forces behind realworld brutalities (“Violence Redux” 58). Researchers found that violent films and television programs not only incited imitation but also—and however paradoxically—desensitized viewers to lived realities of violence. Either way, images of brutality were conceived as stimuli to which spectators responded in socially destructive ways. The result, writes Barker, gave visual media “a substantial moral loading” that hinged, I add, on distinctions the post-Code period itself constructed and policed (67). Indeed, for Slocum, these distinctions constitute a trope that “delimited discourses of film, violence, and film violence” to the late 1960s and early 1970s and carried warnings about on-screen brutality into popular and humanities-based discourse (“ ‘Film Violence’ Trope” 14). In what follows, I examine this discourse from period critics to contemporary scholars, including those who establish the senselessness and sadism of film violence and those who defend it against these positions. With regard to the latter, I begin with commentators who do not contest so much as constrain film’s dubious stimuli. Pitting gratuitous cruelty against genuine disgust, these critics regulate the era’s so-called “obsession” with bloodshed by distinguishing authentic from inauthentic depictions of pain. Later, when scholars join the discussion, they complicate its terms, asking how aesthetics, not authenticity, mediates demands to see more brutality. Looking to style, these thinkers privilege form over content to uncover sense in pleasurable as well as unpleasurable sensations. Still, even these accounts wrestle with control. Ideally, they argue, style organizes perception with and against representation, opening sensuous experience to meaning without closing down its significance. Too often, however, scholars find this ideal founders in practice. When it does, style splits sense from sensation to codify mere discourse or, no less distressingly, it fails to give mere thrills any significance at all. Passionate Detachments shares these ideals and concerns yet intervenes in their outcomes. It does so, moreover, to recover sense and sensation for all, not some, or even most, depictions of violence. This is why I read technologies as figures in the chapters that follow. Joining perception

Introduction

7

to representation, multiple-camera montage, squibs and artificial blood, freeze-frames, and zooms give shape to on-screen brutality at the same time that they mediate spectatorial relationships to it. Offering neither mere discourse nor mere thrills, the devices do not succeed or fail to order or disorder meaning. Instead, they necessarily and inescapably do both. As such, the technologies corroborate and challenge authenticity, as I have suggested, as well as the fixation with violence it answers and animates for the late 1960s and early 1970s. More broadly, the devices open images of bloodshed, however old or new, reputable or disreputable, to new aesthetic legacies and unexpected critical opportunities.

Sense and Sensation A month before his vitriolic review of Bonnie and Clyde, film critic Bosley Crowther marked Hollywood violence for a fall from Code-era grace. Writing in response to a “new flock of sadistic pictures,” including The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1967) and the American release of A Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone, 1965), Crowther rails at the “gross and bloody nature” of their “irrational” and “excessive” violence, which, he suggests, could only “lead the . . . public to condone preposterous values” or “deaden their sensitivities” to slaughter (“Movies to Kill People”; “Another Smash”). Adds one of his readers: “To see this kind of action again and again tends to harden human sensibilities and to persuade the viewers that brutality is a commonplace of life” (“Movie Mailbag: Where Will the Violence End?”). Echoing period research, these accounts conceive images as stimuli that innervate and anesthetize audiences. They also set contemporary violence against earlier and presumably more reasonable, less vicious, and decidedly more justifiable depictions. Such sentiments stick, even when Crowther’s peers take moments of post-Code brutality to be warranted, humane, or logical. In a retraction of his initial condemnation of Bonnie and Clyde, critic Joseph Morgenstern blames the “violence in daily life” for his hasty evaluation, which was, he suggests, “as excessive as the stimulus” (“Thin Red Line”). Regardless, the columnist’s positive review warns that “distinctions can and must be made between violent films that pander and violent films that enlighten.” A “thin red line” separates the “poignant and intricate wonders” of Bonnie and Clyde from the “stock shockery” and “gratuitous crudities” it nonetheless harbors. Images that thrill, Morgenstern implies, ought to be separated from those with loftier, more cerebral aspirations. Without clear, cognitive significance, he warns, screen violence merely exploits the body, working in vulgar, morally indefensible, and, as a consequence it seems, gratuitous sensations.

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Passionate Detachments

To combat such gratuitousness, others point to the authentically unpleasurable experiences film violence supplies its viewers. “Spectators should feel uncomfortable,” writes Pauline Kael in her review of Bonnie and Clyde, “but this isn’t an argument against the movie. The whole point . . . is to rub our noses in . . . the dirty reality of death” (“Bonnie and Clyde” 188). Bonnie and Clyde screenwriter David Newman proceeds similarly: Ah, good old gratuitous violence, the phrase used by every outraged critic . . . who didn’t understand that the entire point of the violence . . . was that it was not gratuitous. . . . We wanted to show that when a bullet penetrates human flesh it hurts like hell and one of the things we intended to do was show that penalty in all its unvarnished truth. (35) For Newman, as for Kael, verisimilitude generates disgust that controls violent thrills by directing them toward morally coherent aims and responses. The result does not necessarily pass, however, to less realist styles or more pleasurable viewer reactions. Kael and Newman thus defend Bonnie and Clyde but on Crowther’s terms. In advocating genuine displeasure, they leave distinctions between meaningful and meaningless violence largely intact. The case is similar for those who cite the era’s lived brutality as reason for cinema’s reasonableness. In these accounts, moral clarity issues from unpleasure and authenticity, though authenticity defined by historical context as much as verisimilitude. “We are living in a period when newscasts refer casually to ‘waves’ of mass murders,” muses Roger Ebert in 1967. “Perhaps at this time, it is useful to be reminded that bullets really do tear skin and bone” (“Bonnie and Clyde”). Adds Jack Valenti in his appearance before the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence: “The kind of society we live in today is different from the kind of society we used to live in” (65). The war in Vietnam, urban unrest, assassinations, and violent crime—these circumstances give on-screen brutality value that, according to Valenti, it otherwise fails to possess. Tying “obsessions” with violence to its purported demonstrative power, period events warrant the end of the Production Code and the proliferation of bloodshed in ways earlier incidents of brutality did not. Scholars, too, link violent times to violent media at this point in history. “Suddenly,” writes Vivian Sobchack in “The Violent Dance” (1974), “. . . there was blood everywhere.” . . . [It] appeared in living color in more and more of our living rooms. And it was there all around us in the streets. . . . Politi-

Introduction

9

cians became . . . mortal. People who looked and lived exactly as we did shot at us from water towers, slit our throats, went berserk. . . . No place, however ordinary, was safe; blood ran in busy streets, on university campuses, in broad daylight, everywhere. (113) Here, Sobchack describes the mid-1960s in terms Ebert or Valenti might recognize. Unlike her contemporaries, however, she finds films both reflect and refract their historical contexts. Cinema abstracts lived brutality, she argues, stylizes it, and makes it visible through techniques such as slow motion, extreme close-ups, and artificial blood. The result grants access to formerly unseen abuses, promising knowledge, stability, perhaps even security, to viewers less obsessed than unsettled by bloodshed. Screen violence does more than express “fear[s] of chaos,” writes Sobchack; it also “create[s] order” (118). It generates significance, inspiring satisfaction as much as disgust. Indeed, compared to accounts that seek to control film violence through unpleasure and authenticity, “order”—that is, abstraction, or representation—constructs both meaning and enjoyment for those who view violent images. Still, scholars worry that style orders sense and sensation too much or too little. Comparing documentary to Hollywood deaths, Sobchack notes how the former tend to “confound[] representation and exceed[] visibility,” while the latter typically “satisfy us, . . . sate us, or overwhelm us.” They do not leave us “strain[ing] to see” (“Inscribing Ethical Space” 235). Style supplies order, that is, but it may do so too well. In making violence visible and pleasurable, it risks losing the volatility, the lived concreteness, of bodies and brutalities, whether on or off screen. For this reason, Sobchack retains yet revises her position on cinematic brutality. Fiction films “contain death in a range of formal and ritual simulations,” she affirms, but in so doing, they hazard “viewing it with unethical and prurient interest” (242). The prospect is especially high in contemporary Hollywood, where style tends to restrain violence too little as opposed to too much. In today’s films, “bodies are more carelessly squandered than carefully stylized,” she writes in a 2000 afterword to “The Violent Dance” (121). Replacing quality with quantity, they split abstraction from concreteness and sense from sensation to offer “noise and constant stimulation” but “no transcendence of ‘senseless’ violence,” which, too often, “just is” (120). Though distressing, a variety of thinkers arrive at similar conclusions. Constrain violence too much, some reason, and meaning overtakes matter, reducing vagaries of perception to comparatively secure, though ideologically dangerous, representations and fantasies. Constrain it too little, however, and, others warn, matter overruns meaning. Films abandon

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viewers to unregulated, even unethical, thrills. Devin McKinney distinguishes, for instance, between two types of screen violence: “Strong,” which engages audiences through ambiguous bodily perceptions, and “weak,” which works in coherent representations that encourage “distant, formalized response[s]” (“Violence” 22, 16). The former organizes brutality yet disorganizes signification, while the latter makes violence “too rationalized, too articulate” to realize the sensuous and “unspoken contingencies” that “shake everything up” (“Violence” 19, 17). Contributors to Christopher Sharrett’s Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media offer similar positions: Whereas some depictions of bloodshed “signal[] the unspeakability of certain concepts that represent gaps in American ideology,” others affirm only those actions that “transcend the immediate physical and social context” (60, 141). In either case, and as McKinney suggests, brutality orders and disorders meaning, or it codifies dominant discourse in politically dubious ways. In this sense, discourse proves risky, but so, too, do thrills. One may lead to the other, in fact, as James Kendrick suggests for the 1980s. At this time, he argues, producers grew weary of the controversies that accompanied films such as Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980), Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980), and White Dog (Samuel Fuller, 1982). In response, they exchanged “socially conscious, disturbing and provocative violence” for “rhetoric[s] of harmless, action-oriented escapism” (Hollywood Bloodshed 19, 17). Hardly evidence of diminished interest in graphic brutality, however, this exchange made “screen violence less controversial by treating it less seriously” (80). Typified by the blockbuster, films from this period cultivated “the simplest forms of bodily affect” alongside “a sense of detachment” (80). They made “the viewer’s heart pound,” writes Kendrick, but they “[didn’t] ask much of one’s mind” (81). Rather, such films seized sensation only to sever it from sense, packaging bloodshed as a safe and uncomplicated form of bodily enjoyment that split on- from off-screen abuses. If, in this case, discourse generates thrills, then in others, it fails to control them. Stephen Prince suggests as much with his study of “stylistic amplitude”—that is, how bloodshed appears—before and after the Code. In classical Hollywood, he argues, films used devices such as silhouettes and shadow play to displace rather than display acts of brutality. These techniques, which implied “levels of meaning and experience that go beyond what the screen can show,” both grounded and ungrounded signification, not unlike McKinney’s “strong” violence (Classical Film Violence 244). Yet, as Prince notes, silhouettes and shadow play also distilled brutality, concentrating its sensuousness and increasing its amplitude—an outcome that continued after the Code when graphicness and duration intensified

Introduction

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the impact of violence on character and spectator bodies. As a result, Prince contends, style began “to subvert the ability of . . . filmmaker[s] to create a perspective on violence that [was] other than celebratory” (Classical Film Violence 189). He points to Sam Peckinpah, who used melancholic narratives and self-reflexive designs to “establish a clear and coherent perspective” on bloodshed (Savage Cinema 210). Because the filmmaker “portrayed screen mayhem as sensuous and kinetically appealing,” however, his films suffer the “occasional loss of coherence,” whereby “critique . . . seem[s] to become its opposite” (Savage Cinema 229, 103–04). The effect worsens in contemporary Hollywood, where filmmakers are generally “unrestrained and undisciplined in their depictions of violence” (Savage Cinema 211). Weakened, style overwhelms sense with sensation in these works, setting the thrills of on-screen brutality against discourses that variously court and contain them. Within this context, my approach to film violence repeats and revises extant accounts. Using technology, I, too, trace the promise and peril of film style yet resist the idea it constrains violence too much or too little. Instead, I embrace Marsha Kinder’s suggestion that neither narrative nor spectacle but, rather, their tension most defines Hollywood brutality (70). Narrowing her scope, I track tensions not only between narratives and spectacle but also within violent images themselves. Never strong or weak, mere discourse or mere thrill, these images are inescapably sensuous and significant, thanks to technologies that disorder the very orders, the very sense, their sensations create and destroy.

Figuring Film Violence Read as figures, these technologies—multiple-camera montage, squibs and artificial blood, freeze-frames, and zooms—emphasize the sights of film violence and its sites of significance. Though new to screen violence and its related technologies, figures have a place in film studies history, including works by Christian Metz and Stephen Heath, Dudley Andrew and Vivian Sobchack, D. N. Rodowick, Nicole Brenez, and Adrian Martin. Though diverse in interest and aim, these accounts find in the figure a meeting of perception (what one sees, hears, and feels) and representation (how those sights, sounds, and feelings make meaning) that facilitates “having” as much as “making” or “unmaking” sense. Figures are more than motifs or symbols; they are interfaces, dynamic zones of encounter that join material practice to cultural significance and invite interpretations their sensuousness reciprocally resists. “The true symbol gives rise to thought,” Jean-François Lyotard writes in Discourse, Figure, which dates to the late 1960s, “but not before lending itself to ‘sight,’ ”

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Passionate Detachments and the surprising thing is not so much that it gives rise to thought, since once language exists, every object has to be signified and inserted in a discourse. . . . The mystery is that the symbol remains to be ‘seen,’ that it remains steadfastly within the sensory, that there remains a world that is a store of ‘sights,’ . . . and that every form of discourse exhausts itself before exhausting it. (7)

Figures shape meaning, in other words, but their shapes need not mean a thing. Both line and letter, they retain the manifold concreteness from which they abstract determinate value. Figures refer, but they also designate; they show, organizing and disorganizing significance, because they issue yet outlast that to which they point. In this way, figures inaugurate discourse at the same time they establish its limits. If representation harbors perception, then perception’s irreducibility also destructures, or displaces, representation’s coherency. The result opens apparently determinate meanings to new and indeterminate arrangements, reconciling and “deconciling”—to use Lyotard’s term—relationships among bodies, narratives, and histories. Figures are, in this sense, critical acts that suggest interpretive models to viewers. They “coalesce, condense, embody, enact, and transform the trouble in [a] text,” writes Sobchack, “giv[ing it] visible form, . . . but also . . . alter[ing] it to . . . change its structure, its dynamic, and its meanings” (“Bringing It All Back” 147). Indeed, as I use them throughout Passionate Detachments, figures are literal and—if one may put it this way—figural, too. Lending shape to brutality, multiple-camera montage, squibs and artificial blood, freeze-frames, and zooms make it legible inside films, yet they also articulate, disarticulate, even rearticulate violence for people and practices outside the cinema during the post-Code period. Figures thus refer to actual, extant images and virtual, as yet unrealized relationships to what they depict and express. With roots in eschatology, they mediate space and time, retaining unfulfilled pasts (what was) and protending unpredictable futures (what will be). For Brenez, this makes figures forces of “visionary critical activity” (“Ultimate Journey”). They put “the possible back into the world,” including “what forever remains to be constituted, . . . [what] in the visible, tends to the Inexhaustible, . . . for it is the Unforeseeable, the Unpredictable” (Brenez, “Ultimate Journey”; Martin, Last Day 7–8). Figures are the stuff of Walter Benjamin’s “optical unconscious,” that capacity of photography and cinema to penetrate and preserve, perhaps reveal and redeem, realities that otherwise escape human historical consciousness (“Work of Art” 117). They are the stuff, too, of “events,” which partake, as Martin Jay notes,

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of the future anterior, entangling past, present, and future in advents that initiate what, in retrospect, will have been (“Historicism and Event”). Theorized by Lyotard and others in the wake of May 1968, events, like figures, disrupt the passage of time to disclose “a vast territory of potentialities” that, according to Rodowick, precede and exceed the present (200). They open narratives and histories to “unanticipated lines of variation,” even as, I add, they inspire constructions that serve to reclose these lines in return (Rodowick 199). In my work, both gestures matter, since multiple-camera montage, squibs and artificial blood, freeze-frames, and zooms imply “structure[s] and process[es],” to cite Andrew, setting, upsetting, and resetting the era’s purported obsession with bloodshed and the fantasies of authenticity that support it (159). Indeed, for Lyotard, figures bind and unbind desire and fantasy in addition to perception and representation. They transform imperceptible, even unconscious, wishes into discernible images, not unlike dreams. Figures are, for this reason, more than mere images. They answer unsatisfying circumstances, mingling extant realities with unrealized possibilities and supplying the means by which people adapt to and make sense of their worlds. Accordingly, the contents of figures matter less than their forms, which do not substitute, or “stand for,” the desires they express, according to Lyotard, so much as generate irreducible “concentrations of libidinal energy on the surfaces of the visible and articulable” (“Beyond Representation” 159). Far from determinate or static, figures make indeterminately dynamic sensations and pleasures discernible. They create to destroy and destroy to create, preserving the inchoate perceptions and desires that constitute fantasies and representations. For all these reasons, I read technologies as figures and argue that they, too, join perception to representation and desire to fantasy. Though practical means for seeing more violence, multiple-camera montage, squibs and artificial blood, freeze-frames, and zooms also distill indeterminate depictions from less deliberate demands. They assemble and disassemble narrative meaning and historical context, shaping what brutality meant and could mean for the immediate post-Code period. Beyond this moment, the devices offer a method for approaching film violence today, one that redresses the concerns of contemporary scholarship in at least two ways. First, by refusing to split or subsume sense and sensation, the aforementioned technologies constrain brutality neither too much nor too little. Second, and more broadly, they remediate vision and violence for film theory, which exhibits distrust for the pair in spite of the complexities shock, touch, and masochism have brought to them. I am hardly the first, after all, to consider perception and pleasure within so-called “body genres,” films that, according to Linda Williams,

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take sex and violence as “fundamental” and, therefore, not gratuitous “elements of [their] sensational effects” (“Film Bodies” 3). By the early 1990s, scholars had replaced so-called “gaze theory” with a variety of Viewing Positions, gathered and canonized by Williams in an anthology bearing this name. These accounts set active historical bodies against the passively disembodied “eyes and I’s” that Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, and, perhaps most influentially, Laura Mulvey described during the late 1960s and 1970s. In so doing, they not only admitted the body and bodily sensation into film theory but also rendered that body’s pleasures admissible experiences. Within gaze theory, perception is visual; pleasure, violent; and each, overwhelmingly dubious. In Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” for instance, spectators enjoy positions of mastery to which the film’s “male gaze” paradoxically subjects them. The result conceives perception and pleasure as abstract, immutable, and inescapably sadistic, much like early responses to post-Code brutality, which imagine, I have demonstrated, helpless yet vicious film viewers. Against these formations, scholars introduce shock, touch, and masochism to rethink cinema’s fundamental perceptions and pleasures. Each brings, in its own way, immanently variable and embodied experiences to spectators who enjoy their intimacy with, their vulnerability and responsiveness to, concretely sensuous film worlds. Shock, for example, names the tactile as well as optical experiences that cinema mediates for viewers—experiences that, according to Benjamin, foster interplay not mastery between spectators and their environments. For Tom Gunning, these shocks constitute the primary thrills of the Cinema of Attraction, which, as is well known, solicited the curiosity of early film audiences then fulfilled it with a variety of visual, physical, and emotional assaults. In Shocking Representation, Adam Lowenstein explores these attacks in narrative as opposed to nonnarrative cinema, uncovering moments in modern horror, wherein “bodily space and historical time are disrupted, confronted, and intertwined” (2). When this happens, he argues, films summon “the threat and the promise of shock,” which reiterates yet potentially redeems too-easy distinctions between responsible and irresponsible depictions of trauma (16). Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972), for instance, implicates spectators in attacks on privileged middle-class girls as well as working-class criminals. “In both cases,” writes Lowenstein, “the acts . . . are unflinchingly cruel and graphically extreme” (127); they push audiences “too far,” disrupting narrative and viewer investments in violence and the political divisions these reflect and reiterate (123). Representations shock, in other words, but they also shock representation, tying bodies to narrative and historical contexts and interrupting, perhaps even altering, relationships among them.

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Expressed this way, shock and figures function quite similarly. Each grants sense to and through sensation without foreclosing sensuousness or signification. Still, as I have emphasized, figures set and upset narratives and histories, generating positive structures in addition to negatively disruptive instants. Figures may shock, but they underwrite as much as undermine the representations into which perception intervenes. Controlling brutality neither too much nor too little, they alter discussions of screen violence inside the academy. They also refuse shock’s frequent reduction in popular discourse to that which intensifies then deadens spectatorial sensibilities. Indeed, from this point of view, the technologies I explore here crystallize, or concentrate, what shock conjoins—curiosity and thrill, sight and touch, mastery and vulnerability—into discernible yet unstable shapes. For this reason, figures contribute to shock’s phenomenal and psychic foundations, complementing and complicating vision and violence for theories of cinematic embodiment and enjoyment. To be sure, multiple-camera montage, squibs and artificial blood, freeze-frames, and zooms engage the “lived body,” as Sobchack describes it: “a commutative reversibility between subjective feeling and objective knowledge, between the senses and their sense or conscious meaning” (“What My Fingers Knew” 61). The devices do so, moreover, for images that concern and motivate much phenomenological film criticism, including those that “squander” on- and off-screen bodies, to cite Sobchack, or exploit “the gaze, . . . as it mobilized and exchanged and imbued with power,” according Jennifer Barker (25). In fact, because this gaze implies that vision itself is violent, scholars from Barker to Laura Marks to Elena del Río distinguish haptic, or tactile, vision from its optical counterpart. The latter, notes Marks, “isolates and comprehends . . . objects of vision,” while the former encourages one to “lose her/himself” in images that invite vulnerable, even masochistic, pleasures rather than mastery and sadism (“Video Haptics and Erotics” 341). Such pleasures draw phenomenology nearer the psychoanalytic theories from which it initially departed, particularly when one considers the latter’s responses to gaze theory. As with the former, these responses generally set vulnerable bodies against visual mastery, emphasizing, in this case, the fluidity of cinematic identification and pleasure. Take the “money shot” in hard-core pornography, which, according to Williams, turns proof of male orgasm toward ersatz female pleasure. In so doing, it establishes links among vision, knowledge, and power that it also belies, routing and rerouting desire toward sadism and masochism alike (Hard Core 93–119). Carol Clover argues similarly for identification in modern horror, where active, predatory looks regularly turn back on themselves.

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Always temporary, if not compensatory, these “assaultive” gazes are, she writes, “by and large the minority position.” The genre’s “real investment” lies in “reactive or introjective” gazes, wherein passivity and pain are the viewer’s primary pleasures (Men, Women, and Chain Saws 211–12). “Horror films do attack their audiences,” concludes Clover. “The attack is palpable; we take it in the eye” (202). Here, as for Williams, masochism—not unlike touch—intervenes in the presumed violence of vision. Figures, for their parts, repeat and revise these interventions. As interfaces between perception and representation, desire and fantasy, they mediate sight and touch as well as mastery and vulnerability. In fact, because they articulate previous challenges to vision and violence, the technologies I explore here disarticulate distinctions between optics and haptics, sadism and masochism. This matters, I argue in my conclusion, when theories that uncover sense in sensation or pleasure in unpleasure divide what they mean to conjoin or halt the fluidity they serve to enable. Indeed, as with accounts of on-screen brutality, efforts to redeem vision and violence sometimes lead to unexpected cleavages and collapses. Figures, by contrast, embrace and extend extant critiques by returning the possibilities they trace for haptics and masochism back to the optics and sadism they transvalue. This is why I title my book Passionate Detachments after a phrase from Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” A formative text for linking vision to violence, it nonetheless joins sense to sensation by way of technologies that register entanglements between sight and touch and sadism and masochism. “The first blow against . . . traditional film conventions,” writes Mulvey, “. . . is to free the look of the camera into . . . materiality . . . and the look of the audience into . . . passionate detachment” (26). Though hardly the avant-garde practices Mulvey imagines, multiple-camera montage, squibs and artificial blood, freeze-frames, and zooms nevertheless attach and detach matter to and from meaning and do so for laudatory as well as loathsome encounters between sensuousness and significance. As critical acts and interpretive models, figures thus imply passion in both senses of that term: Expressing one’s fervor for demonstrative violence, they demand viewers suffer its indeterminacies.

Authentic Pursuits At the crux of these passions lies authenticity, which according to thinkers Marshall Berman and Lionel Trilling, Erich Fromm and Theodor Adorno, preoccupied the late 1960s and early 1970s as much as violence itself. As with bloodshed, authenticity promised to disclose abuses individuals wished to control, including the alienation of midcentury rationalism,

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which threatened to isolate people from each other and their innermost selves. To repair the damage, one immersed oneself in desires and feelings, discovering “inside” something more fundamental, more “real,” than the external structures of the “outside” world. Authenticity thus divided internal from external and private from public. It collapsed them, too, assuring the former’s liberty so as to secure the latter’s regulation. Indeed, to the extent that it implies “something done by one’s own hand” (autos, meaning “self,” and hentes, meaning “prepared”), authenticity leveraged self-possession toward authority over others. For this reason, authenticity influenced political discourse from the New Left and counterculture to conservatism and the mainstream. “Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, selfunderstanding, and creativity,” declared Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the Port Huron Statement. The goal of man and society should be human independence: . . . finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic: a quality of mind not compulsively driven by a sense of powerlessness, nor one which unthinkingly adopts status values, . . . but one which has full, spontaneous access to present and past experiences, one which easily unites the fragmented parts of personal history, one which openly faces problems which are troubling and unresolved: one with an intuitive awareness of possibilities. (Tom Hayden, 66, emphasis added) For leftists, authenticity liberated the self from a repressive status quo, revealing the “big pictures”—the totalities—that remained concealed to most people. So construed, it offered activists a tool that, like protests or “demonstrations,” visibly—and often violently—disrupted everyday arrangements. Authenticity appealed to the counterculture for similar reasons. Practices such as uninhibited sex, illicit drug use, and the occult reveled in yet purportedly razed distinctions between public imperative and private interest. The same holds true for apparently antithetical ideologies. “Every man, both for his own individual good and for the good of society, is responsible for his own development,” writes Barry Goldwater in terms reminiscent of SDS (Berman, xviii). Here, self-reliance steers social structures, yet as much as self-discovery, it pits personal freedom against external prescription. From this point of view, authenticity suits the period’s self-conceived obsession with bloodshed. From government reconnaissance to “body counts” to John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier,” demands to see more— and, often, see more violence—characterized much of American culture

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during this period. On screen, multiple-camera montage, squibs and artificial blood, freeze-frames, and zooms worked similarly, especially at first glance. They did so, moreover, by exploiting cinema’s indexicality, its capacity for collecting, storing, and re-presenting light so as to document—indeed, guarantee—the existence of what it depicts. Most famously described by André Bazin, this capacity to transport “reality from [a] thing to its reproduction” proves more complicated in the film critic’s work (“Ontology” 14). Though photography grants film “credibility absent from all other picture-making,” it also orders, or shapes, perception and representation in ways that exceed simple fidelity or genuineness (“Ontology” 13). “Every image is to be seen as an object,” writes Bazin, “and every object as an image” (“Ontology” 15–16). At once matter and meaning, films join what authenticity divides: objective “facts” and subjective “hallucinations” (16). Even so, film violence regularly denied these meetings, exaggerating or extinguishing differences between object and image, perception and representation, to marshal authenticity. In these endeavors, films squelched rather than seized indeterminacy, reconciling desire and medium alike to visual mastery. Technologies, too, were put to this purpose, even if they challenged the fantasies they likewise corroborated. For this reason, I take two passes at each of the aforementioned technologies. I begin by asking how they articulate forms of authenticity that not only belong to the military and journalism, capitalism and the counterculture, but also prove more brutal than a film’s violent contents. Having established this brutality, I then return to multiple-camera montage, squibs and artificial blood, freeze-frames, and zooms and pursue relationships between inside and outside, self and other, that disarticulate authenticity by revealing its fundamentally inauthentic techne¯ and logos. In chapter 1, I turn to multiple-camera montage, which, along with squibs and artificial blood, heralded Hollywood’s shift to graphic, corporeal violence in Bonnie and Clyde. Interweaving footage captured at a variety of distances, angles, and speeds, the film’s conclusion offered breathtaking leaps across incongruous footage from close-ups to long shots, high to low angles, and regular speed to slow motion. Rather than disorientation, however, viewers reported astonishment at what the technology disclosed: a murder’s perceptible details and the comparatively indiscernible moment of death. In this way, I argue, multiple-camera montage served authenticity. Turning simultaneity toward synthesis, it united incompatible spaces through synchronized recordings to promise viewers all conceivable views. It thus challenged everyday perception with fantasies of omnipresence that characterized practices in broadcast television, military reconnaissance, and even film theory itself. Setting

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these alongside Bonnie and Clyde, I explore the relationships to vision and violence that multi-unit coverage, remote surveillance, and gaze theory shared—relationships that recast discordant sensations as visual omnipotence. Chapter 2 extends this argument to squibs and artificial blood and television news, both of which, I contend, used wounding to offer firsthand experiences of what, for most viewers, remained inaccessible events. Probably the most conspicuous sign of the era’s supposed obsession with violence, squibs and artificial blood are surprisingly undertheorized, except as complements to multiple-camera montage or evidence of cinema’s alleged competition with television. Departing from these precedents, I demonstrate how the technology met and mobilized fantasies of authenticity in its own right—fantasies that, for both cinema and television, incarnated ungraspable realities in unexpected images of bloodshed. In America’s “living-room war,” chance recordings of wounded combatants disrupted reports from Vietnam with purportedly authentic material. Films such as The Wild Bunch or Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973) figured similar disclosures with squibs and artificial blood that rendered fictional wounds startlingly tangible. Whether sticky or slippery, viscous or thin, the blood’s unprecedented tactility used cinema’s indexicality to breach boundaries between reality and representation as well as narrative fiction and network news. In so doing, squibs and artificial blood proffered “proof” of what the Production Code, the government and military, and television journalism typically prohibited, abetting their appeals to authenticity and the masculine and national integrity they largely supported. Freeze-frames and zooms offered similar assurances by shaping vision and violence for the counterculture and capitalism. Though largely unappreciated for their contributions to on-screen brutality, these technologies, as much as multiple-camera montage and squibs and artificial blood, delivered the demonstrative violence that characterized the late 1960s and early 1970s. As I argue in chapter 3, freeze-frames figured the popularization of ecstatic fantasy in American culture during the postCode period. Setting the contingency of photography against cinema’s relatively abstract construction, they joined the occult and rock music in pitting “external” alienation against the “internal” and presumably more authentic abundance that “stood outside” everyday as well as cinematic experience. Bearing this out, I analyze Gimme Shelter (Albert and David Maysles, 1970) and Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968), both of which disclose the details of a black man’s murder through a series of freeze-frames. If, as commentators suggest, these films offered proof of the period’s violent, even apocalyptic, tendencies, then it is not,

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I argue, merely for the brutality of their content alone. Rather, the form of the freeze-frame reiterated self-serving hypostatizations of inside and outside, self and other, upon which the era’s ecstatic fantasies depended. Chapter 4 completes my investigation of technology’s relationship to historical fantasies with a look at how zooms mediated violent encounters between bodies and worlds amid the rise of modern environmentalism. A tool for depicting proximity amid distance, the zoom variously situates details within larger milieus or isolates, penetrates, and distills them. It draws spectators nearer the world while at the same time separating them from it. For this reason, I submit, zooms figured the place of technology under the extension of twentieth-century capitalism, which itself seized people and places, stretching out to exploit and “enframe” them, as Martin Heidegger might argue, from assumedly unimplicated positions. The result, which cleaved inside from outside and body from world, excited fantasies of authenticity through which one escaped one’s debt to the very systems by which one laid hold of living and nonliving things. On my read, films such as M*A*S*H (Robert Altman, 1970) and McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971) demonstrate this relation, linking Manifest Destiny to Kennedy’s New Frontier and figuring economies of extraction through zooms that abstract and enframe concrete particulars. In all, these chapters demonstrate how technologies that render onscreen brutality organize vision and violence for the post-Code period. They do so, moreover, through perceptual experiences that precede and exceed representational structures. Multiple-camera montage, squibs and artificial blood, freeze-frames, and zooms are not authentic, in other words, because they reflect their era’s brutality. Rather, because they forge fantasies of authenticity, the devices solicit and satisfy period demands for demonstrative violence. They “excribe” as well as inscribe historical concepts and contexts, writing the latter from sensuous encounters the former reciprocally provide (Routt). When I appeal, for this reason, to post-Code preoccupations with violence or authenticity, I do not mean to explain a particular film’s use of a single technology so much as trace the deliberate designs and indeterminate desires by which that device grounds and ungrounds historical fantasies. Only in combination do multiplecamera montage, squibs and artificial blood, freeze-frames, and zooms figure the period’s heterogeneous relationships to bloodshed, including the brutal contradictions that inhabited and inhibited these structures.

Inauthentic Encounters As I have emphasized, post-Code brutality shaped authenticity through technologies that reconciled desire to seeing more. The result, which

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promised visual mastery through demonstrative violence, proved brutal for its gendered, racialized, and class-based assumptions as well. And yet if, as I have suggested, how cinema reveals matters as much as what it discloses, then the foregoing devices assaulted the fantasies they organized as much as the bodies they depicted. Indeed, as figures, multiple-camera montage, squibs and artificial blood, freeze-frames, and zooms work at the interface of perception and representation, desire and fantasy, mobilizing the volatile force of the former to create and destroy the latter. With this in mind, the subsequent chapters explore how technologies at once issue and outlast authenticity, binding and unbinding the cultural practices it underwrites and exposing their fundamental inauthenticity. Chapter 1 demonstrates how multiple-camera montage not only turns temporal synchrony toward a spatially unified field but also registers the parallax upon which this transformation depends. As a result, the device figures fantasies of omnipotence within broadcast television, military reconnaissance, and film theory at the same time it exposes how these cultivated and conflated differences between incongruity and synthesis. Multiple-camera montage thus shaped authenticity while crystallizing its blind spot, challenging the omnipresence that live television, military surveillance, and cinema presumably codified during this period. Squibs and artificial blood also undermine the mastery they engender. They do so, in fact, through the very tactility by which they assure their authenticity. After all, both authenticity and tactility depend on indexicality, which substantiates film’s credibility yet underscores its irreducibility, its status as object and sign. Though frequently overlooked, this irreducibility characterizes the index, as philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce first described it. The index commands one’s attention, he writes, yet points only to provisional constructions of meaning. In chapter 2, I return to this description so as to recover cinema’s indeterminacy, its inauthenticity, as opposed to its determinate authority. The result transforms the evidentiary value of bloodshed for The Wild Bunch and Mean Streets as well as for broadcast news. Rather than “proof” of what the Production Code, the government, or television networks prohibited, wounds revealed unstable solutions for capturing the real, including the extent to which authenticity restored the integrity of bodies and bodies politic to such institutions. In chapter 3, I revisit the freeze-frame’s ecstatic claims to similar ends. The device may forge encounters that “stand outside” everyday perception, I argue, but it also still moves, however imperceptibly, as repeated frames, or photograms, that pass through the projector and onto the screen. For this reason, freeze-frames, too, point to the overlooked, indeterminate, and inauthentic origins of authenticity. As film’s internal

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“other,” photograms partake of both photography and cinema, forbidding easy distinctions between inside and outside, self and other, upon which the racialized ecstasies of Gimme Shelter and Night of the Living Dead, the occult and rock music, regularly relied. Finally, in chapter 4, I examine the zoom as a tool of environmental intension as much as capitalist expansion. While zooms stretch out to enframe people and places, they also stretch toward the worlds they distill, heightening correspondences between bodies and milieus and intensifying the limits they share. As such, the device proffers reciprocity and exchange in addition to escape and possession. For an era in which neoliberalism and modern environmentalism emerge, this matters, I argue, since the zoom figures the promises and abuses—the dangers and “saving powers”—of America’s old and new frontiers and the technologies that historically support them. In each chapter, then, technology reflects yet refracts the post-Code period’s apparent obsession with violence by making legible authenticity and the contradictions that inhabit it. Exploring these contradictions for their actual and possible consequences, my aim in Passionate Detachments is to rethink the popular aesthetics and critical responses of film violence for past and present alike. Figures may reconcile audiences to historical moments, but they also deconcile those realities in ways viewers may not always recognize. “The fulfillment of the figure,” writes William D. Rout, “. . . is a function of something beyond any artist’s willing or doing”; it is “the inescapable creation of a world in/by/through/with the work.” For the post-Code period, this means multiple-camera montage, squibs and artificial blood, freeze-frames, and zooms repeat and revise the place of vision and violence in military reconnaissance, television news, and leftist and capitalist practices. Assaulting everyday appearance with extraordinary experience, they cleave and conflate inside and outside, self and other, at the same time that they register these pairs as linked yet distinct. The result forges encounters between perception and representation, desire and fantasy, to reveal hidden “truths” about seeing more violence, including the inauthenticity that, in fact, constitutes it. To embrace this inauthenticity is, I contend, to appreciate the creative and destructive force of these technologies. It is to acknowledge, moreover, the violent forms they deploy in addition to the brutal contents they depict. For contemporary thinkers, such forms matter for the lived cruelties—and virtual alternatives—they express for cinematic brutality. After all, most commentators agree that relationships between viewers and violence mean as much, if not more, than the fact of bloodshed alone. It is for this reason that scholars express concern for films that constrain brutality too much or too little. One splits on- from off-screen realities,

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while the other overwhelms narrative and historical significance. In either case, sensation pulls away from sense and cultivates pernicious pleasures. Figures, meanwhile, bind meaning while unbinding the significance—the certainty, the determinate authority—it produces in return. They redress the past’s penchant for revelation and mastery and answer the present’s critical anxieties. For this reason, figures open then and now to alternative—and potentially less brutal—organizations of vision and violence. This includes, as my conclusion suggests, new relationships to optics and haptics, sadism and masochism.

1 A Parallax View The Violent Synchrony of Multiple-Camera Montage

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D E C E M B E R 8, 1967, T H E C O V E R of Time announced Hollywood’s “New Cinema” with images of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967). America’s answer to François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, the film, according to the magazine, epitomized contemporary assaults on traditional cinema by drawing together “Violence . . . Sex . . . Art.” Coupling nudity and impotence with protracted and bloody deaths, Bonnie and Clyde privileged ambiguity, chance, and incoherence, not unlike “abstract painting, atonal music, and the experimental novel” (“Hollywood” 67). It comes as no surprise, then, to discover the aforementioned cover features a collage by Robert Rauschenberg rather than a conventional production still or publicity poster. In fact, in 1968, Rauschenberg produced a series of six lithographs titled Reels (B+C) that variously repeat and juxtapose images from Bonnie and Clyde. As with much of his collage work during this period, Reels (B+C) appropriates photographs from popular sources that index the era’s preoccupations with, among other things, violence. One thinks, for instance, of Rauschenberg’s 1970 screenprint Signs, which brings stills from the Zapruder film together with images of Vietnam, youth protests, the Kennedy brothers, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s dead body. Despite the apparent unity of their content, however, the form of these works frustrates determinate interpretations of their significance. Subject to recursive changes in focus, beholders must navigate incompatible contexts N

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Figure 1.1. Robert Rauschenberg’s Bonnie and Clyde (Time, 1967).

Figure 1.2. Still (Reels [B+C]) (Robert Rauschenberg, 1968) © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and Gemini G.E.L.

Figure 1.2. Still (Reels [B+C]) (Robert Rauschenberg, 1968) © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and Gemini G.E.L.

