Whitehead and Levinas

An essay of mine, “Self-enjoyment and Concern: On Whitehead and Levinas,” has just been published in the new volume Beyond Metaphysics?: Explorations in Alfred North Whitehead s Late Thought, edited by Roland Faber, Brian G. Henning, and Clinton Combs. Since the price of the volume is beyond ridiculous (US$101 list and at Amazon, or marked down to US$67.68 at Barnes and Noble), I am making my own essay available here (pdf).

There’s lots of good stuff in the volume aside from my essay, I wish it were all available at a more reasonable price.

I feel that my own essay is a bit underdeveloped; there is much more to be said about Levinas than the brief and cursory discussion I offer here; but, for what it’s worth, I stand by my basic argument.

Jean Renoir, La Chienne (1931)

The latest issue of Quarterly Review of Film and Video contains a section on films that ought to be on DVD, but currently are not. Many authors contributed short articles; I wrote about Jean Renoir’s La Chienne (1931). Since the whole issue is behind a paywall, and if you don’t have access to the journal through a university library or some such, you must pay the ridiculous fee of US$30 to get access to a single 1000-word article, I have made my contribution available for free here.

Survival of the Dead

George Romero’s latest zombie film, Survival of the Dead (2009), is cogent and powerful, and fully worthy of Romero’s life work. It’s a sequel to Diary of the Dead (2007), and it bears something of the same relation to its predecessor that the much-underrated Day of the Dead (1985) bore to its predecessors (Night, from 1968, and Dawn, from 1978) in Romero’s first zombie series. Stylistically, Survival makes no concessions to the 21st century: it is defiantly old school in its editing, in its characterizations, and even in the (relative) crudity of its special effects. It is exactly the same sort of film that Romero was making thirty years ago; and I loved every minute of it. 

What makes Survival of the Dead seem relevant and contemporary, rather than merely retro, is (surprisingly, perhaps) the way it conveys a sense of exhaustion. The filmmaking doesn’t seem to me to be in the least exhausted, but the content of the film is a very pronounced sense of exhaustion and entropy. Where Diary of the Dead was a highly remediated film, commenting on 21st century networked media, Survival suggests that the communications media themselves are over and done with. In the first few minutes, we see a laptop and (woo!) an iPhone, but these disappear, or are forgotten, as the movie proceeds. Indeed, in those first few minutes, the soldiers-gone-rogue whose Sergeant leader (Alan Van Sprang) narrates the film capture and (apparently) eliminate the Net-connected filmmakers who struggled to bear witness throughout Diary. A teenage geek boy (Devon Bostick), the owner of the aforementioned iPhone, who has more or less joined the band of rogue soldiers, finds himself reduced to last-century analog technologies (like a vinyl record player).  So much for mediation and remediation; the WiFi networks have finally broken down, and we are now stuck in an interminable endgame that is no longer being televised, an ending (of the world) that itself refuses to end.

After a few misadventures, the soldiers reach an island off the Delaware coast, and therefore sheltered from the massive “unknown unknowns” of life on the mainland. Instead, they stumble into a crazy war between two patriarchs, the leaders of opposing (Irish? judging from the names and accents) families. The patriarchs have been enemies ever since childhood, we are told. They have come to blows now because one of them  — Patrick O’Flynn (Kenneth Walsh) — wants to exterminate the zombies, even if they were once family members; while the other one — Seamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick) — wants to keep them around (suitably chained and restrained) in the hopes of ultimately finding a cure, or at least training them to eat animal instead of human flesh. 

 

Despite (or because of) these disagreements, the patriarchs are really mirror images of one another. They are both egomaniacal despots, bitter, stubborn, and self-willed, lording it over their families, followers, and flunkies. They have both responded to the collapse of our high-tech, globalized society by reinventing an archaic social order, one that owes more to the movies than it does to the actual everyday life of pre-zombie, pre-catastrophic modern society. O’Flynn gets a bit too much pleasure out of his fights with his identical twin daughters, one of whom lives (and is sensible where he is crazy), while the other has become a zombie (both played by Kathleen Munroe); while Muldoon has chained up his zombified wife in the kitchen, where she continues to perform a simulation of the duties that she had when alive. The oppressed women of both clans contrast with the one woman in the soldier group, referred to only as “Tomboy” (Athena Karkanis), who has the same toughness, intelligence, and clear-headedness that we’ve seen in previous Romero heroines.

A recent review of the movie’s DVD and BluRay release complains that “the O’Flynns and the Muldoons are barely convincing as modern families because they dress and act in a way that feels like an awkward mix of Lorna Doone and old-school Western.” But this archaism is not a flaw in the movie; rather, it is precisely Romero’s point. He’s taking aim, precisely, at the survivalism that is a prominent strain in contemporary American ideology and culture. Think of the Tea Party today, or of Ron Paul’s Presidential run a couple of years ago. Behind the current frothing at the mouth over the alleged “socialism” of Obama’s exceedingly cautious and right-of-center reforms, there’s a hatred of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, and the fantasy of an earlier, white-settler America. We live in an age of “capitalist realism,” where the only alternative to neoliberal capitalism that we can imagine is outright catastrophe. But the nativist, survivalist strain in American culture actually welcomes the prospect of such catastrophe, because it fantasizes the post-catastrophic landscape as one in which “individualism” and “self-reliance” could actually flourish

Survival of the Dead actually gives us this post-catastrophic landscape. In the real world we live in, today, neoliberalism’s scorched-earth policies are in process of exterminating all forms of sociality, association,meaningfulness, and hope, leaving us only with a “marketplace” of private families and individuals locked in eternal Malthusian competition in order to survive and to consume. It isn’t too difficult to foresee the prospect that, sooner or later, these policies will end by destroying the neoliberal order itself, leaving us with nothing at all. Such is Romero’s world of the (un)dead: everything has collapsed, only we don’t realize it yet, so we continue on in our zombified state, crying out with desires for destruction and consumption that will never be satisfied, no matter how many of the still-living we consume. From the point of view of, say, Goldman Sachs, such a collapse would be the “unintended consequence” (oops!) of policies that they engaged in with no other motive than to enrich themselves. But from the point of view of the Tea Partiers and Ron Paul-style Libertarians, such a consummation is devoutly to be wished. Social implosion clears the ground for the survivalists to live their dreams.  

Survival of the Dead takes a close look at the Real behind this American fantasy: it’s monomaniacal, paranoid, autocratic, misogynistic, and utterly self-deluded in its belief that it is possible to be independent of the burdens and obligations of otherness. What the survivalists fail to understand is that they themselves are already zombies while they are still alive; because their own form of life is itself a dead archaism, which continues only because they are unable to recognize that it is, already, long dead. This is the source of the sense of exhaustion that I mentioned earlier.

Romero’s zombie films have always been more about what the stress of catastrophe and danger reveals about the living, would-be survivors, than they have been about the state of being of the zombies themselves. This tendency is pushed to an extreme in Survival. For in this movie, the zombies themselves are scarcely even a menace. Anybody with a gun and ammunition (and there seems to be no scarcity of these) is well protected, and has little or nothing to worry about. The menace comes from the living, not from the dead. Most of the people who get killed in the course of the movie are murdered by other living human beings; even the genre-requisite zombie swarm, unleashing an orgy of destruction at the end, is only the result of living-human stupidity and pointless rivalry.

Survival of the Dead has many small pleasures, and moments of affective ambivalence and intensity, that are reminiscent of Romero’s earlier zombie movies. I am thinking of the moments of hesitation, of suspension between living and dying and coming back from the dead; and the tension involved in killing oneself, or somebody else one cares for, in order to avert such a return. There’s the insuppressible longing that the undead might retain something of what they were before, and the disappointment (and often, mortal danger) when it becomes clear that, inevitably, they do not. (I am thinking, especially, of the moment when O’Flynn’s daughter is bitten by her undead identical twin, as well as of the moment when Tomboy kills the other soldier with whom she has been bantering throughout, in order to spare him zombification). What’s new in Survival is only the context in which these events occur. There is no longer anything like the well-stocked shopping malls or Dawn, or the military bunker of Day, or even the yuppie enclave of Land of the Dead; and, as I’ve already noted, the network that seemed to have survived its human users in Diary has also, for the most part, gone down. 

In retrospective comparison, Romero’s earlier zombie films had a perverse hopefulness, noticeable only in contrast to its absence here. We are left with a group of three survivors: the Sergeant, the tough woman soldier, and the teenaged nerd. They themselves concede that the prospects for any sort of affective bond or positive sociality, even among the three of them, is pretty slim. This may be contrasted to the island paradise to which the survivors escape at the end of Day of the Dead (a utopian moment, even though a heavily ironized and thoroughly precarious one), or even to the filmmakers-in-a-van collective at the end of Diary. The film ends, not with the escape of the three, but with a final long shot in which the two patriarchs, who have not exhausted their idiotic rivalry even by killing one another, shamble as zombies to yet another shootout; they ineffectually fire their empty pistols at one another, against the backdrop of an outrageously enormous (rising or setting?) moon. 

