Dreaming Øf Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, & The Age of Digital Media

Like Kinder, I believe that Buñuel’s films (alongside the surrealist encounter with cinema more generally) provide important touchstones for today’s task of charting the relations between old and new media along the axis of interactivity. I propose to shift the discussion, however, from an emphasis on narrative to the interrelated subjects of gaming and art cinema. Narrative is certainly important for many forms of new media, but it cannot claim the same kind of centrality for digital culture as gaming can, nor can gaming be reduced wholly to a narrative-oriented phenomenon, even if it usually involves some narrative structures. What is occluded in our understanding of new media when narrative is installed as the primary point of entry for analysis?² Art cinema, too, has been defined most influentially by considering narrative form first and foremost. When David Bordwell describes art cinema as a “distinct mode of film practice,” his definition leans most heavily on those “loosenings” of classical narrative form that distinguish art cinema from mainstream popular cinema, on the one hand, and from more radically experimental “modernist cinema,” on the other.³ But do these distinctions, however useful for illuminating the particular narrative strategies of art cinema, end up overshadowing its other vital aspects?

For Bordwell the “intellectual presence” of art cinema during its heyday in the 1960s “effectively reinforced the old opposition between Hollywood (industry, collective creation, entertainment) and Europe (freedom from commerce, the creative genius, art).”4 This dichotomy remains with us today at some intuitive level, but as Thomas Elsaesser and Rosalind Galt have argued persuasively, art cinema (particularly after 1989) situates itself toward the coordinates of “Hollywood,” “Europe,” “popular,” and “avant-garde” in ways that the old oppositions fail to capture.⁵ In this chapter I hope to contribute to art cinema’s redefinition by juxtaposing two films whose relations to art cinema may at first seem tangential: Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un chien andalou (1929) and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999). The former is a famous French film (made by two Spaniards) that is most often discussed as an avant-garde surrealist film rather than an art film. The latter is a sleeper Canadian film (produced with additional funding from Britain and France) that is most often mentioned as a science fiction film rather than an art film.

Nevertheless, Buñuel’s associations with the avant-garde and popular genres such as melodrama, like Cronenberg’s own associations with the avant-garde and popular genres such as horror and science fiction, have not diminished (in fact, have often enhanced) their status as auteurs whose bodies of work are now read most commonly through the authorship protocols belonging to art cinema.⁶ Instructive parallels in the career arcs of these two directors become apparent when Buñuel’s beginnings in avant-garde cinema (Un chien andalou, L’âge d’or [1930]) are juxtaposed with Cronenberg’s (Stereo [1969], Crimes of the Future [1970]). Each man then endures a period outside major international recognition, only to resurface as an “art cinema director” (with Buñuel’s Los olvidados [1950]) and a “horror film director” (with Cronenberg’s Shivers [1975]). Later “rebirths” in each of the director’s careers, whether Buñuel’s from gritty art cinema realist in Los olvidados to flamboyant art cinema surrealist in Belle de jour (1967) through That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), or Cronenberg’s from the horror provocateur of Shivers to the art cinema provocateur of M. Butterfly (1993) onward, highlight the continuity in their authorial signatures across categories of avant-garde film, genre film, and art film. I will contend that when Un chien andalou and eXistenZ are considered together around questions of gaming and interactivity, striking possibilities for understanding art cinema, spectatorship, and digital media beyond their conventional categorizations emerge. What finally binds these two films most powerfully is a shared commitment to a surrealist-inflected cinematic form perhaps most accurately described as interactive art cinema.

Whether in the form of video games played on home consoles and mobile devices or computer games played online with multiple participants, there is no doubt that gaming occupies a dynamic, popular, and lucrative space within the digital culture of new media. Indeed, scholarly studies of these games have begun to take shape as a field of their own, and Alexander R. Galloway’s recent book Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture represents an important moment in the development of video game studies.7 Galloway attempts, with a compelling sense of ambition and scope, to address both the unique specificities of video games and their shared traits with older media, particularly cinema. He begins by claiming, “If photographs are images, and films are moving images, then video games are actions.”⁸ As this statement suggests, Galloway frames video games within the contexts of earlier visual media, but he tends to highlight how video games depart from their antecedents in the realm of action. He resists the label “interactivity” to describe video games precisely because he feels it is too broad to capture the material specificity of “gamic action.” For Galloway video games constitute an “active medium” due to a materiality that “moves and restructures itself—pixels turning on and off, bits shifting in hardware registers, disks spinning up and spinning down.” So for him “interactivity” risks sliding into more abstract, less materialist notions that could apply just as easily to literature or film as to video games.⁹ But what is gained or lost by using “gamic action” to separate one type of interactivity from another? Are video games always actions and never images? Are films always images and never actions?