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and scales while weighing individual elements against the compositions to which they contribute and from which they distract. Take the Time cover, which situates four images across three horizontal panels, the lowest of which is split into two. Moving from center to periphery, the viewer regards each still separately before conceiving the whole. Yet even this synthesis is troubled by a host of internal incongruities. Foremost among these are the panels that produce separate channels even as Rauschenberg’s irregular color flows across their makeshift boundaries. In fact, the painterliness of the color is itself at odds with Bonnie and Clyde’s mechanical reproduction, pitting cinematic realism against fantastically garish hues. Disorienting, too, are the moves from medium shot to close-up to long shot that accompany each image, not to mention the rotation of Bonnie’s (Faye Dunaway’s) visage and the flipped negative that Time’s title partially obscures. In general, one might say, the cover’s components are joined but, at the same time, separate. Challenging beholders to forge connections among its images, the collage nonetheless defers completing this task. • If I belabor Rauschenberg’s take on Bonnie and Clyde, then it is because the painter’s collage resembles, however inadvertently, the film’s violent contribution to New Hollywood.1 Using multiple-camera montage, Penn’s film interweaves footage shot by multiple, synchronized cameras to generate images of varying distances, angles, and speeds. For Bonnie and Clyde’s death scene, Penn tethered four cameras to shoot from roughly the same perspective then repeated that setup from multiple vantage points (Crowdus and Porton 9–10). The cameras, though they shot simultaneously, recorded the scene at rates of 24, 48, 72, and 96 frames per second, respectively, producing footage from standard speed to just one-quarter of it (D. Cook, “Ballistic Balletics” 140–41). Edited in postproduction along with traditional, single-camera footage, the resulting sequence leaps from close-up to long shot, high to low angle, and standard speed to slow motion, giving the spectator a dizzying survey of machine-gun fire’s effects on Bonnie’s and Clyde’s bodies. Indeed, the sheer number of views produced by the sequence emphasizes their incongruities. Like Rauschenberg’s collages, Penn’s montage derives from divergent scales and contexts. Rapid-fire close-ups of Bonnie, Clyde (Warren Beatty), and the bushes that conceal their opponents give way to wider, multicamera shots that capture bodily spasms and, later, to long, high-angle framings that reveal the pair’s relative positions in space. Though single-camera eyeline matches between the protagonists initially provide some continuity between cuts, the couple’s anxious and isolated

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Figures 1.3 and 1.4. Close-ups give way to wider views of Clyde and Bonnie (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967).

looks out of frame prefigure the montage’s ensuing perceptual chaos. At one point, the film repeats Clyde’s fall to the ground from three angles and at two different speeds. Placed in succession, these shots—like the couple’s inexplicably migrating wounds—allow spectators to distinguish among the incompatible takes that actually compose the sequence. Despite these incongruities, however, the montage also strives to synthesize its conflicting components. After a split-second start, the

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Figure 1.5. Long-shot framings reveal the couple’s position at the end of the sequence (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967).

editing slows to a somewhat more accommodating pace. Spectators have time to consider the assaults that toss and tear Bonnie and Clyde, something the film’s repetitions and use of slow motion likewise facilitate. In fact, the scene’s increasingly extended duration, distance, and speed often work against the indeterminate readings that Rauschenberg’s work holds open. As the film concludes, two of the longest shots underscore this sense of determinacy. In the first, Clyde’s once uncontrollable body rolls 360 degrees in quarter-time before reaching a halt. In the second, Bonnie’s arm languidly drops to her side as the machine-gun fire ceases. Together, both shots seem to restore details multiple-camera montage had lost. Smoothing over the gaps privileged by Rauschenberg’s collages, the pair permit spectators to “see more” of life’s imperceptible movement toward death. From this point of view, Penn’s film departs from the experimental forms to which Time initially compares it. “What matters most about Bonnie and Clyde is,” the magazine urges, “. . . its yoking of disparate elements into a coherent artistic whole—the creation of unity from incongruity” (“Hollywood” 67). Accordingly, the film uses slow motion to disclose movements that affirm and stabilize vision as much as unsettle everyday appearances. It also turns simultaneity toward synthesis through multiple-camera montage, promising omnipresence in space by way of temporally synchronized devices. In this, one finds the influence of a

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comparatively unexperimental contemporary form: “Oddly enough,” Time writes, “younger moviemen credit television with a major role in paving the way for acceptance of the new in films” (“Hollywood” 67, emphasis added).2 Though surprising to Time, television’s influence seems quite predictable when one considers how it, like multiple-camera montage, guarantees disclosure and synthesis by way of slow motion and multiple cameras. Though certainly less frequent on television than in cinema, slow motion gives viewers the chance to analyze once unobservable details. Best known for its contributions to “instant replay” during televised sports, slow motion originated with the broadcast of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder on NBC in 1963. Originally transmitted live, Oswald’s shooting was repeatedly replayed in slow motion in the hours following the event. The result helped assure viewers of “what really happened” by supplying them with what may have been missed during the initial broadcast. Transposed to an Army-Navy football game just five weeks later, this experience of authentic disclosure was compounded by sports programming’s effortless moves from taped instant replays to immediate and simultaneous transmissions. Television’s use of multiple cameras also contributed to the medium’s authenticity and liveness. Emerging during the “golden age” of New York–based variety and anthology series, multiple-camera setups permitted television directors to jump to different angles, characters, and sets without disrupting the “real time” of live transmissions. Even when television moved to Hollywood-produced programs on film in the early 1960s, many shows continued to use multiple cameras for recordings with so-called live audiences. In these instances, cuts from camera to camera fragmented space yet unified time, disguising the ruptures they generated by privileging the simultaneity of broadcast. Moves between cameras thus resembled television’s distribution of content across programming blocks, which “abrupt[ly] leap[t] from news about Vietnam to Gomer Pyle to toothpaste ads,” according to Time, yet constituted the medium’s “flow” in the work of Raymond Williams (“Hollywood” 67; R. Williams 78–118). For some, like director Richard Lester, “TV [was] best at . . . sudden shifts of reality. . . . [It], not Last Year at Marienbad, made the audience notice them for the first time” (“Hollywood” 67). Still, for others, the medium diminished distinctions among fragments in favor of unified sequences. “It is evident,” writes Williams, “that what is now called ‘an evening’s viewing’ is in some ways planned . . . as a whole, . . . which in this sense, override[s] particular program units” (93). In what follows, I pursue these tensions between fragment and whole, incongruity and unity, through Bonnie and Clyde’s use of multiple-camera

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montage. Read as a figure for authenticity in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the device joined perception to representation and desire to fantasy, to corroborate and challenge demonstrative violence for a number of media and practices. As with broadcast television, military reconnaissance, and even the period’s film theories, multiple-camera montage reconciled discordant demands and sensations to depictions of omnipresence. At the same time, however, the technology did more than unify incompatible elements. It also registered parallaxes between part and whole, simultaneity and synthesis, and definitive and indeterminate disclosures. Seizing these parallaxes, I trace their consequences for authenticity on and off screen. Indeed, because it articulates and disarticulates visual mastery, multiple-camera montage at once situates vision in violence and opens the pair to less brutal arrangements.

Unity from Incongruity [Bonnie and Clyde] is . . . pitilessly cruel, filled with sympathy, nauseating, funny, heartbreaking, and astonishingly beautiful. —Roger Ebert, “Bonnie and Clyde”

I begin my account of multiple-camera montage with Bonnie and Clyde’s reception, which betrays conflicts regarding unity and incongruity, not unlike the technology and contemporary approaches to it. In that reception, one finds critics collide over the film’s inconsistencies when it comes to narrative sense and spectatorial sensation. Regarding the first, reviewers accuse Bonnie and Clyde of mixing historical fact with Hollywood fiction, since these are, commentators warn, properly incompatible spheres of meaning. The film offers a “purposeless mingling of fact and claptrap,” according to Time, while Bosley Crowther at the New York Times dedicates the last of three excoriating reviews to Bonnie and Clyde’s biographical inaccuracies (“Cinema”). Warren Beatty’s “light-hearted, show-offish” portrayal of Clyde is, he writes, mannered playacting of a hick that bears no more resemblance to Barrow than it does to Jesse James. And the sweet prettified indication of Bonnie that Faye Dunaway conveys is a totally romantic exoneration of that ugly and vicious little dame. . . . This is an indication of the kind of cheating with the bare and ugly truth that Mr. Penn, his writers, and Mr. Beatty have done in this garish, grotesque film that makes the crimes of Clyde and Bonnie quite hilarious. (“Run”)

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Though he denounces the film for its inauthenticity, Crowther’s quest for genuineness indicates graver concerns about Bonnie and Clyde’s blend of comedy and cruelty. In his second review of the film, Crowther writes that Penn’s “ridiculous camp-tinctured travesties . . . might be passed off as candidly commercial, . . . if the film weren’t reddened with blotches of violence of the most grisly sort” (“Screen”). Put simply: When spectators perceive less brutality, representational inaccuracy matters less. For this reason, complaints about the narrative’s inaccuracy generally accompany concerns for its brutally discordant sensations. Bonnie and Clyde “incongruously couples comedy with crime,” notes Variety, while for the Chicago Tribune, its “frivolous approach presents the couple’s criminal career as a kind of musical romp” (Kaufman; Terry, “Bonnie and Clyde”). Here, as during the Code era, critics worry that levity trivializes, perhaps even authorizes, the violent acts of protagonists. Worse, it offers viewers little guidance in how to respond to images of bloodshed. “Blending . . . farce with brutal killings is as pointless,” writes Crowther, “as it is lacking in taste. It makes no valid commentary upon the already travestied truth” (“Screen”). The result is especially worrisome, he intimates, because so many people believe the film holds “some sort of meaningful statement for the times in which we live” (“Run”). This includes Crowther’s readers. “Arthur Penn has not made an educational or historical filmstrip,” writes one; yet “the film makes an intelligent comment . . . about America’s heritage of crime and its penchant for violence, so evident today” (O’Mealy). For many, in fact, the film’s inconsistencies are what make it authentic. “In Bonnie and Clyde,” reads another letter to Crowther, “. . . Penn has managed to create an unusual documentary—sweet, savage, absurd. In short, real” (“Mailbag: Bonnie, Clyde”). Adds Pauline Kael: Bonnie and Clyde may keep the “audience in a kind of eager, nervous imbalance,” but spectators are only amused, until they “catch the first bullet right in the face” (“Bonnie and Clyde”). The film is genuine, in other words, because it unites fact with fiction and pleasure with pain. Together, these generate synthetic significance rather than senselessness or sadism. “Hard times were an impetus to violence and crime,” notes Charles Champlin of the film’s Depression-era setting, “and, as the cities attest, they are even now” (“Bonnie & Clyde”). Drawing sense from sensation both inside and outside the film, Bonnie and Clyde discloses the era’s professed proclivity for violence. It fashions unity from incongruity. Scholars, too, discover as much when it comes to multiple-camera montage, which, many claim, transcends everyday appearance, despite or even because of its divergent aesthetics and the conflicted responses

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they provoke. Such is Stephen Prince’s argument in repeated assessments of the technology, which he argues, ties Bonnie and Clyde to Akira Kurosawa’s experiments with multiple cameras and slow motion as well as Sam Peckinpah’s work from the late 1960s and 1970s (“Aestheticizing Violence”; “Hemorrhaging”; “Aesthetic of Slow-Motion”; “Introduction”). Beginning with Seven Samurai (1954), Kurosawa regularly employed three to five cameras to extend his coverage of complicated fight scenes. A decade and a half later, Peckinpah extended this design, using six separate cameras, running at 24, 30, 60, 90, and 120 frames per second, to film the climactic battle of The Wild Bunch (1969). The slow motion produced by five of these cameras also owed to Kurosawa, whose interest in protracted footage of violence and death emerges as early as Sanshiro Sugata (1943), according to Prince. In fact, Prince’s investigation of multiple-camera montage focuses on slow motion more than any other technique. Its power, he argues, lies in decelerated motion’s conflict with standard-speed footage, which incongruously joins aesthetic beauty to physical brutality. “By alternating the tempo between slow and apparently accelerated [motion],” Bonnie and Clyde “vividly brings out the alternately balletic and spastic qualities of [its final] scene,” Prince notes (“Hemorrhaging” 135, 137). Slow motion makes time elastic, he argues. It extends the duration in which viewers may inspect brutal events, even as standard-speed images and sounds join reduced speeds to supply the dynamism and sensuous physicality they presumably lack. Once united, this collision of elements generates a “synthesized collage of activity” that, writes Prince, forcefully reveals imperceptible details of bodily losses of volition (“Aesthetic of SlowMotion” 192). Though initially discordant, in other words, slow motion gives viewers access to the intimate consequences of corporeal violence, particularly when momentary reductions of speed are stitched into the significance of larger sequences. In this, Prince’s analysis of multiple-camera montage resembles historical accounts of slow motion, which look to avant-garde and art cinemas—the technique’s traditional homes—to defamiliarize and potentially redeem everyday realities. “Slow motion not only reveals familiar aspects of movement,” argues Walter Benjamin in 1936, “but [also] discloses quite unknown aspects within them. . . . It is another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye. ‘Other’ above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious” (“Work of Art” 117). Prince conjures a similarly unconscious optics for the late 1960s when he insists that Hollywood’s slow-motion inserts divulge more than external, bodily damage. “It is not just the moment of violent death which is extended

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[by decelerated movement],” he writes, “but the mysteries inherent in that twilit zone between consciousness and autonomic impulse” (“Aesthetic of Slow-Motion” 185). Indeed, to the extent that it captures the body’s invisible instincts, Prince’s conception of slow motion surpasses Benjamin’s account of what the device can make visible. The closest analogue, in this sense, may be Linda Williams’s account of the “money shot,” modern, hard-core pornography’s requisite display of a man’s ejaculating penis. Promising spectators visual evidence of sexual ecstasy, the money shot appears to arrive at “the mechanical ‘truth’ of bodily pleasure caught in involuntary spasm, the ultimate and uncontrollable—ultimate because uncontrollable—confession of sexual pleasure in the climax of orgasm” (Hard Core 101). Though clearly fictional compared to the money shot’s documentation of male orgasm, the slow-motion deaths in Bonnie and Clyde purport to expose imperceptible experiences no less than their pornographic counterparts. One seeks irrepressible pleasure, the other unrepresentable pain, yet both strive for what Prince calls death’s—or, in the case of orgasm, la petite mort’s—“metaphysical mysteries” (“Aesthetic of Slow-Motion” 189). In this “frenzy of the visible,” as Williams calls it, following French film historian Jean-Louis Comolli, one senses the late 1960s and early 1970s preoccupation with intense subjective experiences that promise something more authentic than perceptible, external realities (Hard Core 36; Comolli 122). As with Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano, 1972), Bonnie and Clyde extends this intensity to spectators, who may not encounter “real” violence as they do actual orgasms yet nonetheless experience fervid feelings of desire and disgust when confronted with on-screen brutality. Of course, as Williams is quick to suggest, the money shot’s authentic revelation of sexual pleasure requires that men disengage from the very act that presumably imparts it. The shot’s bodily truth is compromised further, moreover, because pornography uses male ejaculation to stand in for and substantiate comparatively invisible and unverifiable female orgasms. The money shot’s spectacular visibility “extends,” she writes, “only to a knowledge of the hydraulics of male ejaculation, which, though certainly of interest, is a poor substitute for the knowledge of female wonders that the genre as a whole still seeks” (Hard Core 94). The death throes of Bonnie and Clyde may only pretend to divulge brutally painful extinctions, but as in pornography, the “metaphysical mysteries” slow motion supplies hide splits between inside and outside or visible and invisible upon which these disclosures rely. From this point of view, slow motion’s synthetic union of opposites appears just that—synthetic, a rather inauthentic fusion of what the film otherwise designates as separate.

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In his analysis of Peckinpah, Prince underscores just this artificiality. “It is notable,” he writes, “that critics have discussed Peckinpah’s work as if its use of bloody squibs and slow motion was more realistic than previous generations of Hollywood gunfights. It certainly is bloodier,” he continues, “but Peckinpah’s is far from a realist’s aesthetic” (“Aesthetic of Slow-Motion” 196). Recalling Comolli’s warning that cinema’s “accumulation of technical processes” does not make film content “more real” but rather, and quite simply, “more visible,” Prince, like Kael before him, finds the incongruities of The Wild Bunch or Bonnie and Clyde demand “continuing perceptual reorientation,” not unlike Rauschenberg’s collages (Comolli 132, 137; “Aesthetic of Slow-Motion” 191). In this sense, the aesthetics of Peckinpah or Penn inhibit self-possessed, even composed, attitudes toward violence. To the extent that slow motion lays claim to the truth of corporeal brutality, however, their work in multiple-camera montage also undermines these inhibitions. Rather than suggest the indeterminacy of reality and human perception, as it does in avant-garde or art cinema, slow motion in The Wild Bunch or Bonnie and Clyde tends to mimic the comparatively definitive depictions of violence one finds in television news.

See More Now Despite its massive heterogeneity, there does seem to us a single, coherent language of television to which all its different practices can be referred. —Stuart Hall, “Television and Culture”

Multiple cameras are not unique to television or to post-Code Hollywood filmmaking, though their appearance in both media follows a general hiatus in classical cinema of the mid-1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Earlier, during the industry’s conversion to sound, multiple cameras allowed editors to cut within scenes without compromising a film’s dialogue or diegetic sound effects. Before postsynchronization became widespread in the early 1930s, that is, cinema modeled itself on the live radio broadcasts from which it borrowed technology and personnel. Sound and image were captured at the same time to preserve the illusion of audiovisual synchronization. This was particularly true for the Vitaphone system, which recorded sound directly onto autonomous, nonfilmic discs. To preserve more than one view of an actor’s performance meant employing multiple, synchronous cameras, which could be situated at varying angles and distances to the action.

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Jack Robin’s (Al Jolson’s) numbers in the Vitaphone feature The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927) provide an early example. While singing “Toot Toot Tootsie” before a small, diegetic crowd, Jack begins to hand whistle the song’s chorus. Initially depicted in medium long shot, this performative detail motivates the film’s cut to a close-up, which, to maintain audiovisual continuity, Crosland shot at the same time as the wider framing. Also filmed simultaneously was the full shot to which The Jazz Singer leaps when Jack begins to dance. Preserving, once again, the performer’s uninterrupted vocal recording, this cut underscores his most visually significant movements. Developed by cinematographer Ed Du Par for shooting programs of Vitaphone shorts, this multiple-camera technique rests somewhat uncomfortably in The Jazz Singer, a largely single-camera, nonvocal feature. The result, argues Charles Wolfe, is a strikingly incongruous film, a “hybrid text,” that is both silent and “talkie,” feature and short, fiction and documentary (67). Rapidly replacing cinema’s live vaudeville and musical prologues between 1927 and 1929, Vitaphone shorts anthologized the images and sounds of popular entertainments with fully synchronized recordings. Vitaphone features, meanwhile, offered spectators extended linear narratives accompanied by independently recorded and postsynchronized scores and loosely diegetic sound effects. In most ways, they resembled silent films, except that their once live musical accompaniments now emanated from discs. With The Jazz Singer, the two forms met in a fictionalized plot punctuated by vocal performances that, to varying degrees, interrupted the feature’s overwhelmingly “silent” unfolding with synchronized sound and near documentary recordings of comparatively “live” musical numbers. The simultaneity of the film’s camerawork only compounds these disruptions, which imply an immediacy, a presence, the larger narrative lacks. When The Jazz Singer jumps from long shot to close-up, its aim, argues Wolfe, is not to subjectify space. Rather, its multiple cameras preserve audiovisual continuity across cuts to emphasize the living corporeal embodiment of the sound’s source. As a result, these images attenuate the loss of the live performer that Vitaphone shorts actually introduced. They seek “to make an absent figure at once audible and visible,” Wolfe writes, “to demonstrate—despite a technological divorcement of camera-projector and microphone-speaker—an original unity and causal relation between body and sound at the moment the sound was produced” (65). Corroborating this cohesive presence is Jolson’s own persona—“authenticated by his singular voice”—which, along with the conspicuous frontality and direct address of his performances,

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ensures his “factual” self outpaces his status as the fictional Jack Robin (Wolfe 69). This is not to suggest that The Jazz Singer’s narrative does not, in some sense, decrease the gaps between it and the vocalized passages. The plotting of the fictional feature certainly helps suture the ruptures that its documentary “shorts” introduce. Moreover, as Wolfe suggests, the musical numbers themselves exhibit a kind of latent fictiveness, particularly when, as in the “Toot Toot Tootsie” sequence, the film employs a diegetic audience and rudimentary shot / reverse shot structures to supply a modicum of continuity. More interesting for my purposes, however, are the unifying efforts that characterize the synchronized segments themselves. As much as these numbers introduce an incongruous immediacy, even “liveness,” into their comparatively “canned” narrative frame, their simultaneous recording of sound and image generates a sense of authentic presence that not only synthesizes past and present performances but also permits one to have the best possible account when multiple vantages combine without compromising the film’s auditory stability. Multiple-camera setups returned to prominence in early 1950s television, where they created new fantasies of immediacy and authenticity by corroborating the medium’s liveness through somewhat unexpected means. On one hand, multiple cameras lent television a conventionally cinematic appearance, granting live anthology series such as The Philco Television Playhouse (NBC, 1948–1955) the basics of continuity editing. The result, which disarticulated space to preserve the broadcast’s real time, allowed television to accomplish “with enviable ease” what “cinema,” according to Charles Barr, “might have to do rather laboriously” (59). On the other hand, of course, it was precisely this ease that circumvented postproduction labor and distinguished multiple-camera broadcasts from Hollywood montage. When live television cut between dislocated spaces, it did so “here and now,” unlike cinema, which must wait for film development and editorial reordering. Even Vitaphone shorts, which relied upon multiple, synchronous recordings at the level of production, re-presented the past when it came to exhibition. Television, meanwhile, purported to present the present at the very moment the apparatus recorded and transmitted it. As a result, production and reception became virtually simultaneous. Though distinct from Vitaphone’s “liveness,” this simultaneity was no less contradictory, since television, too, disguised disruption to assure its omnipresence. At first glance, multiple cameras seemed to protect live television against the threat of broken transmissions; if one camera stopped working, another simply took its place. In reality, however, these setups offered no respite from the broadcast clock and its prohibition against retakes. They weakened the director’s compositional control and

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introduced opportunities for error during exchanges between cameras. From this point of view, multiple cameras retained, rather than restrained, the dangers of live transmission. Missed cues or forgotten lines only strengthened television’s claims to instantaneous broadcast and simultaneous reception. Mary Ann Doane makes a similar point in her account of the medium’s liveness, which, she submits, gathers its urgency from the temporality of catastrophe (“Information”). Implying technological failure and unexpected death, catastrophe names the violently inassimilable moments that accompany events such as earthquakes or plane crashes. These moments, Doane argues, supply television with its claims to immediacy, yet in covering them, the medium necessarily extends their durations, compromising the very presence it otherwise seeks. Live transmissions are, in this sense, always too late, rendering visible a “now” that is set in the past and inescapably imperceptible. The coverage of President Kennedy’s assassination offers a formative—perhaps the formative—example in this regard. For four days following the event, networks used live broadcast to “anchor” filmed field reports, interviews with witnesses, and hurriedly compiled documentaries. Indeed, they had to, according to Thomas Doherty and Barbie Zelizer, since, as Doherty suggests, the state of broadcast journalism in 1963 “militated against the coverage of live and fast-breaking events in multiple locations” for a number of reasons: TV cameras required two hours of equipment warm-up to become “hot” enough for operation. Video signals were transmitted cross-country via “hard wire” coaxial cable or microwave relay. “Spot coverage” of unfolding news in the field demanded speed and mobility and since television cameras had to be tethered to enormous wires and electrical systems, 16 mm film crews still dominated location coverage, with the consequent delay in transportation, processing, and editing of footage. Still, by mixing live with canned reports, network coverage spatialized the catastrophe across heterogeneous locations and a variety of sources and media. The result, which suggested immediate access to authentic realities, also managed, even delimited, the discontinuity and indeterminacy of such heterogeneity, not to mention the assassination itself. In this sense, television embraced “breaking news” to exploit then deny the incongruities and impediments that simultaneity, in fact, “contained.” In the world of television fiction, multiple cameras served liveness similarly, fracturing “here” to make more “now” visible. To wit, moving

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between cameras propagated the present by editing in “real time.” It also transposed exigencies at the site of production to the immediacy of at-home reception. In this way, I argue, multiple cameras not only recouped “lost” time but also unified ruptured space. They intensified efforts to overcome distance that characterize “tele-vision” (literally, seeing from afar) both in practice and in name. With television, writes Samuel Weber, viewers “see things from places—and hence, from perspectives and points of view (and it is not trivial that these are often more than one)—where his or her body is not (and often never can be) situated” (116, emphasis added). This may be true of cinema, too, but television aims to guarantee the “now” of both here and there. It “splits” vision, Weber contends, to surmount the divorce between viewer and viewed. Multiple cameras compounded this action for viewers of “golden-age” drama. Dividing perception across diverse views, they transformed “seeing more” into “seeing more now.” As television increasingly abandoned live broadcast in the late 1950s and 1960s, many series persisted in their use of multiple cameras. Programs such as I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951–1957) and, later, The Dick Van Dyke Show (CBS, 1961–1966) shot on film and with three cameras before a “live” studio audience. As in the golden age, these performances were largely continuous and, except in emergency circumstances, filmed without retakes. Editing, meanwhile, “was a largely mechanical process,” according to Barr, and followed “the pattern of cuts between cameras that would have been done on air . . . had it been transmitted live” (62). Ostensibly, the system was motivated by considerations such as error and the quality of future rebroadcasts. Film and videotape abated the threat of technological failure that accompanied live transmission. Still, this reason alone does not explain the persistence of multiple cameras, single takes, and in-studio audiences on the part of some programs. Rather, these techniques seem to emerge as supplements to television’s “new” lack of immanent catastrophe. To the extent, moreover, that shooting on film did not diminish the quality of simultaneous transmission, as did earlier off-air recording, it provided networks with comparatively “livelike” images for rebroadcast on future dates and in multiple time zones. From this point of view, the loss of broadcast to film and, later, videotape did not blunt so much as sharpen fantasies of televisual simultaneity. Live or not, multiple cameras animated and answered demands to “see more now” by synchronously recording various views of a given performance. Along with studio audiences, whose laugher substantiated the place of production, multiple cameras infused reception with the multifarious presence that simultaneity demands and disguises. In this way, post–golden age television unexpectedly resembled one of the chief

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Figure 1.6. Three-camera technique in I Love Lucy, CBS, 1951–1957 (American Cinematographer, 1952).

repositories of liveness after the late 1950s: sports coverage, which, in the case of football, often employed twenty or more cameras inside a single broadcast (Morse 48). Indeed, unlike dramatic programming, simultaneous reception was a hallmark of televisual sports. And yet, its sheer number of vantages suggested that live transmission was inadequate to capturing and delivering immediate presence. Integrating discontinuous views that, according to Margaret Morse, resembled neither the crowd’s nor the players’ perspectives, sports coverage constructed an impossible spectatorial position that turned incongruous fragments toward synthetic omnipresence (51). Betraying this fact, even as they supported it, were play-by-play commentaries and instant replays. As with in-studio audiences, sportscasters imbued broadcasts with on-the-spot presence, particularly since, by definition, they had to play catch up to events as they unfolded. At the same time, however, these commentators—not unlike the images they narrated—managed the game’s intrinsic violence and uncertainty with determinate views about what “actually” happened. Instant replays went further, meanwhile, by foregoing liveness to return to the past. They disclosed what, in the present, instantaneous reception could not authenticate. Thus throughout the 1960s, both live and canned television contributed to fantasies of authenticity by exploiting and denying differences between here and there, then and now, which define simultaneity.

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Multiple cameras, I submit, codified this structure not only when they predominated television’s golden age but also—and especially—when the medium appeared to be losing its liveness for the first time. Conjuring immediate reception for previously recorded, even single-camera, productions, multiple-camera setups helped television reclaim authenticity and differentiate itself from cinema. Still, because simultaneity no longer belonged to live productions alone, cinema could potentially reap the genuineness that “seeing more now” engendered. Accordingly, one finds Hollywood appropriating multiple-camera techniques it had originated some forty years earlier, particularly in fiction and nonfiction works that depicted catastrophe and graphic, corporeal violence. Though the results differed from television in significant and revelatory ways, they signal the extent to which “seeing more” violence reflected and refracted desires and anxieties as wide-ranging pursuits for authenticity across multiple media.

A Parallax View The philosophical twist to be added (to parallax) . . . is that the observed difference is not simply “subjective,” due to the fact that the same object which exists “out there” is seen from two different stations, or points of view. It is rather that . . . subject and object are inherently “mediated,” so that an “epistemological” shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an “ontological” shift in the object itself. —Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View

Bonnie and Clyde opens with a series of thirty-two sepia-tinted photographs that, interspersed with credits, emerge from a black background one by one. Although accompanied by the sound of an imperceptible shutter, these images do not capture the present. Instead, they represent the past. Save for the last two, they are records of the Great Depression, the era in which Bonnie and Clyde is set. Evoking works by Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans, the photographs index a now-mythic documentary impulse with images of austere women, uncertain children, ramshackle homes, and disheveled men. Later, when generic portraits give way to snapshots of the “real” Barrow gang and, finally, to Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, this mix of fact and fiction grows, along with the film’s indications of violence. In one picture, two men hold rifles in front of a car; in another, three squat with guns raised at the camera. Together, they recall photographs, published in 1933 by police in Joplin, Missouri, which secured the legend of a gun-toting Clyde and cigar-smoking Bonnie

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Figures 1.7 and 1.8. Photographs recall Depression-era works by Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967).

for the Hollywood stars who conclude this synthetic yet patchworked history of mediated brutality. Still, if Bonnie and Clyde is a film about the imbroglios of reality and representation, violence and entertainment, then it is so with respect

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to the present as much as the past. More allegory than chronicle for its creators, Bonnie and Clyde was conceived and received as an account of and about the late 1960s. It matters, therefore, that the film begins with photography but concludes with television by way of multiple cameras. The most prominent purveyor of violence for the late 1960s and early 1970s, television was also the era’s predominant source of simultaneity and thus “immediate” reception. Arthur Penn himself began his career during the electronic medium’s golden age, directing numerous episodes of live and multicamera anthology series such as The Gulf Playhouse, also known as First Person (NBC, 1952–1953), and, later, The Philco Television Playhouse. Indeed, both of his early cinematic endeavors—The Left-Handed Gun (1958) and The Miracle Worker (1962)—first appeared as teleplays on the small screen.3 Taking his experience with multiple cameras to Hollywood long after television had begun to shoot on film, Penn unleashed assurances of simultaneity the industry had not regularly deployed since the conversion to sound in the late 1920s. The result, which yoked Vitaphone’s union of past and presence to television’s purported immediacy, promised spectators of Bonnie and Clyde relatively direct and omnipresent access to the deaths of its protagonists. To begin, Bonnie and Clyde exploits multiple-camera montage for the heterogeneity it later denies. With 38 shots in 48 seconds, spectators struggle to accommodate the film’s death scene, which includes abrupt shifts in location, distance, speed, and angle among single- and multiplecamera footage. Most jarring, I have suggested, are the single-camera close-ups that introduce the sequence. Flashing rapidly from a tight shot of Bonnie, who turns away from the spectator with anxiety, the film cuts to a reverse angle of Clyde, who crouches as if preternaturally aware of the danger. The mood of this exchange contrasts sharply with preceding scenes that, however hackneyed, feature the pair consummating their relationship or, more convincingly, sharing a pear. As if to recall these moments, the next three shots—in equally rapid succession—present an extreme close-up of Bonnie, who briefly smiles, followed by Clyde’s tender worry, and then her own gentle resignation. These changes in tone, along with the utter speed of the images, heighten the spectator’s disorientation as well as the scene’s indeterminate threat. Thus, without pretense to liveness, Bonnie and Clyde evokes the immanent catastrophe that television cultivates through single takes and in-studio audiences. Though not cut in real time, multiple-camera montage retains this danger in the following sequence, where errors in shooting would have required laborious changes of wardrobe and makeup, props, and special effects to launch additional takes. The film’s content also contributes to this urgency, since it depicts a sudden eruption of violence,

Figures 1.9, 1.10, and 1.11. Single-camera close-ups introduce abrupt shifts that prefigure multiple-camera montage’s mix of incongruity and unity (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967).

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however historically or narratively anticipated. As bullets knock Clyde to the ground or shake Bonnie’s blood-spattered body, spectators hunt for that inassimilable instant when death intervenes and turns volitional into nonvolitional movement. “There’s a moment in death when the body no longer functions,” Penn told André Lebarthe and Jean-Louis Comolli in a 1967 Cahiers du Cinéma interview, “when it becomes an object and has a certain kind of detached ugly beauty” (169). For Comolli, who, in four years, would describe cinema’s contributions to a modern “ideology of the visible,” Bonnie and Clyde’s attempts to recover this moment for vision likely affirmed his emerging position. Rendering in space what is—even in fiction—unavailable in time, the film aims to represent the inescapably imperceptible. In so doing, Bonnie and Clyde again invokes television, using multiple cameras to split “here” so as to unify “now.” With four cameras running in tandem and at different speeds, the film turns an irreducible instant into manifold presence/presents. Spectators watch Bonnie convulse in medium shot or close-up, while high- and low-angle images of Clyde’s tortured torso intervene in the action. Then, at unanticipated moments, wide shots of the pair draw their agonies together. The result differs from classical editing in emphasis and effect. Rather than supply an illusion of consistency alone, multiple-camera montage underscores both the diversity of fragments with which it begins and the unity it ultimately constructs. In addition to this diversity, the technique also underscores its sources’ synchronous production. If these generate cohesion, it is less from one moment to the next than across all spaces and times. Multiple-camera montage seeks coverage, in other words, but coverage in the name of omnipresence, not linear continuity. As a result, multiple-camera montage reinforces the disclosures that attend its slow-motion inserts. Aggregating space as they extend time, each device expands the moment in which spectators discover brutality’s once imperceptible details. At the same time, however, omnipresence manages, even masters, the discontinuity by which it breaks with everyday perception. Like slow motion—or television news—the coverage it tenders works to cover indeterminacy and incongruity with fantasies of authenticity. In Bonnie and Clyde, this work becomes increasingly complex, if not overwrought. While multicamera television shoots one performance from a few different places, multiple-camera montage interweaves footage shot by a number of cameras over several takes and in many locations. Bonnie and Clyde’s conclusion, for instance, combines the work of four cameras in at least five different setups with an unknown number of takes. To suggest omnipresence, the film must synthesize at least twenty accounts of the violence, while multicamera television typically joins but three.

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As much as it draws them together, therefore, this proliferation of views introduces crucial distinctions between how cinema and television turn “seeing more” into “seeing more now.” Unlike television, cinema does not seek instantaneous reception or its impression. Films may exploit synchronous recording to create a synthetic spectatorial field, but multiple-camera montage does not deny the divorce between here and there, then and now, as does the small screen. Slow motion, repetition, and inconsistencies across cuts resist the suggestion that perception itself is placed before the spectator. When Bonnie’s wounds bleed in one shot but not in the next, the film attests to the many takes—the many spaces and times—that actually compose the sequence. The nature of cinematic representation also contributes to this resistance. As with the photographs that introduce Bonnie and Clyde, films evoke pastness by virtue of photochemical processes that, as André Bazin puts it, “embalm time” (“Ontology” 14). In fact, if, as Roland Barthes and Mary Ann Doane suggest, the noemes of photography and television are “that-hasbeen” and “this-is-going-on,” respectively, then cinema would seem to express “this-is-going-on,” though it also “has-been” (Barthes, Camera Lucida 77; Doane, “Information” 222). Compared to television’s facility for liveness, that is, and the ephemerality it implies, cinema emphasizes sources and archival capabilities in addition to present-tense unfoldings. It is this evidentiary capacity that reinforces multiple-camera montage’s claims to presence/presents, which might be described as a return of Vitaphone documentation by way of televisual simultaneity. Though not instantaneous, multiple-camera montage purports to provide spectators with direct evidence of a former “all-at-onceness” by synchronously preserving as much “now” as the film could record at that moment. Still, because this all-at-onceness avows discrepancies between production and reception, past and present, it points to the hybridity that animates both television’s and cinema’s assertions of authenticity. Both media turn fragmentation toward synthetic wholeness, but only multiple-camera montage registers the parallaxes that subtend this supposed omnipresence. In Bonnie and Clyde, these parallaxes are, at times, quite literal. The differential placement of the film’s cameras frequently produces rifts when their footage is edited together. Indeed, the use of multiple cameras in Bonnie and Clyde remains far more discontinuous than what one typically finds on television during this period. Singleand multicamera setups are often indistinguishable on the small screen. Cinema’s demonstrable incongruities, however, suggest a figural as well as literal relationship between multiple-camera montage and parallax, one that hinges on the latter’s role in stereoscopic vision. As with human depth perception, multiple-camera montage unifies reality from heterogeneous

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views. We “see more” brutality in Bonnie and Clyde because vision itself is split. Yet because multiple-camera montage makes these fractures visible, it unintentionally unsettles the perceptual mastery and metaphysical depth the film otherwise proposes. From this perspective, Bonnie and Clyde’s conclusion comes nearer the Rauschenberg collages from which it initially seemed to depart. Its parallaxes in view, multiple-camera montage presents elements that are joined but at the same time separate. In fact, according to Peter Bürger, montage owes its conceptualization to avant-garde collage, which first drew upon “reality fragments” to disrupt the artwork’s “wholeness” (72–82). Depriving these fragments of contexts that formerly gave them meaning, collage forges new relationships and possibilities for signification among its parts. The fragments, in turn, always precede and exceed the image to which they contribute, thereby preventing any determinate significance for the collage. Hardly avant-garde, Bonnie and Clyde suggests, however inadvertently, the extent to which “seeing more now” splits the difference between disclosure and concealment, presence and absence. With its numerous takes and discontinuous editing, multiple-camera montage indexes the parallaxes—the constitutive excesses—that transform authenticity into indeterminate acts of mediation. On this point, the film’s content is formally instructive, since Bonnie and Clyde thematizes the Barrow gang’s desire for media representation. Finding pleasure in press accounts that transform actual events into the stuff of legend, the outlaws not only contribute photographs and poems to the cause but also take advantage of the power it grants them. During one heist, for instance, Clyde arrests his victims’ attention by simply announcing the identities of himself and his colleagues. As the group executes the robbery with a professionalism they seem to have accrued with fame, Clyde’s brother (Gene Hackman) tells one security guard, “Take a good look, Pop; I’m Buck Barrow.” Moments later, a different guard returns this boast, enthusiastically telling reporters, “There I was, staring square into the face of death,” as he eagerly poses for photographs. In other scenes, the film turns such ambiguous realities toward less pleasurable ends. Before the aforementioned sequence, Clyde’s brother reads from a newspaper that overestimates the scope and severity of the gang’s crimes. Though Buck makes light of the account, Clyde grows increasingly anxious, conscious perhaps of the deadly manhunt the report will warrant in spite of its inconsistencies. These conflicts, meanwhile, tie Bonnie and Clyde’s narrative to its historical reception, which, I have argued, expresses desires for and anxieties about the film’s mingling of reality and representation as well as violence and entertainment. Some condemn the film’s inconsistencies,

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which, according to Bosley Crowther, exchange meaningful positions on violence for senselessness and sadism. Others embrace the film despite its discrepancies, contending, as does Pauline Kael, they authorize its integrity, its sense, by way of genuinely painful sensations. Regardless, both accounts meet in their demands for authenticity. One cleaves fact from fiction, the other conflates them, but together, these approaches seek unity from incongruity. In doing so, however, they point to the impossibility of their pursuit, which like multiple-camera montage, leans on reality fragments that at once animate and inhibit efforts to organize them. Crowther and Kael may overlook this parallax, but multiple-camera montage does not. Instead, it figures—that is, grounds and ungrounds— authenticity, omnipresence, and “seeing more now” for television as well as other media that conjoin vision and violence during this period.