Life and Death of a Porno Gang

I’ve submitted my proposal for the SCMS conference next March. It’s part of a panel that Zoran and I have organized on post-war Serbian film.

After Hope: Life and Death of a Porno Gang
Mladen Djordjevic’s Life and Death of a Porno Gang (Serbia, 2009) contains explicit depictions of sex and violence, including scenes of rape, murder, the making of “snuff films,” and suicide. In its extremity, the film shares many characteristics with the transgressive art cinema of Western Europe and East Asia that has received so much critical attention in recent years (e.g. Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, Takashi Miike’s Audition, Park Chan-wook’s vengeance trilogy). However, Life and Death of a Porno Gang differs greatly from these other films for reasons that have much to do with its particular geographical and historical location (in post-socialist and post-civil-war Serbia), and with the types of economic and political investments that it explores. Djordjevic’s protagonists (an aspiring young film director, and the group of actors and sex-industry performers with whom he works) find themselves caught between the corrupt gangster capitalism of the new social order and the repressive traditionalism of the old peasant Serbia. In such conditions, what starts out as a voyage toward potential sexual and social liberation (implicitly referencing Dusan Makavejev’s great 1972 film WR: Mysteries of the Organism) turns into a nightmarish, nihilistic flight towards oblivion. But if Life and Death of a Porno Gang is not a liberatory film, it is also not a transgressive one. In contrast to the extreme cinema of Western Europe, it does not accord any aesthetic or moral efficacy to the excesses that it depicts. There is no self-congratulation at the rupturing of taboos. Rather, Life and Death of a Porno Gang portrays, and embodies, the aesthetic and moral impasse that results from a social atmosphere of cynicism and demoralization. This atmosphere is the result, not just of the horror of the nationalist wars that tore apart the former Yugoslavia, but also of the general process under which the formerly socialist nations entered, upon unequal terms, into the world of Western capitalism. All this becomes apparent both in the narrative content of the film and in its stylistics (which combine a pseudo-documentary, hand-held-camera look and feel with an oddly elliptical editing strategy). Life and Death of a Porno Gang speaks of, and to, a time when hope has been exhausted, and when it seems that There Is No Alternative (what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism”). If it does nonetheless suggest a way out from the universal rule of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, this is only because it speaks so marginally and so obliquely, from a position of humiliation and opprobrium.

Whitehead vs Spinoza & Deleuze on the virtual

Jeffrey Bell, in another one of his superb readings of Spinoza (or, more precisely, perhaps, of Deleuze’s Spinoza), discusses “Eternity and Duration”, by which he also means the difference between the virtual/problematic (which he associates with Spinoza’s substance) and the actual/determinate (which he associates with Spinoza’s modes). Bell says that, in Spinoza,

the human Mind that is eternal is not the determinate, identifiable mind, but rather the immanent condition for the possibility of such a determinate identification; it is, in short, the infinite power of self-ordering becoming (the ‘infinite enjoyment of existing’) that allows for the possibility of determinate, singular bodies, and for the determinate singular minds that are the ideas of these bodies.

This means — to give a crude reduction of Bell’s argument — that Spinoza’s mind/substance/God is equivalent to Deleuze’s virtual; it is an immanent potentiality. Any actual mind/body is a particular finite determination or actualization of that potentiality (a “solution” to that problematic). There is a continual movement from the problematic — “what can a body do?” — to particular actualizations, or to “modifications and affections of determinate bodies and minds,” that in effect instantiate or realize this problematic. And conversely, there is a counter-movement from the actual back to the virtual, due to the fact that “our determinate bodies and minds require the problematic as the ‘infinite enjoyment of existing’.” The ethical movement in Spinoza, and implicitly in Deleuze as well, is this countervailing movement “from the actual and determinate, from what this body is actually doing or has done, to the problematic and the virtual, the body as an eternity that is not to be confused with the determinate and which is indeed subject to many variations and which we can never fully possess.” This is how we attain Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge, or more generally the freedom that is the subject of Book 5 of The Ethics. Bell’s reformulation clarifies for me both how this works in Spinoza (against the initial impression that Book 5 is merely a retreat to conventional morality after the bold metaphysics and psychology of Books 1-4), and how central this all is to Deleuze’s own vision of the virtual, and indeed of liberation.

But I want to add an important point to this, by adding Whitehead to the discussion. For Whitehead never offers us such a movement back to the virtual as we find in Spinoza and in Deleuze. Indeed, Whitehead specifically declares himself to be inverting Spinoza in this crucial regard. In Whitehead’s own philosophy, “Spinoza’s ‘modes’ now become the sheer actualities; so that, though analysis of them increases our understanding, it does not lead us to the discovery of any higher grade of reality… In such monistic schemes [as Spinoza’s], the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, ’eminent’ reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents” (PR 7). In Whitehead’s resolutely pluralistic ontology, on the other hand, there are only modes or affections, the actual occasions. There is no substance, nothing behind the modes or affections, for them to be modes or affections of. This is because of Whitehead’s effort to get us away from “subject-predicate forms of thought.”

Nearly all the Spinozists and Deleuzians I know would reject Whitehead’s account as a misreading of Spinoza, a claim that Spinozian substance, or God (Deus sive Natura) is somehow transcendent, when in fact it is entirely immanent. (Bell promises to explain in a subsequent post how Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge, or his ascent from the actual back to the virtual, can “be understood in a way that doesn’t reintroduce transcendence”). However, I want to suggest that Whitehead is right. Even if it escapes transcendence, Spinozian substance is still a subject for all the predicates, a monism behind the pluralism. Whitehead, by his own admission, offers a philosophy that “is closely allied to Spinoza’s scheme of thought.” But if Whitehead does not quite set Spinoza on his feet (as Marx claimed to set Hegel on his feet, and as Deleuze claimed that Nietzsche had set Kant on his feet), he does unhinge Spinoza (in the way that, according again to Deleuze, Kant unhinges the classical notion of time, or casts it, in Shakespearean parlance, out of joint). He does this by dethroning substance, or — to put the matter back into Bell’s formulations with which I started this posting — by in a certain sense deprivileging the virtual, or at least rejecting the ethical priority of the virtual in Spinoza (and in Deleuze as well).

One can see this most clearly, I believe, by contrasting Whitehead’s God with Spinoza’s God. Whitehead secularizes God (PR 207) more radically and extensively than Spinoza does; Whitehead’s God, like Spinoza’s — and also like Deleuze/Guattari’s “body without organs,” as I argued in my book — is indeed associated with the virtual rather than the actual; but for this reason, God in Whitehead is curiously marginalized (as Substance in Spinoza is not). God operates for Whitehead as a sort of repository of the virtual, in that he envisages all “eternal objects” or potentialities indiscriminately (this is the “primordial” nature of God). God also functions as a sort of Bergsonian memory, in which all the past is preserved (this is the “consequent” nature of God). But by decentering God, and by splitting him up in this manner, Whitehead disallows anything like a return (a re-ascent?) back to the virtual from the actual. In this way, Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge is for Whitehead a kind of idealist illusion that needs to be rejected: the point being that it is still idealist, even if it is entirely immanent and doesn’t imply any recourse to transcendence. (A similar criticism is implied of Bergson, or at least of that side of Bergson that Deleuze also draws upon in his account of returning from the actual to the virtual. The primordial nature of God is Whitehead’s revision of Spinoza, and the consequent nature of God is Whitehead’s revision of Bergson; in both cases, Whitehead brings us further than Deleuze ever dares to).

If we speak of the virtual, instead of God, then the point is that Whitehead’s often-rejected (even by his admirers) theory of potentialities as “eternal objects” should be seen as a secularization of theories of the virtual such as we find in Deleuze (with its roots in both Spinoza and Bergson). To put the matter very quickly (there is a more extended discussion in my book; but doubtless this is also something that I will need to work out more fully  andcarefully): Every actual entity constitutes itself by a decision that accepts certain eternal objects, while rejecting others. The eternal objects that “ingress” into any actual entity are something like its predicates or qualities; except that no entity can be defined as just the sum of its predicates or qualities, because it is not just a collocation of characteristics (which would be to return to “subject-predicate forms of thought”). Rather, no list of an actual entity’s qualities can give us the entity, because such a list excludes a crucial dimension: the entity as process, or the way in which it selects, and then organizes or “harmonizes”, those qualities. This added dimension is a process or an action, rather than anything substantial (this is where I diverge somewhat from Graham Harman’s admirable notion of “allure,” as the dimension of an object that is withdrawn from, and in excess of, all its qualities).

For Whitehead, therefore, in consonance with Deleuze and Spinoza, something like the virtual or the potential needs to be determined or actualized. This actualization is the process of an actual entity (or, as Whitehead also calls it, an actual occasion) terminating in something absolutely determinate. But there is no movement back from the determinate to the virtual. Rather, once something is determinate, it perishes; and what has perished subsists as a “datum” for new determinations, which themselves, in taking up the data that precede them, must once again actualize potentiality.. and so on, ad infinitum. The movement from the virtual (potentiality, eternal objects) to the actual is involved with and necessary to, but it is also somewhat lateral or oblique to, the most crucial movement in Whitehead’s cosmology, which goes from perished entities (“data”) to new entities, which perish in their own term and thus provide data to new entities, etc.