I wish to reflect on the deployment of “interactivity” to control boundaries between cinema and video games at the level of spectatorship. I will argue that cinema, although not interactive in the same way as video games, still offers valuable models for theorizing gaming experiences linked to but not easily explained by standard notions of interactivity—models that may help us chart more effectively the kinds of spectator/player experiences that unite and divide “new” and “old” media. Furthermore, art cinema’s reliance on particular relays of communication between author and audience lays a foundation for the cinematic interactivity recognizable in both Un chien andalou and eXistenZ. By examining eXistenZ, a film explicitly engaged with questions of cinema and video gaming, I will show how Cronenberg incorporates certain surrealist notions of gaming to demonstrate how video games and cinema intersect through forms of surrealist interactivity based on associative and embodied stimulation. But first it is necessary to explore the surrealist commitment to games as central to their theory and practice. This commitment emerges clearly in Un chien andalou, a film often referred to as marking the birth of cinematic surrealism.¹⁰

Buñuel famously insisted that Un chien andalou must be reckoned with at the level of the “irrational,” where the film’s images are “as mysterious to the two collaborators as to the spectator” and “NOTHING … SYMBOLIZES ANYTHING.”11 In other words, Un chien andalou aims to replicate in the audience’s reception certain antirational mechanisms built into the film’s production. What Buñuel and Dalí did to uphold the film’s commitment to the irrational was what the surrealists often did to preserve the elements of chance and accident in their automatic writing (spontaneous, uncensored free association) and other forms of antirational artistic creation: they played a game. During the writing process, Buñuel and Dalí collaborated by bouncing images off each other, with one man proposing an image (sometimes drawn from dreams) that the other would then question, elaborate on, and reject or accept in a continuing conversation designed to screen out everything that seemed tied to the rational and the explainable.¹² This game of images played between Buñuel and Dalí bears strong similarities to automatic writing but also to surrealist games such as the exquisite corpse, where players would collaborate on a drawing or poem by submitting individual parts toward a collective whole beyond the design of any single participant.¹³ One key difference, however, is that the exquisite corpse games rarely took into account an audience outside the immediate circle of collaborators, while Buñuel and Dalí clearly imagined the spectator of their film as a third player in their game of images.¹⁴ For Buñuel the aim of Un chien andalou was to “provoke in the spectator instinctive reactions of attraction and repulsion.” Couldn’t these instinctive reactions of attraction and repulsion in the spectator also describe the guidelines for the game of images played by Buñuel and Dalí, especially when their film sets out to be “as mysterious to the two collaborators as to the spectator”?¹⁵ In this sense Un chien andalou takes shape as a game of images with at least three players and a duration that encompasses both production and reception. At the same time, my description of Un chien andalou as a game of images is intended to blur the boundaries between the film’s avant-garde qualities, art cinema qualities, and popular film qualities. After all, surrealist cinema stands apart from other avant-garde film movements, such as Dada, for its investment in “the stories, the stars, the spectacular and the specular” that are more frequently associated (to varying degrees) with art cinema and popular cinema.¹⁶

Of course, if Un chien andalou functions as a game of images, this does not mean that all players participate in precisely the same way. It’s not as if spectators have the privilege of speaking directly to Buñuel and Dalí as the two men did with each other during the writing of the film. But the trails through the film blazed by Buñuel and Dalí are based on a chain of associated images (rather than conventional narrative or causal logic) that invite spectators to find their own associations, to take their own turn in the game of images. Indeed, the film presents a number of tropes familiar from popular romance narratives only to parody or obstruct their usual meanings—a game of critique built into the game of images that extends from narrative structures to social ones.17 But with regard to narrative, Bordwell’s characterization of typical audience engagement with art cinema as “play[ing] games with the narrator” applies remarkably well in this context.¹⁸ For example, the notorious opening sequence of Un chien andalou, where a woman’s eye is slit by a razor after a man witnesses a passing cloud “slicing” the moon, certainly includes associations apparent to the filmmakers that would be lost on most spectators: the origin of the film’s title in an unpublished book of the same name written by Buñuel in 1927, or Buñuel’s casting of himself as the man with the razor whose cigarette produces puffs of smoke graphically similar to the “slicing” clouds in the sky (fig. 2.1). These associations posit Buñuel as the film’s primary author and active agent, the force that cuts the eyeball onscreen and cuts the film offscreen.¹⁹ But the graphic associations between the similar shapes and movements of the razor across the man’s thumb, the cloud across the moon, and the razor across the eye (along with the multiple verbal associations suggested by these images)²⁰ may well generate reactions for the spectator beyond the material contributed by Buñuel and Dalí (see figs. 2.2–2.4). For the spectator, encouraged additionally by the fantastic opening title “once upon a time … ,” perhaps this man with the razor is driven to imagine a future crime based on a recent betrayal by a lover. Or this could be the anxious dream of a woman who has left her jealous lover and fears his retribution. Or this could be a film director’s fantasy of punishment for an audience that refuses to “see.” In other words the film’s form as a chain of associated images solicits images from the spectator in turn, extending the game of the film’s construction into the realm of its consumption.