Machines of the Visible The cinematic image grasps only a small part of the visible; and it is a grasp which—provisional, contracted, fragmentary—bears in it its impossibility. At the same time, film images are only a small part in the multiplicity of the visible, even if they tend by their accumulation to cover it. Every image is thus doubly racked by disillusion, and . . . it is . . . this structuring disillusion which . . . in certain rare flashes . . . produce[s] in our sight the very blindness which is at the heart of the visible. —Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible”

Splitting “here” to unify “now” proves more brutal when one considers the bedfellows multiple-camera montage keeps off as well as on screen. As America’s “first electronic war,” the conflict in Vietnam frequently adopted televisual technologies, according to Paul Virilio (82). The PAVE Spectre project, for instance, equipped AC-130 gunships with low-lightlevel television and electronic screens rather than conventional sensors and gun sights (Berger 118; Doleman 147; Dorr and Bishop 109).4 Other examples include the television cameras employed by pilotless drones and some of the nation’s first “smart bombs.” Most interesting for my purposes, however, are strategies that deployed the structure of television if not televisual equipment. Foremost among these is an operation known most consistently as Igloo White, which like multiple-camera montage sought to synthesize simultaneous transmissions gathered at various points in space. Conducted from January 1968 through February 1973, Igloo White was an operation of the U.S. Air Force that combined electronic sensors,

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relay aircraft, and computers to collect and collate reconnaissance data about the Ho Chi Minh Trail in southeastern Laos. Ultimately serving the destruction of North Vietnamese troops and trucks that supplied the Vietcong, Igloo White aimed to make visible what darkness, jungle, and weather regularly withheld from sight. “Before [Igloo White], the enemy had two things going for him,” an Air Force officer told Armed Forces Journal in 1971. “The sun went down every night, and he had trees to hide under. Now, [with Igloo White], he has nothing” (Correll 60). To this end, the program featured four central phases: First, it relied on thousands of battery-operated acoustic and seismic sensors that Air Force planes dropped into Laos at intervals to supply maximum coverage. Next, aircraft, which orbited the sensors twenty-four hours a day, relayed their signals to the Infiltration Surveillance Center at Nakhon Phanom, Thailand, by live radio feed. Then, at the surveillance center, two powerful IBM 360-65 computers processed and assembled the disparate information into synthetic images and maps that assessment officers interpreted on television screens in real time (Correll 58–60; Dickson 83–95; Gibson 396–99). Finally, once targets were confirmed, technicians radioed coordinates to aircraft, the navigation systems of which guided planes to relevant areas for bombing. “As the seismic and acoustic sensors pick[ed] up the truck movements,” notes sociologist James William Gibson, “their locations appear[ed] as an illuminated line of light, called ‘the worm.’ . . . [W]hen the ‘target’ was destroyed, the lights on the screen went out” (397). Joining televisual simultaneity to the compositing capabilities of multiple-camera montage, Igloo White not only linked Arthur Penn’s and Sam Peckinpah’s films to the medium and war that influenced their representations of violence but also generated fantasies of omnipresence that, I have demonstrated, belonged to both television and cinema during this era. In Vietnam, strategic bombing campaigns expressed this omnipotence, not multicamera television or cinematic montage. And yet, striking similarities emerge between descriptions of Igloo White and these media when it comes to the visual mastery, the unity, they privilege and the incongruities they disavow. For Virilio and others, electronic warfare means disembodied attacks that consolidate vision to mediate violence. “The fusion” between reality and representation “is complete” and “the confusion perfect,” according to Virilio. Nothing now distinguishes the functions of the weapon and the eye; the projectile’s image and the image’s projection form a single composite. In its tasks of detection and acquisition, pursuit and destruction, the projectile is an image . . . on a

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screen, and the television picture is an ultrasonic projectile propagated at the speed of light. (83, emphasis added) Cleaving here from there and then from now, electronic warfare conflates them in the name of all-at-onceness. The result brings heady pleasures, as it does for the Barrow gang, but “coverage” also introduces anxiety into the system. In the case of Igloo White, anxiety springs from parallaxes between part and whole, simultaneity and synthesis, that inhere in its fusion of sensors, relay aircraft, and televisual displays. “If a ‘target’ is only [a] programmed threshold point,” writes Gibson, and . . . a “destroyed” target . . . involves the destruction of the transmitting sensors, then how can one be sure that there really were trucks and men in the first place? Couldn’t it be a herd of elephants or deer? Or couldn’t Vietnamese use decoys to deceive sensors? Or, even if the Vietnamese really were detected, how could war-managers and technicians be sure they were destroyed when bombing raids destroyed the sensors that helped create the “target signatures”? (398) The indeterminacy at the heart of definitive—that is, authentic—disclosure crept into military reports as well. Despite assurances that thirty thousand trucks were destroyed on the Ho Chi Minh Trail between 1969 and 1971, on-board cameras and reconnaissance flights frequently gleaned little evidence of the results. Even if the Vietnamese moved damaged vehicles, as some claimed, there remained the problem of ground sensors, which were, as Brigadier General William G. Evans inadvertently reminded reporters, “listening—not viewing—devices. . . . We never actually ‘see’ the trucks,” or, I would add, the civilians whose injuries and deaths, according to Paul Dickson, the government kept secret (Correll 60; Dickson 92). From this point of view, more than Vietnamese fooled the system. Indeed, as Gibson suggests, the system regularly “fooled itself” (399). After all, however overlooked, the destruction of human and nonhuman material remained a matter of meaning, of drawing sense from sensation or unity from incongruity, even with—or, especially with—televisual and photographic documentation. In France, meanwhile, and in not wholly dissimilar terms, theorists such as Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, and others began to conceive cinema—its apparatus and its spectators—in ways that anticipate critiques of electronic warfare. Central to these considerations were the disembodied and omnipotent subject positions cinema

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apparently constructed for viewers. Writing in 1970, Baudry attributed cinema’s optics to Renaissance perspective, which “centered space” by reducing heterogeneous points of view to a fixed and “monocular vision” (“Ideological Effects” 289). Nestled inside the image, this vision admits no parallax. Rather, incongruities disappear into a vanishing point that assures spectatorial transcendence. In its movement, too, cinema splits here to see more now, gleaning continuity from the discontinuous images it differentially displaces. “Film . . . lives on the denial of difference,” writes Baudry, though “difference is necessary for it to live” (“Ideological Effects” 290). Conflating what it cleaves, cinema “preserv[es] at any cost the synthetic unity of the locus where meaning originates”: the subject (“Ideological Effects” 293). It thus fashions more than an impression of reality; it organizes the subject position that authorizes that experience. This subject position is, meanwhile, what makes cinema so dangerous. Like dreamers, or Jacques Lacan’s oft-cited child at the mirror, spectators confuse perception with representation and identify, however perversely, with externally imposed mastery. In this, notes Baudry, “the ‘contents’ of the images are of little importance,” since “the spectator identifies less with what is represented, the spectacle itself, than with what stages the spectacle” (“Ideological Effects” 295). Influenced by Baudry, Metz proceeds similarly, theorizing the primary identification by which spectator looks coincide with the camera. For this reason, writes Metz, cinema grants viewers positions as “all-perceiving” eyes/I’s, precisely because, unlike mirrors, screens do not permit them to locate themselves (Imaginary Signifier 48). Spectators are present, by contrast, through a “diffuse [and] geographically undifferentiated . . . hovering” that touches down into subjective secondary identifications yet never relinquishes its “emplacement” of viewers (Imaginary Signifier 54, 55). For Baudry, too, identification “fill[s] the gap, the split,” the parallax that constitutes cinematic subjects (“Ideological Effects” 294). Uniting here and there, then and now, it reconciles inside and outside, part and whole, and secures fantasies of omnipresence, not unlike Igloo White, television, and multiple-camera montage. Still, as figure, multiple-camera montage binds and unbinds these fantasies, directing spectators to incongruities that Metz and, to a lesser degree, Baudry disavow. Figures are interfaces, I have argued, sites where sensuous experience animates and inhibits narrative and historical sense. Multiple-camera montage may organize relationships to vision and violence, but it cannot contain the shapes it lends to them. Indeed, parallaxes that distinguish the device from tele-vision also differentiate perception from representation, activity from passivity, and disclose the linked yet distinct operations that emplace and displace film’s spectators. “One

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cannot hesitate to insist on the artificial character of the cine-subject,” notes Baudry in a more complex return to the apparatus in 1975 (“The Apparatus” 316). It is doubly, even triply, synthetic, in fact, since its unity implies spectators who not only mistake representation for perception but also self-consciously pursue experiences that take the form of misrecognitions. Thus, on one hand, spectators work at continuity, at identification, as much as the apparatus. Hardly dupes, the viewer uses cinema, according to Comolli, “to fool him or herself” (132). The result answers a need for determinacy, for all-at-onceness that, as in Igloo White, aims at “suturing, . . . filling in, . . . [and] patching up . . . lacks that ceaselessly recall the radical difference”—the uncertainty and partiality—of perception as opposed to representation (Comolli 140). On the other hand, however, and for this very reason, spectators tarry with the discontinuities, the resistances to identification, that in fact constitute omnipresence. Viewers do more, therefore, than exchange perception for representation; in fooling themselves, they nonetheless perceive. This distinction, though subtle, makes all the difference. It does so quite literally, in fact, to the extent it reveals how perception and desire remain irreducible to demands for disembodied omnipotence. In dreams, writes Baudry, “representations appear in the guise of perceived reality”; in cinema, however, “a real perception takes place. . . . Images are taken for reality but require the mediation of perception” (“The Apparatus” 316). Figures name this mediation, whereby sensation precedes and exceeds the subject positions that lend it sense. In the case of multiple-camera montage, elements such as slow motion, repetition, and inconsistencies between takes express incongruities with and against which the technology discovers unity, authenticity, and the capacity to see more now. The device thus figures blind spots that television, the military, and film theorists acknowledge less readily. One thinks, for instance, of the “hovering” by which Metz describes cinema’s monocular vision. Despite assertions to the contrary, it locates and dislocates viewers when it extends and returns them to and from primary and secondary identifications. If, for this reason, cinema belies desires for misrecognition, then it also betrays the extent to which these demands issue and outlast the fantasies that answer them. Such is the value, I argue, of multiple-camera montage, which permits viewers to trace omnipresence with its parallaxes in view, such that one might perceive its brutalities and their unrepresented alternatives.

2 Violence Incarnate Squibs, Artificial Blood, and Wounds That Speak

It is not often that a television cameraman . . . gets on film happening right there before your eyes one man blowing another man’s brains out. . . . It was kind of the supreme melodrama, . . . a kind of super pornography. . . . It was a kind of ultimate horror story that you captured in living color. —Peter Braestrup on NBC’s coverage of the Tet Offensive in Saigon I suppose “The Wild Bunch” is the most violent movie ever made. Hundreds of men, women, and horses are slaughtered. . . . Throats are slit, broken, strangled. Blood flows in an unending stream. —Roger Ebert on Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch

I

N PARRAS, MEXICO, IN MARCH 1968—just weeks after NBC aired color footage of Nguyen Ngoc Loan’s execution of a suspected Viet Cong guerilla in the streets of Saigon—filmmaker Sam Peckinpah and special-effects director Bud Hulburd began strapping small explosive devices called “squibs,” latex bags filled with artificial blood, and even chunks of raw meat to the stars of their upcoming film.1 The result—virtual fountains of blood that erupt from simulated gunshot wounds—not only rivaled the aforementioned news film, but also made The Wild Bunch (1969), along with Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), a landmark of late 1960s Hollywood violence.

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Figure 2.1. NBC footage of the “Saigon Execution,” part of the Huntley-Brinkley Report’s coverage of the Tet Offensive on February 2, 1968 (“Tet (1968),” Vietnam: A Television History).

Figure 2.2. Squib exploding with artificial blood (The Wild Bunch, 1969).

Before this time, bloodletting rarely appeared in mainstream depictions of gunplay and warfare. Strategic cutaways and stunt falls concealed bodies ruptured by violence, while distant camerawork refused to linger on wounds from which little blood seemed to flow. With the release of The Wild Bunch, however, one item—more than any other—dominated

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contemporary reviews: blood. “It is by several thousand red gallons the most graphically violent western ever made and one of the most violent movies of any kind,” writes Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times (“Violence Runs Rampant”). “Thanks to recent advances in special effects,” adds Roger Ebert, “the blood actually spurts when somebody gets shot; there are geysers of blood everywhere” (“The Wild Bunch”). Even when critics mention other aesthetic features of the film, bloody squibs remain integral to their observations. “When [characters] bleed, fall, and die, they do so in beautifully obscene slow motion,” Newsweek declares, “each victim a star swimmer in his own aquacade of blood” (Morgenstern, “The Bloody Bunch”). Slow motion may underscore the act of wounding, but bloodletting remains what viewers remember most. It is surprising, therefore, that few studies of screen violence have interrogated this union of explosives and artificial blood, especially when most acknowledge its significance for the history of Hollywood gunplay. “Probably more than any other effects tool, squibs changed the way screen violence looked,” writes Stephen Prince (“Graphic Violence” 10). Yet his analyses of The Wild Bunch primarily attend to multiple-camera montage and the slow-motion inserts it makes possible. Multiple-camera montage certainly figures prominently in post-Code depictions of corporeal brutality, as I suggest in chapter 1. At the same time, however, one cannot dismiss what appears to have most concerned contemporary viewers of The Wild Bunch: graphic, bloody eruptions from the human body. I thus extend my consideration of multiple-camera montage to include the squibs and artificial blood that generally accompanied such sequences After all, though capsules of artificial blood date to the 1930s and squiblike devices had simulated gunfire on walls, trees, and tables for years, their combination and application to the human body were new to the late 1960s and films such as Bonnie and Clyde. By the 1970s, squibs and artificial blood had moved beyond multiple-camera montage to provide momentary explosions of viscera in films such as Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970), The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971), The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), and Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973), the last of which I explore alongside The Wild Bunch. • I begin, then, with Sam Peckinpah, who in 1972 expressed the following to Playboy magazine: “We watch our wars and see men die, really die, every day on television, but it doesn’t seem real. . . . What I do is show people what it’s really like—not by showing it as it is so much as by heightening it, stylizing it” (Murray 68). His suggestion is twofold. On

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one hand, the nightly news exposes spectators to scenes of lived brutality they might otherwise miss; on the other hand, squibs and artificial blood do television’s job better, providing authentic visions of violence by virtue of their very illusionism. Taken together, both views contribute to conceptions of cinematic violence that circulate throughout this period. With respect to the first, there exist numerous references to the idea—held both then and now—that television journalism regularly brought graphic displays of Vietnam and violent events such as urban riots and protests into American homes. Broadcast via satellite and in “living color,” the Saigon Execution offers one such spectacle, its “super pornography,” as Peter Braestrup suggests, bringing the obscene brutality of an imperceptible war on scene (Culbert 424).2 With regard to the second, there is what I call the “competition thesis” of television’s relationship to cinema. Espoused by historical critics as well as contemporary scholars, it holds that television news coverage became so graphic by the late 1960s that Hollywood had no choice but to compete with such viscerally documentary images. Writes historian David Culbert: Nobody who sees the television newsfilm [of the Saigon Execution] forgets the blood spurting out of the terrorist’s head. Such compelling reality is the despair of every Hollywood special-effects man who ever placed plastic covered packets of ketchup on the bodies of intended victims. (434) Here, realism means bloodletting, an equation with which Peckinpah and his audiences seem to agree, even if they also acknowledge—and sometimes disdain—the stylization that makes this authenticity possible. And yet, televised documents of late 1960s and early 1970s violence were rarely as bloody as popular memory imagines. Despite evidence that television news organizations disproportionately sought the “supreme melodrama” of Americans in combat—what correspondents referred to as “bang-bang” coverage—their reports rarely contained the sensational brutality this deliberation implies (Arlen 112–13; Pach 94). Writes Army historian William Hammond: “From August 1965 to August 1970, only 76 out of more than 2,300 television news reports originating in Vietnam depicted . . . soldiers in combat, incoming artillery, [or] dead and wounded on the ground” (238). From this point of view, images of an execution in Saigon or riots in the streets of Chicago stand as exceptions to the rule of conventional television coverage. Moreover, the “competition thesis” seems wrong on at least two counts. Not only do those who remember graphic violence recall a world that television did not generally show but also, as Peckinpah suggests, Hollywood’s use

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of squibs and artificial blood handily surpassed what spectators typically found on television. Still, if the letter of the competition thesis is wrong, its spirit points to a central tenet of my analysis here. To the extent that cinema and television evince an interest in exceptional, sensational violence—in both senses of those terms—they share fantasies of authenticity in which unexpectedly graphic wounds disclose realities that otherwise remain unseen. Hence the rhetoric of realism and revelation that attend visions of bloodletting in the two media however stylized they may be. Hence, too, the preoccupation, both past and present, with linking Hollywood cinema to violent events and the televisual reports that documented them. In fact, the very persistence of the competition thesis would appear to index a desire to “see more”—of the war, of wounds, of realities that lie beyond the spectator’s purview—that belongs to television news and commercial cinema alike. In what follows, I argue that squibs and artificial blood offer more than gory eruptions of the human body; they also mark desire’s irruption in popular film. Meeting and mobilizing demands for unattainable, if not impossible, views, they speak to a world beyond the film’s diegesis and promise to incarnate, to make flesh, realities that presumably lie off scene. Appropriately, this incarnation hinges on the perceived materiality of the wounds in question. It matters, in other words, that The Wild Bunch and Mean Streets render bloodletting remarkably tangible by isolating squibs and artificial blood through color, close-ups, and slow motion. Compounding cinema’s indexicality—its status as both object and sign—these wounds disrupt everyday fields of perception to effect authentic experiences of violence that breach the boundaries between documentary and fiction, reality and representation, which apparently separate narrative cinema from television news. Of course, in blurring these distinctions, squibs and artificial blood also undermine the very authenticity they otherwise secure. Underscoring film’s ephemeral ethereality even as they deny it, cinematic wounds, like all indices, remain present and absent, material and immaterial, persistent and evanescent at once. For this reason, I contend, bloodletting in The Wild Bunch or Mean Streets bespeaks cinema’s and television’s mutually unstable solutions to the problem of capturing the real—a particularly salient discovery, given the masculine and national integrities to which both media’s perceived authenticity is so often linked.

“Bang-Bang” Television For the first time in the history of this country, people are exposed to instant coverage of a war in progress. When so many movie

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Before turning to the eruptions of blood that typify Hollywood gunplay after the Code, I want to explore television news and the “real” violence that purportedly justifies, challenges, or lags behind cinematic brutality during this period. Indeed, for administration officials and protesters alike, television became a privileged witness to violence at this historical moment, airing living images of war and civil unrest that, in a previous era, might have gone largely unseen. Consider the phrase “The Whole World Is Watching.” Protesters repeatedly invoked this expression during moments of police brutality at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. In so doing, they not only drew attention to the presence of camera crews at the event but also disclosed a more pervasive belief in the revelatory, if not antagonistic, visibility of violence on television news. For administration officials, this conception of televisual disclosure supported “oppositional media” theories that blamed the press in general—and television journalism in particular—for the failure of United States policy in Vietnam. Television news thus became the means by which far-flung brutalities allegedly entered the homes of millions of Americans, directly documenting lurid details of violence and death for doves as well as hawks. Vietnam was, after all, the nation’s first “television war” or, as Michael Arlen called it in the pages of the New Yorker, a “living-room war,” and much has been made of the preponderance of day-to-day combat footage that appeared in nightly news reports. “A really great piece of war film [is] . . . irresistible,” notes a CBS executive in 1968 (Pach 94). Given the choice, adds another at ABC, “a good fire fight is going to get on over a good pacification story” (Pach 94). Violence is desirable for its sensory appeal, attracting audiences with vivid depictions of conflicts and enemies that were—in the case of Vietnam—infamously elusive. “The public does indeed want and need . . . something concrete amid the chaos,” writes Arlen, “something [they] can reach out to over the morning coffee and almost touch” (114). In this context, arrest numbers, body counts, and other material “facts” certainly helped make specific battles or protests more palpable, but graphic displays of wounded soldiers or clubbed students promised authentic, almost firsthand experiences of imperceptible, ungraspable events. Still, as I have already suggested, images of corporeal brutality offered uncommon exceptions to news reports that were hardly as adversarial as

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oppositional media theories would have it. In the case of Vietnam, political scientist Daniel C. Hallin demonstrates that the number of broadcasts featuring American casualties first declined, then stayed relatively steady, throughout the period from 1967 to 1971 (Uncensored War 177). On the domestic front, the media also sought violence for its visual interest and sensory appeal, and clashes with authority—actual or anticipated—figured prominently in reports about youth movements and protests. Violence even framed coverage of peaceful demonstrations, as a CBS news story on the October 1969 Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam exemplifies: “Today’s protest was different,” notes the commentator, “peaceful, within the law, and not confined to a radical minority” (Hallin, Uncensored War 200). Early reports from a second Moratorium march in November 1969 functioned similarly, emphasizing how the protests had been nonviolent “thus far” (Small 117). As this coverage suggests, most images of civil unrest, like those of war, lacked the graphic brutality that characterized events such as the Democratic convention in Chicago. To account for this infrequency, one might identify three factors that shaped televisual depictions of violence at home and abroad: governmental pressure, contemporary journalistic practices, and the vagaries of chance. Though governmental pressure definitely influenced what visions of violence reached American homes during the war in Vietnam, the U.S. military never adopted an official program of censorship as it had during World Wars I and II or in Korea. Instead, reporters, photographers, and cameramen were presented with a system of voluntary guidelines, the transgression of which resulted in loss or suspension of the correspondent’s accreditation, something that rarely happened. Among these guidelines, which included restrictions on reporting troop movements and casualty figures, were limits on photographs and moving pictures taken in the field. The Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) worried that images of dead or wounded Americans might appear before their families could be notified. Television footage was of particular concern. Officials were “convinced,” writes William Hammond, “that sound-on-film pictures of dying Americans could have a strongly adverse emotional impact on families with husbands and sons serving in the war” (237). Thus on April 24, 1966, the MACV met with the three major networks and warned them that any complaints regarding images of dead or wounded Americans would result in the exclusion of cameramen from combat zones. The networks acted accordingly. In fact, thanks to fear, decorum, or the demands of market share, most television reports did more than obscure the identities of soldiers who had been injured or killed in combat. They frequently framed or edited footage so as to avoid graphic

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depictions altogether. An NBC film from February 14, 1968, provides a typical example: Four Americans on stretchers are hurried past the camera, which makes no effort to register their faces or wounds (B. Cook 206). Similarly, another film—this time from CBS in April 1970—shows medics attending two injured soldiers. Captured in medium long shot, their work obscures the men’s bodies, save for a glimpse of bandages on one soldier’s leg. Shot during and after the Tet Offensive, when American concern for U.S. casualties began to mount, these reports and others like them seem surprisingly benign. They seem so, moreover, in spite of complaints from the Johnson and Nixon administrations that television coverage of Tet helped turn the tide of public opinion against the war. Perhaps more than governmental pressure, however, basic practices of “objective” journalism contributed to television’s fairly anemic reporting strategies. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, the mainstream media practiced little of what one now calls “investigative journalism.” Instead, most information about the war or its opposition

Figure 2.3. An April 1970 CBS Evening News report avoids graphic depictions of wounded Americans (“Courage Under Fire,” The Vietnam War with Walter Cronkite, Volume 1).

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came unchanged and unchallenged from military and government sources. Even revelations such as the Pentagon Papers, the massacre at My Lai, or the bombing of Cambodia were the result of governmental leaks and independent or federal investigations. For this reason, correspondents conceived of themselves as passive transmitters of information more than active political analysts. Putting their faith in “hard facts” derived from official briefings and reports, only 8 percent of all Vietnam stories contained journalistic comment on military or government statements, according to Hallin (“The Media” 17). Editorial analysis largely stood outside the limits of acceptable objectivity. Of course, objectivity is, in this case, a highly relative term, something the formal conventions of network news only qualify further. Hinging on brevity and visual interest, televisual reports rely on easily digestible, dramatic themes. In the case of antiwar and other radical movements from the late 1960s, these themes included the idea that leftists aided oversea enemy agendas as much as they disrupted law and order at home. “While Americans fight and die in Vietnam, there are those in this country who sympathize with the Viet Cong,” Peter Jennings reported on October 27, 1965 (Hallin, Uncensored War 193). Even after Tet, most domestic criticism of military and government came from official sources. Protesters generally appeared in news stories about dissent, not those concerning administration policies or federal institutions. For its part, war coverage generally focused on simple tales of soldiers, technologies, and individual acts of heroism. Images of dead or wounded Americans had little place inside such formulas. When they did appear—as in a pre-Tet report by CBS correspondent Charles Kuralt—such images typically reinforced intelligible narratives of American self-possession. In the December 1965 film, the camera lingers, rather uncharacteristically, on the wounds of one Sergeant Floyd, who has inadvertently tripped a Viet Cong landmine. Before and after unveiling the large red holes in his legs, however, the film cuts to a medium close-up of Floyd narrating the event and smoking a cigar. “All I gotta say,” he remarks, smiling, “[is] that little Charlie fella, runnin’ around out there, bothern’ us all. I hope they get ’im.” After Tet, such trends continue, even if stories of masculine competency become increasingly complex. Representations of combat, in particular, turn formulaic, according to Arlen, who finds most feature a distanced overview of a disjointed conflict, . . . composed mainly of scenes of helicopters landing, tall grasses blowing in the helicopter wind, American soldiers fanning out across a hillside on foot, rifles at the ready, with now and then (on

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Along with the networks’ deliberate, yet contradictorily limited, attempts to capture images of violence, predictable scenes like these are at odds with conceptions of television as the purveyor of authentic and unmediated views of the world. Perhaps this is why chance recordings occupy a place of privilege in popular conceptions of televisual authenticity. Incidents like the Saigon Execution, demonstrations in Chicago, or the inadvertent napalming of children in Trang Bang in 1972 explode with quaggy, unscripted brutality that interrupts dominant journalistic conventions. One thinks of the moment in February 1968, when NBC journalist Howard Tuckner was himself wounded on camera. Bemused by the brutality, Tuckner, who provided commentary for the Loan shooting just one week earlier, hunkers

Figure 2.4. A wounded Sergeant Floyd smiles and smokes a cigar in a December 1965 CBS Evening News report (“Courage Under Fire,” The Vietnam War with Walter Cronkite, Volume 1).

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low in the frame, muttering, “I’m hit. . . . I’m hit” (B. Cook 214). There is the moment, too, when Aline Saarinen succumbs to tear gas during coverage in Chicago on August 28, 1968. “I don’t know what you do about it,” she chuckles uncomfortably, then adds more seriously, “I don’t have a handkerchief. . . .” Reports like these join iconic events—iconic because they are exceptional—such as Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation in Saigon, violence and looting in the Watts district of Los Angeles, and Morley Safer’s infamous report from Cam Ne in 1965, during which American soldiers set fire to a small Vietnamese village despite the pleas of its elderly inhabitants. Yet the very contingency that renders such moments authentic also subjects their capture to the vagaries of chance. Reality becomes something after which networks and viewers clamber, a lost object of desire infrequently incarnated and too quickly receding. Writes Arlen: [Viewers] look at Vietnam, it seems, as a child kneeling in the corridor, his eye to the keyhole, looks at two grownups arguing in a locked room—the aperture of the keyhole small; the figures shadowy, mostly out of sight; the voices indistinct, isolated threats without meaning; isolated glimpses, part of an elbow, a man’s jacket (who is that man?), part of a face, a woman’s face. Ah, she is crying. . . . One counts the tears. Two tears. Three tears. Two bombing raids. Four seek-anddestroy missions. Six administration pronouncements. . . . One searches in vain for the other grownup, but, ah, the keyhole is so small, he is somehow never in the line of sight. (83) Combining inscrutable, almost illusory, elements with war’s material details, Arlen’s vision of television news distinctly recalls Sigmund Freud’s primal scene in which the child fantasizes answers to his or her own enigmatic origins (“From the History”). As with all primal fantasies, this one arises in retrospect, the product of “deferred action” that unexpectedly recalls and recodes “repressed” events according to later experiences (Laplanche and Pontalis, “Primal Scene”). The result, Freud writes, is a mix of unscripted reality and psychic illusion that may be in part or wholly invented yet exists prior to any meaning it retroactively gathers. Television news, too, mingles reality and illusion, locating “lost” events in retroactive encounters between “objective” facts and subjective desires. Departing from conventional reports, graphic, unanticipated images of violence unite concrete bodies with demands for disclosure they animate after the fact. For this reason, televisual authenticity may carry the force of reality, but its answers to brutality’s apparent repression remain unstable solutions

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at best. NBC’s coverage of the Democratic convention in Chicago provides a relevant example. Watched by an estimated ninety million viewers, the black-and-white footage appears confusing and, at times, nearly unintelligible, not unlike Arlen’s scene before the keyhole of Vietnam. Outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel, fixed cameras capture police officers beating protesters in long shots filled with swarming, unidentifiable bodies, occasionally zooming in to capture more ascertainable details. While viewers sometimes hear demonstrators chanting, the soundtrack features surprisingly little commentary from correspondents Saarinen and Gabe Pressman, who frequently trail off and leave spectators to interpret the happenings for themselves. As a result, public response to the violence seems to have varied widely, from the Walker Commission, which declared the conflict the result of a “police riot,” to a postconvention Gallup Poll in which Americans supported the police 56 to 31 percent (Small 89). In all, the divergent reactions to these chance recordings suggest the extent to which televisual authenticity remains an ambiguous and indeterminate fantasy, a meeting of documentary and fiction, reality and representation, “objective,” perceptible images and subjective, unrepresentable desires.

Violence Incarnate The era of escapism is over; the era of reality is here. —Phil Feldman, producer of The Wild Bunch

It is 1913. The frontier and the possibility it promised have closed. Edged into Mexico by railroad industrialists, an army surrounds four obsolescent outlaws. The world is silent. They decide to fight. With one shot, the scene explodes into four and a half minutes of unrelenting brutality, the battle for which The Wild Bunch has been excoriated and revered. Here, blood bursts from an officer’s front and backside, arching, like his body, as it glides through the air. There, a chunk of shoulder unloosens, an artery opens, or a geyser of viscera leaps from another man’s side. In the end, the gesture receives more than twenty repetitions, and the Bunch, who have seemingly killed hundreds, lie dead with bright red blotches spattering their clothes. The sequence has little precedent in mainstream American cinema, surpassing even Bonnie and Clyde, its nearest forerunner, in bodies and blood. European and Japanese cinema provide variegated influences—JeanLuc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965) and Week End (1967), Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, and the surfeit of blood that concludes Akira Kurosawa’s Sanjuro (1962) all come to mind. And yet, as with the exploitation

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traditions at Britain’s Hammer Studios or American International Pictures, these films, though occasionally bloody, rarely underscore the sights or sites of wounding as such. Instead, it took Hollywood’s combination of squibs and artificial blood to bring national attention to a shift in the visibility of screen violence that the fall of the Production Code helped to formally instate. Of course, the Production Code’s end coincided with incidents of violence—war, riots, and political assassinations among them—that preoccupied television journalism during this same period. The concurrence was not lost on the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, which called Jack Valenti, then president of the Motion Picture Association of America, to testify about the relationships between social and cinematic violence in December 1968. Telling legislators that “the kind of society we live in today is different from the kind of society we used to live in,” Valenti sketched the portrait of a “new breed of filmmaker,” who searches for “new dimensions of expression,” and a “new audience” that seeks “new fulfillment” in the movies it sees (65). Mirroring television’s pursuit of exceptional combat, this self-conscious concern for heretofore-unknown images and experiences of film violence suggests more than rivalry linked the two media. Instead, I submit, they shared a fantasmatic horizon in which ruptured bodies delivered authentic experiences that, real or imagined, disrupted what conventional forms appeared to repress. On television, chance recordings of brutal realities answered and animated such fantasies, cutting through formulaic depictions of war or civil unrest with sensuous, though ultimately unstable, force. Cinema, by comparison, lacked the “reality” of television, but as Sam Peckinpah suggests, its recourse to unmistakably stylized bloodletting promised hyperreal, even surreal, returns of the historically and representationally repressed. Squibs and artificial blood distill these returns and condense indeterminacy to a repeatable figure: the wound. In so doing, I argue, they not only make flesh formerly imperceptible brutalities but also—and however unintentionally—incarnate the contradictory, unstable logic of authenticity upon which television and cinema together depend. Central to the wound’s authenticating power is its perceived materiality. Squibs and artificial blood render bloodletting astonishingly palpable, as Dutch’s (Ernest Borgnine’s) wounding near the end of The Wild Bunch indicates. Hit simultaneously in the hip and shoulder as he runs to Pike’s (William Holden’s) side, Dutch’s injury is brief. Peckinpah underscores the bright red bursts, however, by slowing the speed of their action. Erupting in lateral view, Dutch’s blood lurches as he spins toward the camera before slowing to a lethargic dribble. Peckinpah twice repeats

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Figures 2.5 and 2.6. Dutch’s fatal wounding (The Wild Bunch, 1969).

this turn between cutaways to Pike, foregrounding the crimson in closeup. Against the dusty environment, the color leaps from its background, giving sensuous immanence to the blood, the tactility of which grows as it trickles, pools, and sticks to clothing. In this, the blood conjures its precursors in art and exploitation cinemas, particularly the rather disparate works of Jean-Luc Godard and Akira Kurosawa, Arthur Penn and Haskell Wexler, Hammer Studios and Herschell Gordon Lewis. “It’s not blood; it’s red,” Godard famously quipped of the substance’s appearance in films such as Contempt (1963), Pierrot le fou, and Week End—a remark that underscores its perceptual as opposed to representational address to spectators (Deleuze, Cinema 1 118). Blood may be fake, but red suggests how sensuous abstractions complicate relationships between matter and meaning. It emphasizes blood’s illusionism, even as it short-circuits signification in favor of more concrete realities. In the American context, a similar tension pervades Wexler’s Medium Cool (1968) and Lewis’s Blood Feast (1963), films that

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mutually, though diversely, mediate encounters between bloodshed, actuality, and artifice. Released between Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch, Medium Cool sets its narrative against the backdrop of Washington’s Resurrection City and, more famously, Chicago during the Democratic National Convention. The film also maps this meeting of documentary and fiction onto television and cinema through its Marshall McLuhan–inspired title and its news cameraman protagonist (Robert Forster). Film and television crews meet, in fact, in scenes shot in Grant Park on August 28, 1968. There, female protagonist Eileen (Verna Bloom) weaves in and out of clashes between police and protesters that both Wexler’s and NBC’s cameras captured. Wearing a spectacularly bright yellow dress, Eileen arrests one’s attention each time she enters the frame, interrupting actuality with artifice, particularly since most viewers would have watched the NBC broadcast in black and white. At the same time, however, Eileen and her dress draw reality toward representation, encouraging spectators to link yellow’s phenomenal immanence to that of police officer blues and activist blood reds. The result lends immediacy to Wexler’s narrative at the same time it opens reality to new and unexpected possibilities. Bearing this out, Eileen is, at one point, stopped by a National Guardsman who questions her briefly before letting her pass. An unscripted incident, Eileen becomes, in that moment, Eileen/Bloom—that is, character/actor at once. Will her encounter derail the narrative? Influence the protest?

Figure 2.7. A soldier questions Eileen/Bloom (Medium Cool, 1968).

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Such questions demonstrate the extent to which documentary and fiction, television and cinema, together suspend and satisfy spectatorial desires, even if they never fully coincide. Lewis, too, works in outrageous colors, though his reds also accentuate blood’s tactility. Blood Feast opens, for instance, on the murder of a bathing Playmate, from whom the killer takes a leg and one of her eyes. Presented to the camera for the viewer’s inspection, the slippery contents of her ocular cavity dangle then drop from the murderer’s knife. Later, when he extracts brain, tongue, and heart from three successive victims, the spectator’s focus rests on the touch and texture of these organs. Throughout the film, in fact, the killer turns his trophies toward Lewis’s camera, squeezing, poking, and fondling the (presumably animal) innards from which blood drips onto porcelain or soaks into sand. Low production values and poor acting certainly underscore the film’s artifice, but the palpability of its viscera adds sensuous density to displays of brutality that, according to Lewis, mainstream Hollywood “couldn’t or wouldn’t make” under the Code (Curry 52).

Figure 2.8. Red, slippery organs are offered to the spectator (Blood Feast, 1963).

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After the Code, films like The Wild Bunch turned to squibs and artificial blood for their sanguinary tactility, mingling actuality and artifice by yoking art and exploitation influences to cinema’s ontological bond with reality. Most famously expressed by André Bazin, this bond issues from film’s photochemical mode of reproduction, which not only represents but also literally re-presents its referents. “The photograph . . . and the object,” writes Bazin, “. . . share a common being, after the fashion of a fingerprint,” a “decal, or transfer” (“Ontology” 15, 14). “Wherefore,” he continues, “photography actually contributes something to the order of natural creation instead of providing a substitute for it” (“Ontology” 15). Though Bazin does not make the connection, scholars regularly link his account of photography and cinema to the index, as described by American logician Charles Sanders Peirce. Unlike icons or symbols, which signify by way of resemblance or arbitrary designation, indices—like fingerprints, decals and transfers, or photographic and cinematic images— remain physically, spatially, or causally linked to what they denote. They partake of their referent’s existence. They are brute facts, objects, in other words, as well as signs that convey meaning. Accordingly, Bazin attributes reality itself to cinema in addition to realism. “The photographic image is the object,” he writes, “. . . and cinema is objectivity in time” (“Ontology” 14). As with most Bazinian formulations, however, this one proves more complex than it initially appears. So, too, the Peircean notion of indices to which it is so often compared. On one hand, indices are singular, material traces, the “mood” of which, according to Peirce, is interruptive, or “exclamatory,” a kind of “See there!” or “Look out!” (Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic” 111). For this reason—and on the other hand—indices incite curiosity, perhaps even anxiety, and mingle concrete perceptions with the abstract representations they inspire, inhabit, and inhibit. In fact, indices beget a kind of logical leaping Peirce calls “abduction.” By startling one, by refocusing one’s attention, they organize and disorganize one’s relationships to the world and its constitutive forces. Peirce offers the following example: “Fossils are found; say, remains like those of fishes, but far in the interior of the country. To explain the phenomenon, we suppose the sea once washed over this land” (“Sixth Paper” 135). Joining “facts of one kind” (“These are fossils.”) to “facts of another” (“There must have been a sea here.”), abduction ties perception to representation through discernible objects that are nonetheless signs—indices, or “curious circumstances,” to cite Peirce—that, like fossils, issue and outlast that to which they point (“Sixth Paper” 135, 150). Unlike induction, therefore, which moves from observable cases to explanatory rules, abduction generates the cases, the fields

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of possibility, that rules constrain as well as explain. It springs, in this sense, from mystery, from uncertainty; it sets and upsets what are, for Peirce, conjectural, provisional constructions, not simple reconstructions of formerly accessible actualities. Though less known within film studies, abduction emphasizes the indeterminacy of indices, which as objects and signs, incarnate and interrupt “objective” realities and express and exceed subjective interpretations. Bazin evinces as much when he invokes the “true realism” of photography and cinema. Offering “the world . . . concretely and in its essence,” these media implicate viewers in encounters with “image facts” that, like all indices—whether fossils, yellow dresses, or wounds—mark junctions of perception and representation that defy and transform each (“Ontology” 12; “Aesthetic of Reality” 37). “The apologia for ‘realism’ . . . means nothing at all,” he urges, since “the movement [toward the real] is valuable only insofar as it brings increased meaning (itself an abstraction) to what is created” (Jean Renoir 85). Still, this meaning is hardly determinate. As in abduction, “a fragment of concrete reality [is] in itself multiple and full of ambiguity,” even if it instigates univocality “after the fact” (“Aesthetic of Reality” 37). What matters, in other words, are the meetings between “facts of one kind” (irreducible objects) and “facts of another” (indeterminate signs) that photography and cinema mediate. Surrealists, Bazin intimates, knew this lesson well when they pursued unrepresentable desires through perceptible images. Indeed, if the index offers “an image that is a reality of nature, namely an hallucination that is also fact,” then it would seem, following Bazin, that image and nature alike mingle the real with the imaginary (“Ontology” 16). Pursuing little else, surrealism adopts, as Rosalind Krauss suggests in multiple works, rigorously indexical practices. It does so, moreover, before and after one considers the movement’s debt to photography and cinema. “I am concerned . . . with facts,” writes André Breton, “which may belong to the order of pure observation, but which on each occasion present all the appearances of a signal” (Nadja 19). To cultivate these appearances, he and others turn to “objective chance,” including the trouvaille, or “found object,” as well as photographs and films. Discovered by happenstance, found objects are resolutely material because obsolescent, having lost the contexts that once established their determinate utility and value. Consequently mysterious, they are what Peirce calls curious circumstances: objects that interrupt structures of meaning and signs that initiate new interpretative fields. For their parts, photography and cinema make these circumstances repeatable by diminishing the found object’s reliance on chance. Yet if surrealists look to these media, then it is for their indexical properties,

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which “convulse” facts, to paraphrase Breton, into “marvelous” signals of unrecognized possibility (Breton, Mad Love 19; Krauss, “Photographic Conditions” 112). One finds, for this reason, works that transmute recognizable material through techniques such as double exposure, negative printing, slow motion, and noncontinuous editing. These devices, which lean on objectivity and concrete existence, according to Krauss, “exploit[] the very special connection to reality with which all photography [and cinema are] endowed” (L’Amour fou 31). At the same time, “in cutting into the body of the world, stopping it, framing it, spacing it, [they also] reveal[] that world as written,” as a subjective and abstract construction (L’Amour fou 40). Louis Aragon makes similar claims for Hollywood fictions, which may “speak of daily life” yet nonetheless manage to raise to a dramatic level a banknote on which our attention is riveted, a table with a revolver on it, a bottle that on occasion becomes a weapon, a handkerchief that reveals a crime, a typewriter that’s the horizon of a desk, the terrible unreeling ticker tape with its magic ciphers that enrich or ruin bankers. (51) Raised from their circumstances by close-ups, these objects command Aragon’s attention and resist their utility as props. Nevertheless, and for this same reason, they are “ciphers,” or signs, which defy and transform relationships to handkerchiefs and ticker tape to evoke crimes or riches or ruin. To be sure, close-ups mingle objectivity and subjectivity in accounts from Béla Balázs and Jean Epstein to Gilles Deleuze and Mary Ann Doane. “The close-up,” writes Doane, “transforms whatever it films into a quasi-tangible thing, . . . and yet, simultaneously, that deeply experienced entity becomes a sign, a text, a surface that demands to be read” (“Close-Up” 94). What matters in this context, however, are the actions close-ups share with all indices—indeed, all figures. As objects, they direct perception to concrete material that disrupts and invites representation; as signs, they abstract irreducible realities toward indeterminate and unstable meanings. Thus while The Wild Bunch shares little, at first glance, with the aforementioned practices, a second look draws them together.3 As figure, squibs and artificial blood join facts of one kind to facts of another, exploiting objective, nearly tactile wounds to cut into the world, interrupt it, and inspire subjective constructions of violence. These constructions, meanwhile, organize and disorganize authenticity. Granting access to what the Production Code, network news, and government officials repress, they also point to the indeterminacy, the inauthenticity, of such

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disclosures. To promise unavailable, even impossible, views, The Wild Bunch underscores the materiality of blood with abstract color, closeups, and slow motion. Privileging the former over the latter, it denies the irreducibility of objects and the indeterminacy of signs, even as it orchestrates happenstance. When, for this reason, Peckinpah “stylizes” brutality to show “what it’s really like,” he nonetheless reveals wounds for the indices they are. Tying actuality to artifice, documentary to fiction, and broadcast journalism to Hollywood cinema, squibs and artificial blood offer a “real” that is “more than real”—“surreal”—and threateningly “irreal” at once. In this, the film’s wounds resemble smoke, raindrops, and tears, other substances that, in addition to blood, become particularly palpable on film. This tactility, according to Lesley Stern, owes to cinema’s facility for isolating movement and underscoring gesture. And yet, these capacities can also privilege objects and substances to points of defamiliarizing rupture. As with indices, film’s movement secures physical presence, but also like indices, it “renders that presence potentially unstable and ephemeral” (320). “The extreme realism of The Wild Bunch,” notes Roger Ebert, “actually reminds you that it’s a movie” (“The Wild Bunch”). It is, in fact, this vacillation between presence and absence, reality and representation, which produces affect, according to Stern. Viewers react to images as objects, even though they recognize them as signs—an experience of incredulous credulity that Tom Gunning, in his analysis of early train films, also refers to as “shock.” Shock emerges when viewers acknowledge representation at the very moment of perceptual response. “This is about the strongest, most terrifying comment on real-life violence that I’ve ever seen in a movie,” writes Vincent Canby, though he notes the film’s “obviously artificial representation of blood and violence” (“Movie Mailbag”). Shock sits at the limits of disavowal, potentially convulsing reality. In the case of The Wild Bunch, squibs and artificial blood certainly shock, commanding the force of the real in spite—or, better, because—of their attendant irreality. More than this, they are indices, curious circumstances, figures, which set and upset narrative and historical contexts. Irrupting into constructions they serve to establish, squibs and artificial blood also erupt with new meaning. On one hand, these constructions speak authenticity, soliciting and satisfying demands to see more violence by incarnating unattainable, if not unrepresentable, views. On the other hand, the technology stymies the competition thesis, as I have described it, answering desire with irreducible objects and indeterminate signs that defy and transform what cinema and television otherwise guarantee.