In this way, I think, Whitehead avoids the Deleuzian suggestion (which one also finds in Bergson, and — in Bell’s reading — already in Spinoza, and currently in the wonderful neo-Schellingism of Iain Hamilton Grant) that the actual must always (with this “must” being something of an ethical imperative) return to the flux of virtuality whence it came. In this way, Whitehead is in accordance with Graham Harman (who rejects the association of Whitehead with Deleuze and Bergson precisely on these grounds). But, to the extent that Whitehead does nonetheless retain the importance of the virtual, he also stands apart from Harman’s actualism. My biggest objection to Harman has long been that he doesn’t give a sufficiently satisfying account of the genesis and perishing of objects, precisely because he rejects the very notion of the virtual, seeing it as something that “undermines” the existence of objects. Whitehead to my mind splits the difference between Deleuze and Harman, in a way that is preferable to either. (Note: I cannot end this discussion without an apology to Levi Bryant, who offers a version of “object-oriented ontology” that includes the virtual. I think that Whitehead represents a preferable alternative to Bryant’s position as well, in the sense that he obviates the need to see objects as somehow being “withdrawn.” But I do not have the space or the energy to pursue this argument here).

“I never liked anyone and I’m afraid of people”

Bret Easton Ellis’ latest novel, Imperial Bedrooms, is his first book since Lunar Park in 2005; and it is a sequel of sorts to Ellis’ very first novel, Less Than Zero, which made him famous or notorious upon its publication in 1985, when he was just 21. The new novel is retrospective; it looks at the characters from Less Than Zero twenty-five years later, when they have gone from being spoiled, bored, and passive college-age kids to middle-aged people of power and influence in Hollywood. Imperial Bedrooms is also an exercise in what can only be called Hollywood Noir; it’s rooted in this genre, and reflects back upon it, in the same way that Lunar Park was rooted in and reflected back upon the John Cheever-style suburban anomie novel and the Stephen King-style horror novel.

Imperial Bedrooms begins with the narrator Clay (who was also the narrator of Less Than Zero) complaining about the way “the author” of Less Than Zero played with his feelings and violated his privacy. While conceding that the earlier book “for the most part was an accurate portrayal… there was nothing in it that hadn’t happened” (3), Clay nonetheless portrays “the writer” of the earlier book as very nearly a stalker, and certainly an exploiter: “he was simply someone who floated through our lives and didn’t seem to care how flatly he perceived everyone or that he’d shared our secret failures with the world” (4-5). From this, Clay goes on to dissect the film that was made from Less Than Zero, and which notoriously turned the novel into a feel-good tale of Hollywood redemption. Clay makes much of the way the movie transformed him from a passive, continually high, and bored observer into “the movie’s moral compass, spouting AA jargon, castigating everyone’s drug use” (7). In the movie, Clay tries desperately to rescue his former best friend Julian, who is falling into an abyss. In actuality, though (i.e. in the original book), Clay had just watched passively, without lifting a finger, as Julian drifted into prostitution, heroin addiction, and general self-abasement. Julian dies in the movie “while a choir soared over the sound track” (9), because being “punished for all of his sins” is “what the movie demanded,” indeed “what all movies demanded” (8). But this, of course, does not happen in the novel Less Than Zero, or in the actuality that Clay is describing for us in Imperial Bedrooms. Rather, “the real Julian Wells was murdered over twenty years later” — in the course of Imperial Bedrooms, as we will eventually learn — “his body dumped behind an abandoned apartment building in Los Feliz after he had been tortured to death at another location” (9).

In these opening pages, we get the same sorts of impossible displacements, and metafictional arabesques, that were major elements of American Psycho and Glamorama, and that also fueled the opening chapter of Lunar Park, with its scathing and hilarious dissection of the life and literary career of “Bret Easton Ellis.” However, after these opening pages, the novel at least seems to play things pretty much straight. Once he’s established his point in the opening pages, Ellis no longer calls attention to the metafictional games and multiple media references — not because he has returned to some prior or more solid sense of “reality,” but precisely because the ubiquity of the mediasphere, the remediation and premediation of everything, and the indistinguishability of so-called “real life” from the movies (at the very same time that movies are ideological lies about the actualities they depict) are now so banally self-evident that they no longer need to be highlighted or called attention to; they are simply part of the book’s (and of our lives’) taken-for-granted background.

Or to put this same point a bit differently: the movies are always already being referenced at every point in Imperial Bedrooms, because all the characters are either directly involved in the movie business, or circle in its wider orbit. Clay, the narrator, is a successful screenwriter; at the start of the book he returns to L.A. in order to be involved in the casting of his latest film, and his social life seems to revolve entirely around industry parties and meetings at swank restaurants. Clay is also a person who seems determined to script his entire life as if it were a movie; though this becomes something of a joke in the course of the book — he isn’t really powerful, since he is just a screenwriter, not a director or a producer (e.g., 156). At the very beginning of the novel, Clay describes Julian’s actual (as opposed to cinematic) fate as follows: “I had put Julian there, and I’d seen what had happened to him in another — and very different — movie” (10); and then, on the very last page of the novel, he refers to “the fades, the dissolves, the rewritten scenes” of his own life (169).

I could go on analyzing the novel’s phrases closely, as I have done so far, because Ellis writes in a minimalist style in which every line seems to be a throwaway — and yet these seemingly casual and commonplace phrases are dense with portent and meaning. But I need to step back and (in the book’s own metaphoric style) view the book from a greater distance, with a long shot. Ellis’ books always have unreliable narrators of one sort or another; but in Imperial Bedrooms, it seems to me, Clay is unreliable in a new way. He isn’t factually unreliable, but emotionally unreliable. He doesn’t really tell us, or let us infer, how he feels about things. It’s not that he is being deliberately deceptive, so much as that he himself doesn’t know. He’s opaque to himself, and the movies are the screen through and upon which this opacity is played out. You might say, in psychoanalytic terms, that Clay fails to apprehend himself not because something is repressed, but because he seems not to have an “unconscious” at all. There are no depths; there is nothing there for the reader (viewer?) to work out, no way for us to understand Clay in a way that he doesn’t understand himself. Indeed, his motiveless behavior seems more or less clear to the other characters in the novel, who are always telling him, in exasperation at his latest irritating moves, that “you have a history of this, don’t you?” (87), or “what you really want to be doesn’t exist” (121), or “you’ve done this so many times before” (151). Nothing can be revealed, because nothing is hidden in the first place. Clay is almost a parody of the calculative rationality — which of course is anything but rational — that neoliberalism presumes to be paradigmatic of the individual.

As for what it is that Clay does over and over: well, basically, he is a serial sexual abuser and near- (or maybe even flat-out) rapist. What happens in the course of the novel — and what has happened, we are told, many times before — is that Clay, a man in his forties, gets twenty-something women (would-be actresses) to fuck him, in return for his (supposedly) getting them roles in his movies. There’s no naivete about this, on either side. The women are playing the game, in full awareness, as much as he is — albeit a game that is rigged in favor of middle-aged, sexually predatory men, and against the young women who enter into it. For in fact, Clay never delivers on his promises. As the women start sensing this, and seek to withdraw from him, he becomes more brutal and sexually abusive. The relationship is so crass and cynical, that it isn’t even disguised as something nicer. It happens something like half a dozen times in the course of Imperial Bedroom’s brief 167 pages: Rain Turner (the beautiful but incompetent actress who seems to be the object of desire, not just for Clay, but for all the heterosexual men in the novel) says she doesn’t want to have sex, or prepares to leave Clay’s apartment, and Clay gives her an ultimatum: do what I want, now, or I will call up and cancel your audition for the part you want so badly in my new movie. And in fact, “this is the way I always wanted the scene to play out and then it does and it has to because it doesn’t really work for me unless it happens like this” (119).

In addition, whenever the woman in question leaves him, Clay goes into a tailspin of depression and rage and anxiety, as if he had been betrayed by somebody whom he deeply loved — despite the fact that the whole situation, up to and including the woman’s departure, is something that Clay himself has pretty much all scripted in advance. So what we get, in the course of Imperial Bedrooms, is a lot of hysteria and emotional turmoil, all the more disturbing for the fact that it is depicted so coldly and flatly, and that there is nothing whatsoever behind it. Al of this builds up gradually, so it takes a while for the reader to figure out that there really isn’t anything to figure out, and that what we see is what we get. At the start of the book, we are inclined to think that Clay is just passive and vapid, the way he was in Less Than Zero; it takes us a while to realize just how complete a psychopath he is.