Such games of association are also woven into the fabric of Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, where the shuttling between cinema and video game opens a space for the spectator’s participation that recalls the image games of Un chien andalou. For much of eXistenZ Ted Pikul (Jude Law) and Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) are playing game characters within the virtual reality video game, designed by Geller, called eXistenZ. At one point their characters arrive at a strange Chinese restaurant where they are served a special platter composed of mutant reptiles and amphibians. Although both Pikul and Geller are disgusted by the sight of the platter, Pikul feels compelled to eat it based on what Geller explains is a “game urge,” an action Pikul’s game character was “born to do.” As Pikul eats, he pieces together the discarded bones to assemble a gun that he then points at Geller, proclaiming, “Death to the demoness, Allegra Geller” (fig. 2.5). “That’s not funny,” Geller replies nervously. After an uncomfortable pause, Pikul apologizes and lowers the weapon.

At the heart of this scene are a series of tensions concerning agency that speak powerfully to the relations between cinema and gaming. Is Pikul playing the game, or is the game playing him when he cannot resist the urge to eat the special platter? Or when he constructs the gun? Or when he points the gun at Geller? The key that unlocks these questions is Pikul’s statement, as he nears completion of the gun’s assembly, that “this looks awfully familiar.” The gun does indeed look familiar, and not just to Pikul. It is a weapon that viewers recognize as a duplicate of the one used earlier in the film during an assassination attempt on Geller. In that earlier sequence an assassin fires on Geller while issuing the exact same proclamation that Pikul does here, “Death to the demoness, Allegra Geller.” The reproduction of the proclamation, as well as the gun itself, suggests that Pikul is caught inside the game’s logic, forced to do what the game insists his character must do. Up until his withdrawal of the gun, it seems that the game controls Pikul’s mimicry of the assassin, just as the game controls his desire to eat the special platter.

This transfer of power from player to game simulates a common formal feature of video games called “cut-scenes.” Cut-scenes are interludes in the gamic action where the player does not control what occurs onscreen but instead becomes a spectator to what the game itself presents. For Galloway, cut-scenes or “cinematic interludes” constitute a “grotesque fetishization of the game itself as machine” because “the machine is put at the service of cinema.” He concludes that cut-scenes are ultimately “nongamic,” that they can be explained best as “brought on by a nostalgia for previous media and a fear of the pure uniqueness of video gaming.”21 In Galloway’s account cut-scenes signal a regression from video gaming’s most interactive, noncinematic features and a return to cinema’s older, more familiar forms of passive spectatorship. But what Cronenberg does by inserting this moment that resembles a cut-scene within eXistenZ is to invite spectator participation in a game of medium definition that recalls the game of images staged in Un chien andalou. Where Buñuel and Dalí encouraged spectators to contribute their own associations to the series of discontinuous images in their film, Cronenberg asks spectators to associate their experiences of cinema with their experiences of video gaming. To explore more thoroughly the intersections between Buñuel and Dalí’s game of image association and Cronenberg’s game of medium definition, I turn now to a theorist whose work straddles the realms of surrealism and the sociology of games: Roger Caillois.

Roger Caillois (1913–78) has yet to receive the kind of scholarly attention accorded to his contemporary and sometime collaborator Georges Bataille, but his work illuminates the terrain shared by surrealism and gaming in unique and often extraordinary ways. Although Caillois was an official member of the Surrealist Group only between 1932 and 1934, he also participated briefly in or stood nearby the surrealist offshoot collectives Contre-Attaque (1935–36) and Acéphale (1936–37).22 In addition he cofounded the famed College of Sociology with surrealist fellow travelers Bataille and Michel Leiris in 1937.²³ Still, Caillois’s relation to surrealism was always a tense and difficult one, even if the movement’s influence on him was profound and long-lasting. As late as 1975, Caillois declared, “I have always been surrealist; what is more, I was surrealist before even becoming one.”²⁴ Yet this declaration appears at the end of an essay, “Surrealism as a World of Signs,” in which Caillois attacks surrealism for its fetishization of obscurity for its own sake, for its unwillingness to incorporate scientific rigor into its explorations of subjectivity, chance, and imagination.