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Wounds That Speak A river of blood flows between what The Wild Bunch wanted to be and what it is. —Joseph Morgenstern, Newsweek

If, as I suggest, wounds speak authenticity, then what do they say about violence in the late 1960s and early 1970s? For The Wild Bunch, the answer proves contradictory among critics and scholars, who, past or present, disagree as to whether the film condemns or celebrates the bloodshed it depicts. “[The film] is brutal,” writes the Chicago Tribune upon its release; “it is unrelenting, and it . . . may be the strongest five minutes of anti-violence ever filmed” (Terry, “The Movies”). Thirty years later, Christopher Sharrett calls The Wild Bunch “an extraordinarily adversarial work” that “savage[es] . . . the American civilizing experience” and, among other things, “the Vietnam adventure” it produced (“Peckinpah” 82, 83). By contrast, the film’s “massacres are glorious rather than distasteful,” according to a period review in the San Francisco Chronicle (Wasserman). Devin McKinney suggests similarly, and more recently, when he writes how The Wild Bunch “undermines the force of its disturbing and innovative . . . violence by trading it for an affirmation that . . . is conventional, formulaic, and unconvincing” (“The Wild Bunch” 195). What interests me in these accounts is not the fact of controversy so much as its source in the same incontrovertible images. This fact—a fact of another kind—expresses the irreducibility, the indeterminacy, which defines the index and the authenticity to which it contributes. Squibs and artificial blood figure this authenticity in its very contradiction, something to which commentators frequently attest. “At first,” writes Vincent Canby, The Wild Bunch “heightens the horror of . . . mindless slaughter, and, then—and this is what really carries horror—makes it beautiful, almost abstract, and finally into terrible parody” (“Violence and Beauty”). “[Sam] Peckinpah . . . got so wound up in the aesthetics of violence,” adds Pauline Kael, “that what . . . beg[a]n as a realistic treatment—a deglamorization of warfare . . .—became instead an almost abstract fantasy” (“The Wild Bunch”). Stephen Prince largely agrees: “Peckinpah’s montages ma[d]e violence pleasurable and beautiful by aestheticizing it and turning it into stylized spectacle” (Savage Cinema 98). For this reason, they sometimes fail to “construct a solid perspective” on their depictions of mayhem and threaten a “celebration of violence” that troubles the filmmaker’s aims (Savage Cinema 104). According to Prince, “[t]he very stylization that Peckinpah thought would wake people up to the horror of violence

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instead excited and gratified many” (Savage Cinema 98). Here, as in period accounts, realism—that is, concrete, ugly, and unpleasurable brutality— mingles with aesthetically enjoyable abstractions. Despite their concern, therefore, these thinkers evince the extent to which The Wild Bunch’s wounds partake of both facts and signals, objects and signs. On my read, squibs and artificial blood crystallize this meeting of actuality and artifice and point to authenticity’s constitution at the limits of concrete perception and abstract representation. The result, which grounds and ungrounds critique as much as celebration, makes for wounds that speak not just the authenticity, but also the instability, the inauthenticity, of violence and the masculine and national integrities it sets and upsets. It is the case, of course, that The Wild Bunch yokes authenticity to the intelligibility, the self-possession, one finds in broadcast news. Poised at the edge of the American frontier, Dutch and the Bunch recapture glory, however briefly, when they instigate a bloodbath from which they cannot escape. They are “outsiders, failures,” writes Stephen Farber, “with nowhere to turn and no place to go, but they have . . . the strength to endure” (3). Battered on all sides, their perseverance reaches impossible, if not automatistic, proportions, when first Lyle (Warren Oates) then Pike commandeers the Gatling gun, which each maniacally fires into the melee. As they do, blood flows from and clings to their bodies, dampening their clothes, weighing them down, and refusing to let go. In this, the men’s wounds affirm the tenacity of Sergeant Floyd, Howard Tuckner, or Aline Saarinen, who exhibit fortitude not failure amid strife at the limits of John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier.” Still, if squibs and artificial blood bring substance to institutions hemorrhaging support, then the device also evokes their dissolution. One thinks, for instance, of Dutch, whose ejaculatory wounds signal resignation as much as resilience. Already feminized compared to the rest, he slumps to the ground, spent and calling for Pike. Of course, neither Dutch nor Pike dies on his feet. Rather, they expire together in soundless cries, as blotches of red sully their soft, messy bodies. These blotches, which join sticky puddles to abstract colorations, enact film’s facility for physical presence, for determinate reference, which is “equaled,” according to Lesley Stern, “only by [its] capacity to . . . unhinge the solidity and certainty of things” (334). To wit, squibs and artificial blood elicit a real that is surreal, even irreal, in the vein of Georges Bataille as much as André Breton. In particular, they exhibit Bataille’s notion of informe, or formlessness, which de-forms—that is, dis-integrates—the realities signaled by Breton’s marvelous facts. More action than object, informe relies on what Martin Jay—borrowing from Julia Kristeva—calls “a materialism of the abject,” including substances such as spittle, excrement, or I would add, blood (Jay, “Modernism” 151). As with all abject objects and prac-

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tices, these materials mark “the place where meaning collapses”; they “bring things down in the world,” preceding and exceeding the orders, the categories, the values, they inspire, inhabit, and inhibit (Kristeva 2; Bataille, “Formless” 31). So, too, for squibs and artificial blood, which liquidate the authenticity, the self-possessed mastery, they likewise make flesh. Breaching boundaries between object and sign, the device draws perception to representation and desire to fantasy, ordering and disordering narrative content and the media forms that lend it shape. In this context, The Wild Bunch’s wounds form and de-form the logic of television news, which, Sergeant Floyd and his compatriots notwithstanding, typically reserves graphic brutality for Asian as opposed to American bodies. Even when depictions of American deaths outnumbered those of North Vietnamese

Figures 2.9 and 2.10. CBS coverage of the Tet Offensive reserved its most graphic images for Vietnamese bodies (“The Tet Offensive,” The Vietnam War with Walter Cronkite, Volume 1).

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Army (NVA) or Viet Cong guerillas, the most vicious images were reserved for the Vietnamese. NBC’s footage of the Saigon Execution is standard in this regard, as is CBS’s coverage of the Tet Offensive in general. In a report from the latter, viewers see seven wounded and dead Viet Cong in less than twenty seconds, including the bloodied faces of at least three fighters. Though a moment before, cameras shot two dead Americans face down and from a distance, they now push into the face of one Viet Cong operative and linger on the broken bodies of others. Such footage contributes to narratives about U.S. proficiency and progress in Vietnam. The Viet Cong’s aim during Tet, notes one CBS correspondent, was “to destroy the embassy. In that purpose,” he continues, as his report cuts to American soldiers carrying a wounded guerilla, “they did not succeed.” Setting silent Vietnamese corpses against walking and talking Americans, this film and others tie objective facts to subjective desires for a racially intelligible war. Indeed, throughout the conflict, writes Bernie Cook, “American television networks sought to appropriate the dead bodies of the North Vietnamese in order to reinvest them with new meanings” (204). In so doing, however, the networks relied on irreducible realities to defy and transform perception and representation in ways they could not fully control. One thinks, for example, of Cook’s description of a report about the siege at Khe Sanh, which features “the body of one grounded helicopter, . . . full of holes” alongside three shots of wounded NVA soldiers (B. Cook 209, emphasis added). These images “shield viewers from the sight of damaged and dead American bodies,” as Cook suggests, but the former’s presence also offers a “destabilizing sign” of the latter’s absence (B. Cook 209). To see more is, in this case, to speak racial violence, but it is also to poke holes in the authenticity that authorizes it. In her analysis of the Saigon Execution, Sylvia Chong notes how neither photograph nor film reveals “that which is most elusive to vision”: the Viet Cong’s death (85). Instead, the media disclose together a “shared inability . . . to master the object . . . of their representation” (88). I suggest something similar for the competition thesis that links film to television. Squibs and artificial blood do not reconstruct repressed yet otherwise accessible realities but, rather, construct these fantasies by mingling documentary with fiction and actuality with artifice. As such, they incarnate the inauthenticity that, in fact, defines these structures and bring down in the world the era’s faith in exceptional, sensational images of graphic bloodletting. • To conclude, I want to turn to the use of squibs and artificial blood after the late 1960s when the lengthy sequences and innumerable wounds

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that characterize The Wild Bunch give way to brief, punctuated explosions. As the use of these technologies contracts so, too, do the fantasies of authenticity they figure, particularly in a film such as Mean Streets, which thematizes the irreconcilable tensions that constitute masculine privilege and its alternatives. If, for this reason, graphic wounds crystallize authenticity in its contradiction, then momentary eruptions of blood further distill that conflict to speak the instability that characterizes its incarnation and liquidation. As with Peckinpah’s Bunch, Martin Scorsese’s protagonists face a world of limitation, particularly Charlie (Harvey Keitel), who is caught between religio-familial privilege and his wish to relinquish its requirements. A small-time money collector for his Uncle Giovanni (Cesare Danova), Charlie entertains notions of moving uptown with his epileptic girlfriend, Teresa (Amy Robinson), of whom his uncle disapproves. Yet as with his attraction to Diane (Jeannie Bell), a black dancer at his friend’s club, Charlie never acts upon these desires because they are at odds with the promise of masculine authority that accompanies fidelity to the Church, the neighborhood, and his uncle. In this sense, Charlie’s dilemma expresses the other side of the Bunch’s predicament. While Peckinpah’s outlaws pursue self-possession through vainglorious determination, Charlie resists losing the restrictive advantages patriarchy grants him. Nonetheless, for Mean Streets as for The Wild Bunch, violence offers men the means to redemption, however unstable. Charlie, who befriends the volatile and aggressive Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro) to inflate his paternal authority, also uses this relation to get nearer the reckless violations he craves. With the film’s climax at the frontier of Manhattan and Brooklyn, these desires erupt in a scene of bloodletting that mingles Charlie’s efforts to save Johnny Boy with the brutal reckoning he courts from the start of the film. As in The Wild Bunch, that reckoning comes through distinctly tactile wounds, though their palpability arrives by different means than in Peckinpah’s film. Foregoing slow motion, Scorsese’s images are wild and frantic. Spectators watch as wet, slippery blood leaps through Johnny Boy’s fingers, spills from Charlie’s wrist, and rains down on their out-of-control vehicle. The brevity of the violence compounds this frisson. Lasting less than a minute, the climax of Mean Streets concentrates what The Wild Bunch achieves across five minutes of countless squib detonations. As a result, Scorsese delivers by compression the effects Peckinpah earned through novelty. Viewers expect violence in Mean Streets, but precisely when it will come generates the sudden and “unexpected” sensations the film shares with televisual bloodshed. As on television, these wounds infrequently materialize and too quickly retreat, recovering but momentarily the inaccessible realities after which audiences clamber.

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Figure 2.11. Wet, slippery blood leaps through Johnny Boy’s fingers (Mean Streets, 1973).

Figure 2.12. A broken hydrant figures the fluidity of wounds (Mean Streets, 1973).

On one hand, therefore, squibs and artificial blood substantiate both Charlie’s blood and his belief that authenticity lies outside patriarchal repression. On the other hand, the film’s sanguine eruptions—like the broken hydrant they precede—index the irruption of more fluid categories into the scene. Heightening the wound’s status as irreducible object and

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indeterminate sign, Mean Streets unsettles Charlie’s answer to masculine authority by deferring the retroactive and provisional mastery it shares with The Wild Bunch. Indeed, Mean Streets throws this lesson back on its audience with a conclusion that de-forms narrative clarity. As Johnny Boy and Charlie stagger from the crime scene, Scorsese jumps from Teresa to Diane to Uncle Giovanni, underscoring the extent to which these relationships persist until Charlie constructs them afresh. At this moment, Mean Streets also leaps to a scene from Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), which draws Hollywood’s representations of violence into the film’s own diegetic “realities.” Confronting the spectator with this commingling of objective and subjective, actuality and artifice, Scorsese’s film recalls the meetings of documentary and fiction that, I have argued, deliver and destabilize the era’s fantasies of authenticity inside and outside the cinema.

3 Hitting the “Vérité Jackpot” The Ecstatic Profits of Freeze-Framed Violence

But how does one review this picture? It’s like reviewing the footage of President Kennedy’s assassination or of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder. This movie is into complications and sleight-of-hand beyond Pirandello, since the filmed death at Altamont—although, of course, unexpected—was part of a cinéma-vérité spectacular. The free concert was staged and lighted to be photographed, and the three hundred thousand people who attended it were the unpaid cast of thousands. The violence and murder weren’t scheduled, but the Maysles brothers hit the cinéma-vérité jackpot. —Pauline Kael, “Beyond Pirandello”

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PAULINE KAEL IN her review of Gimme Shelter (Albert and David Maysles, 1970), the Rolling Stones concert film with a brutal buttoning point: the murder of an eighteen-year-old black man named Meredith Hunter. Though it begins rather routinely, Kael’s review soon stymies—arrested by the violence that apparently unmoors her conventional critical approach. As if to recover, she reminds herself this is a “picture” like any other, a Pirandellian mingling of reality and illusion that not only stages and lights the events but also edits them for maximum “suspense factor.” Indeed, she warns, one must not “get suckered into reacting to motion-picture footage that appears to be documentary as if it were simple truth” (Kael, “Beyond Pirandello” 112). O WRITES

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But why, then, the predicament? Why is Shelter so difficult to review? Because, it seems, Kael dismisses her own notes of caution and discovers contingency amid overwhelming construction. Hence her citation of the implicitly unreviewable footage of John F. Kennedy’s and Lee Harvey Oswald’s deaths—images popularly conceived as visual evidence of historical events. Such documents, at least in Kael’s formulation, marshal a direct and faithful account of reality that stands opposed to Shelter’s more abstract, narrative structuration. And yet, as if beside herself, Kael—in a moment of critical hesitation—draws the three films together, cleaving contingency from construction and replacing Shelter’s formerly calculated, interpretive representations with an immediate and authentic instantiation of the past. No longer a “picture” like any other, Shelter—ninety-one minutes, edited, with titles and frequently asynchronous sound—is reduced to a single moment of unmediated violence. It hits the “cinéma-vérité jackpot.” Far from settling the matter, however, this jackpot merely compounds Kael’s consternation. On one hand, it implies unpredictability. Chance is a hallmark of contingency, and the Maysles brothers’ inadvertent capture of an unanticipated murder offers the most demonstrable link between their film and its counterparts in the assassination footage from 1963. On the other hand, Shelter’s jackpot seems to exceed spontaneity, particularly since the Maysles, according to Kael, deliberately raise its stakes. If they seek to stage the spontaneous, she implies, then do they not also paradoxically cultivate—even dangerously orchestrate—contingency? Were this the case, spontaneous violence alone would no longer account for the film’s jackpot; rather, the very form of that violence would also motivate Kael’s response. Though conspicuously underexamined by Kael, this form haunts her primary utterance of uncertainty: “How does one review this picture?” Picture, I have suggested, marks Kael’s stab at Hollywood parlance. She is stumped by a movie. At the same time, the word implies stillness—a discrete image like a painting, a photograph, or in this case, one of three freeze-frames that arrest Hunter’s murder, not to mention Kael’s review. These stops reinforce the film’s content, violently disrupting life’s movement with the unforeseen stasis of death. As much as the murder, however, they emphasize its media: singular instants drawn and repeatedly printed from cinema’s photographic base. Though moving at the level of projection, these images, or photograms, share the immobile appearance of photography, itself allied, even more rigorously than cinema, with contingency, immediacy, and authentication—the very stuff Kael attributes to Shelter.1 From this point of view, the freeze-frame

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inspires disavowal of its own status as cinema, citing photography to overwhelm, at least for a moment, the filmic construction of which it is part. • I begin with Kael’s efforts to disentangle contingency from construction less for their success or failure than for what they reveal about the cultural significance of freeze-frames at this historical moment. After all, a number of American films from the late 1960s and early 1970s, most of them fictions, conspicuously employ freeze-frames in scenes of protracted brutality. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969), Joe (John G. Avildsen, 1970), and The Parallax View (Alan Pakula, 1974), as well as the primary subjects of this chapter—Gimme Shelter and Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968)—are but a few. The desire to capture contingency extends, in other words, beyond the Maysles or cinéma vérité to other directors and genres and even to spectators themselves. One locates this desire not only in Kael’s unreviewable “picture”—which elides yet implicitly names her investment in the freeze-frame—but also in calls for eyewitness accounts following the Altamont event. “We were there. We didn’t see it. But we did see a lot. We want to know what you saw,” KSAN Radio demands after the concert—“it” bearing the mark of contingency lost (Ponek, emphasis added). Rolling Stone envisions a technological recovery of the concert’s violence, suggesting “an instant replay would have been useful,” since “the action was so thick and heavy” (Bangs et al. 22). In each case, the freeze-frame becomes desire’s ideal response and solicitation, circumventing time, space, and even human perception to construct a missed encounter that stands outside everyday as well as cinematic experience. For this reason, I contend, freeze-frames from the late 1960s and early 1970s figure spectatorial fantasies of ecstasy that compound the ecstatic experiences of violence they likewise depict. By ecstasy, I mean the sudden loss of self-possession to which both the subjects and spectators of freeze-framed brutality succumb. Most commonly expressed as the state of being “beside oneself,” ecstasy literally means “to cause to stand outside”; it offers momentarily what only death makes permanent—an encounter with that which precedes and exceeds individuated consciousness. Undermining conceptions of inside and outside, self and other, these petits morts—what Georges Bataille calls the “continuity” of being—not only upset one’s sense of the world but also excite one’s fascination (Erotism 13).

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Excitation is, in fact, the motor force of ecstatic experience. It implies citation, a summons or call that comes from “outside” (ex-) to set something in motion. That something, writes Eric Santner, is the very structure of desire, since one frequently interprets these calls from “outside” as something that has “gone missing” from everyday life (31). Turning to the domain of cinema, I suggest that freeze-frames in Shelter or Night of the Living Dead effect their own summons from “outside,” citing the sphere of photography so as to excite the spectator of film. As with the deaths they render, freeze-frames imply standing outside conventional experience, violently wrenched from dominant forms. They evoke the contingent instantaneity that has apparently “gone missing” from cinema’s abstract and ever-shifting construction and hold the body—material, diegetic, and spectatorial—rapt in a state of lingering excitation. Though ecstasy may seem, from this description, an ahistorical, even arbitrary, means for approaching the freeze-frame, its conjunction with the device clarifies demands to see more violence and violently see more during this historical moment. The freeze-frame’s rise contributes, in fact, to ecstasy’s broader popularization. Whether through mysticism and the occult or “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll,” ecstatic experience swept the cultural landscape of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Deemed increasingly violent by the time of Shelter and Night, these practices set “external” restriction against an “internal” and presumably authentic abundance that paradoxically belonged to “others” such as women, people of color, and figures like cowboys and frontiersmen. As the media disseminated such techniques through astrology columns, record albums, television news, and Hollywood films, the search for authenticity they served also went mainstream. Given this context, the freeze-frame’s rise in commercial American films at once repeats and revises the device’s precedents in avant-garde and art cinema. Appearing alongside slow motion and superimposition in experimental works of the 1920s, the freeze-frame’s early uses signaled the transformative power of cinematic vision, which promised to unveil alternatives to conventional perception and experience. Freeze-frames from the late 1960s and early 1970s share this revelatory spirit, but the relationship between photography and cinema they mobilize also affirms the quest for authenticity that animates the period’s preoccupations with ecstatic practices and violence. Shelter and Night supply compelling studies in this regard. Frequently cited as “proof” of the era’s apocalyptic fantasies of violence, these films inventory ecstatic experiences from rock music to occultism alongside freeze-framed depictions of two black men’s murders. Consolidating the logic that motivates these ecstasies, the freeze-frame discloses death’s “lost” details through cinema’s photographic interior. It,

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too, posits escape from established realities by appealing to an authentic internal “other.” The certainty with which Shelter and Night make these appeals also distinguishes the freeze-frame’s popular use from its deployment in European art cinema and the American avant-garde. Films such as La jetée (Chris Marker, 1962), Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966), and Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966) clearly influenced their successors by coupling still images with incidents of narrative violence. Yet, unlike their American counterparts, these films tend to employ photograms to heighten subjective uncertainties rather than produce experiences of documentary facticity. Even Night, which shares art cinema’s status as fiction, likens its freeze-frames to historical and contemporary photographs. A similar distinction attends the relationship between commercial and experimental filmmaking. Each turns to photograms to render perceptual and experiential extremes, but works by Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger or, later, Hollis Frampton and Paul Sharits emphasize the destabilizing force of these images, not the “objective” alternatives they seem to secure. My point, then, is not to link all freeze-frames to ecstasy or to suggest they are ecstatic in the same way. Rather, I submit that the freeze-frame’s popularity during the late 1960s and early 1970s makes it a poignant figure for ecstasy’s own proliferation at this historical moment. Giving shape to the logic of ecstatic experience, freeze-frames reduce distinctions between inside and outside to discernible differences between photography and cinema. In so doing, they concentrate heterogeneous desires and practices, distilling both the fantasies these generate and the contradictions that inhabit them. Indeed, to the extent that freezeframes still move, however imperceptibly, they point to the indeterminate, overlooked, and rather inauthentic origins of ecstatic authenticity. As such, freeze-frames do more than reflect ecstasy’s answer to unsatisfying realities. They also refract its promises and permit one to trace the blind spots that unwittingly obscure its visions.

Ecstatic Profits The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed. . . . Cinema participates in [the] domestication of Photography. —Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

“Can you roll back on that David?” someone asks over images of yet another fray in the audience at Altamont. Shot from above and at a

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distance, the details of this skirmish are as imperceptible as the questioner, who, by virtue of a cut, one identifies as Mick Jagger, sitting at a Steenbeck editing table. More than the speaker, however, this sound bridge and subsequent cut register Gimme Shelter’s complex construction, which negotiates, in this case, multiple, though inextricable, spaces and times. Then, as if to underscore the force, and source, of its own mediation, the film cuts again—this time, to a medium shot of the Steenbeck, which rerolls the previous scene’s footage as a frame within the frame. As the sounds and images move across this monitor, smaller, quieter, and less colorful than before, viewers see the celluloid strip that produces them winding its way through the apparatus. The view is significant, for when the film jumps, moments later, to three vibrant, full-screen stills of the violence, spectators remember that strip and believe it has stopped. The Steenbeck points, then, to more than Shelter’s abstract duration. It also primes viewers—by foregrounding framing and the material print—for the intrusion of an alternative spatiotemporal relation: the freeze-frame, which transcends the monitor’s comparatively obscure

Figure 3.1. A Steenbeck rerolls the previous scene’s footage as a frame within the frame (Gimme Shelter, 1970).

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views. “Could you see what was happening there?” asks David Maysles, returning the footage, by Jagger’s request, to the film’s former scene. That spectators, too, have been addressed by his question is made clear by the cut that accompanies Jagger’s reply. With the words, “No, you couldn’t see anything,” Shelter jumps back to the initial full-frame view of the violence, which, as viewers recall and Jagger confirms, was and is chaotically unclear. But then—suddenly—the film freezes, and off screen, spectators hear the Steenbeck pause. “There’s the [Hell’s] Angel right there with the knife,” Maysles announces, and yes, there he is, the weapon clearly suspended, where one could not see it before. The disclosure is startling. So, too, the film’s unexpected arrest. Yet, as the image lingers for seven full seconds of immobile silence, it inspires contemplation in addition to shock. “Where’s the gun?” asks Jagger, and Maysles, rewinding the Steenbeck, responds: “I’ll roll it back, and you’ll see it against the girl’s crocheted dress.” He does, and like Jagger, viewers do, as the film pauses again for seven seconds of stillness and quiet before advancing back to the knife for seven seconds more.

Figure 3.2. “There’s the Angel right there with the knife.” (Gimme Shelter, 1970).

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As with slow motion, freeze-frames extend the interval in which viewers may inspect events, and yet, by momentarily eschewing film’s photogrammic displacement, they also interrupt the illusion—even occlusion—of cinematic movement itself. In addition to time, in other words, freeze-frames transform motion into visibility, bringing more than imperceptible content to the viewer’s attention. Besides murder tucked away amid chaos, Shelter unveils the photograms that line its otherwise interminable flow. Like the shot of the Steenbeck, however, these images exceed any simple reflexive significance. They may draw spectators toward Shelter’s indiscernible constitution in photography, but freeze-frames also turn apprehension of, and about, the illusions of cinema into absorption by other apparently noncinematic means. If they encourage one to “recoil from the image,” writes Raymond Bellour, the retreat “goes hand in hand with a growing fascination” (“Pensive Spectator” 6). Fascination, in this case, belongs to the violence freeze-frames uncover as well as to the explicitly photographic properties—stillness, silence, determinate framing—on which that revelation depends. Repudiating cinematic mediation both by what one sees and how, the photogram becomes, at least for a moment, a “stop within a stop, a freeze-frame within a freeze-frame,” a photographic “outside” inside the film (Bellour, “Pensive Spectator” 6). After all, relative to cinema’s abstract and ephemeral unfolding, photography has long aroused in beholders the contingent encounters that Shelter wishes its spectators to share. Christian Metz attributes this experience to photography’s “past presence,” which not only refers viewers to a present now inaccessible and already past but also, I argue, carries that past forward, making “past presence” equally a presencing of the past (“Photography and Fetish” 141). Accordingly, photography reproduces indexically, collecting, storing, and re-presenting light from an object such that the resulting image is, as André Bazin argues, less likeness and more the “object itself” (“Ontology” 14). Cinema, too, is an indexical medium, but as Metz and others suggest, it tends to overwhelm one’s experience of pastness with an ever-shifting and diegetic present in which “nothing can be kept, nothing stopped” (“Photography and Fetish” 140). With photography, by contrast, the referent stubbornly adheres to its sign, touching one with the contingency—the word itself implies touching—of a slice of space-time. One hears this in Jagger’s and Maysles’s reception of the freeze-frame in which then and there merge contradictorily with here and now. “There’s the Angel right there with the knife,” says David; “Oh, it’s there, isn’t it?” Mick replies upon seeing the gun. In each case, a weapon is present before them, even if there registers its spatiotemporal past.

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Contingency also contributes to the evidentiary force of photography relative to cinema, which, for its part, typically minimizes the index as object in favor of its status as sign. The freeze-frame exacerbates this difference between representation and reality, even in a documentary like Shelter. Coming before editing, before voiceover, the photogram draws one closer to the film’s point of inscription, potentially eluding the significance these structures seek to provide. In fact, Roland Barthes—in the very year of Shelter’s release—drew upon the photogram to elucidate cinema’s “third meaning,” which “blunts” a film’s more purposeful and “obvious” significance (“Third Meaning” 55). Of stills, writes Barthes, it is “their stupidity [that] touches me,” and the same might be said for the freeze-frame (“Third Meaning” 66). Its singular and contiguous relationship to reality resists the disseminating abstraction of signification, seizing both cinematic motion and the act of interpretation itself. Finally, if contingency evades deliberate signification, then this also aligns it with chance. “It is through photography,” writes Walter Benjamin, “that we first discover the . . . optical unconscious”—a mechanism that marks the limits of conscious perception, manifesting facts otherwise unseen (“Little History” 510). When faced with a photograph, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it. (“Little History” 510) Linking the contact between light and photochemical emulsion to unexpected encounters with the stowaways of time, Benjamin unites photography’s contingency as “touching” with the medium’s contingency as “chance.” Though he extends these powers to cinema, Shelter ups the ante by forcing chance’s hand. Compelling an “accidental” encounter with reality, “unmediated” by cinematic construction, the film’s freeze-frames point beyond the limits of everyday human perception to promise, by way of photography, the unforeseen secrets—the optical unconscious—of cinematic representation itself. “Only a spectacular killing . . . has the power to reveal what normally escapes notice,” writes Georges Bataille, the spectatorial ecstasy of which the freeze-frame compounds (Erotism 22). Brutal deaths have a demonstrative function, disclosing what lies beyond everyday consciousness, particularly, notes Bataille, when enacted in ritualized forms. Free of

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the “precarious and random luck” that makes accidental death possible, religious sacrifices—not unlike freeze-frames—contradictorily cultivate chance so as to point to the existence of what remains unseen (Erotism 21). What is more, both ritualized violence and freeze-frames extend the experience of ecstasy from victim to audience. “A violent death disrupts the creature’s discontinuity,” its discrete alienation, argues Bataille. “What remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one” (Erotism 22). Continuity is, in other words, manifestly “proved by death” (Erotism 21). Similarly, the freeze-frame, by violently arresting Shelter’s abstract duration, promises spectators, like Meredith Hunter himself, evidence of what lies outside normative perception and experience.

Occult Technologies The cinema has an unexpected and mysterious side, which we find in no other form of art. . . . There is also a sort of physical excitement which . . . moves beyond the power of representation. —Antonin Artaud, “Witchcraft and the Cinema”

“What could you do for an encore to human sacrifice?” asks journalist Stanley Booth in his account of the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont (375). The question, which forges a connection between ritualized violence and Meredith Hunter’s unexpected death, is representative of many contemporary reactions to the event. Music critic Albert Goldman describes the concert as an “orgy of violence and madness,” while David Pirie of Sight and Sound calls Gimme Shelter “an overwrought religious vision” (Goldman “Whitewash”; Pirie 226). These reports, which link film and concert to rituals of ecstatic violence, tap into the Stones’ much-touted interest in occult practices—an interest exploited by the album Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967) as well as singles such as “Sympathy for the Devil” (1968), which they perform in Shelter under the protection of no less than the Hell’s Angels themselves. Referring to Mick Jagger as the “Prince of Darkness” or “the showbiz Lucifer,” such accounts delight in connecting the Stones and their “violent Walpurgisnacht” to satanism and witchcraft (Goldman “Whitewash”; McGregor “Rock’s”; Sadkin). Their delight is significant, for while the Stones—the self-proclaimed bad boys of rock—represented a dark and violent vision that defied the purported peacefulness of Woodstock, the discourse surrounding Altamont and Shelter evinced broad fascination with the occult and its demonstrative practices. The late 1960s and early 1970s marked, after all, a conspicuous resurgence of occult interest in the United States, one the mass media

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documented and delivered. A March 1969 Time magazine cover story hails “Astrology and the New Cult of the Occult” and announces that astrological calculations are being taken up seriously and semiseriously by the most scientifically sophisticated generation of young adults in history. Even the occult arts of palmistry, numerology, fortunetelling, and witchcraft—traditionally the twilight zone of the undereducated and overanxious—are catching on with youngsters. (“Astrology”) Embracing the supernatural in spite, or even because, of their knowledge of science, America’s youth, Time reasoned, contradictorily mingled urbane sophistication with backwater naïveté. And while university courses in witchcraft or Anton LaVey’s 1966 establishment of the Church of Satan in San Francisco may have attested to the occult’s special province with countercultural youth—a subject to which I return—the appearance of astrology columns in 1,200 of the nation’s 1,750 newspapers suggested widespread curiosity about the supernatural’s apparently irrational claims. Time even cites Ronald Reagan’s interest in the zodiac, which the California governor claims is “no more . . . than the average man[’s]” (“Astrology”). Of course, the most cursory list of contemporary publications on the subject—from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Newsweek to Esquire, McCall’s, and Vogue—suggests this may be a lot (Sansweet; Klemesrud; “Voodoo U”; “Style of Evil”; “Occult Explosion”; Du Plessix).2 Indeed, as Martin Marty argues in his 1970 contribution to the proliferating discourse on the occult, an “Occult Establishment” had emerged in the United States that further entangled a superstitious periphery with the enlightened mainstream. This “safe and often sane ‘aboveground’ expression” of practices such as astrology, telepathy, and even voodoo “gives every sign,” writes Marty, “of being beamed at what is now usually called ‘middle America,’ ‘the silent majority,’ or ‘consensusUSA’ ” (216). What sustained the manifest quest for secret knowledge, however, were the illicit, shadowy “others” that this establishment helped to foment. Conjuring images of a dark, dangerous, and patently youthful occult “underground,” these accounts, not unlike Pauline Kael’s attack on the Albert and David Maysles, give their authors the means to disavow their own transgressive desires. “If there is one devastating aspect to the documentation . . . [of a] purportedly ominous underground,” notes Marty, “it is this: the turned-on, black magical, satanist, and otherwise disturbing sector of the population is always written about and never written to” (217). The result fantasmatically disentangled what were, in

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fact, entwined cultural expressions. “Aboveground” practitioners indulged in the occult they also sought to contain, while those who identified as underground upheld a status quo from which they likewise departed. The commingling of rationality and irrationality that composed occultism in the late 1960s and early 1970s typified its history in American culture, as did its frequent associations with modern technologies. Tracing the contemporaneous development of telegraphy and Spiritualism in the mid-nineteenth century, Jeffrey Sconce notes how telegraphs modeled the female “medium’s” ability to overcome bodily constraint at the same time that they provided psychologists with analogues for the electrical origins of her purported insanity. Meetings of science and supernaturalism, conservatism and critique, also characterized the paranormal fantasies that arose with subsequent technologies such as radio, television, and the Internet. Though certainly distinct from the history of electronic media that Sconce undertakes, freeze-frames occupy a similarly overdetermined fantasmatic horizon, keyed to the demands of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Along with horoscopes, tarot cards, and satanic iconography, freeze-frames contributed to this period’s store of “occult technologies,” sociologist Marcello Truzzi’s term for ritualized instruments that disclose “supernormal” realities (633). That cinema should provide this kind of technology is in keeping with its own emergence at the intersection of science and magic. Touting the apparatus to sell an illusion, cinema’s first practitioners compounded the rationalized antimodernism one finds in such turn-of-the-century pursuits as dime museums and magic theaters. “The cinema reveals a whole occult life,” wrote Antonin Artaud in “Witchcraft and the Cinema” in 1928, but one “must know how to divine [it]” (66). It comes, he warned, “not by a succession of images so much as by something more imponderable which restores them to us with . . . no interpositions or representations” (66). Artaud’s description, which opposes cinema’s abstract and uniform construction to the occult, resembles the photographic contingency that freeze-frames promise viewers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. After all, freeze-frames, too, reclaim once inaccessible worlds by revealing the photograms that lie inside cinema. Some forty years after Artaud, underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger turned these photograms toward his own occult interests. For Anger, the physics of light and film’s photochemical emulsion gave cinema the Luciferian power to bedevil everyday appearance. In films such as Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), which features both the Rolling Stones and the British Hell’s Angels, photographic processes link objects to their beholders and “impose upon the mind of the watcher an alternative reality” (Hutchi-

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Figure 3.3. Magick, the Rolling Stones, and the British Hell’s Angels (Invocation of My Demon Brother, 1969).

son 163).3 “Centuries before photography, there were talismans,” notes Anger, “which actually anticipated photographs. A talisman was a sticky fly-paper to trap a spirit—cunningly you printed on it a ‘photograph’ of the demon you wanted to capture in it” (Rayns 24). In less “underground”—indeed, even popular, narrative films—photograms trap unseen forces that, when freeze-frames release them, summon ecstatic visions for cinema’s spectators. And while they expose the dark “other” scene that makes cinema possible, these films also enforce distinctions between cinematic representation and photographic authenticity.