I said that, in genre terms, Imperial Bedrooms is Hollywood Noir; in interviews, Ellis has mentioned Raymond Chandler as a particular influence, and Chandler provides one of the novel’s epigraphs: “there is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.” Another one of the novel’s accomplishments is that it both honors the genre’s conventions, and turns them inside out. There are all the trappings of a violent and sordid Hollywood mystery: a femme fatale (Rain Turner), a menacing gangster  type (Rip Millar, the drug dealer from Less Than Zero), intimations of conspiracies, people spying on Clay and sending him disturbing anonymous messages, etc. But the logic of noir gets inverted, as we gradually realize that Clay is neither solving a mystery, nor finding himself lured into crime, vice, and ruin. Rather, he is one of the perpetrators, one of the people who makes the mystery. He doesn’t commit a murder for money or for a woman — both of these are things that he already has easy access to. The femme fatale is essentially his victim, rather than the reverse. Even the massive betrayal that Clay commits at the end of the book is not a surprise, since he has already confessed to it in the opening pages.

There’s an incredible coldness in Imperial Ballrooms; and this is something that has to do with the background of comfort and power and privilege that the novel depicts: a comfort and power and privilege that all the rich white men in this novel have, and take entirely for granted. In this sense, the novel is not about the fictions that Hollywood produces, so much as it is about the people who produce them. Beneath the flatness and coldness, there’s a savagery about Hollywood here that rivals the great portrayals by Nathanael West (Day of the Locust) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Last Tycoon). It’s as if Ellis has updated these portrayals for the postmodern age, so distant from the classic Hollywood of West and Scott, and yet in basic continuity with it; and combined it with James Ellroy’s take on Hollywood’s sleazy underside. What Ellis adds to all of these, perhaps, is a sense of the everydayness of what, from another angle, might be seen as depravity. This is both because of the privileged status of his narrator, and that narrator’s friends and milieu, and also because of the way, as I said before, a total media immersion is taken for granted as one of the story’s premises.

Where Lunar Park ended on a note of at least potential hopefulness (the closest Ellis has ever come to suggesting even the glimmer of something like redemption), and where even Glamorama (still Ellis’ craziest novel, and the one most engaged with a broader social reality even though, or because, its narrative is entirely delirious) had a slight metaphorical suggestion of improvement in its final words, Imperial Bedrooms leaves us with an unrelieved chill. It’s intentionally narrow focus has a strongly intensifying effect. Where American Psycho (1991) totally nailed the ethos of the Reagan 80s, and Glamorama (1999) presciently divined the social maladies (terrorism and reality television) of the decade following it, Imperial Bedrooms glancingly suggests the psychological malaise (can we even call it “narcissism” any longer?) of a society in which capitalist realism survives, and continues to dominate, despite its utter loss of all credibility.

Splice

I can’t stop thinking about Vincenzo Natali’s new SF/horror film Splice. Although narratively straightforward, thematically and emotionally it is very rich, and I am not sure how much of it I was able to grasp in just one viewing. Kim has a great discussion of the film, to which my own discussion here is greatly indebted. As often happens, Splice seems to be one of those cases in which my own enthusiasm is not generally shared either by the critics or the fanboys. The movie seems not to have performed as well at the box office during its first weekend as the studio had hoped (it earned $7.4M, well below pre-weekend projections of $12M — figures from boxofficeguru.com). It’s also gotten fairly mixed reviews, at best. (For a representative sample of fan-based negative reactions, see the comments to Annalee Newitz’s largely favorable review). Interestingly, reviewers’ complaints mostly have to do with the movie’s ending; but where some critics dismiss the ending as a lapse into the most predictable and hoary genre cliches, others deplore it as being beyond the pale, absolutely reprehensible and unbearable. I find this split to be symptomatic of a certain confusion on the part of viewers and critics who remain anxious about whether genre pieces can truly be embraced as works of art. In fact, Splice never departs from being a genre film; but the way it twists genre conventions is powerful and original.

[SPOILERS FOLLOW, OBVIOUSLY]

Most obviously, Splice addresses our hopes and anxieties concerning the prospects of genetic engineering and transhumanism. It draws upon, yet also subtly undermines, both extremes of opinion regarding these issues. On the one hand, there are the utopian dreams of human self-transcendence, of tweaking our own genome in order to become stronger, smarter, and more than human. On the other hand, there are the cautionary moralisms warning us against transgressing limits, violating the natural order, and usurping the role of God. Though Splice can be understood as a cautionary tale, it finally puts no more credence in the latter of these opinions than it does in the former. Actually, the film is disillusioning, or deflationary, with regard to our sense that technological advances Change Everything, whether for the better or for the worse. The film suggests that both our hopes and our fears are greatly exaggerated; and that technocentrism ignores too much, both about social structures and about ourselves. Splice is (quite unusually, for speculative films today) anti-apocalyptic, although in a way that is grim rather than reassuring.

Splice has familiar genre coordinates. It reworks motifs from (among other obvious sources) Frankenstein, Eraserhead, and Cronenberg’s early biohorror films. But it reworks these motifs, by placing them in the context of today’s computerized and corporate-financed biotechnology. Even when the scientist works alone and in secrecy, she is entangled in social and economic circumstances that would have been unthinkable for the Victor Frankenstein either of Mary Shelley’s novel, or of James Whale’s films for Universal. It remains noteworthy, however, that the main characters in Splice take their names from the Universal films. Meet Elsa (played by Sarah Polley, and named after Elsa Lanchester as both Mary Shelley and The Bride in Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein) and her partner Clive (played by Adrian Brody, and named after Colin Clive, who played Victor Frankenstein in both of Whale’s films). Elsa and Clive are science-superstar biochemists, with boho-hipster sensibilities and a rebellious streak. They live for their cutting-edge research, and don’t seem to have much in the way of lives outside it. Their home is not a lavish mansion, but a hip but grungy, run-down downtown loft. And they don’t have sex very often; they (and especially Elsa) are always too busy with work. Elsa and Clive are living, walking embodiments of a sort of nerd chic, that has become one of the myths of contemporary society (though the film works to make us skeptical as to what sort of work this myth actually does). Working in a lab provided for them by a Big Pharma company, Elsa and Clive splice genes to make hybrid organisms, whose use is to secrete marketable pharmeceuticals. But their real passion is not the meds (which is what the company has hired and bankrolled them for), but the thrill of creating new forms of life. They are always arguing with their corporate overlords, who want to see something profitable now; whereas they demand creative freedom in their research, which they unconvincingly claim will pay off for the company in the long run. We are given a familiar opposition — Creatives vs. The Man, or entrepreneurial initiative vs. corporate/bureaucratic fossilization — which will be thoroughly deconstructed in the course of the film.

Splice begins with a prosthetic childbirth scene, as Elsa and Clive “deliver” a new organism they have created. We see the whole process from the newborn creature’s own POV, as enters into the world, by being drawn out of the incubator, or artificial womb, in which it was first encased. It’s all very sticky and oozy, and the camera’s POV-from-the-birth-canal feels claustrophobic. (One might compare the POV here to the POV-from-inside-the-gas-tank-as-Gerard-Butler-pisses-into-it shot in Neveldine/Taylor’s Gamer). The creature given birth to in this way is a gross and enormous slug-like organism, looking to me like nothing so much as a gigantic turd (though others have seen it as phallic). This specimen, we are told, is a female; Elsa and Clive immediately plop it in a tank with a previously-created male of the same invented species, and the two proceed to copulate, or at least “imprint” on one another. (It is noteworthy that the film only imagines heterosexual attractions and relations. While it may well be that Natali simply fails to entertain other erotic possibilities, I think that — as will become more evident later — the film’s insistence upon a compuslory, and indeed compulsive, heterosexuality is actually a big part of its point).

The grotesquerie and messiness of the turd/phallic thingies contrasts with the generally sterile, high-tech look of the lab in which they are produced — all the scenes that take place here are shot in with an uninviting bluish glow. The lab continues to feel sterile even at crisis moments when tanks and test tubes get smashed, material falls off the shelves, etc. (One of the strongest resemblances between Splice and early Cronenberg has to do with its portrayal of the grim sterility of official corporate spaces and architectures). These genetically engineered organisms may be ugly, but they do indeed produce the chemicals that the Big Pharma bosses need. The problem is that Elsa and Clive are bored with the thought of merely taking the extraction process to its conclusion, by isolating the important proteins and maximizing their production. They want more; or more precisely, Elsa does, as she is both the true genius, and the active, enterprising one, of the pair. So, without the authorization or knowledge of the corporate bosses, and even in the face of laws that explicitly prohibit it, Elsa soon takes the next step, growing a transgenic organism that includes human DNA together with that of other organisms. She tells Clive that the DNA is from an unidentified “Jane Doe”; but he later figures out that it is in fact her own.

There is clearly something narcissistic and self-obsessed here; all the more so when we learn that Clive wants to have a child, but Elsa is reluctant. She’s the one who would have to become pregnant, after all. The film doesn’t judge this, and indeed suggests that Elsa is moved both by a legitimate worries about the gender inequality involved, and how this would interfere with her work and career, and by a kind of squeamishness about her own body, however down and dirty she is able to get with the animal bodies she creates. This is the aspect of the film that most directly references, and rewrites, Frankenstein. Instead of a man who seeks to create new life without feminine mediation, we get a woman who produces new life while replacing her womb with a technological prosthesis — a substitution that also allows her more complete control over which genetic material gets mixed with her own. (And indeed, it is arguable that the mixed species DNA that Elsa uses — evidently including fish, amphibian, reptile, and bird components, though it is hard to say whether any invertebrate material is also included — is far superior to any DNA that the rather creepy Clive could provide).

The gender switch makes for a very different sort of Prometheanism than Mary Shelley envisaged. Frankenstein revolves around issues of patriarchal fiat. It is also centered on Victor’s disgust at working with putrefying dead matter; since the monster is made by revivifying this dead matter, it is no wonder that the monster turns out to be an ugly and terrifying figure. It’s as if Victor’s moral failure is the consequence of a previous aesthetic failure or mistake. Victor sees everything maternal or feminine as a “filthy workshop of creation,” and this disgust spills over into his own prosthetic creation of life as well. Splice, however, “feminizes” this process, and gives us maternal relations between creator and monster instead of paternal ones. The movie has to do with questions of intimacy, continuity, and trust, instead of with ones of disgust. Abject, matter-based technologies are replaced by (relatively) cleaner computer-based ones, in which matter is not so much treated with horror, as it is distanced and made manipulable through being regarded as merely information or digital code. Elsa may not want to give birth physically, but the logic of her displacement of maternity into a computer-mediated process does not have the Manichean overtones one finds in Frankenstein. Splice seems to take for granted the affinities between constructions of femininity and technoculture. Infotech with its horizontal networks is far different from the older, hierarchical and patriarchal, structure of science and technology; though this doesn’t necessarily mean that it is “freer” or less oppressive.

Of course, Splice‘s focus upon a woman instead of a man as the “mad scientist” figure whose creations ultimately lead to catastrophe has been quite a point of contention. Some bloggers have seen the film in anti-feminist backlash terms, on the grounds that Elsa is punished by the narrative for being too uppity. But this seems to me to be wrong, and based in an overly literal-minded take on the film, not to mention regarding it as far more moralizing than it actually is. I am inclined to think that the film is on-target in the way that it suggests that a certain “feminization” is at work in our current digitally-based regime — without implying that this actually translates into actual equality for women. Most other films that approach this sort of territory — I am thinking of Cronenberg’s earlier films, but also of something like Fight Club — tend to see the development of prosthetic or virtual embodiment, and the leveling, horizontal tendencies of network culture, as leading to crises of masculine subjectivity. Splice seems to me to be refreshingly free of this sort of retro, conservative anxiety. It takes recent shifts in gender politics — especially as they relate to the workplace — for granted, without nostalgia for the good old days of male supremacy (cf. Mad Men), but also without imagining that this somehow means that gender equality has actually been achieved. — But all this is really a subject for another essay.

I should also note that the digitization of the flesh has deep consequences in the narrative of Splice. Gender itself is a binary — male/female — which means, in digital terms, that it can easily be flipped from one state to the other. The sudden transformation of a transgenic organism from female to male — something that actually happens in many species of fish — becomes a major plot point and thematic concern in Splice. One of the movie’s highlights is the comedic-horror scene where Elsa and Clive are demonstrating their success with the sluglike thingies to the stockholders, press, and public. They put the two beasties in the same tank; but instead of copulating as before, they fight to the death, smashing up everything in the process and raining blood and gore over the audience. It turns out that the female organism had flipped over to male, without Elsa and Clive noticing. And males, of course, must always be aggressive and fight one another. What’s significant here, I think, is the combination of utterly stereotyped norms (of what males and females supposedly always do, regardless of species) and the utter arbitrariness of their expression (one of the gender terms can flip over into the other, without motivation, just like that). As in all the other cases I mention, the juxtaposition of assumptions is so telling that I think that all this is not a flaw or limit to the film, but something that the film is itself quite self-conscious about.

After some experimentation, the transhuman splice is fertilized and then born — it bursts traumatically out of its sac or artificial womb, long before it should have been ready. This is the first of several traumatic ruptures in the course of the movie. One could easily regard this in Freudian/Lacanian terms; but I prefer to see it, more generally, as having to do with the lack of fit between information and embodiment, or between genotype (what is “written” in the DNA) and phenotype (the actual living body that is ostensibly “programmed” by that DNA). In general, I would want to argue that Freudian Nachträglichkeit and Lacanian “prematurity of birth” are themselves not primordial formations, but merely derivatives of the more general situation — not restricted to human beings — in which what determines, codes, or “preforms” a given body is never adequate to the full range of “what a body can do.” Here, Spinoza and Deleuze must come before Freud and Lacan. Elsa knows precisely how she has coded the new transhuman organism that she creates; but she still does not know, and cannot know in advance, how it will grow and change, how it will act, and what it will feel. As Natali puts it in a recent interview: Elsa and Clive “understand life in its chemical form, but they don’t really understand the essence of what life means, what life is. And that’s where things go wrong.”

In any case, the birth of the new entity isn’t premature, so much as it is a reflection of the fact that the very nature of this new entity involves a continual getting-ahead-of-itself. It has an alarming vitality, which translates into both an accelerated developmental span, and a progress through several larval forms, metamorphosing from one to the next in stages. The new entity apparently recycles some of the DNA from Elsa’s previous creations. Nonetheless, it — or rather, as we quickly learn, she — has a backbone, and isn’t a slug. We get a chimera that starts out very animalistic, but that becomes more human as she grows up. Elsa immediately adopts a stereotypically “maternal” attitude towards this new being. Clive wants to destroy the larva, but Elsa cuddles and encourages it/her, thereby winning its/her trust. There is a very peculiar and interesting thing going on here, and throughout the film: Natali thoroughly mixes together (or “confuses”) those sorts of attitudes, gestures, and behaviors that our ideology tells us are “natural,” with those which, being the immediate product of high technology, are manifestly “artificial.” The result is to destabilize our habitual binary between the two. Either the splice is herself just as “natural” as any other biological organism; or else Elsa’s supposedly “intuitive” maternal behavior is just as “artificial” as the genetically engineered organism. In our hyper-technologized world, and precisely because of all this technology rather than in spite of it, any nature/culture or natural/artificial distinction breaks down. This has the effect of undermining our currently hegemonic biological determinism (tracing all qualities and behaviors back to “the genes” or to DNA) as much as it does so-called “social constructionism.” The fact that we now how such extreme power in manipulating DNA does not mean that DNA determines everything — indeed, quite the contrary is the case.

As the splice grows up, Elsa eventually names her Dren, which is “nerd” spelled backwards — a kind of ironic self-reference, as Elsa sees Dren as an offshoot or rearrangement of herself. (The theme of rearrangement is emphasized by the way in which “nerd” is first spelled out in Scrabble ® tiles; “dren” is then the result of looking at these tiles upside down). Dren is hairless, but with a largely human face and upper body, bird-like legs that can be articulated in several directions and with claws for feet, a tail that ends with a stinger, and the ability to extrude and withdraw wings at will. I think that one of the brilliant aspects of the film is the way that it positions Dren in between the allure of the enticingly unfamiliar, and the frightfulness of the truly alien. When fully grown, Dren is played by Delphine Chanéac, whose digitally-altered body has been carefully tweaked by Natali to maximize a sense of “exotic” beauty and mystery, in a way that is just barely this side of a creepy “uncanny valley” effect. (I put “exotic” in scare quotes in order to call attention to the often racist/colonialist implications of the term; Chanéac is white, and French, but the makeup and digital effects alter her just enough to “other” her). This presentation allows the white male heterosexual viewer (if I am at all representative) to be suspended just at the precise point in between voyeuristic drooling lust on the one hand, and castration anxiety on the other. As I will soon explain, this is crucial within the diegesis itself, as well as outside it for the normative viewer.

As befits this “exotic” or alien portraiture, Dren remains largely inscrutable both to her creators and to us the viewers. We never get “inside” Dren’s mind anytime in the film. Some critics have seen this as a defect in the movie, but I think that it is poignant and effective. Her facial expressions do indeed communicate, at different points in the course of the film, such feelings as contentment, fear and dread, and anger. But none of this is ever made entirely concrete. Dren is highly intelligent. She evidently comes to understand human language; she clearly comprehends and responds to the English that Elsa and Clive speak to her. But she is apparently unable to speak; evidently Elsa failed to provide her with the genes that would have allowed for the development of human vocal cords — an omission that may well be symptomatic. For it guarantees Dren’s outsider status, and her subordination; she will always be enough of an animal that she cannot be regarded as superhuman.

Dren communicates, occasionally, by arranging Scrabble ® tiles into words. Elsa and Clive are thrilled when this happens, because it is sign of her high intelligence. But they don’t seem at all interested in the content of what she tries to tell them. They are too invested in studying her scientifically, in disciplining her properly, and in securing her from the risk of discovery. All too much in accord with contemporary scientific ideology, they are intrigued by Dren exclusively in cognitive terms. They don’t have any sense of her affectively; they don’t even know to look for her feelings, let alone to try to consider how they might work. This is all the more the case, in that Elsa’s and Clive’s own behavior is equally incomprehensible to themselves. Elsa and Clive, no less than Dren, are driven by affects that are out of their control or even of their awareness. They do not look at Dren’s affectivity, precisely because they are unable to comprehend even their own affectivity. And this is not just a personal failing of theirs; it is a symptomatic consequence of the cognitivist assumptions of the contemporary biological and behavioral sciences in general.