Rituals of Authentication The goal of man and society should be . . . finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic. —Port Huron Statement, Students for a Democratic Society We demand the Politics of Ecstasy! —Jerry Rubin, Yippie

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As its relationship to occult ritual has already begun to suggest, the freeze-frame conjures a veritable litany of ecstatic fantasies that characterize the period to which Altamont and Gimme Shelter belong. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll were, for instance, the holy triumvirate of this cultural moment, harbingers of ecstasy for the very youth who increasingly and, by a number of accounts, violently turned on to satanism, cinema, and the Stones. For many of these young people, especially participants in the era’s countercultural movements, such experiences promised a glimpse of the authenticity that was, they believed, otherwise denied them by the structures of postwar America. Indeed, as much as ecstasy, authenticity occupied the era’s cultural imagination, not only within the counterculture but also for the New Left, the Far Right, and in the academy. Arising alongside modern rationalism, authenticity renounced the world in the service of self-possession. What interior desires and feelings offered was more fundamental, more “real,” authenticity wagered, than the external prescriptions of the outside world. Though certainly less complicated than philosophical treatments of authenticity that circulated in the late 1960s and early 1970s, popular culture’s take on the subject nonetheless shared ecstasy’s concerns with “loss” as well as “insides” and “outsides.” In the case of the counterculture, young, predominantly white members of the middle class conceived themselves as existentially alienated from an inner, more personal wholeness, unlike the poor or people of color, who were, they believed, already socially and politically estranged from external power structures. “This inner wholeness,” writes Doug Rossinow, “was the state of authenticity” and capturing it meant recovering the immanent instincts and spontaneous experiences that had been lost to widespread affluence and bureaucratization (4). In this context, uninhibited sex, illicit drug use, and rock music became rituals of authentication, tools for apprehending alternative realities that preceded and exceeded interior isolation. Returning its listeners to the contingency of sensation, rock—like an unrestrained libido or that “new technology of the mind,” LSD—promised momentary communion with originary, even “primitive,” instincts and experiences that redeemed one’s social indoctrination (D. Farber, “Intoxicated State” 23). As with freezeframes, these techniques revitalized the past in, as, and for the present, opening an inner space that stood outside the repressive institutions of modern, everyday life. Consider, for instance, the turn to preindustrial clothing and practices, whether indigenous (buckskins, peyote, cowboy boots) or “exotic” (saris, Zen Buddhism, Arabian robes) among members of the counterculture in the early to mid 1960s. Consider, too, descriptions of LSD that adopt the image of the freeze-frame itself: “You knew

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it was working,” reports one practitioner, “when you moved your hand and you had twenty images of the hand in your mind at the same time, like fifteen stills of a motion picture film” (Hoffman 212). As the decade progressed, the demonstrative power of authentic experience fascinated more than just “hippies.” Folding countercultural practices into its political programs, the New Left, too, “put their bodies on the line” with external appearances and internal experiences that challenged the boundaries of dominant culture. Reaching the mass media, images of bearded or braless young people, dancing wildly and smoking dope, soon united a generation—and those that opposed it—with the style and intoxicating habits of their ecstatic subjects. “Life, Time, and the trendspotters of the evening news outdid themselves trumpeting the new youth culture,” Todd Gitlin writes. “Alarmists and proselytizers alike collaborated in the belief that American youth en masse were abandoning the stable routes of American society” (205). Films like Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) and songs such as the Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” further corroborated this fantasy, their popularity drawing casual

Figure 3.4. Rock music: one of the era’s many rituals of authentication (Gimme Shelter, 1970).

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dabblers and faithful practitioners together through the rituals of authentication they shared. Still, the rebellion that joined dominant to counterculture—the latter increasingly and contradictorily mainstream—also exacerbated distinctions between the two spheres, particularly as ecstasy turned violent in the popular imaginary. It is the case, of course, that small segments of American youth did participate in acts of physical violence as the 1960s came to a close. Protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the Weather Underground’s 1969 Days of Rage were, like the Stones concert at Altamont, only the most prominent examples. It is also the case, however, that American media increasingly covered only the most violent youth actions, cleaving them from “nonviolent”—though certainly confrontational—activities such as marches, strikes, and sit-ins. “Even when events were virtually violence-free,” writes historian Melvin Small, “journalists pointed that out at the beginning of their stories or in headlines, . . . reinforcing the notion that demonstrations meant violence” and—I would add—that nonviolent tactics somehow evaded coercion (162). Thus fracturing the youth movement, popular accounts gave prominence to its most immoderate factions, the participants of which answered the press in kind. As a result, young people seemed to stand more and more outside the confines of conventional culture, consolidating fantasies of extremism among those who supported and opposed it. For one side, marginality promised authentic rebellion, or so people of color, especially African Americans—from Harlem hipsters to civil rights activists to Black Power militants—appeared to attest. At odds with the “silent majority,” young radicals believed themselves similarly subjugated. To respond to violence with violence was, therefore, to generate a repressive, and thereby revelatory, response. For the other side, violent provocations disclosed nothing, however, except perhaps a generation bent on apocalypticism for its own sake. And yet, because each side saw only the other’s self-serving brutality, they misrecognized the visions of violence—popular, apocalyptic, and articulated in otherness—that, in fact, entwined them both. In particular, they missed the way in which people of color—and African Americans in particular—defined their cultural differences. According to Rossinow, urban riots between 1965 and 1968 “left a deep imprint on many conservative Americans, driving them further to the political right. They associated violence,” he continues, “with black Americans, not whites” (271). Leftist radicals made similar assumptions, though they admired rather than maligned the brutality in question. Notes former Weatherman Jeff Jones:

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People like the Vietnamese and, in this country, people in the black community, especially people like the Black Panther Party, were in a state of revolutionary warfare. The question was: Were we going to join that war on terms equal to what black people or Vietnamese people were doing, or were we going to continue to use our privilege as white people as an excuse for not accepting the same level of risk? (311) Here, overcoming alienation means emulating those whose lives are on the line. Doing so may challenge middle-class banality, but it also contributes to fantasies of violence as authentically “other” at the same time.

Gimme Shelter Let’s get it together. . . . Keep it together. . . . Hell’s Angels, everybody. Let’s just keep ourselves together. You know, if we are all one, let’s show we’re all one. —Mick Jagger to the crowd at Altamont

Cataloguing the era’s many rituals of authentication, Gimme Shelter compounds popular fantasies of apocalypse to become, like the concert it renders, a symbol of youth violence writ large. “Altamont was . . . an end to innocence,” writes Charles Champlin in his Los Angeles Times review of the film, “its brutal murder an all-too-apt symbol of the death of a dreamy vision of a lifestyle drug-soothed and peaceful” (“Movie Review”). Indeed, compared to Woodstock, held just four months earlier, Altamont spelled the “End of the Sixties.” While the former “confirm[ed] that good things can happen here,” the latter marked a shift from amity to enmity, hippie to militant, Beatle to Rolling Stone (Lydon). And yet, to the extent that Shelter cites imagery from Woodstock, the festival, and Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh, 1970), the movie, it also “proves” that the counterculture in general—and rock music in particular—had always harbored an ecstatic Armageddon. More popular than drugs or “free love,” rock promised to liberate the senses of young people throughout America—evidence, for many, of its potential danger. This was particularly the case with such bands as the Rolling Stones, MC5, or The Doors, whose interest in sex, violence, and the occult coincided with the counterculture’s more aggressive manifestations (Whiteley). “Rock and roll is one of the most vital revolutionary forces in the West,” writes John Sinclair, manager of MC5 and founder of the Detroit-based White Panther Party. “It blows people back to their

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senses and makes them feel good, like they’re alive again in the middle of this monstrous funeral parlor of western civilization” (301). Calling for “Satisfaction” as early as 1965, the Stones leaned on hard-driving rhythms and explicit lyrics to out-menace their compatriots and revitalize youth’s instincts. In doing so, they excited the desire of fans as well as detractors, representing, like the era’s various “undergrounds,” all that stood “outside” mainstream institutions. Whether promise or threat, therefore, rock invokes ecstasy for all, including those who, at first glance, seek to inauthenticate its rituals. Once again, adversaries converge at a mutual blind spot, unwittingly defining each other’s position by affirming ecstatic otherness. Evident in the antagonism between dominant and countercultures, this shared logic of exclusion draws on established racialized fantasies. Rock emerged, after all, under the influence of black music, which had long meant authenticity for white Americans. First as “race music,” then as “rhythm and blues,” rock ’n’ roll was variously embraced and reviled, writes Brian Ward, for its relationship to an “unremittingly physical, . . . emotional, and, above all, sexually liberated black world” (12). This held true for black as well as white performers, who, in anticipation of later political radicals, cited black, Southern influences in their efforts to thrill popular audiences. Take Elvis Presley, whose “waist-up” appearance on Ed Sullivan crystallized “black” aggression as much as “race riots” at several high-profile black concerts. In either case, Ward suggests, rock was “inextricably linked . . . to desegregation and black insurgency”—to fantasies, that is, of African American transgression (113). In the mid to late 1960s, this history found new expression when bands like the Rolling Stones tapped American blues to revitalize white music. Called “devil’s music” in its own time, the songs of Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, and Robert Johnson helped the Stones cultivate their own satanic personas. In fact, the band’s alchemical fusion of blues, rock, and country-western prompted extreme fantasies of racial transubstantiation. Asking “Why Do Whites Sing Black?” just eight days after Altamont, music critic Albert Goldman describes the adoption of “black shouts and black lips, black steps, and black hips” by a growing number of white performers and their audiences (“Why Do Whites”). Adds rock journalist Chet Flippo: “If there were any way to get temporary skin transplants, [the Stones] would be black every night on stage” (85). A kind of modern blackface, this “adventure of transvestism” encompassed the complex, and often contradictory, pleasures of the earlier practice (Goldman, “Why Do Whites”). Indeed, as scholars such as Eric Lott suggest, blackface implies more than racial antipathy. Offering spectacles of “black” vulgarity and

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violence, these fetishized displays are also projections of white America’s untenable desires. As such, they secure “white spectators’ positions as superior, controlling . . . figures” at the same time that they permit these audiences to indulge and master their own ecstatic impulses (Lott 28). As with any fetish, in other words, blackface—like the burnt cork it employs—only partially screens out what white consciousness disowns. A similar structure characterized rock’s blues revival, which reanimated pleasures that exceeded establishment limits. Yet whether one abhorred or welcomed this “infiltration” into white culture, the music offered listeners the chance to domesticate its “surplus.” For some, “singing black” reaffirmed the very boundaries it transgressed, while for others, it revived, then replenished, their corresponding “lack.” And though my point is not to conflate rock’s supporters with its detractors or declare them all equally racist, it is to suggest that a neglected logic of exception underlies these cultural expressions. If, therefore, Shelter and the rituals of authentication it renders are brutal and self-serving, then it is less for their efforts to test the status quo than for the violent blind spots they share with it. The Stones’ number “Love in Vain” is particularly significant in this regard. Penned by Robert Johnson—a “paragon of blues authenticity” with mythic links to satanism and the occult—the song opens in Shelter on a crowd of young, white fans at Madison Square Garden who undulate in slow motion, all bathed in red light (Daley 163; Palmer 111–31). With hands raised, heads bobbing, and eyes half-closed, they appear lost, mesmerized by waves of music and the first calls of a voice. At this point, the film cuts to Mick Jagger, who, with parted lips and hair pulsing, advances, trancelike, to a song he does not seem to be singing—possessed, from the outside, by the sound of his voice. Reanimating Jagger as he reanimates Johnson, the film suspends the former between body and voice, stillness and motion, black and white. Then, as if to compound these temporal and psychic dislocations, Shelter leaps from urban North to rural South. There, at Muscle Shoals Sound Studios—Alabama’s “unspoiled” home to country-western and the blues—the Stones stand, quite literally, beside themselves, listening to, though never performing, the song that unites the two scenes. In fact, as the camera passes over the bandmates, withdrawn to various parts of the studio, they remain silent—transfixed and apparently transported by their own, yet “other,” music. In this moment, the group reiterates Jagger’s position both on and in front of the Steenbeck, images of which not only follow “Love in Vain” but also compose Shelter’s structure in general. On one hand, this structure would seem to challenge the authenticity of otherness, since it portrays the Stones as both producers and receivers of the “black” music

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they imitate. From this perspective, ecstasy derives from retroactive rather than extant distinctions, the excitations of which mutually constitute “insides” from which “outsides” have apparently “gone missing.” On the other hand, however, Shelter eschews such indeterminacy, enforcing a gap between body and voice, black and white, that disentangles outside from inside and hypostatizes otherness in the service of self. In this case, ecstasy offers a “fix” for the supposedly alienated subject, an authenticity donned or dropped like Jagger’s strut or Keith Richards’s prominently framed cowboy boots. Thus carving a space between self and other, white and black, the film—like the cultural fantasies it documents—unwittingly gives shelter to some at the violent expense of a few. Suggests one black resident of New York’s East Village: “The hippies really bug us because we know they can come down here and play their games for a while and then escape. And we can’t” (Braunstein and Doyle 12). Correspondingly, Jagger can sing the blues and watch himself do so, while Meredith Hunter remains fixed, forever “outside,” at the moment of his death.

Still Moving Forms will circulate around that which they lack, the expression that they cannot express, articulations that cannot be articulated; and yet these limits will be experienced through the new possibilities opened by the radical sharing of form. . . . Forms that expose their outside are not simply cut off or disconnected. —George Baker, “Reanimations (I)”

Returning to Gimme Shelter’s “picture” of Meredith Hunter and the occult technology that makes it possible, I want to argue that the freeze-frame reduces the era’s rituals of authentication to a single, perceptible figure. In so doing, it crystallizes the violent exceptions on which ecstatic experiences depend, particularly because the freeze-frame, too, harbors a constitutive blind spot. Though apparently static, freeze-frames are always still moving. They give the lie to cinematic abstraction while simultaneously occluding their own. As a result, they evince an impossible split between motion and stillness, construction and contingency, that compounds the psychosocial exclusions one finds elsewhere in Shelter. “There’s the Angel right there with the knife.” These words, I have argued, announce the freeze-frame’s claim to ecstatic experience. Matched to the arrest of Hunter’s once indefinite image, they bespeak the contingency and immanent facticity of an instant that unsettles signification as much as the spectator. In this, the freeze-frame recalls the

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“disruptive force” of the “filmic,” that third or “obtuse” meaning, which for Roland Barthes, lies in the still’s capacity to precede and exceed film’s manifest representations (“Third Meaning” 58). A cinematic analogue to photography’s punctum, the filmic “appears to extend outside culture, knowledge, information,” what in Camera Lucida Barthes refers to as studium (“Third Meaning” 55). Central to my argument, however, is the extent to which Barthes distinguishes cinematic “stills” from photographic images, which, he warns, cannot disclose third meaning because they “lack the diegetic horizon” that photograms deride and embody (“Third Meaning” 66). It matters, therefore, that the still—like the freeze-frame—sits at the limit of cinematic semiosis, exciting constructions of meaning that contingency reciprocally challenges. The freeze-frame signifies, in other words, but in excess of signification, hailing viewers from inside the film while remaining, paradoxically, what they add to it. As with Barthes’s punctum, indeterminacy would seem to constitute the freeze-frame’s “madness,” entwining photography’s “objective” past (“that-has-been”) with cinema’s subjective present (“there-it-is”) to ecstatically reveal what cannot be directly or determinately represented (Camera Lucida 113, 117). Still, it is at this point that one discovers Shelter’s logic of exception, since the film denies the freeze-frame its “mad” irreducibility. Focusing on “knife” and, later, “gun,” Shelter promises the contingent details of murder, but in divulging “what really happened,” it disavows its own delimitation of these once imponderable particulars. Hunter’s death may precede, even exceed, signification, but it remains recognizable as such only in its retroactive cinematic construction. In this way, the murder becomes an event in Mary Ann Doane’s sense of the term, a place “where time coagulates and where the contingent can be readily imbued with meaning through its very framing as event” (Emergence of Cinematic Time 169). More than a slice of space-time, Shelter gives one its signs—discernible “facts” that the film has already harnessed as contingency, as authenticity, as an encounter with death itself. When, therefore, the freeze-frame “proves” there is more than meets cinematic, if not everyday, experience, it is because Shelter tames that “more” by rendering it fully apprehensible. Ecstasy comes less by what the freeze-frame reveals than by how, since the film both depends on, then ignores, the photogram’s fundamentally indeterminate composition. In this sense, the freeze-frame resembles the era’s other rituals of authentication, whether astrology, sex and drugs, or rock’s blues revival. These rituals control otherness by setting it outside white, middle-class alienation, while Shelter similarly relies on the freeze-frame to master photography for cinema.

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Of course, to the extent that the freeze-frame makes legible these sociocultural exceptions, it threatens the authenticity they aim to secure. In fact, Shelter’s very pronouncement of photographic contingency cannot help but betray the image’s unacknowledged and imperceptible debt to cinematic construction. “There’s the Angel right there with the knife.” The utterance evinces a fantasy of unmediated authenticity, binding photographic excitations to Pauline Kael’s vérité jackpot. At the same time, however, it unravels this possibility, the words unfolding in time to reveal the freeze-frame’s abstract duration. This, too, is a jackpot, though of another kind, since it discloses the freeze-frame’s irreducible relationship to motion and stasis, cinema and photography, inside and outside. It thus follows that indeterminacy rather than antinomy defines ecstatic experience, for here, “outsides,” as I previously suggested, merely compose the “insides” from which they have retroactively gone missing. With respect to the freeze-frame, one might call this “dual articulation,” George Baker’s term for the incommensurable sharing that takes place among media. As much as people, that is, forms seek what they ostensibly lack, what for any one medium appears inexpressible. Nevertheless, writes Baker, media that discover their limits are “not simply cut off or disconnected” (62). Rather, they meet despite, even through, such restrictions, communicating together what each fails to express alone. Dual articulation does not, for this reason, describe “a collision of mediums as opposed ‘essences’ ”; it envisions the product of forms that “interpenetrate without losing their specificity” (35). Take Shelter’s voiceover. It compromises the freeze-frame’s contingency, disclosing a gap between the film’s asynchronous sound and its comparatively “live” performances. Yet it also preserves the freeze-frame’s “event-ness,” constructing the kind of significance that contingency undermines. To synchronize soundtrack and photogram would produce an unintelligible stutter, while leaving the spectator in silence too long risks losing authenticity to a profusion of subjective interpretations. Sound, in this case, produces meaning where image cannot, while image reciprocally grounds sound in an ascertainable reality. Only by gathering around their shared limitations do sound and image, cinema and photography, articulate authentic experience. From this point of view, the freeze-frame does more than render logics of exception. It also registers the indeterminacy that motivates their structure. In fact, by directing viewers toward another, more entangled relation, the freeze-frame potentially challenges conceptions of ecstasy at work in this period. When spectators uncover the imperceptible point where photography and cinema commingle, they trouble the integrity of insides and outsides and expose the blind spots of occult technologies.

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Ecstasy no longer issues from “genuine” sources but rather from the revelation of authenticity’s inauthentic origins. Such a discovery works to resituate the violence of the era’s numerous rituals, testing the limits of perception and experience without hypostatizing otherness or overlooking its immanent entanglement with dominant realities.

Resurrecting the Dead They Won’t Stay Dead! —Tagline for Night of the Living Dead

At first glance, Night of the Living Dead and Gimme Shelter seem incongruous films. One exploits horror. The other documents history. And yet, Night not only engages occult realms of zombies and voodoo but also depicts a black man’s murder through a series of full-frame photographs. These images, though patently “staged” compared to Shelter’s own “pictures,” partake nonetheless of their counterparts’ authenticating effects. At the same time, they draw documentary and narrative together, compounding previously identified encounters between contingency and construction. Indeed, to the extent that Night’s freeze-frames give incommensurability shape, they suggest how reality and fiction commingle in images of “actual” violence—from Altamont to John F. Kennedy’s assassination—as much as in narrative cinema. Night’s freeze-frames come the morning after the film’s eponymous assault by zombies. As daylight breaks, spectators find a posse of armed men killing “undead” stragglers. They soon reach a farmhouse, where Ben (Duane Jones)—a black man and the residence’s sole survivor—hides in the basement. Hearing commotion outside, he furtively leaves this shelter, only to be shot between the eyes by a white vigilante’s rifle. In this instant, the film stops its regular unfolding and offers, instead, a montage of twenty-five grainy, black-and-white freeze-frames. Underscoring the viewers’ shock at the unlikely death of their protagonist, this shift to the freeze-frame also produces astonishment in excess of narrative. As with Shelter, Night’s conclusion sacrifices motion for visibility, pitting photography against cinema to disclose murder’s unexamined details. Among these are the posse’s police badges and pistols, artillery belts and meat hooks—violent accoutrements that, along with helicopters and hunting dogs, conjure Vietnam, the American South, and other contemporary scenes of racialized brutality. With each static revelation, the spectator is touched by space-time, the apparent facticity of which interrupts cinematic signification with photography’s obdurate existence.

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The grain of the images, too, heightens their relative contingency, connoting an amateur’s chance recordings or, as in Blow-Up, the recovery of unintentional material by photographic enlargement.4 In all these ways, Night shares Shelter’s promise of ecstasy, offering spectators missed encounters with the film and historical events that stand outside its purview. Unlike Shelter, however, Night must contend with its status as fiction, which consequently transfigures the freeze-frame’s claims to authenticity. While Night’s freeze-frames draw one toward contingent points of inscription, they also turn one’s attention to the film’s artificial construction. They give one time to uncover evidence of Ben’s murder but risk underscoring the actors and props, costumes and makeup, that compose such material. It matters, therefore, that George A. Romero does not suspend, then release, Night’s movement as Albert and David Maysles did Shelter’s, but rather more strenuously brackets the cinematic by incorporating full-frame photographs into his film.5 Going further, Night supplements its freeze-frames by way of allusion, referencing well-known photographs of actual events that lend documentary force to the film’s fictional images. When, for instance, freeze-frames disclose Ben’s wounds and the meat hooks that transport his dead body, Night summons images of Emmett Till, clashes in Birmingham, and other photojournalistic proof of white-on-black violence. In this way, Night, as much as Shelter, guarantees authenticity, resurrecting “lost” instants that return, zombielike, to threaten the film’s “living” representations. As before, this assault relies on logics of exception. Night clears a space between inside and outside, photography and cinema, then mobilizes these terms at will. At the level of plot, even the farmhouse articulates this logic. Exterior shots depict zombies gathering at windows and doors, while the film’s leaps inside the house reveal humans defending its limits. At the level of form, meanwhile, Night’s freeze-frames redouble the fantasies one finds in Shelter, citing two “outsides” at work “inside” the film’s narrative. The first of these, photography, excites ecstasy by opposing contingency to construction, while the second, history, validates the first by bringing “external” realities into the fiction. Yet at the same time Night refers to historical photographs to heighten the freeze-frame’s contingency, it also necessarily lends significance to the “facts” it recovers. Dragged to a bonfire, Ben’s body recalls those represented in lynching souvenirs, which return from the past to animate Night’s freeze-frames with the force of the real. In so doing, however, these images—in spite of their stillness—set into motion determinate frames for interpreting their meaning. Actual brutality—or better, the photographs that permit it to circumvent time and space—entwines the film in apocalyptic fantasies that characterize the era. “Night of the

Figures 3.5 and 3.6. Night of the Living Dead conjures scenes of racialized brutality from Emmett Till, to Birmingham, to historical lynching souvenirs (1968).

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Living Dead was not only an instant horror classic,” write J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, “but a remarkable vision of the late 1960s— offering the most literal possible depiction of America devouring itself” (125). Ben’s race, meanwhile, only compounds associations between blackness and violence for advocates and detractors of attacks on dominant culture. However apocryphal, Night’s producer, Russell Streiner, recounts his drive with Romero to secure a distributor for the film on the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. “We figured, ‘Oh, great,’ ” he recalls, “ ‘. . . here we show up with a film with a black cat playing the lead and probably every theater in the country is going to be burned down within two days’ ” (Gange 34). So conceived, the ecstasy of Night’s spectacular killing emerges less from a polarizing state of exception than from the audience’s shared investment in its incommensurably dual articulation. As with Shelter, Night does not recover lost contingency so much as construct its significance as such and in retrospect. Reality meets fiction to evince the facticity that fiction lacks, while fiction grants this reality its import as “evidence.” The result draws documentary and narrative cinema closer together. Both Shelter and Night package time as recognizable instants at the same time that they disavow how cinematic duration or historical allusion signify “event-ness.” The freeze-frame, for its part, distills this relation. Commingling photography and cinema, it figures authenticity through patently inauthentic means. To discover these means potentially transfigures ecstatic experience from that which restores “outsides” to “insides” to that which recognizes their fundamentally entangled existence. It matters, therefore, that Night, like Shelter, bears the traces of the freeze-frame’s dual articulation, not only in sound and image but also through editing and camerawork. Night composes its freeze-frames in montage, after all, suturing images with straight cuts and dissolves. Along with the film’s eerie, postsynchronous soundtrack, such editing belies the freeze-frame’s manifest stillness and points to the latent, repetitive movement that produces it. Even more legible—and certainly more responsible for constructing the freeze-frame’s significance—are the horizontal and vertical movements and zooms that cut across its otherwise static surface. Consider, for instance, the film’s zoom into a high-angle shot of Ben and his wounds, which then dissolves into a close-up of one posse member looking down toward his body. Moving up and left, the camera reveals a second man’s similar posture, then following a cut, moves down to disclose the meat hook he clutches. At this point, the film leaps to a second hook, then moves up to a third, before pulling back to unveil a white policeman,

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blue-collar laborer, and hunter surrounding Ben’s corpse. Undoubtedly more mobile than its counterpart in Shelter, this montage makes evidentiary claims by privileging the freeze-frame’s relative impassiveness. At the same time, camera movement necessarily organizes spectatorial responses and thus registers, as much as “knife” or “gun,” how the film narrativizes the crime scene after the fact. For this reason, I contend, Night’s freeze-frames compromise the very mastery they purport to offer, unhinging any interpretation they might otherwise “prove.” This is not to suggest that Romero—any more or less than the Maysles—deliberately challenges the rituals of authentication that characterize their historical moment. Nor is it to suggest that spectators, in every—or any—case, consider the incommensurability freeze-frames express. To be sure, dual articulation generates vérité jackpots as much as it undoes them. Yet freeze-frames also figure substrata of doubt that run counter to the era’s faith in authenticity. Despite their blind spots, they mark sites where photography and cinema, documentary and narrative, reality and fiction, meet. Ecstasy, from this perspective, no longer cleaves outside from inside or makes one the instrument of the other. Rather, when occult technologies do violence, it is to fantasies that retroactively bind excitation to ever-recoverable external excesses.

Reanimating the Undead Between one death and the other, the absolute inside and the absolute outside enter into contact, an inside deeper than all the sheets of past, an outside more distant than all the layers of external reality. Between the two, in the in-between, it is as if zombies peopled the brain-world for a moment. —Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image

Because they give life to the dead, zombies are frequently compared to cinema. Yet as any horror aficionado knows, zombies are neither fully living nor fully dead. They are, as anthropologist Wade Davis puts it, “on the cusp of each”; they are “undead” beings (57). As such, zombies make better analogues for freeze-frames than for cinema as a whole, since freeze-frames do not recover moments that would otherwise go missing so much as reinvigorate photograms that never departed. Freezeframes reanimate, that is, as much as they resurrect, by which I mean they revitalize that which exists more than they merely end death. From this point of view, neither zombies nor freeze-frames restore outside to inside; rather, they give new life to the undead otherness that haunts each from within.

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Of course, to view Night of the Living Dead, is, at first glance, to regard zombies quite simply as other. Embodying the profound alterity of corpses, they stand outside every boundary the living erect. As the film unfolds, this exteriority accrues a racial dimension, as I have observed. Most notable when white vigilantes kill the film’s only African American character, articulations of inside and outside, white and black, also affect relationships inside the farmhouse. When, for instance, the basement door first menacingly opens, it reveals no zombie but rather Mr. Cooper (Karl Hardman), Ben’s distinctly white, human rival. Racial difference is, in fact, integral to zombie lore, whether indigenous or as translated by Hollywood cinema. Originating in the voodoo rituals of colonial Haiti, zombies did their possessor’s bidding, rendering them uncannily similar to the African slaves cultivating the island. Later, when they entered American culture during the U.S. occupation of Haiti, zombies retained this subjugated position. In Victor Halperin’s misleadingly titled White Zombie (1932), black zombies labor at the behest of a white sorcerer named Legendre (Bela Lugosi). Indeed, in most horror films before 1968, zombies are either black or caught up in the occult practices of Afro-Caribbean culture. Night, for its part, marks a shift in the popular representation of zombies. Here, the undead are white cannibals lumbering en masse and free of any magician or master. Vacant and listless, they clearly hunger for vitality, but, as the living dead, they are also already “beside themselves.” To the extent, meanwhile, these zombies occupy a historically racialized position, their ecstasy, like that of blackface performers, makes otherness a palliative for white, internal alienation. Thus while zombiism, as much as blackness, might be construed as abject or lacking, both have surplus value as desirable repositories of irrepressibly “authentic” instincts. In this sense, writes Ken Gelder, one might imagine whites “yearning for possession” (92). Zombiism permits them to lose self-control while displacing anxious wishes onto the bodies of “others.” Conceived this way, zombiism perpetuates the exceptional logic one finds in Gimme Shelter. It may offer apparent transgression, but it likewise retains dominant structures. In her aptly titled “Eating the Other,” bell hooks describes a similar structure for the contemporary commodification of black culture: To make one’s self vulnerable to the seduction of difference, to seek an encounter with the Other, does not require that one relinquish forever one’s mainstream positionality. . . . One desires contact with the Other even as one wishes boundaries to remain intact. (23, 29)

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Similarly, in Night, “possession” promises self-possession and maintains one’s mastery over others. Distinctions between living and dead, white and black, self and other, disavow how internal disequilibriums are brutally externalized. Still, residues of this violent fantasy remain, including, most demonstrably, in the manifest whiteness of zombies and Ben’s human murderers. With this in mind, Mr. Cooper’s emergence from the basement seems especially conspicuous, implying that otherness springs from distinctly internal rather than external sources. In fact, as Eric Santner suggests in his discussion of excitation, “outsides” only emerge when subjects seek self-containment. Confronted with a world of excess stimulation, the self seeks shelter from others that it, in effect, produces. The result motivates fantasies of authenticity, wherein one pursues what one has lost by cleaving inside from outside. This cleavage leaves countervailing traces, however, including an “internal alien-ness” that, according to Jean Laplanche, marks selfhood’s articulation in and through otherness (Santner 33–37; Laplanche, Essays 80). In a striking coincidence, Santner actually refers to this alien-ness as the psychic “undead,” which, as much as Romero’s zombies, complicates too-easy divisions among apparent oppositions (36). From this point of view, the self’s violent, even cannibalistic, efforts to resurrect what has “gone missing” harbor undead indeterminacies that encounters with otherness necessarily reanimate. Inviting relationships between inside and outside that liquidate self-possession and mastery, the undead, like freeze-frames, potentially transfigure popular ecstasies from zombiism to the blues. This is the case, moreover, with rituals of authentication that rely on conceptions of otherness that extend beyond race, including fantasies about sexual difference and the historical frontier that freeze-frames also express. Racial violence does not, in other words, compose all of the freeze-frame’s “pictures,” though it has been my interest here. Films such as Joe or Who’s That Knocking at My Door? (Martin Scorsese, 1969) arrest brutality against women, while works such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969) do the same for the cowboys the counterculture privileged. Beyond cinema, similar confluences of race, gender, and history inform the photojournalistic instants that, like freeze-frames, render moments of violence from this period particularly memorable. In addition to the images of Emmett Till or Birmingham I have already mentioned, there are, for instance, photographs of Nguyen Ngoc Loan’s execution of a Viet Cong guerilla in the streets of Saigon and Phan Thi Kim Phúc’s escape from a South Vietnamese napalm attack. Though cameras captured these events as moving and still pictures, the photographic “proof” circulated with far greater frequency. As with the occult, moreover, the

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authenticity of photography relative to cinema had its conservative as well as liberal expressions. Take the television advertisements for Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, which urged voters to “Vote Like Your Whole World Depended on It.” Created by documentarian Eugene Jones, the spots feature photographic montages of civil unrest and the war in Vietnam that, along with their dissonant soundtracks, resemble Night’s disturbing conclusion. Whether fictional or real, right or left, such images stand as privileged icons in the era’s apocalyptic self-conception. They are, in this sense, always repetitions of the “event” culled from the Zapruder footage—vérité jackpots that promise to reveal devastating violences to viewers who cannot directly perceive them. Freeze-frames, meanwhile, because they are dually articulated, underwrite this fantasy while undermining its relationships to temporality and history. Like zombies, they index an alternative logic of ecstatic experience, one that exposes the undead moments that haunt returns to authentic instants. To get at this alternative, I extend meetings of photography and cinema in Shelter and Night to encounters between “poses” and “snapshots.” The extension moves freeze-frames and photojournalism alike toward less apprehensible, but also less fixed, pasts, presents, and futures. To call freeze-frames or photojournalism “iconic” is, after all, to illuminate their ritual value. As “icons,” they incorporate their referents as contingent slices of space-time and imbue the pictures with sacredness. They make contingency discernible, in other words, and, in so doing, endow it with an abstract and summary significance. In this sense, argues Raymond Bellour, freeze-frames and photographs offer privileged instants that are “pregnant” with “both the average and the acme of a dramatic action” (“Film Stilled” 107). They are, he continues, like paintings or “poses,” classical postures that recompose movement as essential, transcendent moments. What matters, then, are the instants when vigilantes suspend Ben’s body by meat hooks or when Phan Thi Kim Phúc screams with outstretched arms, not the incidental transitions between these and other moments that cameras may well have captured. Excerpted from the continuum from which they derive, such instants are cited for their capacity to excite meaning. For this reason, Bellour opposes freeze-frames and photographs to the “snapshots” that he, following Gilles Deleuze, attributes to cinematic motion. Snapshots are not privileged moments, Deleuze argues; they are “any-instants-whatever,” the equidistant selection of which constitutes film’s impression of continuity (Cinema 1 1–11). Cinema “does not give us a figure described in a unique moment,” he writes, but rather “the description of a figure which is always in the process

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of being formed or dissolving” (Cinema 1 5). This is not to suggest that cinema does not seek iconic poses. Night’s and Shelter’s freeze-frames do just that. It is to posit, however, that photograms, whether “regular or singular, ordinary or remarkable,” are fundamentally exchangeable slices that inhere in movement and change (Deleuze, Cinema 1 5). To claim freeze-frames as poses is, from this point of view, to exempt them impossibly from the snapshot’s continuous coming and going. Bellour acknowledges this, though he nonetheless argues that films with photographs or freeze-frames divide their time between the two modes. He does so, he specifies, to get at the spectatorial experiences these arrests produce, including visions of time characterized by anteriority and reversibility—or, as I have put it, their availability to resurrection. Though I agree that freeze-frames serve to restore moments past and passed, I think it instructive to recall that they also reanimate the virtual instants that remain immanent to such exceptions. Films such as Shelter and Night do not “alternate” between poses and snapshots, as Bellour suggests, but rather commingle privileged moments with any-instantswhatever (“Film Stilled” 107). Freeze-frames rely on cinema to “fix” photography’s meaning, but their equivalence to all other photograms also sets significance back into motion. This structure has consequences for the era’s returns to particular photojournalistic images, which, I contend, index history’s indeterminacy even as they render it iconographic. On one hand, these repetitions manifest a ritualized, recursive temporality that provokes and satisfies desires for lost material. They are, in this sense, memorializing gestures, much like the wreath that Barbara (Judith O’Dea) and Johnny (Russell Streiner) leave on their father’s grave at the beginning of Night. On the other hand, such photographs pluck but one instant from its innumerable equivalents, elevating it above others and retroactively according it meaning. Johnny corroborates this view when he cynically suggests that he and his sister most likely repurchase the same wreath year after year. Challenging its assertion, “We Still Remember,” he speaks of time as an irretrievable duration on which one cannot get a handle. The freeze-frame, for its part, embodies meetings of fixity and change, as it does encounters between photography and cinema. In fact, to conceive the period’s fascination with recurrent pictures of violence, one might look to the device’s own constitution in images repeated on celluloid. From the vantage of photography and privileged instants, such iterations are characterized by identity. To produce the appearance of stasis, each photogram must be indistinguishable from those that precede and succeed it. Approaching the filmstrip as any-instants-whatever, however, one discovers that equivalence need not conjure identity. Though cor-

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respondent in content, each photogram remains its own imperceptible entity. The camera movements that traverse Night’s concluding photographs render this coincidence particularly legible. Each freeze-frame reduplicates a single image while the camera’s movement and zooms lend the photograms incremental differences. As a result, the freeze-frame unites two visions of repetition—one that manifests sameness and one that registers difference. In the former, freeze-frames resurrect events spectators have missed, offering them visible icons about which they may gather. These returns certainly extend opportunities for remembering, perhaps even redeeming, past brutalities, but they also delimit the significance of such violence to eminently apprehensible moments. In this sense, they partake of the mastery I have attributed to rituals of authentication that promise recovery by violently cleaving inside from outside and self from other. To recognize the latter vision, however, wherein difference inheres in repetition, is to reanimate the indeterminacy at the heart of this period’s ecstatic states of exception. The result discloses, I suggest, all the inapprehensible and unfixed instants that remain immanent to reified poses, turning stagnant repetition compulsions toward fresh traversals of new relationships to otherness and to history. Finally, freeze-frames permit one to resituate the apocalypticism to which they give shape. Rendering the devastation of events such as Altamont, they recover “proof” of the “End of the Sixties.” Yet because freeze-frames also uncover the incommensurable logic on which authenticity depends, they figure unknown futures in addition to perceptible presents and pasts. Occult technologies upend everyday perception and experience, but this violence brings unrealized beginnings out from cover as much as actualized ends. Perhaps this is one way to understand why freeze-frames so frequently come at the conclusions of films, where they leave spectators with the possibilities of ecstasy’s popularization in addition to its cataclysmic limits.

4 Extraction and Exchange The Zoom and Environmental Intension

All saving power must be of a higher essence than what is endangered, though at the same time kindred to it. —Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” The zoom reflects a way of seeing the world not as it appears to the human eye but, perhaps, as it really is. —John Belton and Lyle Tector, “The Bionic Eye”

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HE CONCLUSION TO ROBERT ALTMAN’S McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) gathers three lines of action. In the first, tinhorn-gambler-cum-entrepreneur John McCabe (Warren Beatty) variously evades and pursues three mercenaries hired by Harrison Shaughnessy Mining Company to kill him. In the second, citizens of Presbyterian Church, Washington—where McCabe owns both House of Fortune and house of prostitution—extinguish a fire in the town’s unfinished and unattended house of worship. In the third, McCabe’s business partner and madam Constance Miller (Julie Christie) languishes in a Chinesequarter opium den.

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Figures 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3. The conclusion to McCabe and Mrs. Miller gathers and separates three lines of action (1971).