The import of all this is that Dren’s inability to speak is itself an expression of her existential situation. She cannot speak, in effect, because she cannot help feeling like an alien or an Other even to herself. (Clearly we need to reject the Lacanian assumption that it is somehow language which “alienates” us as subjects; this assumption rests on the unjustified anthropocentric belief that non-human or non-linguistic beings are somehow simply “natural,” simply immediate, simply at one with the world, unaware of mortality, etc. Dren is alienated by the way that she only has a partial and oblique relation to language; this relates to what I said above about trauma and prematurity not being exclusively human experiences or attributes). Dren is brought up in isolation, she is effectively abused, and there is no other being who is anything like her. When she spells out the word TEDIOUS in Scrabble ® tiles, in order to complain of her boredom and frustration at being locked up alone and not allowed even to go outside, Elsa and Clive respond simply by dismissing her complaint; doesn’t she know that they cannot risk letting her outside, since nobody must know of her existence?

Most of the movie is taken up with Elsa’s “mothering” of Dren, with Clive as the somewhat distant father figure. And this is where any prejudice that “mothering” might be “natural,” or inherently “feminine,” or inherently hardwired in Elsa’s, or any woman’s, genes, definitively breaks down. For Elsa engages in a kind of arbitrary, schizophrenic parenting style that would be enough to drive any child crazy, let alone one as “gifted” and “different” as Dren. At one moment, Elsa is exceedingly warm towards Dren, drawing her out of her scared shell and winning her trust; and then at the next moment she is overly severe in her disciplining of Dren, on the basis of distinctions between permitted and forbidden behavior that Dren clearly cannot understand (and that no child or teenager would ever be able to understand). For instance, Dren at one point adopts a stray cat, as a compensation for her boredom and loneliness. But Elsa takes the cat away from Dren, berating her for doing something unsafe (which seems to mean, both something that might expose Dren to discovery by other people than Elsa and Clive, and something that might interfere with the level of control Elsa needs in order to study Dren as a scientific experiment). A few scenes later, however, Elsa changes her mind, and brings back the cat, returning it to Dren as a “present,” and a sign of her (Elsa’s) warmth and affection. This is clearly just as incomprehensible to Dren as the original gesture of taking the cat away had been. Confused and panicked by the erratic nature of Elsa’s affection, Dren freaks out and kills the cat by stinging it with her tail. Elsa — in a rage all the more disquieting for being kept under wraps by an external calm — responds by physically restraining Dren, and subjecting her to (unsuccessful) surgery to remove the stinger. Castration, anyone? This is yet another moment of violence and trauma for Dren; and another moment to which Elsa remains completely oblivious. She is entirely unable to notice or understand her own effect upon her “daughter.”

Throughout the relationship between Elsa and Dren, therefore, intimacy is tied together with a horrific sense of violation. In Polley’s amazing performance, Elsa’s fucked-up parenting is utterly horrific, and yet entirely understandable from the inside. For Elsa is nothing if not well-intentioned; and she herself is also a victim of her own mother’s crazy abuse of her, when she was a child. Elsa mentions her past history as an abused child several times in the course of the movie; yet she thinks nothing of hiding or imprisoning Dren within the very walls in which she (Elsa) grew up and suffered this abuse. (We even get to see the spartan room, much like a prison cell, that was Elsa’s childhood bedroom). Thus Elsa troublingly (but not unsurprisingly) replicates, with Dren, all the ways that her mother mistreated her. But even when Elsa explicitly tries to do the opposite with Dren from what her mother did to her, the results are problematic and messed up. Thus Elsa gives Dren a Barbie doll which she had loved as a child, but which her mother had taken away from her. Elsa also has Dren wear baby-doll dresses and put on makeup. The Barbie doll, the dresses, and the makeup have the effect of “humanizing” Dren, making her over in accordance with human norms — which in this case means, in effect, making Dren stereotypically “feminine.” Even worse, the sexy-alien Dren gives off something close to a pederastic vibe.

In this way, all-too-human (by which I mean, culturally specific) gender roles are oddly reinforced, precisely when we are supposed to be getting beyond the human. Yet again, the film entirely scrambles our sense of what is natural and what is artificial, or of what is innate and “genetic”, and what is implanted or learned. We often reflexively assume the idea that nature, or the given/innate, is inherently deterministic and programmed (“hardwired”), while culture — that which is invented, transmitted through language and behavior, and which can be learned — allows for the possibility of difference. But Splice entirely reverses this dynamic. Dren is radically new and different, as far as her genetic endowment is concerned; but Elsa (and Clive) work to contain this difference within the cultural norms that they take for granted without question. And indeed, the film as a whole plays on the way that we, too, take these norms for granted; they are built into our genre expectations, which regulate how we take both the film’s form and its content. This is also the reason why the film is, as I noted before, heterosexual with a vengeance: it depressingly chronicles the ways that, faced with the prospect of difference, novelty, or radical otherness, we try to reduce this difference to the same, to police it and regulate it by inserting it within these pre-assumed norms. The film highlights these normative aspects (of cinematic genre, of socially-enacted gender, and of assumptions about what is natural and what is artificial) in a way that makes us troublingly conscious of them, instead of just letting them go “without saying.”

I should say something here about Clive as well as Elsa. She is the main mover and shaker of the couple; but his role as enabler should not be ignored. He is in fact is exceedingly creepy, without this ever quite coming out up-front. He simultaneously objects to all of Elsa’s transgressions, and yet helps to further them by his attitude and actions. All this is captured in Brody’s excellent performance, which really makes me squirm. Clive is a passive enabler, while at the same time disavowing this role by coming off as a (fake) voice of moderation and reason — despite the fact that he is evidently every bit as crazy as Elsa is. Clive encourages Elsa, while at the same time doing this in such a way that she must take responsibility, or take the fall, when anything backfires. Beneath the veneer of hipness and reasonableness, he is really a self-righteous prick. He sits back and lets Elsa take the initiative and maneuver them both into difficult situations. Then he objects, but at the same time provides evidence that there is no way out. He manages, therefore, both to express moral qualms and yet to use those qualms as an alibi for the fact that he is really excited by what Elsa is doing, and that he is desperate to get involved.

This also relates to the fact that Elsa and Clive turn out not to be the perfect couple that they seemed to be at the start of the film. I have already mentioned that they rarely have sex, and that this seems to be something of an issue for Clive. The one time in the film that they do get it on, it becomes sort of a primal scene for Dren, who sees them in the act without their being aware that she is viewing. them. But beyond this, all the tensions between Elsa and Clive get acted out in relation to Dren, and are directly projected onto Dren. She both becomes the alibi for, and suffers the consequences of, their instabilities and their lack of self-knowledge. In addition, all the traditional Frankenstein/SF arguments about morality, responsibility, the limits of knowledge, etc., are taken up in Elsa’s and Clive’s arguments; which has the effect of undermining the discursive force of the arguments, since they so clearly become masks or alibis for the couple’s own feelings, which they are quite obviously not at all in touch with.

All of this comes to a head in the third act of the film. This is the part that, as I mentioned above, some reviewers deplore as a capitulation to Hollywood/exploitation norms; while others condemn it as ugly and nasty, morally unacceptable, horrifically misogynistic, etc. I am inclined to think that these incompatible responses are symptomatic of the way that Natali has touched nerves, and thereby done something right. A conventional macho action film, with its taken-for-granted misogyny, would never get denounced for being “a thoroughly repulsive science fiction-horror flick that slicks up its B-movie tawdriness with high-gloss production values and two otherwise classy stars… a singularly cynical enterprise, exploiting our anxieties about reproduction, parenthood, control and betrayal while engaging in the crudest forms of sensationalism” (Ann Hornaday, in The Washington Post). I think that the ending of Splice succeeds both in fulfilling the pre-assumed requirements of the genre (there has to be a climax of violent monstrosity, in which all the creepy suggestions raised earlier in the film are pushed to a point of extremity, and, perhaps, catharsis), and in working through the logic of its premises — which, as I have been suggesting, have to do with the uses and abuses of technology, with both the creation of otherness and the attempt to contain and reduce it, with the regendering of processes in global, highly technologized capitalism, and with the relation of innovation and creativity to corporate control and corporate property.

In the third act, there are two significant — highly disturbing, and even shocking — events. The first one is that Clive has sex with Dren, in a way that is psychologically suggestive of incest. The attraction is apparently mutual. Dren, having been “feminized” by Elsa, and put off by the violent abusiveness of Elsa’s treatment of her, seems to idealize Clive as the more distant, and therefore less painfully-associated, authority or parental figure. There is something perversely innocent (oxymoron entirely intended, since it is something that at once seems childlike and yet is very post-puberty-aware and erotic) about Dren’s desire for Clive. On Clive’s part, the desire seems shifty and creepy in the same way that all his actions and affects have been throughout the film. He first formulaically tells Dren that we cannot do this, only to respond avidly to her allure a moment later.

Clive claims — sincerely,as far as we can tell, in his lack of knowledge of himself — to be attracted to Dren because of the way she reminds him of Elsa. He disavows the other elements of her appeal: for Dren, of course, is more sexy than Elsa on account of being younger, not tied to her work the way Elsa is, not Clive’s evident intellectual superior the way Elsa is (though we don’t know the level of Dren’s intelligence for sure) — not to mention that, of course, Dren’s not-entirely-human makeup makes her thrillingly exotic/unknown in a way Elsa could not be. Clive is able to enact, in other words, the fantasy relation to Dren that (as mentioned above) the film produces for the normative male-heterosexual spectator. In fact, Clive’s coming on to Dren, and his self-understanding about doing this, simply replicates the most boring and banal, and most common, scenario of heterosexual-male psychodrama imaginable. It’s a syndrome that forms the basis of far too many melodramas and far too many real-life divorces (not to mention its featured role in award-winning movies like American Beauty, and in prominent real-life careers like that of Bill Clinton). It bespeaks a kind of self-blindness that could only come out of (unacknowledged) privilege. In the (fairly explicit) way that the movie presents this sexual act, it is shocking, jolting, and disturbing, and yet at the same time disappointing: as if this extravagant, transgressive act were at the same time the enactment of a failure to change, a failure to get anywhere, a failure to do anything different from business (and prejudice) as usual. My sense of the film is that, precisely, Natali manages to have it both ways: to give us the genre-specific thrills that we need and expect, and to make a meta-commentary which precisely turns on the the oppressive sameness of what the genre gives us.

Of course, Elsa walks in on Clive and Dren while they are in the midst of fucking: this, again, is both a genre necessity, and acutely true to the strained and messy psychodynamics of the entire film. Elsa is angered and disgusted; she walks out and drives home — but first she stops at the lab in order to do the banal protein sequencing that the corporate bosses had demanded of her all along, and that she had previously considered beneath her. Apparently Dren’s DNA coding, no less than that of the slug-like creatures, causes her to produce and secrete the meds that the Big Pharma company wanted in the first place. And this is apparently the first thing that Elsa thinks of, in her rage that Dren and Clive have betrayed her.

When Clive goes after Elsa and tries to explain what happened, she tells him: “you aren’t going to talk your way out of this one.” But in fact, Clive succeeds in talking his way out of trouble within just about two minutes of screen time. Clive convinces Elsa that the rules have changed, that they have both overstepped limits, etc. etc. It becomes clear to the audience that neither Clive nor Elsa has learned anything whatsoever from all that has happened to them, and to their creation. Worried about further consequences, and at least sensing the need for damage control, they return to the farmhouse/barn where they had left Dren.

The very ending of the film pushes all this contradiction and tension to its most extreme point. For the second significant, and disturbing happening in the third act is that Dren (quite predictably, in genre terms) turns monstrous and murderous. But there’s more: Dren’s turn towards homicidal behavior is correlated with her shifting gender from female to male (just as slug-like creature did earlier in the film). The male Dren-creature murders Clive and some secondary characters, and concludes by raping Elsa. This is also the notable point when Dren — turned male — speaks a word for the first and only time in the movie. The word has trouble coming out of his throat; the Dren-organism’s difficulty with articulating spoken language still remains. The barely articulated word is “inside.” Male Dren wants to enter/penetrate/fuck/rape Elsa; but also, perhaps, he wants to return to the womb, to an ultimate inner place where the outside world cannot harm him. It makes no difference that, in fact, Dren’s original womb was not literally Elsa’s, but a prosthetic one. The whole film has worked through an ambivalently aggressive dynamics in relation to technologies of reproduction, and now this is all quite horrifically and nastily literalized and embodied — in a way that collapses back on Elsa, the originator of these dynamics, and now their victim.

As before, I think it makes sense to see this rape scene in relation or contrast to Frankenstein. In the original novel, the monster, denied his own possibilities of sexuality and reproduction, murders his creator’s bride, but leaves that creator himself uninjured, to stew in his own regrets and guilt. In Splice, Elsa suffers a worse fate than Victor Frankenstein; I think indeed that this is because she is a woman, but (as noted before) I take this, not as evidence that the film is misogynistic, but precisely as an indication that misogyny is part of the situation that the film reveals, and of which it offers a diagnosis. Frankenstein’s transgression of the laws of God and Man has been transformed into Elsa’s pseudo-transgression, which ends up only reinforcing the order it had seemed to be rebelling against. Elsa has worked throughout the film to create life prosthetically, to give birth to and raise a being that transcended the limitations of the human order. But (as her confusions and failures in parenting Dren have shown), she proves unequal to this task, and ends up reproducing the same all-too-human (and in fact culturally as well as genetically determined and limited) order that she had thought to get beyond. Which is why, at the end, she is reduced to the limited role of having/being a womb and nothing but a womb, after all. She manages to destroy the “monster” that she has created, but only after it has inseminated her (in effect, returning to her the burden she had imposed upon it).

A sort of epilogue shows Elsa, pregnant and evidently close to term, signing everything away to the corporation, in return for ample (we presume) financial considerations. She would seem to be giving the corporation both her scientific expertise and the contents of her womb (produced, presumably, by the rape, though we do not know this for sure); the distinction between them has entirely collapsed. And this is the saddest and most horrific thing in the entire film — much more so than anything having to do with Dren. Whatever the film has to say about gender and familialism, everything is overcoded by the reality of corporate ownership. Property and profit come first. It’s significant that the corporate boss with whom Elsa negotiates this abdication of power is also a woman: as if to explicitly show us both that there is nothing special about a woman-to-woman bond, and that the regime of captial is always ready to allow exceptions to conventional hierarchies without thereby ceasing to rule. Elsa can be a successful scientist, and a woman can be the CEO of a Big Pharma company; but these individual exceptions or exemptions don’t ever rock the boat. Corporate power is what bought Elsa and Clive their lab with its high tech machines in the first place; and corporate power accumulates the profits that are generated with the help of that lab and its machines. Elsa’s and Clive’s creative surplus does not belong to them, and never did. Movies in the last three decades of the twentieth century tended to figure corporate power in terms of vast conspiracies (this has been discussed at length by Fredric Jameson, and more recently by Jeff Kinkle here). But in 2010, there is no longer any need for a conspiracy in order to explain corporate dominance. The corporation is just there, a banal fact that is not in the least bit hidden, and that everybody takes for granted without even thinking about it.

Indeed, I think that we can go further, and say that Elsa and Clive’s whole hipster/boho/rebellious vibe not only doesn’t threaten the reign of capital (or Big Pharma in this case), but also actively helps to maintain it, and may even be necessary to its functioning. It’s not just because the hipster-rebellious genius image appeals to disaffected arty-intellectual types like me, and thereby helps (just as “cool” corporations like Apple, Google, and Starbucks do) to draw me into a more active and engaged complicity with the mechanisms of capital accumulation. But beyond this (and on a more fundamental level than that of mere “ideology”), techno-innovators and “creatives” like Elsa and Clive both provide the corporations with continual streams of innovation and insure that these innovations will be channeled in normative and profitable ways. Old Deleuze/Guattari enthusiasts like me have tended to privilege, celebrate, and idealize flows of becoming, monstrous metamorphoses, and lines of flight and escape from the normative and the all-too-human. At times in our enthusiasm, we would tend to forget Deleuze and Guattari’s own warnings that capitalism recuperates (“reterritorializes” and “recodes”) whatever crazy, destabilizing fluxes it unleashes.

But Splice suggests that the relation between capitalism’s “creativity” and its recuperations is even more intimate. It’s not that Elsa and Clive create something radically new, and then desperately try to recuperate it within conventional or normative parameters. Rather, the normalizing drive is at the heart of their “creativity.” Elsa doesn’t secondarily familialize a transgenic creation that initially threatens to escape her control and that of the conventional gender coordinates. It is rather the case that she develops the transgenic creation in the first place in order to produce a body upon which those conservative, familiar and familialist coordinates may be inscribed. She rebels against corporate management in order to fulfill its aims better than that management would be able to do by itself. Her very choice of private, emotionally meaningful goals instead of externally-imposed corporate ones is a vital and necessary element of the corporate seach for ever-expanding profits. In this way, Splice suggests that the fantasy of transgressive genius, the dream of liberating metamorphosis, and the dedication to personal fulfillment, are themselves adjuncts to, and enablers of, corporate power.

Or, to use a biological metaphor here, Splice suggests that evolution is only the result of the essential conservativism (drive to self-preservation and self-perpetuation) of “life.” Mutations happen, and grow within a population, not out of any drive for change, but precisely because life’s only goal is to replicate and multiply itself, to continually reproduce itself as the same. Whatever does the best job of this flourishes. Biotechnology’s current vision is bloodless, rationalistic, cognitivist and computational. Splice challenges this vision, by suggesting that it must ultimately be brought back into contact with a politics of affect, of the visceral, and of the body. But the film is deeply disillusioning, in that it further suggests that the movement back to affect and the body doesn’t have anything emancipatory about it. Rather than moralistically warning against the dangers of experimentation beyond socially acceptable limits, Splice suggests that such experimentation itself works to return to and reinforce those limits, so that it is inherently disappointing. Indeed, we are never imaginative enough.