While separate, the trio share details that, by turns, draw them together. Though connected, these same details variously drive the three apart. Take the fire’s assembly of miners, tradesmen, and whores. A

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motley collective, it links McCabe to Mrs. Miller through their respective alienations from the group. At the same time, McCabe’s efforts to escape violent destruction link him to the townspeople. Their relative success puts his demise into relief, but the same soft snow nonetheless accumulates on each. Similarly, the flames that engulf Presbyterian Church’s eponymous structure threaten all the town’s timber, including that of the Chinese, whose warm, smoky interiors conjure the burning façade that ties Mrs. Miller to the crowd she rejects. The zoom, I submit, figures these meetings and departures, since it, too, renders proximity amid distance. Unlike tracking shots, which travel through physical environments, zooms “move” optically. They use lenses with variable focal lengths to magnify or demagnify extant space. An infrequent tool in classical Hollywood cinema, the device’s use grows more emphatic during the late 1960s and early 1970s when Altman emerges as one of its foremost practitioners. In films such as M*A*S*H (1970), McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and The Long Goodbye (1973), zooms repeatedly isolate, penetrate, and distill visual details. When reversed, they situate those details within larger milieus. In fact, the zoom’s capacity for emphasis and contextualization recommended its adoption as a “reportorial device,” according to Paul Joannides’s 1970 treatment of the technology in Sight and Sound magazine (40). Most familiar to filmgoers for its use in television journalism and broadcast sports, the zoom offered remote access to people and places in the midst of ongoing, nonfictional events. As a result, it proved attractive to practitioners of Direct Cinema, for whom the technology contributed to the unimplicated immediacy, the authenticity, that movement embraced. Still, as the zoom migrated to Hollywood, it met with controversy. Besides the unskilled pragmatism with which critics linked journalistic and documentary uses of the device, its distortive effects concerned those for whom cinematic realism remained an ideal. For the classicist, “zoom is a four-letter word,” note John Belton and Lyle Tector in a 1980 article for Film Comment (11). It may save filmmakers time by circumventing laborious camera set-ups and lens changes, but the zoom also flattens and abstracts the realities it represents. “The effect,” writes Joannides, “is . . . one . . . of space warping toward or away from the camera. It annihilates the third dimension . . . [and] ‘planarizes’ the natural world” (41, 42). In this sense, the zoom underscores and undermines its reportorial function. Drawing spectators nearer the world’s multitudinous particulars, it suppresses and coalesces those details from afar. The device’s obtrusiveness only compounds this contradiction, according to commentators, for whom the device paradoxically fixes and unfixes meaning. “The zoom,” writes Robert Kolker, “. . . coax[es],

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lead[s] but never totally or comfortably situat[es] the viewer” (344). It establishes and erodes narrative urgency at the same time. For historical critics, this mix of demonstrative and nondemonstrative gestures variously inspires condemnation or praise. Some, like Vincent Canby, condemn the zoom’s conspicuousness by linking it to the technology’s tendency to homogenize heterogeneous worlds. Altman’s use of the zoom in McCabe and Mrs. Miller leads to “tired symbolism,” he writes, “. . . [and] the sort of metaphysically purposeful photography that, in a tight close-up, attempts to discover the soul’s secrets in the iris of an eye” (“The Screen”). For others, zooms prove valuable precisely for their failures to generate determinate significance. Privileging the zoom’s distillative powers, these thinkers champion the unruly immediacy of the concrete particulars it reveals. In Altman’s films, the device frequently “reveals nothing,” writes Michael Tarantino in 1975. “When one keeps using the same tool to lend emphasis to every event, one winds up stripping the importance from everything” (98, 99). Here, zooms undercut the metaphysical pretenses, the homogenizing abstractions, with which Canby and others associate them. Isolating and situating details, they manage to “do away with ‘meaningful’ arrangements,” generating, as Joannides notes, “unclearness rather than clearness” (42). Taken together, these incongruous responses reiterate the zoom’s fundamental irreducibility, which mingles immanence and abstraction, detail and milieu, in addition to proximity and distance. It matters, for this reason, that Altman turns to the device at moments defined by liminal extremes. Throughout McCabe’s brutal climax, zooms render limits between individuals and their environments that gather and separate life on the frontier. One thinks, for instance, of two zooms that tie McCabe to Butler (Hugh Millais), the mercenary who ultimately kills him. The first pushes in to McCabe to reveal his wounded body tumbling through a morass of brush and snow. The second marks his retaliation, as snap zoom and bullet together land on Butler’s skull. Distinguished by subject, speed, and distance, these shots establish reversible relationships between the antagonists, drawing them together and setting them apart. They also express the extent to which zooms figure fantasies of violent encounter, including, I argue, the exacting brutality and unexpected promise of the frontier and the relationships to technology and the environment it mediates. My use of frontier is, in this context, appropriately expansive, referring to the historical West of Manifest Destiny as well as John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” and the logic of unrestricted expansion that motivates each. In the nineteenth century, the frontier marked the boundary between two worlds, dividing East from West, culture from nature, and

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Figure 4.4. A zoom to McCabe’s body tumbling through brush and snow (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971).

civilization from savagery. It was, in this sense, a site of brutal encounter. Europeans struggled to master a purportedly unoccupied wilderness and the Native Americans who contradictorily inhabited it. Temporarily regressing to “primitive” states, pioneers believed they had escaped the physical and moral corruption of urban modernity even as they extended industrial rationalism to seize the seemingly unspoiled abundance of the rural frontier. The result, which dismissed brutality among settlers and savages, likewise ignored necessary exchanges between them. In the end, the frontier made of people and places “standing reserves,” Martin Heidegger’s term for an instrumentalized world that is orderable, substitutable, and “ready at hand.”

Figure 4.5. A snap zoom to the bullet McCabe fires into Butler’s skull (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971).

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Declared “closed” in 1890, the frontier was reopened in 1960 when Kennedy invoked its ideals at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.1 Though spatially and temporally unmoored from Manifest Destiny, the “New Frontier” proved no less Western in the boundaries it forged. Separating democracy from communism, surplus from scarcity, earth from space, it sought to extend postwar capitalism to people and places that had otherwise escaped so-called development. Technology figured prominently in this expansion, providing the means by which antipoverty measures, counterinsurgency missions, and even Apollo space flights “set upon” the world, “enframing” it—to borrow another phrase from Heidegger—as that which can be isolated, penetrated, and distilled. The zoom’s rise in American cinema is conspicuous in light of this history. Appearing as images of Saigon and Detroit, Agent Orange and oil spills, revealed the New Frontier’s violence to lived environments, the zoom at once corroborated and challenged its logic. On one hand, both device and frontier isolate, penetrate, and distill people and places. They exploit concrete particulars by planarizing, piling up, or enframing otherwise heterogeneous worlds. On the other hand, zooms heighten encounters the frontier ignores, intensifying the limits that proximity and distance, immanence and abstraction, detail and milieu, share. As such, zooms do more than organize the world as “standing reserve.” They also disclose what Heidegger might call the “saving power” of the frontier. To bear this out, I explore how zooms mediate both capitalist extension and what I call environmental intension. By extension, I refer to the ways in which frontier economies expand. Stretching out from presumably unimplicated positions, they extract resources from their environments while refusing encounters this seizure implies. The result, which separates enframer from enframed, inspires fantasies of possession and escape in those through whom capitalism magnifies its reach. With intension, meanwhile, I refuse this separation and emphasize the exchange upon which extraction depends. On this view, capitalism stretches into the world, gathering its agents and exploits into reciprocal relations that reveal alternatives to the violence by which the frontier’s limits are made. Set among Washington zinc mines in 1901, McCabe and Mrs. Miller may appear an extraordinary linkage of zoom and frontier, but the film merely reinforces relationships to the world that the technology expresses in its own right. Conceived as figures, zooms lend shape to fantasies of mastery and vulnerability that characterize western expansion, even as they open these fantasies to less brutal encounters with the environment for inheritors of the frontier. In this sense, zooms prove suggestive for other films from the post-Code era, including Altman’s M*A*S*H and

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Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971), which not only deploy the device but also invoke the frontier by way of Vietnam and vigilantism, respectively. In fact, as I argue, zooms seize and situate the world’s details for the spectator’s scrutiny while harboring exchanges that possession and escape necessarily deny. Thus even beyond narrative invocations of frontierism, the technology organizes and disorganizes capitalist extension and the environmental intension that initiates and outlasts it. Unveiling formerly concealed contents, zooms partake of the violence that accompanies economic extraction by corroborating the authenticity to which “seeing more” gives rise. At the same time—and however unwittingly—they reveal as yet unrepresentable forms of encounter that challenge the relationships between human and world upon which capitalism historically relies. For this reason, I conclude my investigation with the zoom’s consequences for a rather unexpected arena: Earth Day 1970 and the modern environmental movement. As I demonstrate, environmentalism, too, corroborates and challenges frontier economies with fantasies of possession, escape, and exchange that mediate old and new ecologies—literally, logics of dwelling—for living and nonliving entities alike.

Capitalist Extension “[L]ook with yet clearer eyes into the danger.” —Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”

I begin, then, with the zoom’s extensive gestures and the capitalist expansion to which they give shape. One must trace the promises and abuses of stretching out, I wager, before discovering the reciprocity that stretching into supplies. Among these promises and abuses are the assurances of unimplicated seizure that frontier economies extend to men like McCabe. “Partners is what I come up here to get away from,” he tells saloon-owner Sheehan (René Auberjonois) near the start of the film—a sentiment McCabe maintains, even as he joins Mrs. Miller to open the town brothel. From house of prostitution to House of Fortune, McCabe denies his indebtedness to Mrs. Miller, the prostitutes, their clients, and the mining company that employs them. He pursues capitalism’s rewards by believing that his position as “house” places him outside the game’s consequences. Indeed, from his first moments in Presbyterian Church, McCabe evinces desires for possession and escape that capitalist extension requires. Having crossed the footbridge to Sheehan’s saloon, he locates the establishment’s back door before preparing his gambling table for business. This

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exit in mind, he assembles the town’s miners with promises of material gain and a two-dollar bottle of whiskey. Still, his efforts firmly separate McCabe from the men he hopes to exploit. The only man with cards, booze, and, presumably, resources to back the endeavor, McCabe sports a cigar, suit and tie, bowler hat, and flask, while the others, in worn work clothes and flat caps, visibly and audibly gawk at his purportedly “big rep.” Though never substantiated by the film, this “rep” complements the roles of gambler and entrepreneur to which McCabe aspires. After all, each profession, in its own way, pries fantasies of limitlessness from historical and economic constraints. Gambling proceeds by flights from the past that lay hold of financially unlimited futures. “[The] process of continually starting all over again is the regulative idea of gambling,” writes Walter Benjamin (“Some Motifs in Baudelaire” 331). It is the same for wage labor; “each operation at the machine is just as screened off from the preceding operation as a coup in a game of chance is from the one that preceded it” (“Some Motifs in Baudelaire” 330). A reason for the miners to gamble, labor’s loss of experience seems not to concern McCabe. For him, poker is less a threat to collective engagement than an opportunity for private advantage. Taking coup at its word, McCabe strikes out from the past to overtake the present and seize future authority. He thus perverts the logic of play, which supplies freedom precisely because participants yield to its disinterested structures. “Play is a voluntary activity,” writes Johan Huizinga, “. . . executed within certain fixed limits . . . , according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, [and] having its aim in itself” (28). Rules restrain and protect players, adds Roger Caillois, though without determining the game’s outcome (44, 3–10). McCabe, for his part, shirks these constraints, forsaking the support they supply for promises of guaranteed victory. He thus treats games of chance like acts of divination, which, according to Caillois, herald play’s corruption by material interests. Rather than pursue freedom within poker’s rules, McCabe uses the game to safeguard his liberty from limits. The protagonist’s efforts at entrepreneurship work similarly, particularly since, like gambling or mining, they, too, suggest speculation in the face of structured risk. McCabe moves seamlessly from poker to proprietorship, asking the bar’s patrons, “Who owns the property around here?” As he issues his query, McCabe cracks a raw egg into his whiskey. Eggs are a recurrent motif in the film, and this one receives inordinate attention. Held in extreme close-up, Altman shoots the egg for nearly eight seconds before McCabe empties its contents into his glass. On the bar, the egg conjures McCabe’s search for self-possessed origins and his repudiation of relationships with others. Suspended in the glass, it

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expresses the fragility of his independence, which issues from the very structures in which he denies implication. The many idioms associated with eggs only overdetermine the motif’s significance. In his pursuit of capitalist authority, McCabe may be willing to break a few eggs, but he also counts his chickens before they hatch, opening a “henhouse” in a company town whose owners come home to roost. Even so, McCabe continues to cleave mastery from vulnerability, as does Mrs. Miller. One either authorizes the game, they seem to believe, or one finds oneself subject to its conditions. As such, when Mrs. Miller first meets McCabe, she compels him to join her in business. Her success, according to most commentators, points to her entrepreneurial acumen and communal indebtedness, particularly compared to McCabe. “McCabe is a tinhorn,” writes critic Michael Goodwin, “whose strength lies in his ability to bluff. Mrs. Miller is a professional, whose strength lies in her ability to deliver” (19). Demanding a “proper sporting house with class girls, clean linen, and proper hygiene,” Mrs. Miller imagines a civilized Presbyterian Church that fosters “a community of sisters, . . . a shelter, . . . a place of nurturing,” according to scholar Robert Self (124). Yet Self also notes her arrival by steam engine, which, he claims, exhibits the “invasion of lush, nurturing nature by the unnatural, mechanical, and monstrous machine” (14–15). From this point of view, Mrs. Miller’s ease on the frontier owes to her familiarity with industrial capital as much as women and nature. For the most part, in fact, oppositions between man and woman or human and nature do not hold in the ways most critics and scholars argue. Instead, one is struck by similarities between McCabe’s and Mrs. Miller’s individualist ambitions. When Mrs. Miller speaks of gentrifying Presbyterian Church for the sake of prostitutes and miners, she emphasizes how the changes will generate “at least double the money,” not how they will cultivate community. The endeavor is temporary, moreover, since Mrs. Miller dreams of escaping to San Francisco to establish a sole proprietorship. Such goals complicate Mrs. Miller’s purported engagement with the town, not to mention the kind of shelter her brothel offers and to whom. As much as McCabe’s, her aspirations evoke distinctions between inside and outside, individual and collectivity, as her frequent retreats to her room or the town’s Chinese quarter only reiterate for spectators. Mrs. Miller also disregards her role in economic extraction, though more self-consciously than McCabe. This is evident from their first meeting when she implicates then exculpates herself in and from the structures she extends. “I’m a whore,” she tells McCabe to his visible discomfort, “and I know an awful lot about whorehouses.” Intended to trump McCabe’s performance of professional prowess—and this is how

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most commentators read it—the revelation also points to Mrs. Miller’s knowledge of her position as madam of the “house” and the prostitute who inhabits it. The announcement troubles McCabe, who cannot conceive his place as both dealer and poker player. He seems particularly distraught, moreover, when Mrs. Miller requires him to pay for their sexual rendezvous. Thus, on one hand, Mrs. Miller finds liberty within limits that McCabe cannot imagine. His payments for sex, writes Helene Keyssar, help “free the image of the woman from [its] usual servility” in the Hollywood western (190). On the other hand, however, Mrs. Miller disregards her indebtedness to her environment, pursuing possession alongside escape, not unlike her collaborator and client. For a film about the American West, these contradictions prove relevant, since the violence of the frontier owes to the boundaries it marked between opportunity and constraint as much as culture and nature. Pitting civilization against savagery, historical settlers fled existing structures and seized new possibilities by retreating to, then rising above, the wilderness and its purported depravity. In this way, writes environmental historian Donald Worster, the frontier offered a “redeeming spirit” (4). Encounters with nature and indigenous people restored the individualism that fueled one’s conquest of them. Possession sprang, in this regard, from reserves of self-interest. Settlers escaped “rules and hierarchies” only to erect the same, notes Richard Slotkin, “according to the occasion and after [their own] preferences” (Fatal Environment 41). From this perspective, the frontier resembles authenticity as I have defined it in previous chapters. Each mingles inside with outside and self with other, only to divide these pairs in efforts to extract mastery from vulnerability. Similarities between frontier and authenticity also help explain the former’s dramatic reprisal in the culture of the 1960s and 1970s (Slotkin, Regeneration and Gunfighter Nation). In this era, desires to thwart modern rationalism fueled fantasies of possession and escape. As historian William Graebner notes, McCabe and Mrs. Miller emerged during a period suspicious of what Erving Goffman called “total institutions” in 1961. Such institutions lacked “spaces where an individual could take refuge in an effort to withstand . . . assault[s] on the self, on the individual qualities that make people unique and sustain them in places . . . that otherwise restrict their roles and behaviors” (61). By the time of McCabe, Goffman’s critique had become commonplace, motivating diverse calls for individual freedoms. Both the New Left and counterculture, for instance, embraced authenticity as an antidote to modern alienation. Encounters with the occult or rock music promised interior experiences of “otherness” that seized something more fundamental, more “real,” than the external worlds they purportedly evaded. Accompanying these pursuits

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were explicit appeals to the frontier: first, in the folk music revival of the early 1960s and, later, in period fashions such as buckskins and fringe as well as cowboy boots and denim. Beyond these circles, self-possession yoked authenticity to frontierism for the right as much as the left. As David Harvey suggests, the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley and Paris in 1968 shared unexpected convictions with neoliberalism’s early proponents. Though the left challenged a class system the right hoped to maintain, both groups championed individual freedom in the face of corporate and federal constraints. For this reason, Harvey urges, neoliberalism linked noninterventionist economics to a “practical strategy” of “liberty . . . with respect to lifestyles, modes of expression, and a wide range of cultural practices” (42). The result permitted conservatives to dismantle the welfare state without alienating liberals who otherwise demanded social justice. Turning self-discovery toward self-reliance, the free market reopened the frontier in its own image, advocating a deregulated horizon for reclaiming privatization. And yet, neither right nor left seemed to avow the brutalities that authenticity and frontier implied. Indeed, for some—including the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence—the frontier justified the era’s pursuits. Writes historian Joe B. Frantz in a 1969 report to the commission: The frontier, by the very act of its being there for the taking and taming, gave us an optimistic belief in progress which again has marked the nation for greatness. The frontier fostered individualism as in no other region of the world. It gave us mobility; a man could move up and down the social, economic, and political scale without regard to what he had been before. (141, emphasis added) Though wary of the frontier’s abuses, Frantz aims to divide its virtues from its violence. “If the good could somehow be retained,” he muses, “. . . those qualities which have outlived their usefulness could be eschewed, . . . [and] the human material which constitutes this nation could develop in the direction of an improved society” (141–42).2 Progress, individualism, and mobility—these are the qualities Frantz seeks to retain over and against exploitation. Still, with references to “human material” and “taking and taming,” he evinces the logic of standing reserve that underwrites the frontier he privileges. In many ways, Altman’s zooms reinforce the divisive promises of capitalist extension. Throughout the film’s conclusion, they separate mastery and opportunity from vulnerability and constraint. As McCabe

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moves from church to gambling hall to bathhouse to mine, zooms express urgent advantages, pressing in to spaces from which he can track his enemies, acquire weapons, or retreat to relative safety. When he first spies the town church, for instance, a snap zoom to its steeple indicates McCabe’s discovery of both watchtower and refuge. Later, a similar leap to the mouth of a mine discloses possible protection. In each case, zooms constrain visual fields to extract resources and apparently unassailable positions. They underscore McCabe’s (and Mrs. Miller’s and Harrison Shaughnessy’s) faith in the seizures supplied by exclusions. Later, when zooms depict brutal acts, they magnify this faith’s violence. Take the zoom that follows McCabe’s bullet to Butler’s skull: In giving shape to his conquest, the “shot” isolates and penetrates McCabe’s opponent, extracting authority from the encounter. Though common to all zooms, snap zooms, in particular, exhibit this self-possessed brutality. Hurtling from far to near, they obliterate the world at frame’s edge, distilling figure from ground while flattening and homogenizing the

Figures 4.6 and 4.7. Zooms inward mark urgent advantages for McCabe, including a steeple-cum-watchtower and mineshaft retreat (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971).

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two. In this sense, they, like all zooms inward, put people and places “on call.” They stockpile visual details like coal or zinc and set fantasies of possession and escape into motion. When, for instance, Butler kills the town’s minister, a snap zoom underscores his authority by traveling against the bullet’s path to arrive at mercenary rather than victim. Indeed, the reversibility of the zoom generally heightens the oppositions it serves, since the device, as John Belton and Lyle Tector observe, “can only ‘move’ in and out” (12). Antagonistic reversals attend the film’s characters, too, who cleave mastery from vulnerability to their own detriments. If McCabe and Mrs. Miller do not set upon the world, then the environment, it seems, turns against them. The film’s “trajectory,” writes Graebner, “moves from openness and possibility to the tragic confinements (death and the opium den) that mark [its] end” (67–68). This may be why each push in during the film’s conclusion meets its match in a pull out. Most noticeable as McCabe runs from gambling to bathhouse, these zooms outward point to his tenuous grasp on makeshift shelters such as doorjambs and boardwalks. Time and again, in fact, Altman uses the device to set fortune against loss. After leaping to the church, for instance, the film quickly retreats from this space, revealing the unprotected expanse McCabe must traverse in order to seize its advantage. This shot recalls others, including two zooms that follow McCabe’s refusal to partner with Sheehan. “Sometimes, you can’t have things your own way,” the barkeep urges, as the film cuts to a whore desperately stabbing her client. Though McCabe intervenes, zooms that pull back from the violence suggest his haplessness in the face of others. Only later does McCabe admit to frailty, telling a

Figure 4.8. When Butler shoots the town’s minister, a snap zoom travels against the bullet’s path to arrive at killer rather than victim (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971).

Figure 4.9. Zooms outward point to McCabe’s tenuous grasp on makeshift shelters and boardwalks (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971).

Figure 4.10. Immediately after its leap to the church, a zoom retreats from this space, revealing the unprotected expanse McCabe must traverse (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971).

Figure 4.11. Zooms pull back from violence to suggest McCabe’s haplessness in the face of his environment (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971).

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trust-busting lawyer who offers him entrepreneurial liberty, “I just don’t want to get killed.” In this sense, of course, McCabe succumbs to Harrison Shaughnessy well before he dies in the snow. So, too, Mrs. Miller, whose hopes for proprietorship in San Francisco are but the opium addict’s “pipe dreams,” according film critic Jackson Burgess (51). By 1901, moreover, the historical frontier has long since closed, marking formerly boundless possibilities with anxiety and resignation. The frontier was, Slotkin notes, a “fatal environment,” a phrase he draws from Walt Whitman’s poem “A Death-Sonnet for Custer” (Fatal Environment 11). Fatal, in this case, refers to westward expansion’s manifest destiny, as well as the literal and figural deaths to which it subjected Custer, settlers, and the Native Americans. Both fates, meanwhile, “seem somehow implicit in the environment,” which, writes Slotkin, supplies the means by which the wilderness redeems civilization “in opposition to both . . . the New World savage and the Old World aristocracy” (Fatal Environment 35). With its own dichotomous movement, the zoom, too, implies “a kind of destiny,” demonstrating the extent to which McCabe and Mrs. Miller unwittingly stretch out—that is, extend—the limits by which capitalism assures its limitlessness (Belton and Tector 12). Cutting between slow pushes in to Mrs. Miller, then to McCabe, the film’s conclusion separates the pair both from each other and their divergent environments. She lies indoors, supine in the warm, red glow of opium bowls, while he huddles outside, exposed to howling winds and blowing snow. The result, writes Keyssar, suggests “binary oppositions that are among the central conventions of the western,” including not only “ice and fire” but also “vast exterior space and claustrophobic interiors” (176). Beyond the western’s conventions, zooms figure the economies of extraction from which such separations derive. They do so, moreover, by ignoring one of the frontier’s fundamental contradictions: Rather than reject civilization or savagery, it reduplicates the former in and through the latter. In stretching out, in other words, capitalism isolates and penetrates the West only to distill Eastern values, something commentators unselfconsciously repeat when confronted with Altman’s film. For most critics and scholars, that is, McCabe’s critique of capital lies in its substitution of vulnerability for mastery. “The options are closing,” writes Ralph Brauer in a 1973 review of the film, “and those who believe them to be open or who fight to keep them open are those who suffer the most” (398). The culprit, adds Michael Shapiro, is “a powerful force outside the frame, the force of capital,” which “displaces the efforts of the small entrepreneur” apparently caught inside its web (61, emphasis added). Here, as in most accounts, the danger of capital lies in its violent subsumption of individual

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freedoms. McCabe and Mrs. Miller offers a “requiem for the American spirit of individuality,” according to a reviewer from Newsweek, while scholar Robert Kolker finds that it “denies absolutely the possibility of the individual triumphing” (Zimmerman; Kolker 356). Overlooked, in both cases, is capitalism’s debt to the individualism it purportedly destroys. McCabe’s commentators may challenge economic extraction, but they do so, I argue, by adopting that system’s terms.

Environmental Intension But where danger is, grows / The saving power also. —Martin Heidegger, citing Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Patmos,” in “The Question Concerning Technology”

My own approach refuses the division between mastery and vulnerability I have thus far examined. Instead, it emphasizes the remarkable exchange—the environmental intension—economic extraction requires yet tenaciously disavows. Whether old or new, the frontier fostered reciprocity that capitalist extension ignored. In the nineteenth century, settlers paradoxically “went native” to prove self-possession, while twentiethcentury frontierism meant setting individuals against a system steeped in economic liberalism. The results, which brutally divided exploiter from exploited, also registered the inextricability of self and other, human and world, despite—even through—these contradictions. Zooms, I submit, express similar possibilities and paradoxes. They may cleave proximity from distance or detail from milieu, but in doing so they intensify the extent to which these registers intend toward one another. As with all figures, in other words, zooms unbind the fantasies they foster, deconciling, in this case, divisions between inside and outside, constraint and opportunity, that foreclose relationships to people and places beyond possession and escape. There is, for instance, the snap zoom that first reveals Harrison Shaughnessy’s mercenaries to the spectator. Shuttling from extreme long to full shot, it isolates the once imperceptible men while pressing them into their environment. Along with its palette—dark browns and dull greens—and vertical repetitions, the shot’s flatness heightens correspondences among trees, bridge supports, and humans. What separates foreground from background thus ties the two together. Later, when Butler shoots the minister, then McCabe shoots Butler, zooms emphasize reciprocal abuses as much as mastery or vulnerability. The same holds true for the minister and McCabe, the former holding the latter at gunpoint moments before Butler shoots them both. From this

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Figure 4.12. The zoom’s flatness heightens correspondences among trees, bridge supports, and humans (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971).

point of view, zooms conjure an appalling circuit of violence—minister to McCabe and Butler to minister, Butler to McCabe and McCabe back to Butler—that separates the men yet nonetheless draws them together. Thus, on one hand, zooms offer what I described in the previous section: Seizing and situating details from remote distances, they express violent extremes that pit independence against implication. On the other hand, however, they demonstrate the interdependence of these regimes as linked yet distinct entities. Zooms “need not . . . suggest . . . disengagement,” writes film scholar Adam O’Brien. Rather, they might also express “a desire to be closer to something which has been rendered inaccessible by non-negotiable conditions” (184). Accordingly, the device does not simply oppose or collapse mastery and vulnerability. If zooms mark opportunities for McCabe, then they constrain his actions at the same time. They do not merely put people and places “on call” or turn advantages to losses. Instead, zooms are reversible, promising immanent exchange in addition to abstract substitution. They flatten, “pile up,” and enframe the world but only by tying distance to proximity, milieu to detail, and thus abstraction to concrete and heterogeneous particulars. In this way, zooms redefine the abstraction for which they are historically maligned. To the extent that they join disparate scales, they enact the nontotalizing wholeness that Mary Ann Doane attributes the close-up. Like zooms, close-ups invite oppositions between near and far at the same time that they “annihilat[e] . . . depth and its corresponding rules of perspectival realism” (“Close-Up” 91). More important, they, too, perform “inextricability,” according to Doane, mingling acquisition with unattainability. Conceived as a detail of some larger scene, the

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close-up “is allied with . . . possessiveness, the desire to ‘get hold of an object’ ” (“Close-Up” 92). Yet understood as an entity unto itself, the same close-up evinces transcendence; “the image is truly ‘larger than life’ ” (“Close-Up” 93). As such, close-ups, like zooms, inspire abstraction, though only in and through material reality. They are sensuous presences, entrees to signification, and “semiotic threat[s]” all at once (“Close-Up” 91). This is why, perhaps, Murray Pomerance links zooms to vertigo in Alfred Hitchcock’s film of the same name (1958). With zooms, writes Pomerance, one’s “distance from”—and, I would add, proximity to—“the subject matter of the shot . . . is not what [one] think[s] it is.” Instead, “[t]he vertiginous pleasure of the shot lies in a discovery—. . . I am not where I thought I was” (219). Like all figures, zooms settle and unsettle signification, determinately claiming the world while forging immanently less determinate relationships to it. For this reason, I argue, zooms generate unexpected ethical imperatives. Dismantling the homogeneous totalities to which it contributes, the device renders abstraction concrete and concreteness abstract and thereby connects heterogeneous particulars. Zooms, writes Robert Kolker, are “a means to discover detail and . . . a way to connect disparate parts” (343). Transposed to the language of standing reserves, they trouble divisions between inside and outside, individual and collective, that capitalist extension variously abandons or upholds. When, for instance, the aforementioned zoom presses the mercenaries into their environment, it undercuts their independence from Presbyterian Church, as well as Harrison Shaughnessy, on whose behalf, they repeatedly remind McCabe, they cannot authorize deals. When it comes to McCabe himself, zooms express his tenuous authority and the recognition of otherness it harbors. In one of the most powerful uses of the device, McCabe faces a prostitute who expresses the following: “I have to go to the pot, and I don’t think I can hold it.” With this utterance, the camera pushes in to her beseeching face then snaps to McCabe, who hesitates and looks away. His inscrutable reaction—like the technology that renders it—erodes boundaries between self and other, mastery and vulnerability, upon which the whore’s supplication and McCabe’s command depend. The result, which complicates McCabe’s relationship to the system by which he profits and suffers, evokes alternatives to the violence of economic extraction. McCabe’s gambling, for instance, conjures Walter Benjamin’s concerns about the deadening effects of industrial modernity as well as the theorist’s hopes for the innervating aesthetics of play. According to Miriam Bratu Hansen, Benjamin’s interest in gambling belonged to a series of efforts to rethink apperception for a “technologically changed and changing environment,” including “cinematic techniques

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such as camera movement and close-ups [that] explor[e] the common ‘milieu[s]’ of ordinary life” (186, 192). In fact, gambling, like cinema, requires a “ ‘bodily presence of mind,’ ” an “ ‘inter-play between nature and humanity,’ ” that, according to Benjamin, potentially bends capitalism’s destiny toward reciprocal exchange in addition to possession and escape (Hansen 186, 191). Rather than turn poker’s rules toward private advantage, McCabe could acknowledge the collective engagement, the mutual support, those limitations supply. This acknowledgment would transform his liberty from the milieus that he (or Mrs. Miller or Harrison Shaughnessy) encounters into freedom within, as well as responsibility to, the environments he puts on call. It matters, in this regard, that the “house” in McCabe’s House of Fortune or house of prostitution refers not only to proprietorship and protection but also to dwelling places and the people who gather within them. Zooms gather similarly and, consequently, disclose as yet unrepresentable horizons for play. One remembers, for instance, the lines of action with which I began this chapter—lines that, while separate, nevertheless intersect. So put, one may read the film’s conclusion as fulfilling McCabe’s and Mrs. Miller’s “isolation and self-absorption,” or one may recognize the couple’s mutual implication in the structures they extend (Kolker 327). Similarly, if in fighting the fire in Presbyterian Church its citizens defend an institution that—like the company town—potentially exploits them, then they also join as a collective for the first time in the film. “ ‘Presence’ emerges as copresence” throughout Altman’s work, writes Michael Shapiro. It “bring[s] to presence—conceptually, cinematically—. . . parallel streams of life” (53). Accordingly, when Altman zooms in and out throughout the foregoing sequence, he ties proximity to distance in ways I have described, and he carries this inextricability to zooms that cleave McCabe from Mrs. Miller and their pairing from the group. In this sense, the “sheer volume” of zooms in Altman’s work “creates a mood of unease,” but they also generate “expectation,” according to Michael Tarantino (101). They fix and unfix meaning to reveal new relationships between the people and places they isolate, penetrate, and distill. As a result, zooms do not simply unveil previously disguised content—whether mercenaries, churches, or mines—they also unconceal forms of relation that the frontier and its enframing technologies otherwise hide. This is, at last, what Martin Heidegger means when he suggests, “The coming to presence of technology harbors in itself what we least suspect, the possible arising of the saving power” (32). It matters, therefore, “that we ponder this arising and that, recollecting, we watch over it. How can this happen? Above all, through our catching sight of what comes to presence in technology, instead of merely staring

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at the technological” (32). In the case of the zoom, this “catching sight” partakes of what Béla Balázs suggests for the close-up: “We can see that there is something there that we cannot see” (76). Yet because they move through time and space, flattening the worlds they encounter, zooms resist the static metaphysics, the “irrecoverable depth,” with which, according to Doane, theorists such as Balázs or Jean Epstein persistently link the close-up (“Close-Up” 97). To be sure, the zoom is “the intensification of a locus of signification,” but as figure, it destructures, or disarticulates, the coherency it presumes (Doane, “Close-Up” 96, emphasis added). Zooms cast depth back to the surface, where meaning at once accumulates and dissolves in return. To hear Altman speak of McCabe and Mrs. Miller’s final use of the device is to appreciate its affinities with art and experimental cinema, including the grainy magnifications of Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966) or Wavelength’s (Michael Snow, 1967) reflexive zoom: Instead of the traditional thing, ending a film that you pull back from the action to say, “See, it’s just a minor thing in this enormous universe,” we went the other way. We went in and in and in until that image . . . almost looked like another universe so that we were trying to implode rather than explode. My feeling was that . . . we were going in and in and in, and that when you got in far enough, . . . there was no outside or inside. . . . It went in every direction. (Altman interview with Parrill, emphasis added) In the shot that Altman describes, the camera slowly pushes in to Mrs. Miller’s eye, picking up a prismatic reflection of the set’s profilmic lighting equipment. As this light flares, the film cuts to an extreme close-up of what Mrs. Miller regards: a marbled-glass opium bowl, which revolves like some microscopic planet in her unseen hand. Hardly the “metaphysically purposeful photography” with which Vincent Canby links it, this shot mediates a virtual whole in spite of its vectorial “destiny” and precisely through the actualized world. To the extent, moreover, that it follows a push in to the dying McCabe obscured by flurries of snow, the zoom disintegrates the elemental regimes that separate madam and entrepreneur in addition to culture and nature. On this view, what John Belton and Lyle Tector call the zoom’s “inappropriate intensifications” do, in fact, do “something peculiar to the environment” (12, emphasis added). They create, as Pauline Kael writes in her review of the film, “an atmosphere of living interrelationships” (“Pipe Dream” 40).

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This atmosphere, meanwhile, does not disclose the “saving power” of Manifest Destiny alone; it also unconceals the environmental intension of the New Frontier and its fantasies of authenticity. Joining conservatives to counterculturists, as I have suggested, these fantasies pit individuals against institutions, hinging both self-discovery and self-reliance on possession fueled by escape. Influencing the terms by which scholars and critics read Altman’s critique of capital, these authentic freedoms likewise characterize discussions of his technique. Robert Self notes, for instance, “the apparent spontaneity and improvisatory quality” of Altman’s approach, which, he adds, “personify the carefree and rebellious mood of the time” (107). For Michael Dempsey at Film Comment, oppositions between spontaneity and structure also mark the film’s sound design and its company of actors: “Preconceived concepts, grand designs, tight scripts, and rigid shooting schedules go by the boards as much as possible. . . . Improvisation, casual comedy, and overlapping dialogue express the free-and-easy give-and-take of a lively, thriving community” (12). Community, in this context, would seem to complicate the liberties celebrated by other commentators. So, too, Altman’s famously muddled dialogue, which according to Dempsey, “creates a sense of swarming life” (13). Still, community does not, in this case, trump self-possession so much as invert its logic. Scholars oscillate between McCabe’s excoriation of lost individualism and its “elegy to the loss of community” (Kolker 351). As such, they distinguish independence from collectivity for authenticity and frontierism yet overlook the violence of these fantasies as well as the zoom’s power to bind and unbind them.3 Indeed, the zoom’s capacity for reciprocity in addition to division characterizes its function in films that, unlike McCabe, depart from overt frontierism. One thinks, for instance, of Altman’s own oeuvre and works such as M*A*S*H and The Long Goodbye. Though war film and neo-noir, respectively, they cue westward expansion with settings in Korea qua Vietnam and Los Angeles as well as through collective (the military “unit”) and individual (the “private” investigator) protagonists. Both films zoom incessantly, moreover, and do so across violent as well as nonviolent sequences. For this reason, they, as much as McCabe, reveal forms of relation in excess of content that extract people and places from their environments while introducing exchanges among them. Consider M*A*S*H’s scenes in operating rooms, which typically begin with zooms out to situate doctors and patients, bodies and instruments, within broader milieus. Soon after, zooms press in to physicians and nurses, the details of their faces obscured by surgical masks. Finally, the film drifts or cuts to headless bodily cavities into and from which doctors push and pull various tools. Generating ambiguity as much as clarity, these scenes recall

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Benjamin’s well-known analogy, wherein cinematographers, like surgeons, “penetrate” bodies and do so through “the most intensive interpenetration of reality with equipment” (“Work of Art” 116, emphasis added). Surgeons thus “abstain[] . . . from confronting [their] patient[s] person to person” and let technology mediate and thereby shape potentially transformative relationships between operator and “operated” (Benjamin, “Work of Art” 115–16). In M*A*S*H, this mediation is overtly dramatized, not only with literal depictions of surgeries, but through the zoom’s distortions as well. With images of doctors huddled around patients, Altman crowds compositions and presses foregrounds to backgrounds. He then redoubles

Figure 4.13. M*A*S*H’s operating-room scenes typically begin with zooms out to situate doctors and patients, bodies and instruments, within broader milieus (1970).

Figure 4.14. Zooms then press in to hospital staff, their faces obscured (M*A*S*H, 1970).

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Figure 4.15. Finally, the film drifts or cuts to bodily cavities into and from which doctors push and pull various tools (M*A*S*H, 1970).

the effect by combining telephoto lenses with anamorphic widescreen. Common to most of his work, this couplet suggests wide, open spaces at the same time that it constricts and compresses their depths. Thus even when the film is not actively zooming, it forges meetings between figure and ground that evince extension and intension at once. Sheets, gowns, and doctors in masks—these, too, draw physicians to patients, bodies to instruments, and people to things. They make modernist canvases of the frames: flat, white, and splashed with red. As such, zooms emphasize blood and shock, but they also forsake these gestures. Leaping from place to place or listlessly scanning the image, they enact a nondemonstrative, even disinterested, relationship to what might otherwise take center stage. In this sense, writes Kolker, zooms attend to peripheries that “tend to background everything.” Viewers are “locked into an observation,” but one “that refuses to open up or give way . . . to [their] investigation[s]” (338). The device puts people and places on call, that is, but troubles its stockpiles, its fantasies, with the material from which they derive. One remembers, in this regard, André Bazin’s “image facts,” which pull spectators in and through the world before pushing them back out to significance. “Facts take on meaning,” he writes, “but not like a tool whose function has a predetermined form.” Rather, “a fragment of reality [is] in itself . . . full of ambiguity; [its] meaning emerges only after the fact” (“Aesthetic of Reality” 36, 37). For a film about war—and, implicitly, Vietnam—Bazin’s approach opens a different “operation,” another kind of frontier, to brutal and less brutal organizations of power. Relevant in this context are the thirteen minutes M*A*S*H devotes to a football game between the protagonists and another unit. Besides

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similarities between the sport and war, the characters cheat, an action, which, like that of the zoom, sets and upsets established structures. According to Johan Huizinga, cheaters implicitly acknowledge a game’s rules and affirm them by way of defiance. This distinguishes the cheater from spoilsports who merely refuse to play (11–12). In the context of frontierism, a cheater’s fidelity to the game and its rules generates two significant consequences. First, it points to his or her implication in the structures over which he or she seeks mastery, and second, it points to possibilities within constraint that might otherwise be ignored. For a film such as M*A*S*H, which attends to not only the rules of war

Figure 4.16. Dirty Harry’s introductory zoom pulls back to a sniper’s scope (1971).

Figure 4.17. The Conversation zooms in, mimicking aural surveillance (1974).

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but also—and often troublingly—those of heterosexism, the potential change rendered in and through the game suggests readings in excess of sophomoric humor. The zoom harbors similar possibilities for violence beyond Altman’s oeuvre, including films such as Dirty Harry and The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974).4 Mutually set in San Francisco, these works privilege investigation, violence, and individual, if not vigilante, justice. Both feature protagonists, moreover, who, like frontier settlers, regress to and (perhaps never fully) rise above the violence of their antagonists. Apropos of this frontierism, each film starts with a zoom that implies unimplicated seizure. Dirty Harry’s pulls back to a sniper’s scope while The Conversation’s pushes in, mimicking aural surveillance. As the films continue, however, opportunities expressed by these shots give way to the constraints of the devices they figure. On one hand, the scope narrows the sniper’s vision such that he loses sight of his victims. On the other, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) so isolates his evidence he fatally misrecognizes its emphasis. In registering these limits, zooms disclose the vulnerability the men’s mastery disavows. More important, they unconceal the extent to which fact and meaning, surveillant and surveilled, are joined and at the same time separate. As proof, one might look to Dirty Harry’s eponymous hero (Clint Eastwood) who intends toward the killer by extending his own look, donning a pair of binoculars only to spy a naked woman. Though not the

Figure 4.18. Harry dons a pair of binoculars and spies a naked woman (Dirty Harry, 1971).

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Figure 4.19. Harry’s gaze thus mirrors the killer’s look at the film’s first victim (Dirty Harry, 1971).

look of Harry’s antagonist, this image mirrors the latter’s gaze, repeating the content and form of the killer’s peek at his first victim in the film’s opening shot. As a result, Harry—like his namesake in The Conversation or McCabe or the unit in M*A*S*H—stretches out to enframe people and places that reciprocally stretch into him.

Living (and Nonliving) Interrelationships A multiplicity of . . . interacting factors may operate together to form a unity, a system. —Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary”

To conclude, I want to extend—or better, intend—the zoom to an unexpected horizon: Earth Day 1970 and the modern environmental movement it helped inaugurate. When one looks at this movement and its history, one discovers their relevance for what I have previously described. Explicitly concerned with the consequences of economic extraction, environmentalism imagines exchanges among human and nonhuman nature at the same time that it harbors its own fantasies of possession and escape. Since its emergence with the “closing” of the American frontier in 1890, environmental thought in the United States has been dominated

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by two tendencies. The first—associated with Teddy Roosevelt and his adviser, Gifford Pinchot—emphasizes conservation, including the efficient use of resources and the scientific management of land use. The second, linked to John Muir, privileges the preservation of nature as a place of refuge. Responding to the idea that the frontier’s limits meant the end of limitless resources, Roosevelt and Pinchot sought to extend those reserves in perpetuity by way of public policy and the establishment of state and national parks, wildlife refuges, national monuments, and the like. Despite the protections these offered natural spaces, “the issue,” writes Jim O’Brien, “was not the aesthetics of nature but the defense of material resources against short-term plunder” (8). The purpose of forestry, writes Pinchot, should be “to . . . produce the largest amount of whatever crop or service will be most useful and keep on producing it for generation after generation of men and trees” (32). Muir, by contrast, was motivated by the wilderness’s sensuous pleasures and advocated returns to nature on the parts of industrial modernity’s alienated urbanites. “The tendency nowadays to wander in wilderness is delightful to see,” writes Muir. “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life” (459). New for Americans who, “since Columbus, . . . had always been [focused] on ‘conquering’ and ‘harnessing’ nature,” Muir’s notion of nature as refuge nonetheless emerged in and through the capitalist extension it sought to remedy (O’Brien 10). In fact, as should be clear by this point, both Muir’s and Pinchot’s positions mirror the fantasies of possession and escape with which I have linked economic extraction. Conservation, with its evocations of stockpiling resources, conjures the means-ends rationalism of Martin Heidegger’s “standing reserve.” Preservation, for its part, recalls the frontier’s pastoralism and its supposed freedom from the ills of contemporary life. Overlooked in each case are the ways in which industrial capitalism underwrites the practices of both movements. Roosevelt and Pinchot fought to save nature from monopolist exploitation, but they nevertheless partook of the instrumental scientism that defined modern capitalism. Muir, by comparison, opposed the commercial use of American forests and waterways, but Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan were among those who provided him financial support. In this sense, the frontier’s promises of possession and escape not only tie both conservation and preservation to capitalist extension but also intend nature to culture, and ecology to economics, in ways that the movements themselves disavow. If the environment is constitutive of American capitalism, then the latter

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is necessarily bound up with conceptions of the former’s defense. For this reason, relationships persist between wilderness and civilization despite, even because of, the differences upon which reserve and refuge—not to mention environmental “defense”—rely. Frontierism characterizes much of modern environmentalism’s encounters with capitalism as well. As with conservation and preservation before it, ecological thought in the 1960s and 1970s owed to fresh understandings of the limits of economic expansion and the oppositions and exchanges they invite. During this period, environmental disasters such as the Santa Barbara oil spill and Cuyahoga River fire led to the first Earth Day as well as a series of federal initiatives during Richard Nixon’s first and second terms: the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, Endangered Species Act, and establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency among them. “The frontiers were gone,” Secretary of the Interior John C. Whitaker noted in 1969; “[Americans] could no longer move a few hundred miles West” (Kline 89). Nixon and environmental activists may seem odd bedfellows, but as O’Brien and other historians of environmentalism suggest, the late 1960s and early 1970s marked the popularization of ecology as a concept. Implying a “web of interdependencies,” or “totality of nature with all its complex interrelationships,” ecology espoused human and nonhuman entanglements as opposed to nature as economic reserve or aesthetic refuge (J. O’Brien, 17, 18). The result, which undercuts the anthropocentrism that characterized the work of Muir as well as Roosevelt and Pinchot, nonetheless gives rise to new conceptions of possession, escape, and exchange. Once again, environmental discourse expressed two general tendencies, each with its own set of contradictory assumptions. In the first, or what Benjamin Kline calls “mainstream” environmentalism, participants focused on “legislation, administrative and regulatory action, the courts, and the electoral sphere” (96). Emphasizing issues more than reimagining relationships to the world, organizations such as the National Wildlife Federation and Environmental Defense Fund advocated licenses and limits through established economic and political systems. Their approach, which shared tactics with early twentieth-century environmentalism, partook of the rationalism that led to post-WWII industrial pollution. Rejecting these efforts to isolate and regulate the world and its resources, the era’s second and “alternative” tendency eschewed structures of power for grassroots, direct-action approaches that relied on public demonstrations and protests (Kline). Groups like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace employed less traditional means to pursue more radical ends, including organizations of human and nonhuman relations that dramatically decentered anthropocentric values and practices. Indeed, movements such as deep

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ecology and, later, ecofeminism challenged the centrality of human needs when considering the environment and explicitly linked such demands to the exploitative aims of modern industry. Whereas “shallow ecology” struggled to “fight against pollution and resource depletion . . . [for the] health and affluence of people in the developed countries,” deep ecology, according to Arne Naess, who coined the term in 1973, sought an ecocentric “total-field image” of humans and nonhumans independent from anthropocentric utilitarianism (Devall 52; Naess, “Shallow and Deep” 95). For Naess, ecocentrism meant mutual, though nonidentical, relationships among “knots in the biospherical net” (“Shallow and Deep” 95). For environmentalists, it often led to divisions between nature and culture, despite their rejections of regulatory anthropocentrism. For this reason, both alternative and mainstream groups typically overlooked “the precarious balance of sameness and difference” that, according to ecofeminist Val Plumwood, ecology needs to “overcome dualism and to establish non-instrumentalizing relationships” between human and nonhuman nature (“Deep Ecology, Deep Pockets” 63; Feminism 80). Instead, these groups brought reserve and refuge to bear on the era and its fantasies of authenticity. Focusing on licenses and limits, mainstream approaches situated humans outside the nature they sought to possess, while alternative groups imagined escapes from culture for nonhumans. Either way, activists denied sameness and difference among living and nonliving things, configurations of which create and destroy the environment as such. “There is no sharp line between culture and nature,” writes historian Richard White. “Wilderness—that is, land unaffected by human use—is rarely to be found” (29). All this is compounded, meanwhile, by socioeconomic schisms that worked within and against each group. Deep ecology gathered largely upper-class support, while blue-collar and immigrant workers expressed sympathy for regulating public health and urban pollution rather than fostering the independence of wilderness spaces. As the economy worsened in the mid- and late 1970s, it became difficult to defend environmental against economic concerns, particularly for citizens financially prohibited from appreciating nature as leisure. The problem, of course, lies in separating environment from economics or nature from culture in ways that both shallow and deep ecologies do at various times and in multiple ways. One does better, I argue, to acknowledge the discrete entanglement of these terms and their reciprocal exchanges. This is, after all, the zoom’s lesson as I have traced it. I would suggest, in fact, that environmentalism, like the zoom, does more than reveal unrecognized reserves or refuges; it also potentially unconceals forms of relation that precede and exceed possession and escape. In this regard, the ecology that underwrites modern environmentalism

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becomes particularly important, implying not simply a total-field image of interdependencies but also, literally, a house, a dwelling place, a site of habitation. This brings me back to McCabe and Mrs. Miller, wherein “house” refers to a gathering of people and places as much as to proprietorship or protection. It returns me as well to Heidegger for whom technology offers a clearing through which humans recognize both their indebtedness to and responsibility for a world that likewise needs them. Naess makes a similar point with his notion of “environmental ontology,” within which “self-realization” means “realizing a potential [that] is always an interaction involving one single concrete unit, one gestalt, . . . and three abstract aspects[:] subject, object, and medium” (“Self-Realization” 93, 96). As before, the aim is neither to cleave subject from object, concrete from abstract, or human from world, nor is it to collapse their differences. Rather, it is to disclose the intensions between and among these registers in spite of their divergent extensions. The zoom, I have wagered, figures such a disclosure, constituting the danger and “saving power” of economic extraction for those willing to traverse its abuses and promises.

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STANLEY KUBRICK’S 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange, features the rehabilitation of rapist, murderer, and aesthete Alex (Malcolm McDowell) in, of all places, the cinema. Straitjacketed, his eyes held wide by bizarre optometry equipment, Alex is subjected to the Ludovico technique, which aims to reverse his pleasure in vision and violence both inside and outside the theater. Indeed, the film implicates reality in representation when Alex reacts to the first of several “ultraviolent” films by glossing Sam Peckinpah: “It’s funny,” he notes, “how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you [view] them on the screen.” Despite his initial pleasure, however, Alex soon admits to feelings of bodily distress. Thanks to drugs he has been administered, his depraved regard for the “beauty” of bloodshed gives way to morally palatable disgust. Returned to the “real” world, he takes his coerced vulnerability with him—so much so, in fact, that Alex’s response to on- and off-screen displays of aggression proves as brutal as the sadism his reprogramming served to constrain. I begin my conclusion with Clockwork because it returns me to the concerns of my introduction. I find in Kubrick’s film a dark allegory of early accounts of post-Code brutality and the so-called apparatus, or gaze, theories that emerged at roughly the same time. Strapped to a chair, eyes pried open, Alex exemplifies cinema’s purportedly sadistic spectator, who, according to period commentators, enjoys the disembodied and masterful position into which he is contradictorily forced. Of course, if vision is violent and violence pleasurable, then the Ludovico technique turns both around. Refusing an abstract and immutable spectator, Alex’s treatment compels his transformation into an embodied and responsive viewer. HE CENTERPIECE OF

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Figure C.1. Cinema’s dangerously sadistic spectator (A Clockwork Orange, 1971).

Still, like critics who pit gratuitous cruelty against genuine disgust, Alex’s doctors do not contest so much as constrain film’s abuses to and through its viewers. For this reason, his rehabilitation proves as untenable to Kubrick as unpleasure did to film scholars. Both reject aversion as an ideal and avow the pleasures of sensuous experience. For academics, this avowal means disclosing aesthetics that control brutality neither too much nor too little. When style overtakes sensation, they posit, it splits sense from sensibility to codify mere discourse. Conversely, when mere thrills overrun style, it fails to lend proper significance to sensuous experience. The goal, therefore, is to tie discourse to thrill such that sense and sensation work with and against each other. However cynically, Kubrick suggests as much at the end of Clockwork. Alex publicly reconciles with administrators who know he privately deconciles the imperatives of their treatment. With Passionate Detachments, I have endeavored a similar though, one hopes, less cynical conclusion by reading technologies such as multiplecamera montage, squibs and artificial blood, freeze-frames, and zooms as figures in addition to tools. Indeed, because figures join perception to representation and desire to fantasy, they neither succeed nor fail to order or disorder meaning. Rather, the aforementioned devices lend shape to screen violence while setting and upsetting relationships to it. Tying material practice to cultural significance, they express what violence meant

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and could mean for the post-Code period. The technologies are, as a result, critical acts and interpretive models, articulating and disarticulating the era’s supposed obsession with bloodshed and the fantasies of authenticity that support it on and off screen. In the case of multiple-camera montage, this means the device not only splits “here” to “see more now” but also registers the parallaxes that constitute omnipresence. It does so for films such as Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) as well as for institutions and practices that share the device’s structure, including broadcast television, military reconnaissance, and apparatus film theory. Squibs and artificial blood, too, express broader fantasies when they promise viewers brutalities the Production Code, network news, and the military admit only by chance. In heightening the tactility, the material fact, of bloodletting, however, the technology signals the indeterminate significance of mediated wounds. Finally, freezeframes and zooms may offer unimplicated seizures of the world and its details, but these technologies nonetheless betray reciprocities between self and other, human and nonhuman, that activist and capitalist practices mutually, though hardly identically, ignore. As a method of interpretation, figures have broader relevance, too, repeating as well as revising interventions in gaze theory made by phenomenological and psychoanalytic criticism.1 Throughout Passionate Detachments, multiple-camera montage, squibs and artificial blood, freezeframes, and zooms address viewers who “have” and “make” sense of vulnerable and masterful pleasures. They articulate meetings of optics and haptics, sadism and masochism, as do phenomenology and psychoanalysis. As figures, however, these devices also disarticulate suspicions about vision and violence that divide sight from touch and mastery from vulnerability. It is the case, after all, that the very accounts that first set bodies against “eyes / I’s” and pleasure against unpleasure now seem, as a consequence, to divide what they meant to conjoin or halt the fluidity they otherwise enabled. In what follows, I return to these theories to restore touch to sight and masochism to sadism and thereby enact what phenomenology and psychoanalysis already express and endorse.

Touch and Vision From the start, figures share affinities with phenomenological thinking. Multiple-camera montage, squibs and artificial blood, freeze-frames, and zooms are, I have argued, interfaces between objective material and subjective experience. So construed, the devices partake of “flesh,” as described by Maurice Merleau-Ponty; they are “what make[] the fact be a fact. And, at the same time, what make[] the facts have meaning” (140).

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Within film studies, descriptions of the “lived body” in works by Vivian Sobchack, Laura Marks, and Jennifer Barker among others likewise draw flesh and figure together. “We need to alter the binary and bifurcated structures of the film experience,” writes Sobchack, . . . and, instead, posit the film viewer’s lived body as a carnal “third term” that grounds and mediates experience and language, subjective vision and objective image—both differentiating and unifying them in reversible (or chiasmatic) processes of perception and expression. (“What My Fingers Knew” 60) The site of what Marks calls “haptic visuality,” or Barker, the “skin” of the film, this lived body, this flesh, incorporates the meetings of perception and representation I have attributed to figures throughout this book. Nonetheless, similarities between flesh and figure put differences between my work and the foregoing texts into relief. Such differences owe, I have intimated, to the gaze theory that historically motivated scholars to turn to lived bodies, haptics, and skin. Positing “spectator-fish” who, according to Christian Metz, “tak[e] in everything with their eyes, nothing with their bodies,” gaze theory isolated vision from other senses (Imaginary Signifier 96). It also conceived this vision as overwhelmingly violent, thanks to the abstract and immutable mastery films supposedly granted to spectators. Phenomenologists, by contrast, underscore vision’s linked yet distinct relationship to the rest of the body. Writes Sobchack: “Whatever its specific structure, capacities, and sensual discriminations, vision is only one modality of my lived body’s access to the world and only one means of making the world of objects and others sensible—that is, meaningful—to me” (“What My Fingers Knew” 64). And yet, because vision means violence within gaze theory, scholars tend not to “dwell in and on films’ visual and visible patterns of difference and repetition,” as Barker puts it, so much as pursue “tactile and tangible patterns and structures of significance” (25). The result, which emphasizes touch more than sight, points to the body’s intimacy with the world as opposed to the eye’s omnipotence over what it surveys. Still, in dethroning the eye, these accounts often separate touch from sight in ways the lived body otherwise precludes. Thus while Marks advocates a “robust flow between sensuous closeness and symbolic distance” in her description of haptic visuality, she also imagines “a battle between the material significance of the object and the representational power of the image” for film and film theory alike (Touch xiii, 7). This “battle,” which sets concrete expression against abstract visuality, emboldens the

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very structures Marks seeks to redress. To wit, she concludes, “cinema’s optical images address a viewer who is distant, distinct, and disembodied. Haptic images invite the viewer to dissolve his or her subjectivity in the close and bodily contact with the image” (Touch 13). Films disseminate visual mastery, or they offer bodily communion. The two may alternate in Marks’s account, but their opposition strains the copresence of perception and representation by cleaving then conflating viewer and viewed. The strain persists, indeed worsens, when films depict brutality, since these works reinforce sight’s distance from touch and proximity to violence. This is the case even among theorists who neither split optics from haptics nor subsume subjects in objects. “Meaning,” writes Sobchack, “and where it is made, does not have a discrete origin in either spectators’ bodies or cinematic representation but emerges in their conjunction” (“What My Fingers Knew” 67). Adds Barker: “We don’t ‘master,’ possess, or know the other (the film) completely, . . . nor do we lose ourselves or give ourselves over completely to it” (36). Yet when faced with the violence of Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959), Barker argues that “haptic visuality . . . alone reveals to us the [film’s] profound connections between past and present” (61, emphasis added). Sobchack argues similarly, though by inverse operation, when she notes that visual representations of death “not only contain [it] in a range of formal and ritual simulations, but also often boldly view[] it with unethical and prurient interest” (“Inscribing Ethical Space” 242). These moments, which divide concrete perception from abstract representation, do so to split touch’s care from sight’s cruelty. Time and again, in fact, doubts about vision and violence encourage scholars to discriminate between sight and the lived body. These doubts are most apparent in texts that privilege illegible over legible images. Marks’s work embraces video, for instance, because its low-contrast ratio and propensity for decay yield fewer visual details. The result “frustrate[s] optical knowledge,” she argues, such that vision “gives up some degree of mastery” (Touch 10). Barker, too, links a work’s capacity “to make vision difficult” to its ability to “invite the viewer to feel rather than see the film” (23). Even Sobchack, who typically avoids tying illegibility to touch, gravitates toward indistinct images in her reading of The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993). Its opening shots supply, she writes, a relatively rare instance of narrative cinema in which the cultural hegemony of vision is overthrown, an instance in which my eyes did not “see” anything meaningful and experienced an almost blindness at the same time that my tactile sense

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Of course, if vision is but one of the lived body’s linked yet distinct senses, then—as these thinkers elsewhere agree—sight is always tactile, distance always proximate, self always bound up with other, and omnipotence always already linked to the intimacy that undoes it. For this reason, legible as well as illegible images join matter to meaning. Both inspire and inhibit reversible relationships between abstraction and concreteness. This both-andness differentiates the figure from works that appeal to optic and haptic regimes. While the latter set visual authority against intimate bodies, figures crystallize the discrete reversibility of perception and representation. They do so, moreover, through legible as well as illegible images. Figures express what one sees, however discernibly or indiscernibly, as well as how one views it; they are, I have suggested, interfaces that show where sensible matter meets matters of sense. A return to Barker demonstrates the difference that figures make. In her reading of Hiroshima mon amour, she uncovers two approaches to selfhood and history in the film’s opening sequence. The first privileges sight, depicting legible landscapes and artifacts from a distance that implies objective, determinate knowledge. The second underscores touch through inscrutable bodies, the proximity of which heightens their texture, their unintelligibility, and their subjective indeterminacy. It is precisely the illegibility of these bodies, however, that brings clarity to the viewer. “Through the skin,” she writes, “we gain a clearer picture of ourselves in relation to others and to history, and we come to recognize that relationship as one of mutual permeability” (62, emphasis added). The lesson, according to Barker, “is that what is merely seen is less enlightening than what is seen and also touched” (62, emphasis added). Still, what strikes one about these conclusions are their commitments to sight and touch, distinction and reversibility, in spite of their affirmations of skin. Figures sustain such commitments, I argue, in their very both-andness. They also preclude mere sight and, for that matter, mere representation, too. Read as figures, therefore, Hiroshima’s landscapes and artifacts express both materiality and mastery, its bodies, both abstraction and tactility. These elements tie optics to haptics and bring irreducible forms to discernible as well as indiscernible contents. In the context of screen violence, this both-andness proves crucial, since “seeing more” characterizes so many figures of post-Code brutality. To be sure, these figures articulate visual omnipotence. My look at multiple-camera montage, squibs with artificial blood, freeze-frames, and

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zooms suggests as much. They also disarticulate it, however, retaining the stubbornly sensuous material that issues and outlasts efforts to control its signification. Figures partake, in this sense, of what Jean-François Lyotard, following Merleau-Ponty, calls the “thickness” of vision, what remains invisible within the visible or unrepresentable within representation (Discourse, Figure 8). From this point of view, my “defense of the eye” derives from more than Lyotard; it also owes to the lived body as Sobchack, Marks, and Barker describe it (Discourse, Figure 11). Indeed, figures enact their intervention in the violence of vision and extend it to and through film’s visions of violence. So doing, they return sight, however discretely, to the lived body, where—as much as touch—it foregrounds the commensurability of sense and sensation. More than this, figures emphasize the reciprocity, the reversibility, of legible and illegible images, not to mention perception and representation as well as visual mastery and bodily communion. When it comes to screen violence, this reversibility matters, since it means films that reduce vision to violence also retain irreducible—that is, as yet invisible and unrepresentable— forms of encounter. These forms, which draw perception and representation, optics and haptics, together do the same for pleasures that typically attend the desires and fantasies of each. In the foregoing accounts, sight implies sadism by promising omnipotence to disembodied spectators. Touch, by contrast, brings viewers the comparatively dispossessed pleasures of masochism. In either case, these terms mark sites where phenomenology and psychoanalysis meet, particularly since each appeals to the body’s pleasure in unpleasure to counter film vision’s abuses. In what follows, therefore, I extend the figure’s both-andness to desire and fantasy in addition to perception and representation and uncover the commensurability of sadism and masochism as well as optics and haptics. In the end, neither sight nor touch is reducible to mastery and cruelty or vulnerability and care.

Masochism and Sadism Psychoanalytic critiques of vision and violence date to the late 1960s and early 1970s when French critics at Cahiers du cinéma initiated the apparatus, or gaze, theory against which later scholars would mobilize. In this theory, cinema’s spectator-fish enjoy visual authority that not only dates to Quattrocento perspective but also implies the child who mistakes its mirror image for self-possession. Whether through camera or character, omnipotence or ideal ego, film viewers identify with positions that bind them, according to gaze theorists, to ideologically dubious and decidedly sadistic pleasures. In this context, Laura Mulvey’s “Visual

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Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is a benchmark text. There, she links spectatorial enjoyment to a rigorously “male gaze” that grants viewers the pleasures of voyeurism and fetishistic scopophilia to which it paradoxically subjects them. Though this subjection, like fetishism, implies masochistic disavowal, Mulvey entertains neither these possibilities nor feminine subject positions. Instead, sadism alone defines the pleasures of the monolithic male gaze her essay reiterates and resists. In the wake of this near total suspicion of film’s visual pleasures, film scholars began to consider experiences beyond sadism’s violent control. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, thinkers embrace the masochistic enjoyment—the pleasure in unpleasure—that Mulvey overwhelmingly ignores. While reactionary accounts simply supplant sadism with masochism, others argue for multiple, fluid, and cross-gendered points of identification. Among the most sophisticated in this regard are works by Carol Clover and Linda Williams, who explore meetings of sadistic and masochistic enjoyment in horror and pornography, respectively. Asking “whether cinematic looking always and inevitably implies mastery over its object,” Clover pursues vision’s “double movement” in horror films and, by extension, cinema more generally (207–08). On one hand, films grant viewers an “assaultive gaze” that conforms to the sadistic voyeurism theorists had long presumed. Active, self-possessed, and aimed at mastery, this way of looking, writes Clover, “is repeatedly associated with the camera (either as theme or device), and it is resolutely figured as male” (204). On the other hand, cinema offers a “reactive gaze,” which, though underobserved by commentators, revels in passivity, self-dispossession, and vulnerability. Decidedly feminine rather than masculine, this gaze offers masochistic as opposed to sadistic pleasures to spectators. In fact, what Williams calls the “female gaze” constitutes “the real investment” of horror films, according to Clover, even if the “male gaze” holds initial or temporary sway (Hard Core 207; Clover 211–12). As evidence, Clover points to the slasher film, a subgenre that, she argues, does not encourage identifications with male killers over and against female victims so much as ask viewers to partake of the Final Girl’s protracted terrors and last-minute triumphs. Men, in particular, find a “congenial double” in this victim-hero, whose masculinity compensates for the masochism that is her femininity’s raison d’être (51). Williams proceeds similarly in her account of hard-core pornography. Noting the “fluid movement between masculine/feminine, active/ passive, [and] sadistic/masochistic” in Clover’s work, Williams uncovers an analogous—and more self-conscious—counterpart to the Final Girl in her reading of the genre’s S/M varieties (Hard Core 208). In these films, female protagonists pretend to succumb to masculine aggression, when

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they—and those who identify with them—actually find pleasure in the suffering they seek. Like the slasher film’s victim-heroes, these women convert abasement into authority. Unlike their sisters in horror, however, they prove less “identificatory buffer[s]” for men’s masochistic pleasures than “bad girls” through whom female viewers enjoy “a modicum of power” in punishment (Clover 51; Williams, Hard Core 209). In either case, the characters indicate possibilities for multiple, fluid, and crossgendered identifications that, while hardly feminist dreams-come-true, transform presumed sadists into potential masochists. Central to this transformation are theories of the lived body, which tie masochism to tactile, bodily proximity and sadism to abstract, disembodied control. Writes Williams: The so-called “phallic mastery” of distanced voyeurism is more often than not a fantasy to which spectatorship may aspire, but the feminine position of what Clover calls “taking it in the eye” is closer to the visual and visceral reality of the vulnerable and impressionable spectatorial body. (Hard Core 291–92) Here, masochism implicates viewers in on- and off-screen realities from which sadism permits their escape. Like phenomenological reversibility, it brings touch to sight, proximity to distance, and in this case, feminine vulnerability to masculine authority. With “each of the horror genres,” writes Clover, “I have argued against the temptation to read the body in question as ‘really’ male . . . or ‘really’ female . . . , suggesting instead that the [spectator’s] excitement is precisely predicated on the undecidability or both-andness . . . of the construction” (217, emphasis added). There is no “pure sadism” in cinema, adds Williams, “(presumed to be dominant and the only tenable position for spectators),” nor any “pure masochism (not dominant and ultimately unpleasurable)” (Hard Core 214). Instead, she submits, there is “an oscillation within sadomasochism which is not identical” to either position (Hard Core 214, emphasis added). An affront to gaze theory, this nonidentity, this undecidable both-andness, troubles the abstract, immutable, and inescapably sadistic subject positions formerly attributed to cinema. Because they lean on masochism and vulnerable bodies, however, these accounts, not unlike their phenomenological counterparts, sometimes forsake the irreducible identifications that constitute their challenge to visual mastery and sadism. This is particularly the case when, as with optics, brutal contents seem to compound violent forms of viewing. In her look at the slasher, for instance, Clover begins by emphasizing the “uncertainty of sexual identity” in the Final Girl, who “fools” with gender

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to the delight of viewers who enjoy both sadistic and masochistic identifications with her (56). “We are,” she writes, “. . . in the end ‘masculinized’ by and through the very figure by and through whom we were earlier ‘feminized.’ The same body does for both” (59). Later, in her discussion of Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960), Clover assigns a similar position to the body of the film’s male killer, Mark (Carl Boehm). Yet this time, when it comes to sadism and masochism, she emphasizes the film’s “radical division of labor” more than its irreducible identificatory positions: Peeping Tom, in short, should . . . be taken . . . as a commentary not only on the symbiotic interplay of sadistic and masochistic impulses in the individual viewer but equally as a commentary, within the context of horror filmmaking, on the symbiotic interplay of the sadistic work of the filmmaker and the masochistic stake of the spectator. . . . There may be no such thing as purely masochistic spectatorship (or even, perhaps, purely sadistic moviemaking), but the job of horror . . . is to give the viewer as pure a dose as possible. (179, emphasis added) Without a doubt, there is interest, on Clover’s part, in the commensurability of sadism and masochism, but there is interest, too, in putting the male gaze—and the disembodied self-possession with which it is linked—“on the defense,” especially when it comes to depictions of and identifications with male killers (205). Thus while male and female gazes are eminently reversible, as both Mark and the Final Girl suggest, Clover tends to foreground the “resolutely gendered” nature of each and the fact that “assaultive gazing never prevails” (205, 187). She recovers masochism for film theory, in other words, but leaves sadism a tacit fact. Though Williams, too, rejects “pure sadism” and “pure masochism,” she occasionally suggests the former, if not the latter, when meetings of form and content draw on- and off-screen, real and imagined, abuses together. In the case of S/M, this means refuting what, according to critics of pornography, haunts the genre: snuff film, which, if it exists, replaces orgasm’s la petite mort with the actual deaths of women. “[W]ith the specter [of snuff],” writes Williams, “. . . sadistic control . . . is total and . . . , in being total, does not allow even masochistic pleasure” (Hard Core 226–27). Denying this possibility, Williams points to what snuff, like gaze theory, cannot avow: [T]he most unthinkable thing in . . . snuff is not the sadism of the viewer who identifies with the torturer, but the masochism of the woman viewer identifying with her annihilated

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surrogate. . . . This . . . , much more than . . . the evil sadist, disturbs us most. (Hard Core 227) Sadism is easy to imagine, masochism, more difficult. This is, Williams implies, because spectators reduce masochism to “the pure pleasure of victimization, [when] such pleasure cannot exist” (Hard Core 227). By contrast, she insists, “There can be no pleasure . . . without some power” (Hard Core 227). Masochism is, from this point of view, irreducible and, therefore, less disturbing. Sadism, however, seems comparatively pure and more threatening as a result. In this sense, Williams departs from gaze theory, only to return to it. Affirming masochism and its heterogeneous pleasures, she sustains sadism’s homogeneity and the dangers it presents to viewers. For this reason, she, like Clover, embraces reactive over and against assaultive gazes. “Clover’s points about horror spectatorship (and my point about pornographic spectatorship) is,” Williams writes, “that . . . [the] ‘introjective’ . . . gaze is what the genre is more importantly about” (Hard Core 291). Here, despite depictions of male (or masculine) victimizers, horror and pornography privilege identifications with female (or feminine) victims, who mix authority with abasement in ways their counterparts do not. Of course, privilege—in film, film theory, or even psychic etiology—need not mean partition.2 To set masochism against sadism is, after all, to relinquish the nonidentity, the undecidable both-andness, by which Williams and Clover upend gaze theory’s monolithic pleasures. Figures, by contrast, retain this irreducibility. They do so, moreover, for both sadism and masochism by preserving what is not identical to identificatory positions. Indeed, because figures lend shape to what one sees as well as to how one views it, they distill discretely reversible relationships between desire and fantasy. Like identification, these relationships bind inchoate demands to determinate content. Unlike identification, however, they unbind the forms that secure significance in turn. In the context of masculine killers and feminine victims, figures demonstrate—that is, at once designate and show—how gazes coagulate desire as much as divide it between fantasies of sadism and masochism. In fact, despite my suggestion that Clover sometimes separates male from female gazes, her description of horror’s first-person camera offers a powerful illustration of the figure in action. “The most widely imitated— and widely parodied—cliché of modern horror,” subjective camerawork is rigorously linked—both in films and film theories—to identifications with sadistic, male killers. Clover is no different in this regard, though she offers a crucial addition. What scholars fail to note, she argues, are the “shortcomings” of this gaze. “The fact is,” she continues,

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Passionate Detachments that the “view” of the first-person killer is typically cloudy, unsteady, and punctuated by dizzying swish-pans. Insofar as an unstable gaze suggests an unstable gazer, the credibility of the first-person killer-camera’s omnipotence is undermined from the outset. One could go further and say that the assignment of “real” vision to “normal” characters draws attention . . . to the very item the filmmaker ostensibly seeks to efface: the camera. . . . Moreover, inasmuch as the vision of the subjective camera calls attention to what it cannot see—to dark corners and recesses of its vision, and above all to the space, and what might be in it, just off-frame—it gives rise to the sense not of mastery but of vulnerability. (187)

For Clover, subjective camerawork exhibits the “ultimate failure” of the assaultive look, which she reminds readers, consistently turns “back on itself” to produce reactive gazing (187). This may be the case, but I cite Clover at length for the divisions first-person camera organizes and disorganizes at the same time and in the same image. At once stable and unstable, this camera points to the killer’s visual mastery and bodily vulnerability, the combination of which rivals the Final Girl’s undecidable both-andness. What is more, to the extent the shot implies concrete perception and abstract representation, it expresses how neither “phallic mastery” nor “taking it in the eye” is reducible to reality or fantasy. Finally, in conjuring what spectators can and cannot see, the killer’s point of view summons the determinate content and indeterminate forms that make for multiple, fluid, and cross-gendered identifications in the first place. What matters, then, are the pleasures figures render commensurable—that is, linked though distinct—not for the sake of sadism or masochism, but on behalf of the problems and possibilities they share. It is important, therefore, to overestimate neither male nor female gazes, since, as both Gilles Deleuze and Kaja Silverman suggest, sadism and masochism together issue from and react to the abuses of patriarchy (Silverman; Deleuze Masochism). Another figure—this time, from Williams—indicates as much: the money shot, which she calls a “rhetorical figure that permits the genre to speak in a certain way about sex” (Hard Core 94). That “way” couples sadism and masochism, not unlike horror’s killer camera. On one hand, money shots promise mastery over seen and unseen, leveraging the “maximum visibility” of male ejaculation toward evidence of comparatively invisible female orgasms (Hard Core 49). For this reason, writes Williams, they “can be viewed as the most representative instance of phallic power and pleasure” in hard-core pornography (Hard Core 95). On the other hand, she continues, and at the same time,

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money shots express “the limits of visibility” and the authority it promises (Hard Core 94). To prove male pleasure, after all, the penis must disengage from the very act that presumably supplies enjoyment. As a substitute for female orgasm, moreover, it is a poor one, “extend[ing] only to a knowledge of the hydraulics of male ejaculation” (Hard Core 94). Consequently, Williams argues, the money shot serves the genre as fetish. It suggests omnipotence, where there is uncertainty, invisibility, even unrepresentability. In this sense, of course, the money shot is more than a fetish; like first-person camera, it is also a figure. Each turns sadism to masochism to motivate sadism, which turns to masochism again. In so doing, both disclose how assaultive and reactive gazes mutually, though differentially, avow and disavow fantasy and reality, masculinity and femininity, visual mastery and bodily vulnerability. As with all figures, moreover, these work with and against identification. Reconciling perception to representation, desire to fantasy—and vision to violence—they deconcile these relationships and open them to possibilities nonidentity preserves. Figures extend similar possibilities to phenomenological film criticism, which I have noted also ties differences between optics and haptics to those between sadism and masochism. Laura Marks’s essay on the pleasures of gay male pornography for straight female viewers supplies a typical example. In that text, Marks begins, not unlike Clover and Williams, by describing the “various viewing positions” that grant spectators “pleasures of dominance and submission” (Touch 76). In the pages that follow, she develops “a model of spectatorship based on the practice of S/M” (Touch 77). It springs from “a tension between the sense of control and submission . . . rather than complete domination on one side and complete submission on the other” (Touch 77, emphasis added). The model is one of nonidentity, in other words, or undecidable bothandness. In it, there are a number of “roles” spectators adopt, play out, trade, and repeat. “Like [the sexual practice of] S/M,” Marks theorizes, “identification is a contingent, experimental process. . . . A viewer can make a pact with many viewing situations” (Touch 88). Still, what is irreducible in theory sometimes slips in practice. As Marks continues, tensions between control and submission become positions that “oscillate between distance and involvement,” offering “temporary alignment with a controlling, dominating, and objectifying look” and “the pleasure of giving up to the other’s control” (Touch 74, 77). These descriptions resemble Clover’s assaultive and reactive gazes, which though reversible, are more or less reducible, given production conditions or narrative content. As a result, some works permit viewers to choose between dominant or submissive roles, while others—especially

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“large-scale commercial film[s]”—“. . . usually invite[] what Christian Metz terms primary identification: an identification with . . . an abstract and objectifying gaze” (Marks, Touch 87). In either case, mastery and vulnerability are separable pleasures and importantly so, since one summons the distantly disembodied and immutable male gaze, and the other, an intensely embodied and consensual visual eroticism. The difference, meanwhile, redoubles divisions between sight and touch, legibility and illegibility, I have already traced. “Visual erotics allows the object of vision to remain inscrutable,” Marks argues. “It is not voyeurism, for in visual erotics the looker is also implicated. By engaging with an object in a haptic way, I come to the surface of my self . . . , losing myself in the intensified relation with an other that cannot be known” (Touch 18–19). Haptics imply self-dispossession and bodily vulnerability, and optics, the self-possessed authority of visual mastery. From this point of view, when Marks’s S/M model establishes looks that are “contingently ‘top,’ contingently ‘bottom,’ and contextually erotic,” it recalls Williams’s S/M female protagonist, who brings power and pleasure to masochism but leaves sadism largely untouched (Touch 90). Figures remind one that masochism is no more or less irreducible than sadism, even if their pleasures are not the same. Irreducibility is, after all, what makes assaultive and reactive gazes reversible. It permits oscillations between dominance and submission. If, for this reason, haptics generate “a panoply of possible attitudes,” as Jennifer Barker suggests— including “styles of touch that may be placid and gentle or aggressive and cruel”—then one need not separate readings of Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955) and Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977) into sections titled “pleasure” and “horror” or withhold these possibilities from optics (39). Indeed, as figures, horror’s first-person camera and pornography’s money shot convey omnipotence as well as susceptibility. They do so, moreover, at the same time and in the same image. This is why, I submit, figures matter as critical acts and make meaning as interpretive models. They do not replace but rather reveal what flesh and identification already do for panoply and tension as well as nonidentity and both-andness.