Slow Cinema Vs Fast Films

I really think I need to jump in on this one. In the April 2010 Sight and Sound, the journal’s editor, Nick James, wrote as follows:

Part of the critical orthodoxy I have complained about has been the dominance of Slow Cinema, that “varied strain of austere minimalist cinema that has thrived internationally over the past ten years”, as Jonathan Romney put it. “What’s at stake,” he wrote, “is a certain rarefied intensity in the artistic gaze . . . a cinema that downplays event in favour of mood, evocativeness and an intensified sense of temporality.”

I admire and enjoy a good many of the best films of this kind, but I have begun to wonder if maybe some of them now offer an easy life for critics and programmers. After all, the festivals themselves commission many of these productions, and such films are easy to remember and discuss in detail because details are few. The bargain the newer variety of slow films seem to impose on the viewer is simple: it’s up to you to draw on your stoic patience and the fascination in your gaze, in case you miss a masterpiece.

Watching a film like the Berlin Golden Bear-winner Honey (”Bal” Semih Kaplanoglu, 2010) – a beautifully crafted work that, for me suffers from dwelling too much on the visual and aural qualities of its landscape and milieu – there are times, as you watch someone trudge up yet another woodland path, when you feel an implicit threat: admit you’re bored and you’re a philistine. Such films are passive-aggressive in that they demand great swathes of our precious time to achieve quite fleeting and slender aesthetic and political effects: sometimes it’s worth it, sometimes not. Slow Cinema has been the clear alternative to Hollywood for some time, but from now on, with Hollywood in trouble, I’ll be looking out for more active forms of rebellion.

This passage is cited, and then heavily criticized, by Harry Tuttle in Unspoken Cinema, the blog devoted to what it prefers to call CCC (Contemporary Contemplative Cinema), as exemplified in the work of such directors as “Bela Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang, Bruno Dumont, Weerasethakul, Sharunas Bartas, Kore-eda, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Sokurov, Lisandro Alonso, Carlos Reygadas, Pedro Costa” (list appears here). For Tuttle, James’ criticism is “anti-intellectual banter”, “typical of the anti-intellectual, pro-entertainment inclination that plagues today’s film culture,” and offering a “reductive and superficial” account that perpetrates a “mischaracterisation” of recent art films “that induces contempt and caricature.” Tuttle says that “critics need to learn how to name (and list) things that are not obvious, to learn to find the content behind the appearance of emptiness, to learn to understand the depth and complexity in the intervals between the apparent (and nominal) details” — he accuses James of failing to do this, and instead merely remaining on the surface of things.

Will it get me expelled forever from the ranks of Film Bloggers Who Can Be Taken Seriously if I state that I am more in agreement with James than with Tuttle here? [I should declare in advance that I am unwilling to be drawn into lengthy polemics on this issue. I’m making my sentiments clear in the present blog post; this posting may well just be totally ignored by the film blogosphere and the larger world; but if  anyone does pay attention to it, I feel sure that it will garner substantial criticism. I am stating here and now, in advance, that I will not respond to criticisms with counter-arguments. I’ve had my say, and that’s that].

Anyway. Like Nick James, I am not insensitive to the greatness and power of many of these recent “slow” or “contemplative” films. Tsai Ming-Liang is a great director by any accounting; Tarr, Kore-eda, and Sokurov have in my opinion made some important and powerful films (though in both cases, I find their work uneven). And friends of mine, whose aesthetic sensibilities I respect, have had sublime experiences with films by Reygadas, Weerasethakul, and Alonso — and I can see what it is in the films by these directors that appeal to them, even though I do not quite share their admiration.

And yet, and yet… There seems to be something lacking to me in nearly all the recent exercises in contemplative (or slow) cinema, when you compare them with such older “contemplative” works as Antonioni’s films of the 1960s, Chantal Akerman’s early films from the 1970s, Miklos Jancsó’s films of the 1960s and early 1970s, and Tarkovsky’s films before he left Russia. There was something daring and provocative about Antonioni’s portrayals of fatigue and ennui, and his precise contemplations of the positive emptiness of both natural and human-made landscapes; about Akerman’s digging into the horrors of women’s everydayness; of Jancsó’s icy priouettes around the clashes of armies on vast plains; about Tarkovsky’s patience and sense of duration. All these directors were extremists in their own singular ways: by which I mean they were pushing cinema to its extreme limits, as well as exploring the extreme aspects of human possibility and impossibility (and not just human ones — some of these directors may well be credited with pioneering a potential posthuman and object-oriented cinema).

In today’s contemplative cinema, in contrast, the daringness and provocation are missing. I never get the sense that Dumont, or Reygadas, for instance, are ever taking risks or pushing boundaries. There’s an oppressive sense in which the long-take, long-shot, slow-camera-movement, sparse-dialogue style has become entirely routinized; it’s become a sort of default international style that signifies “serious art cinema” without having to display any sort of originality or insight. “Contemplative cinema” has become a cliche; it has outlived the time in which it was refreshing or inventive.

I’d even say that the most inspired works of “difficult” international cinema are characterized by the ways that they depart from slow-cinema norms. Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum, for instance, cannot be classified as slow or contemplative cinema: its narrative is oblique, as is its presentation of that narrative, but it is too intimate, or too interested in the feelings and everyday shifts of attention and mood of its protagonists, to fit the “slow” paradigm. The late (and still woefully underappreciated) Edward Yang abandoned the Antonioniesque stylings and slownesses of his earlier films for something more like a Renoiresque social realism with ensemble casts (I still think that Confucian Confusion and Mahjong are two of the greatest films of the 1990s, together constituting the postmodern equivalent of Rules of the Game). Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life is utterly inspired, with its peculiar, more-than-Gondryesque take on mortality and memory, while Still Walking seems to me to be just standard-issue CCC, with a deep-emotions-displayed-through-restraint portrayal that is strictly by the numbers, more “moving” than actually moving. Similarly, the handheld-camera  rawness of Jia Zhang-ke’s earlier films (like the intensely disillusioning Xiao Wu) seem to me to be far superior to his “slower” recent works. The crazy excesses of the best Korean directors (Bong Joon-ho, park Chan-wook, and Kim Ki-Duk) all evidence, in their utterly different ways, a hunger for all the dimensions of life (from corporeal to spiritual to social) that contemplative cinema systematically omits. In his best films, Takeshi Kitano pushes slow cinema to the point of buffoonery and absurdity. And Takashi Miike has shown more formal invention, and rethinking of what cinema is, what it can be,  and what it means, in each year of his career than all the CCC directors combined have shown over their entire careers. (And I could go on; Wong Kar-Wai, David Lynch, Guy Maddin, and Mladen Djordjevic are all important contemporary directors who have nothing whatsoever to do with Contemplative Cinema).

So my overall sense is that the Contemplative Cinema Canon doesn’t even give us a very good sense of what’s most interesting and most powerful in contemporary international art cinema today. But I think there’s more. Great works of art can be created in profoundly retrograde styles, and almost completely detached from contemporary concerns. And I think the best works of the Contemplative Cinema Canon may in fact be described in such a way. But I still think that, even at its best, Slow-Cinema-As-Default-International-Style is profoundly nostalgic and regressive — and I think that this is a bad thing. It’s a way of simulating older cinematic styles, and giving them a new appearance of  life (or more precisely, a new zombified life-in-death), as a way of flattering classicist cinephiles, and of simply ignoring everything that has happened, socially, politically, and technologically, in the last 30 years. It’s a way of saying No to mainstream Hollywood’s current fast-edit, post-continuity, highly digital style, simply by pretending that it doesn’t even exist. And I agree with Nick James that this simply isn’t enough.

When I say that CCC is regressive, I don’t mean that all change automatically constitutes “progress,” or that such “progress” is somehow automatically good. But in a world that has been so profoundly changed over the past 30 or 40 years by globalization, financialization, and technological innovation, it’s simply an evasive cop-out to make movies as if none of this had happened. And in a film industry whose production processes have been entirely upended by digitalization, and where film itself has increasingly been displaced by newer media, and refashioned to find its place within the landscape of those newer media, it is a profound failure of imagination to continue to make films in the old way, or that continue to signify in the old way, when this “old way” has itself become nothing more than a nostalgic cliché.

In other words: it’s very consoling and self-congratulatory for old-line cinephiles (a group in which I fully include myself) to tell ourselves the story that the current cultural landscape’s insistence on rapidity and speed and instantaneous gratification is a monstrous aberration, and that we are maintaining truer values when we strive to slow everything down. But this is a lie. You cannot change a situation if you are unwilling to have anything to do with it, if you are so concerned with keeping your hands clean and avoiding complicity that you simply retreat into fantasies of the good old days. To my mind, this is what Slow Cinema is doing; and Nick James is entirely right to find it unsatisfactory, and to look instead for new, “more active forms of rebellion.” And we are likely to find these as often in exploitation cinema as in art cinema; but in any case, in movies that engage with the new media landscape, and the new socio-economic landscape, rather than fleeing them in dreams of “learn[ing] in to find the content behind the appearance of emptiness.”