Passionate Detachments My book’s title, Passionate Detachments, means to convey this work. As figures, multiple-camera montage, squibs and artificial blood, freezeframes, and zooms attach and detach matter to and from meaning and do so for self-possessed as well as self-dispossessed desires and fantasies. They demonstrate the extent to which optics and haptics, sadism and masochism, are commensurable—or, better, “passionately intertwined”

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(Sobchack, “Passion” 286). Taken from Vivian Sobchack, this phrase gets at the relationships the technologies express for lived bodies and the pleasures they enjoy. On one hand, passion connotes suffering, particularly one’s subjection to external forces or the will of another. On the other hand, it conjures devotion, “an intense, driving, and overmastering feeling” directed at other subjects and objects (Sobchack, “Passion” 288). Together, these forms of passion render inside and outside, self and other, dominance and submission, reversible. As suffering, passion puts one in contact with “the extreme vulnerability of [one’s] material objectivity,” according to Sobchack (“Passion” 287). It connects active, vocal, and animate subjects to the “passive, mute, and inanimate objects of the world” (“Passion” 287). Devotion, by contrast, suggests self-interested intentions and, at the same time, indicates one’s desire for otherness, one’s capacity “to embrace . . . alterity as [one’s] own” (“Passion” 289). In both cases, meanwhile, passion is irreducible. It implies subjective objects and objective subjects who are themselves “response-able” and “sense-able” and, therefore, potentially responsible for and sensible to others (“Passion” 288, 290). To compare figures to passion is to evoke irreducibility and, in the context of film violence, claim commensurability for sense and sensation, visual mastery and bodily vulnerability, among spectators as well as theorists. It means joining techne¯ to logos through technologies that corroborate and challenge authenticity in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Multiple-camera montage, squibs and artificial blood, freeze-frames, and zooms—these bind perception and desire to determinate content. They permit one to see more bloodshed. Yet because they shape how one views what one sees, the devices also express the indeterminate—indeed, inauthentic—forms of relation that mediate the era’s representations and fantasies. In this sense, the technologies organize and disorganize the brutality that attends military reconnaissance, television news, and leftist and capitalist practices. They also repeat and revise responses to vision and violence for past and present alike. Neither mere discourse nor mere thrills, these figures work with and against each, setting and upsetting matter and meaning for reputable as well as disreputable images. The result proves valuable for scholars concerned that films control brutality too much or too little. It proves valuable, too, for theories of touch and masochism, which avow irreducible perceptions and pleasures yet suspect sight and sadism. I want to conclude, in fact, by suggesting that either-orness menaces the foregoing literature precisely because it assures both-andness. To draw this conclusion, I return to A Clockwork Orange and the allegory Alex and the Ludovico technique afford cinema. Before his treatment, Alex is the consummate sadist. Delighting in the sensuous particulars

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of on-screen brutality, he demonstrates why thrills merit control. The Ludovico technique, by contrast, exhibits the inverse. It controls violence too strenuously, abstracting sense from sensation as a matter of discourse. To the extent doctors bind then drug the wide-eyed Alex, moreover, their treatment resembles gaze theory’s conception of cinema. After all, they, too, compel spectatorial subject positions, whether disembodied omnipotence or, as the cure progresses, invasive embodiment. The problem in each case—Alex or the technique—is the either-orness it illustrates. On one hand, there is too much perception or too much representation, and on the other hand, unqualified authority or utter abasement. After his treatment, therefore, Alex—now victim as opposed to victimizer—exhibits no power or pleasure. He confronts violence with nothing but terror, nausea, and helplessness. Remarkably, however, this either-orness gives rise to both-andness. In his defenselessness, Alex suffers the passion of self-dispossession; he is, in Sobchack’s terms, a subjective object. As such, he resembles her description of Antoine Roquentin in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, who faced with a chestnut tree, “is overtaken by the passivity of immanence and the opacity of the material,” which includes “the subjective objectivity of his own body” (“Passion” 303). Similarly overtaken, Alex responds like Roquentin. His passivity provokes another passion—a drive for self-possession that, in Alex’s case, culminates in a suicide attempt. The act, though perverse, reveals Alex as objective subject and subjective object. It points as well to commensurabilities—between self and other, meaning and matter, abstract mastery and bodily vulnerability—that Clockwork’s allegory at first glance denies. Despite, even through, Alex’s “horrible ecstasy,” he, as much as Roquentin, “is incapable of experiencing—or thinking through—either subjectivity or objectivity as absolute and ‘in-itself’ ” (Sobchack, “Passion” 304, 311). The world impinges on Alex as he imposes on it, demonstrating, however violently, the irreducibility of flesh. Irreducible, too, are the nonidentical identifications Alex indicates to spectators. Springing from impotence, his efforts at action harbor Alex’s susceptibility to others. Like subjective cameras or money shots, the former libertine commingles mastery and vulnerability, the latter issuing and outlasting the former’s efforts to contain it. Thus while Clockwork, like Nausea, offers “one of the least sanguine . . . encounters between body and world” one might imagine, it nonetheless expresses the both-andness one finds in accounts of the Final Girl, S/M, or passion (Sobchack, “Passion” 303). It is odd, therefore, to find Sobchack reading Nausea “for the ‘happy parts’ ” or, relatedly, to discover theories that restrain or liberate perception and pleasure by separating optics from haptics or sadism from masochism (“Passion” 307). To be sure, the results prove more positive than those I

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have traced in this book. Touch and masochism admit the body and its pleasures more directly and often less deploringly than sight and sadism. For this reason, the very both-andness that animates commitments to bodily vulnerability often establishes either-orness as a response to the irreducibility, the commensurability, that cannot reduce or foreclose visual mastery. To entertain either-orness is, however, to diminish the multiple, fluid, and cross-gendered identifications films extend to lived bodies. It is to forgo passion’s promise of objectivity in subjectivity, submission in dominance, care in cruelty, and vice versa. Most important, it is to preclude possibilities for creating and destroying violent representations and fantasies, however laudatory or loathsome. Figures, I have argued, preserve both-andness through their passionate detachments. Joining perception to representation and desire to fantasy, they organize and disorganize sense and sensation for all, not some, or even most, depictions of violence. In this, they enact the ideals of preceding works. Yet they also intervene in outcomes that invite mere discourse or mere thrills, mere sight or mere sadism, back into texts that otherwise dispel them. Figures may, for this reason, lead to more than the happy parts, as the foregoing chapters imply. Still, in what Sartre calls “atrocious joy,” there remains irreducible—that is, unrecognized and unrealized—aesthetic legacies and critical opportunities (Sobchack, “Passion” 304). In Passionate Detachments, I have traced these legacies and opportunities for the late 1960s and early 1970s when devices such as multiple-camera montage, squibs and artificial blood, freeze-frames, and zooms at once articulated and disarticulated that era’s brutal narratives and histories. Beyond this period, technologies—from models and matte work to rotoscoping and virtual cameras—point to similar possibilities for vision and violence. Read as figures, these, too, promise to open brutal contents to as yet unrealized forms of encounter.

Notes

Introduction: The Technology of Film Violence, or, Figuring the Sense in Sensation 1. To these, one might add Hannah Arendt’s 1968 editorial to the New York Times, “Is America by Nature a Violent Society”; Lawrence Alloway’s Violent America: The Movies 1946–1964 (1971); John Fraser’s Violence in the Arts (1974); Michael Leach’s I Know It When I See It: Pornography, Violence, and Public Sensitivity (1975); and Thomas R. Atkins’s Graphic Violence on the Screen (1976).

Chapter 1. A Parallax View: The Violent Synchrony of Multiple-Camera Montage 1. It is worth noting in this context that both Rauschenberg and Penn attended the experimental Black Mountain College in 1948. There, Penn directed Erik Satie’s The Ruse of Medusa, starring Buckminster Fuller, with music and choreography by longtime Rauschenberg collaborators John Cage and Merce Cunningham and set design by Willem de Kooning. 2. In keeping with these connections, Cage once described Rauschenberg’s collages as “many television sets working simultaneously all tuned in differently” (105). 3. Leslie Stevens based the screenplay for The Left-Handed Gun on Gore Vidal’s teleplay “The Death of Billy the Kid,” which appeared on The Philco Television Playhouse in 1955. Robert Mulligan was the director, and Paul Newman, who reprised the role in Penn’s film, played Billy the Kid. Penn directed both the television and film versions of The Miracle Worker, which first appeared on Playhouse 90 (CBS, 1956–1961) in 1957 with a teleplay by William Gibson. 4. According to Paul Dickson, AC-130 gunships also carried sensors to pick up the ignition systems of trucks. “This particular trick,” he writes, “was accomplished through a special cathode ray tube that reacts to electrical ignitions with jittery interference in much the same way that a home TV set reacts when a plane passes overhead” (85).

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Chapter 2. Violence Incarnate: Squibs, Artificial Blood, and Wounds That Speak 1. Aired as part of the Huntley-Brinkley Report’s coverage of the Tet Offensive on February 2, 1968, the so-called “Saigon Execution”—shot by cameraman Vo Suu and narrated by NBC correspondent Howard Tuckner—was transmitted via satellite from Tokyo to New York moments before its broadcast. Upon airing, NBC trimmed seventeen seconds from the end of the original film, which, according to Suu’s notes, included a “zoom on [the prisoner’s] head, blood spraying out.” While the version seen by roughly twenty million viewers on February 2 cut to black after the corpse fell to the ground, a March 10, 1968, rebroadcast on the Frank McGee Report restored the previously excised footage. Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams also captured the execution; his black-and-white photograph aired on NBC the evening before Suu’s color film and appeared in a number of national newspapers on the morning of February 2 (Bailey and Lichty). 2. I refer here to Linda Williams’s distinction between ob/scene, which names what should remain imperceptible, or “off/scene,” and on/scene, which describes the prevalence of explicit sexual representations in public life (Hard Core 281–82). Linkages between pornography and violence circulated widely during the late 1960s and early 1970s. “In recent years,” writes Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “the movies and television have developed a pornography of violence far more demoralizing than the pornography of sex” (53.) Adds Tom Wolfe: “The new pornography depicts practitioners . . . ripping guts open [and] blowing brains out” (59). 3. This is not to ignore Peckinpah’s affection for Luis Buñuel, whose work The Wild Bunch references, however obliquely. The film opens, for instance, on a scene of scorpions not unlike L’age d’or (Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, 1931), while its wounds recall the eruptive eyeball that opens Un chien andalou (Buñuel and Dalí, 1929). For more on Peckinpah’s interest in Buñuel, see Sharrett, “Peckinpah the Radical.” Worth noting, too, are the conspicuous returns of interwar art movements, including Dada and surrealism, to minimalist, pop, and conceptual art as well as films from the American underground during the 1960s and 1970s. Neo-noir, including works such as The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973), Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), and Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), also recall the surrealist sensibilities to which French film critics linked Code-era film noir (Schrader; Naremore; Borde and Chaumeton).

Chapter 3. Hitting the “Vérité Jackpot”: The Ecstatic Profits of Freeze-Framed Violence 1. Kael’s appeals to Kennedy and Oswald also evoke Shelter’s unacknowledged freeze-frames, since the footage of each likewise appeared as “stills.” Portions of Abraham Zapruder’s film of JFK’s assassination first appeared as a series of photograms in the November 29, 1963, edition of Life magazine. Moving images of the murder were not widely viewed until 1975 when Geraldo Rivera aired Zapruder’s film on ABC’s Goodnight America. For its part, Oswald’s murder—cap-

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tured live by NBC—was repeatedly played, arrested, reversed, and replayed by all three broadcast networks. Robert Jackson’s photograph of Oswald’s reaction to Jack Ruby’s gunshot also circulated widely. 2. Still others include “Theosophy”; Greeley; “Cult of the Occult”; R. Baker; “Evil, Anyone?”; “The Occult”; and Baltad. Anton LaVey even made guest appearances on television’s The Tonight Show in 1969 and Donahue in 1971. 3. Having met Jagger and the Rolling Stones in London in 1968, Anger not only invited the musician to star in his formerly abandoned Lucifer Rising project (1970–1981) but also interwove the band into Invocation, for which Jagger composed a monotonous, trancelike soundtrack on the newly developed Moog synthesizer. The network linking the Stones to Anger is particularly dense. Anita Pallenberg—lover to musicians Brian Jones and Keith Richards—allegedly introduced Jagger and Richards to the occult and to Anger. Pallenberg would later produce Lucifer Rising, which stars Jagger’s former lover Marianne Faithfull and filmmaker Donald Cammell. Cammell, another member of the Stones’ circle, not only directed Performance (Cammell and Nicols Roeg, 1970), which stars Jagger and Pallenberg, but also earned Anger’s affection, given the relationship between Cammell’s father, Charles Richard Cammell, and Aleister Crowley in the 1930s. It is likewise significant in this ecstatic context to mention that the Stones footage in Invocation comes from the band’s July 5, 1969, Hyde Park concert for which the British Hell’s Angels provided security. See Hutchison and Hunter for more about these links. 4. Released prior to both Night and Shelter, Blow-Up casts its shadow over both films. It even enters discourse about Meredith Hunter’s murder. Writes Newsweek: “In a kind of latter-day variation of Antonioni’s Blow-Up, police last week studied a remarkable film vignette of the murder [at Altamont]” (“The Underground”). 5. The Maysles used an optical printer to rephotograph individual frames, while Romero shot photographic prints with a motion-picture camera. Though different, their means do not change my argument here. Both processes produce full-frame images that resemble each other on celluloid and on screen.

Chapter 4. Extraction and Exchange: The Zoom and Environmental Intension 1. By most accounts, the frontier and the tracts of “free land” associated with it closed in 1890; McCabe and Mrs. Miller is set in 1901. Still, as western historians such as Patricia Limerick have observed, the notion of an “open” frontier is itself a fraught concept. Mining towns such as the fictional Presbyterian Church prove significant in this context, since according to Limerick, they give the lie to the frontier’s presumed limitlessness more than, say, farming or ranching. At its height, the “open” frontier was defined by two or less people per square mile. Because mining, unlike farming or ranching, requires a concentration of laborers and thus a more urbanized settlement, “one would have to declare the mining frontier closed virtually the moment it opened,” she writes (74).

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2. Similar claims are made for vigilantism in the same report. “In shortrun practical terms,” writes Richard Maxwell Brown, “the vigilante movement was a positive facet of the American experience. Many a new frontier community gained order and stability. . . . From a longer perspective, the negative aspects of vigilantism appear. . . . It was extended into areas of American life where it was wholly inappropriate. . . . The middle and late 1960s have produced a new upsurge of vigilantism,” including “(1) negro enclaves, South and North, . . . (2) white urban and suburban neighborhoods, . . . [and] (3) urban neighborhoods beset by crime” (183, 187, 191–92). 3. In this respect, Altman’s near total use of the telephoto lens in his films underscores the device’s twofold expression. Such is the case for his actors, who never know how near or far from the camera they will appear in the frame. Always ready to seize them, Altman’s lens makes standing reserves of his players. Regardless, however—and at the same time—the zoom invites awareness of the body’s relationship to its surroundings on the parts of his actors. Altman’s regular use of two cameras only contributes to this effect. In an interview following the release of Gosford Park (2001), he tells David Thompson that his actors frequently “don’t know whether they’re on camera or not” or “if it’s a close-up” (198). 4. Zooms also shape readings of The Long Goodbye for which two scenes come to mind. In one, Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell) smashes an empty Coke bottle into his girlfriend’s (Jo Ann Brody’s) face; in the other, Marlowe (Elliott Gould) shoots longtime friend and recent enemy, Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton), at close range. In both scenes, zooms first move away then toward the agents and objects of violence before pulling back, just as the bloodshed commences. The result, which mingles proximity with distance and friend with foe, entwines fate with possibility. Zooms anticipate the film’s brutality, but they do not necessarily ordain it.

Conclusion: Passionate Detachments 1. In this context, it is worth noting that Jean-François Lyotard wrote Discourse, Figure as an explicit remediation of and rapprochement between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. 2. Masochism’s etiological priority dates to Sigmund Freud, who dismisses primary sadism after wrestling with the development of both perversions in such works as “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (1915), “A Child Is Being Beaten” (1919), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), and “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (1924). Apropos of cinematic pleasure is the fact that Freud’s decision emerges in his consideration of scopophilia: “At the beginning of its activity the scopophilic instinct is autoerotic. It has indeed an object, but that object is the subject’s own body. It is only later that the instinct comes . . . to exchange this object for . . . the body of another” (“Instincts” 94). In fantasy, too, Freud grants masochism priority, something to which Jean Laplanche turns when he argues for the “privileged character of masochism in human sexuality” (Life & Death 102). Along with texts by Gilles Deleuze and Leo Bersani, translations of Laplanche’s work in the late 1970s help explain masochism’s presence in film theory of the 1980s and 1990s.

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Index

abjection. See Kristeva, Julia Adams, Eddie, 164n2.1 Adorno, Theodor, 16 Altamont (1969 Rolling Stones concert), 83, 92, 96, 99, 105, 165n3.4 Altman, Robert: actors, filming of, 166n4.3; improvisation, reliance on, 135; Long Goodbye, The, and 117, 135, 164n2.3; Gosford Park and, 166n4.3; M*A*S*H and, 20, 117, 120, 135, 136; McCabe and Mrs. Miller and, 20, 115, 117, 118, 122, 125, 127, 129, 133, 134, 135, 166n4.3; overlapping dialogue, use of, 135; telephoto lens, use of, 166n4.3; two cameras, use of, 166n4.3; zoom, use of, 117, 118, 125, 127, 133, 134, 135, 139, 166n4.3 American International Pictures, 67 Andrew, Dudley, 11, 13 Anger, Kenneth, 87, 94–95, 165n3.3 apparatus theory, 51, 53, 145, 147, 151. See also gaze theory Aragon, Louis, 73 Arendt, Hannah, 163nI.1 Arlen, Michael (Living-Room War), 60, 63–64, 65 Artaud, Antonin, 92, 94 artificial blood. See squibs and artificial blood

assaultive gaze, 16, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158. See also gaze theory; male gaze; sadism authenticity: counterculture and, 17, 86, 95, 96–99; definition of, 16–17; freeze-frames and, 84–85, 87, 95, 102–6, 108–9, 111–14; frontierism and, 124–25, 135; indexicality and, 18, 19, 21, 59; military reconnaissance and, 51; multiple cameras and, 32, 38–39, 41–42, 44–49, 53; New Left and, 17, 95, 97; occult and, 86, 92–95; photography and, 18, 84, 86, 87, 104, 109, 112; pornography and, 35; race and, 98–99, 100–2, 110–11; rock music and, 86, 100–2, 103; slow motion and, 34–36, 46–47, 53; television and, 31, 39, 41, 58–59, 60, 64–66; violence and, 4, 6, 7, 8, 17–23, 33, 35, 59, 73–75, 84, 91–92; technology and, 7, 13, 18–23, 147, 159; squibs and artificial blood and, 59, 67, 73–77, 78–81; zooms and, 117, 121, 135 Balázs, Béla, 73, 134 Barker, Jennifer, 15, 148, 149, 150, 151, 158 Barker, Martin, 3, 6 Barthes, Roland, 47, 87, 91, 103 Bataille, Georges, 76–77, 85, 91–92

183

184

Index

Baudry, Jean-Louis, 14, 51, 52, 53 Bazin, André, 18, 47, 71, 72, 90, 137 Bellour, Raymond, 90, 112, 113 Belton, John, 115, 117, 127, 129, 134 Benjamin, Walter, 12, 14, 34, 91, 122, 132–33, 136 Berman, Marshall, 16 Bersani, Leo, 166nC.2 Big Heat, The, 81 Birmingham campaign (1963), 106, 107, 111 blackface, 100–1 Blood Feast (Lewis), 68, 70 Bloom, Verna, 69 Blow-Up, 87, 106, 134, 165n3.4 Bonnie and Clyde (Penn), 1, 2, 7–8, 18–19, 25–36, 42–49, 55, 57, 66, 69, 147 Brenez, Nicole, 11, 12 Breton, André, 72, 73, 76 British Hell’s Angels, 94, 95, 165n3.3 broadcast news. See television, journalism Buñuel, Luis, 164n2.3 Bürger, Peter, 48 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 85, 111 Cage, John, 163n1.1, 163n1.2 Caillois, Roger, 122 Cammell, Donald, 165n3.3 Canby, Vincent, 74, 75, 118, 134 Capitalism, 18, 19, 20, 22, 120–21, 123, 125, 129–30, 132, 133, 135, 141–42, 147, 159. See also neoliberalism Champlin, Charles, 33, 57 Chinatown, 164n2.3 Chong, Sylvia, 78 Church of Satan. See LaVey, Anton Cinema of Attraction, 14 cinéma-vérité, 83, 84, 85, 104, 112 Clean Air Act, 142 Clean Water Act, 142 Clockwork Orange, A (Kubrick), 145–46, 159–60

close-ups, 73, 131–32, 134 Clover, Carol, 15–16, 152–57 Comolli, Jean-Louis, 35, 36, 46, 49, 51, 53 conservationism, 141 conservatism, 17, 94, 98, 112, 125, 135 Contempt (Godard), 68 Conversation, The, 138, 139–40 counterculture, 4, 17, 18, 19, 93, 96–99, 100, 111, 124–25, 135 Crowley, Aleister, 165n3.3 Crowther, Bosley, 7, 8, 32–33, 49 Cruising, 10 Cuyahoga River fire (1969), 142 Days of Rage (1969), 98 deep ecology, 142–43. See also Naess, Arne Deep Throat, 35 del Río, Elena, 15 Deleuze, Gilles, 73, 109, 112–13, 156, 166nC.2 Democratic National Convention (1968), 60, 65, 66, 69, 98 Deren, Maya, 87 Dick Van Dyke Show, The, 40 Diddley, Bo, 100 Direct Cinema, 117 Dirty Dozen, The, 7 Dirty Harry, 121, 138, 139–40 Doane, Mary Ann, 39, 47, 73, 103, 131–32, 134 Dressed to Kill, 10 Du Par, Ed, 37. See also Vitaphone Earth Day (1970), 121, 140, 142 Easy Rider, 97 Ebert, Roger, 1, 2, 8, 9, 32, 55, 57, 74 ecofeminism, 143 ecology, 121, 140, 141, 142–43 ecstasy: apocalypse and, 98, 99, 106, 112, 114; authenticity and, 96–98, 102, 103–5, 109, 114; counterculture and, 96–98; death

Index and, 91–92; definition of, 85–86; fantasies of in late 1960s and early 1970s, 19–20, 21, 85, 86, 87, 111; freeze-frames and, 21–22, 86–87, 92, 95, 96, 102–5, 106, 108, 109, 111, 112, 114; money shot and, 35; New Left and, 96, 97; photography and, 19, 86, 87, 104, 106 109, 112; occult and, 19, 22, 86, 92–95, 96; race and, 22, 86, 98–99, 100–2, 110–11; rock music and, 19, 22, 86, 96, 99–102; violence and, 98, 99, 102, 108; zombies and, 110, 111, 112 Endangered Species Act, 142 Environmental Defense Fund, 142 environmentalism, 20, 22, 120–21, 124, 140, 142–44 Environmental Protection Agency, 142 Epstein, Jean, 73, 134 Eraserhead, 158 Esquire magazine, 4–6 Faithfull, Marianne, 165n3.3 female gaze, 152, 154, 156. See also masochism; reactive gaze Few Dollars More, A, 7 figures: definition of, 4, 11–13; film theory and, 11, 15–16, 52–53, 147–48, 150–51, 155–57, 158–59, 161; freeze-frames and, 19, 21–22, 85, 87, 102, 109, 114; multiplecamera montage and, 18–19, 21, 32, 49, 52–53; shock, compared to, 15; squibs and artificial blood and, 19, 21, 67, 73–74, 75, 79; technologies as, 4, 6–7, 11, 12, 13, 18–23, 146–47, 158, 159, 161; zooms and, 19, 20, 22, 117, 118, 120, 129, 130, 132, 134, 139, 144 film noir, 164n2.3 Final Girl, 152, 153, 154, 156, 160. See also Clover, Carol; horror films First Person. See Gulf Playhouse, The Ford, Henry, 141 Frampton, Hollis, 87

185

Free Speech Movement, 125. See also New Left; Students for a Democratic Society freeze-frames: authenticity and, 18, 20, 21, 22, 84–86, 87, 95–98, 102–6, 108–9, 111–14, 147; avantgarde and, 86, 87; art cinema and, 86; Blow-Up and, 87; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and, 85, 111; ecstasy and, 19–20, 21–22, 85–87, 91–92, 95, 96–97, 102–5, 111–12; figure, as, 4, 7, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21–22, 85, 87, 102, 109, 114, 146–47, 150–51, 158, 159, 161; Gimme Shelter and, 19, 22, 84–85, 86, 87, 88–90, 102, 103–5, 106, 108, 109, 112, 113, 165n3.5; graphic violence and, 84, 85, 88–90, 91–92, 102, 104, 105–9, 111–12, 114, 164n3.1; Joe and, 85, 111; La jetée and, 87; Night of the Living Dead and, 19, 22, 85, 86, 87, 105–9, 111, 112, 113, 114, 165n3.5; occult and, 94–95; Parallax View, The, and, 85; Persona and, 87; photography and, 22, 84–85, 87, 90, 91, 104, 108, 109, 113; photojournalism and, 106, 111–12, 164n3.1; Who’s That Knocking on My Door? and, 111; Wild Bunch, The, and, 111; zombies, similarity to, 106, 109, 112. See also photograms French Connection, The, 57 Freud, Sigmund, 65, 166nC.2 Friends of the Earth, 142 Fromm, Erich, 16 frontierism, 22, 66, 86, 111, 118–19, 121, 124–25, 129–30, 133, 135, 138, 139, 140–41, 142, 165n4.1, 166n4.2. See also Manifest Destiny; New Frontier gaze theory, 14, 15, 51–53, 145, 147, 148, 151, 153, 154, 155, 160. See also male gaze; sadism

186

Index

Gimme Shelter (Maysles), 19, 22, 83–85, 86–90, 92, 96, 97, 99, 101– 5, 106, 108–9, 112, 113, 164n3.1 Gitlin, Todd, 97 Godard, Jean-Luc, 25, 68 Godfather, The, 57 Goffman, Erving, 124 Goldwater, Barry, 17 Gosford Park (Altman), 166n4.3 Greenpeace, 142 Gulf Playhouse, The, 44 Gunning, Tom, 14, 74 Hall, Stuart, 36 Hallin, Daniel C., 61, 63 Hammer Studios, 67, 68 Hansen, Miriam Bratu, 132–33 haptics, 15, 16, 23, 147, 148–51, 157–58, 160. See also touch Harvey, David, 125 Hayden, Tom, 17. See also Port Huron Statement Heath, Stephen, 11 Heidegger, Martin, 20, 115, 119, 120, 121, 130, 133–34, 141, 144 Hell’s Angels, 89, 92. See also British Hell’s Angels Hiroshima mon amour, 149, 150 Hoberman, J., 2, 108 Ho Chi Minh Trail, 50–51 Hollywood Production Code. See Production Code hooks, bell, 110 horror films, 14, 15, 152, 153–54, 155–56, 157, 158. See also Blood Feast; Clover, Carol; Last House on the Left; Lowenstein, Adam; Night of the Living Dead; slasher film Huizinga, Johan, 122, 138 Hulburd, Bud, 55 Hunter, Meredith, 83, 89, 92, 102, 165n3.4 Huntley-Brinkley Report, 56, 60, 164n2.1 Igloo White, 49–51

I Love Lucy, 40, 41 indexicality, 18, 19, 21, 59, 71–72, 75, 90–91 instant replay, 31, 41, 85 Invocation of My Demon Brother (Anger), 94, 95, 165n3.3 Jagger, Mick, 88–89, 90, 92, 99, 101–2, 165n3.3 Jay, Martin, 12, 76 Jazz Singer, The, 37–38 Jennings, Peter, 63 Joe, 85, 111 Johnson, Robert, 100, 101 Jones, Brian, 165n3.3 Jones, Eugene, 112 Jones, Jeff, 98 Kael, Pauline: on Bonnie and Clyde, 8, 33, 49; on Gimme Shelter, 83–85, 93, 104; on McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 134; on Wild Bunch, The, 75 Kendrick, James, 3, 10 Kennedy, John F., 17, 39, 83, 84, 105, 164n3.1. See also New Frontier Kinder, Marsha 11 Kolker, Robert, 117–18, 130, 132, 133, 135, 137 Krauss, Rosalind, 72, 73 Kristeva, Julia, 76–77 Kubrick, Stanley, 145, 146 Kuralt, Charles, 63 Kurosawa, Akira, 34, 68 L’age d’or (Buñuel), 164n2.3 La jetée, 87 Lacan, Jacques, 52 Laplanche, Jean, 111, 166nC.2 Last House on the Left, 14 Last Year in Marienbad, 31 LaVey, Anton, 93, 165n3.2 Lebarthe, André, 46 Left-Handed Gun, The (Penn), 44, 163n1.3 leftism. See New Left Lewis, Herschell Gordon, 68, 70

Index Limerick, Patricia, 165n4.1 Little Big Man (Penn), 57 Loan, Nguyen Ngoc. See Nguyen Ngoc Loan Long Goodbye, The (Altman), 117, 135, 164n2.3, 166n4.4 Lucifer Rising (Anger), 165n3.3 Lyotard, Jean-François, 11–12, 13, 151, 166nC.1 male gaze, 14, 152, 154, 158. See also assaultive gaze; gaze theory; sadism M*A*S*H (Altman), 20, 117, 135–39, 140 Manifest Destiny, 20, 118–20, 135 Marks, Laura, 15, 148–49, 151, 157–58 Martin, Adrian, 11, 12 masochism, 13, 14, 15–16, 23, 147, 151–58, 159, 160–61, 166nC.2. See also female gaze; reactive gaze Maysles brothers (Albert and David), 19, 83, 84, 85, 93, 106, 109, 165n3.5. See also Maysles, David Maysles, David, 89, 90 McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Altman), 20, 115–17, 118, 119, 120–24, 125–35, 144, 165n4.1 McKinney, Devin, 10, 75 McLuhan, Marshall, 69 Mean Streets (Scorsese), 19, 21, 57, 59, 79–81 media effects research, 6 Medium Cool (Wexler), 68, 69–70 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 147, 151 Metz, Christian, 11, 14, 51, 52, 53, 90, 148, 158 Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, The (MACV), 61 Miracle Worker, The (Penn), 44, 163n1.3 Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam (1969), 61 Morgan, J. P., 141 Morgenstern, Joseph, 2, 7, 57, 75 Muir, John, 141, 142

187

multiple-camera montage: authenticity and, 18, 20, 21, 22, 38–39, 41–42, 44–49, 147; Bonnie and Clyde and, 18–19, 28–30, 31–32, 33–34, 36, 44–49; collage, compared to, 28, 30, 34, 36, 48, 163n1.2; conversion to sound, use during, 36–38; figure, as, 4, 7, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18–19, 20, 21, 22, 32, 49, 52–53, 146–47, 150–51, 158, 159, 161; gaze theory and, 19, 51–53; graphic violence and, 28–30, 32–36, 42, 44–49; military reconnaissance, relationship to, 18, 21, 22, 32, 50–51, 53, 147, 159; simultaneity and, 18, 28, 30, 32, 37–38, 42, 46–47; slow motion and, 28, 30, 31, 34, 35, 36, 46, 47, 53, 57; television, relationship to, 18–19, 31, 32, 38–42, 44, 46–49, 147, 163n1.2 Mulvey, Laura, 14, 16, 151–52 Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, 101 My Lai massacre, 63 Naess, Arne, 140, 143, 144 Napalm Girl. See Phan Thi Kim Phúc National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, 3, 4, 8, 67, 125, 166n4.2 National Wildlife Federation, 142 neoliberalism, 125 neo-noir, 164n2.3 New Frontier, 17, 20, 76, 118–20, 135 New Left, 17, 22, 63, 96, 97, 98, 112, 124–25, 159 Newman, David, 8 Nguyen Ngoc Loan, 55, 111. See also Saigon Execution Night of the Living Dead (Romero), 19, 22, 85, 86–87, 105–11, 112, 113–14 Nixon, Richard, 112, 142 North Vietnamese Army (NVA), 77–78

188

Index

O’Brien, Adam, 131 occult, 19, 22, 86, 92–95, 103, 124 optical unconscious, 12, 34, 91 Oswald, Lee Harvey, 31, 83, 84, 164–65n3.1 Pallenberg, Anita, 165n3.3 Parallax View, The, 85 Passion of the Christ, The, 1, 2 Pather Panchali, 158 Peckinpah, Sam, 2, 11, 34, 36, 50, 55, 57, 58, 67, 74, 79, 111, 145, 164n2.3 Peeping Tom, 154 Performance, 165n3.3 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 21, 71–72 Penn, Arthur, 2, 25, 28, 30, 32, 33, 36, 44, 46, 50, 55, 57, 68, 147, 163n1.1, 163n1.3 Pentagon Papers, 63 Persona, 87 Phan Thi Kim Phúc, 111, 112 phenomenological film criticism, 15, 147–51 Philco Television Playhouse, The, 38, 44, 163n1.3 photograms, 21–22, 84, 87, 90, 91, 94, 103, 104, 109, 113–14, 164n3.1. See also freeze-frames photography: authenticity and, 18, 84, 86, 87, 104, 109, 112; Bonnie and Clyde, appearance in, 42–44; ecstasy and, 19, 86, 87, 104, 106, 109, 112; freeze-frames and, 22, 84–85, 87, 90, 91, 104, 108, 109, 113; indexicality and, 18, 47, 71, 72, 90–91; Night of the Living Dead, and, 105–6, 107; occult and, 94–95; optical unconscious and, 12, 91; punctum and, 103; surrealism and, 72–73. See also freeze-frames; photograms; photojournalism photojournalism, 106, 111–12 Pierrot le fou (Godard), 66, 68 Pinchot, Gifford, 141, 142 Playhouse 90, 163n1.3

Plumwood, Val, 143 Pomerance, Murray, 132 pornography: money shot in, 15, 35, 156–57; pleasure and, 152–53, 154–55, 157; S/M and, 152, 154, 157–58, 160; violence as, 4, 55, 58, 163nI.1, 164n2.2 Port Huron Statement, 17, 95 preservationism, 141 Presley, Elvis, 100 Pressman, Gabe, 66 Prince, Stephen, 3, 10–11, 34–36, 57, 75–76 Production Code, 2–3, 4, 8, 10, 19, 21, 33, 60, 67, 70–71, 73, 147, 164n2.3 psychoanalytic film criticism, 15, 147, 151–58. See also apparatus theory; gaze theory; male gaze Rauschenberg, Robert, 25, 27, 28, 30, 163n1.1, 163n1.2 reactive gaze, 16, 152, 155, 156, 157, 158. See also female gaze; masochism Reagan, Ronald, 93 Resurrection City, 69 Richards, Keith, 102, 165n3.3 Rivera, Geraldo, 164n3.1 rock music: ecstasy and, 19, 22, 86, 99–102, 103, 124; race and, 100–2; rhythm and blues and, 100–1. See also Rolling Stones Rockefeller, John D., 141 Rodowick, D. N., 11, 13 Rolling Stones, 92, 94, 95, 97, 99, 100, 101, 165n3.3. See also Altamont; Jagger, Mick; Richards, Keith Romero, George A., 19, 85, 106, 108, 109, 111, 165n3.5 Roosevelt, Theodore (Teddy), 141, 142 Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 108 Routt, William D., 20, 22 Rubin, Jerry, 95

Index Saarinen, Aline, 65, 66, 76 sadism: film violence and, 6, 7, 49, 145, 146, 147; theories of, 14, 15, 16, 23, 151–58, 159, 160–61. See also assaultive gaze; gaze theory; male gaze Safer, Morley, 65 Saigon Execution, 55, 56, 58, 64, 78, 164n2.1 Sanjuro (Kurosawa), 66 Sanshiro Sugata (Kurosawa), 34 Santa Barbara oil spill (1969), 142 Santner, Eric, 86, 111 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 160, 161 Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., 4, 164n2.2 Sconce, Jeffrey, 94 Scorsese, Martin, 19, 57, 79, 81, 111, 164n2.3 Scott, A. O., 1, 2 Self, Robert, 122, 135 Seven Samurai (Kurosawa), 34 Sharits, Paul, 87 Sharrett, Christopher, 10, 75, 164n2.3 shock, 13, 14–15, 74 Silverman, Kaja, 156 slasher film, 152, 153. See also Final Girl Slocum, J. David, 3, 6 Slotkin, Richard, 124, 129 slow motion: art cinema, use in, 34, 36; avant-garde and, 34, 36, 86; authenticity and, 34–36, 46–47, 53; Bonnie and Clyde and, 18, 28, 30, 34, 35, 46, 47; freeze-frames and, 86, 90; Gimme Shelter and, 101; Kurosawa, Akira, and, 34; Mean Streets and absence of, 79; multiple-camera montage and, 28, 30, 31, 34, 35, 36, 46, 47, 53; Peckinpah, Sam, and, 34, 36; surrealism and, 73; television, use on, 31, 36, 46, 47; Wild Bunch, The, and, 1, 34, 57, 74 S/M (sadomasochism), 152, 154, 157, 158, 160. See also masochism; pornography; sadism

189

snuff film, 154–55 Sobchack, Vivian, 8–9, 11, 12, 15, 148, 149–50, 151, 159, 160–61 squibs and artificial blood: abject and, 76–77; authenticity and, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 59, 73–77, 78–81, 147; Bonnie and Clyde and, 55, 57, 66; color and, 68–69; figure, as, 4, 7, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 67, 73–74, 75, 79, 146–47, 150–51, 158, 159, 161; French Connection, The, and, 57; Godfather, The, and, 57; graphic violence and, 55–59, 66–71, 73–77, 78–81; Little Big Man and, 57; Mean Streets and, 19, 21, 57, 59, 79–81; Production Code and, 19, 60, 67, 70–71, 73; tactility and, 19, 21, 59, 67–68, 70, 71, 73–74, 76, 79, 147; television, relationship to, 19, 21, 22, 57–59, 77–78, 147; Wild Bunch, The, and, 19, 21, 55, 56–57, 59, 66–68, 71, 73–77, 79, 81 Stern, Lesley, 74, 76 Still (Reels [B+C]). See Rauschenberg, Robert Students for a Democratic Society, 17. See also Free Speech Movement; New Left surrealism, 72–73, 164n2.3 Taxi Driver (Scorsese), 164n2.3 Tector, Lyle, 115, 117, 127, 129, 134 telephoto lenses, 137, 166n4.3. See also zooms television: authenticity and, 31, 39, 41, 60, 65; flow and, 31; freezeframes and, 112; instant replay on, 31; journalism, 18–19, 31, 39–40, 55, 57–66, 69, 74, 76, 117, 147, 164n2.1, 164–65n3.1; live coverage, 39–40, 41; media effects research on, 6; military reconnaissance and, 49–51, 163n1.4; multiple cameras and, 31, 32, 38–41; multiplecamera montage, relationship to,

190

Index

television (continued) 18–19, 21, 22, 31, 38–42, 44, 46–49, 147, 163n1.2; simultaneity and, 31, 39–41, 47; slow motion and, 31, 36, 46, 47; sports coverage on, 31, 41; squibs and artificial blood, relationship to, 19, 21, 22, 57–59, 77–78, 147; violence on, 19, 21, 31, 39, 57–66, 67, 77–78, 164n3.1; zooms and, 117 Tet Offensive, 55, 56, 62, 63, 77, 78, 164n2.1. See also Vietnam War Thich Quang Duc, 65 Thompson, David, 166n4.3 Till, Emmett, 106, 107, 111 Time magazine, 25, 26, 28, 30–31, 32, 93, 97 touch, 13, 14, 15, 16, 90, 91, 105, 147, 148–51, 153, 158, 159, 161. See also haptics; squibs and artificial blood: tactility and Trang Bang, 64 Trilling, Lionel, 16 Truffaut, François, 25 Tuckner, Howard, 64, 76, 164n2.1 Un chien andalou (Buñuel), 164n2.3 Valenti, Jack, 3, 8, 60, 67 Viet Cong, 78, 111 Vietnam War; military reconnaissance and, 17, 18–19, 21, 22, 32, 49–51, 147, 159, 163n1.4; television, depictions on, 19, 55, 56, 58, 60–66, 77–78, 164n2.1 vigilantism, 105, 110, 112, 121, 139, 166n4.2 violence: authenticity and, 4, 6, 7, 8, 17–23, 33, 35, 59, 73–75, 84, 91–92; classical Hollywood and, 3, 10, 56; concept of, 3; control, efforts to, 6, 7–11, 22–23, 146; documentary depictions of, 9, 83–85 (see also Gimme Shelter); ecstasy and, 98, 99, 102, 108;

freeze-frames and, 84, 85, 88–90, 91–92, 102, 104, 105–9, 111–12, 114, 164n3.1; frontierism and, 124–25, 135, 166n4.2; media effects research on, 6; photojournalism and, 111–12; pleasures of (see masochism; sadism); pornography, compared to, 4, 55, 58, 163nI.1, 164n2.2; public demonstrations of, 4, 8–9, 33, 60, 66, 69, 98; racialized depictions of, 19, 22, 55–56, 77–78, 83, 86, 100–2, 105– 8, 110–11; television depictions of, 19, 21, 31, 39, 55, 56, 57–66, 67, 77–78, 84. See also individual film titles; specific film genres Virilio, Paul, 49, 50 Vitaphone, 36–38 voodoo. See zombies Vo Suu, 164n2.1 Walker Commission, 66 Waters, Muddy, 100 Watts riots, 65 Wavelength, 134 Weather Underground, 98. See also Jones, Jeff Week End (Godard), 66, 68 Wexler, Haskell, 68, 69 Whitaker, John C., 142 White Dog, 10 White, Richard, 143 White Zombie, 110 Whitman, Walt, 129 Who’s That Knocking at My Door? (Scorsese), 111 widescreen, 137 Wild Bunch, The (Peckinpah), 1, 2, 3, 19, 21, 34, 36, 55, 56–57, 59, 66–68, 69, 71, 73–77, 79, 81, 111, 164n2.3 Williams, Linda, 13–14, 15, 16, 35, 152–58, 164n2.2 Williams, Raymond, 31 Wolfe, Charles, 37–38

Index Wolfe, Tom, 164n2.2 Woodstock (1968 festival), 99 Woodstock, 99 Worster, Donald, 124 Yippies. See Jerry Rubin Zapruder, Abraham, 164n3.1 Žižek, Slavoj, 42 zombies: freeze-frames, compared to, 106, 109, 112; race and, 110–11; voodoo and, 105, 109. See also Night of the Living Dead zooms: Altman, Robert, use of, 117, 118, 125, 127, 133, 134, 135, 139, 166n4.3; authenticity and, 18, 20, 21, 22, 115, 147; close-up and,

191 131–32, 134; controversy, regarding use, 117–18; Conversation, The, and, 138, 139–40; Dirty Harry and, 121, 138, 139–40; graphic violence and, 118, 119, 126–27, 128, 130–31, 135–37, 139–40; figure, as, 4, 7, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 117, 118, 120, 129, 130, 132, 134, 139, 143–44, 146–47, 151, 158, 159, 161; function, 117, 120; Long Goodbye, The, and, 117, 135, 166n4.4; M*A*S*H and, 20, 117, 120, 135–39; McCabe and Mrs. Miller and, 20, 117, 118, 119, 125– 35, 140, 144; Night of the Living Dead and, 108, 114; television and, 66, 117