In many ways “Surrealism as a World of Signs” recapitulates the reasons for Caillois’s original break from the movement in 1934. “Above all, there were the Surrealist games, which were the real cause of my break with Surrealism,” Caillois recalls in 1973.²⁵ He refers specifically to the game of the “irrational knowledge” questionnaires I described in chapter 1 (which Caillois dismisses as “literary … in the worst sense of the word”),²⁶ but his general unease with surrealism’s refusal to embrace the scientific is perhaps most vividly captured in a famous incident dating from 1934. When Caillois and André Breton are faced with a new, strange object, in this case a Mexican jumping bean, Caillois’s instinct is to slice it open to discover its inner workings. Breton refuses to allow such an action, claiming it would violate the mystery of the jumping bean and thus break the spell of the marvelous cast by its strangeness. Caillois laments Breton’s rejection of what Caillois calls the “great game [grand jeu]” of charting the marvelous in a manner that “does not fear knowledge but, on the contrary, thrives on it.”²⁷ For Caillois this Mexican jumping bean incident clinches his decision to leave the Surrealist Group; he cannot tolerate Breton’s refusal to play the “great game” of interweaving knowledge and the marvelous, science and surrealism.

Caillois’s entire career, in a certain sense, can be summed up in his continuing commitment to playing this “great game.” In fact, the traces of his most famous essay written during his early years, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia” (1935), can be detected clearly in the most well-known book from his later period, Man, Play and Games (1958). In the space between these two seminal works Caillois stages the encounter between surrealism and games that will illuminate the exchanges between cinema, gaming, and surrealism present in Un chien andalou and eXistenZ.

“Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia” studies instances of mimicry in the animal kingdom (particularly among insects) to suggest that it is not, as is often assumed, a primarily defensive phenomenon. For Caillois imitative acts performed by animals are understood best not as camouflage that protects the organism but as a desire on the organism’s part for self-erasure, for a removal of the distinctions between itself and its surrounding environment. Caillois’s mimicry is not an instinct for self-preservation but for self-abandonment, an often dangerous attraction toward “depersonalization through assimilation into space” that resembles the Freudian death drive. These aspects of self-erasure and depersonalization cause Caillois to align mimicry with psychasthenic psychology, or “disorder in the relationship between personality and space.” The organism engaged in mimicry is seduced by “a veritable lure of space” where the organism “is no longer located at the origin of the coordinate system but is simply one point among many.” In this state the organism “quite literally no longer knows what to do with itself.”28

The desire to lose oneself, to become assimilated into the surrounding environment rather than control that environment, connects mimicry to certain aspects of game play. Indeed, Caillois’s Man, Play and Games returns to “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia” for some of its key theoretical components. Although the critical hindsight granted by more than two decades forces Caillois to distance himself from his earlier claims about mimicry’s connections to the death drive and the spatial disorder of psychasthenia, he maintains that mimicry constitutes one of the four major classifications of human game play described in his sociological taxonomy of games. These four types of games are competition (agôn), chance (alea), vertigo (ilinx), and simulation (mimicry). Examples of agôn include “football, billiards, or chess”; of alea, “roulette or a lottery”; of ilinx, “a rapid whirling or falling movement, a state of dizziness and disorder.” Games of mimicry simulate an imaginary universe, one where the player “forgets, disguises, or temporarily sheds his personality in order to feign another.” So examples of mimicry include “theatrical presentations and dramatic interpretations” that Caillois labels “cultural forms found at the margins of the social order”: carnival, theater, cinema.²⁹ For Caillois it is not only the film actor who participates in mimicry but also the film spectator. The actor, of course, pretends to be someone else during his performance. But spectators are also engaged in acts of imaginative imitation, forgetting themselves as they enter the film’s world and identify with the film’s characters or stars. Although Caillois considers this sort of identification to be a “degraded and diluted form of mimicry,” he cannot deny its power to fascinate or its location at the center of modern society, “in a world in which sports and the movies are so dominant.”³⁰

When Caillois describes cinematic spectatorship’s forms of identification as a “degraded and diluted” version of mimicry, his point of comparison is older rituals (often religious) that use masks, possession, and trance to access mimicry’s roots in the realm of the sacred. The complicated category of the sacred anchors much of Caillois’s work over the course of his long career, but perhaps most notably during his involvement with the College of Sociology in the late 1930s and in his book Man and the Sacred (first published in 1939, then revised in 1949). The revised edition of Man and the Sacred includes an appendix entitled “Play and the Sacred,” which introduces the concerns taken up later in Man, Play and Games. “Play and the Sacred” argues against the sociologist Johan Huizinga’s tendency in Homo Ludens (1938) to equate play and the sacred. Caillois contends that play and the sacred are opposites: play affords an active, controlling mastery over the profane realm of everyday life, while the sacred requires a tension-filled submission to forces that transcend the profane. So play and the sacred may ultimately mirror each other in their shared difference from the everyday, but the particular ways in which they differ from the profane are opposed. For Caillois modern society has lost touch with the sacred; he laments this passing of the sacred, especially the modern practice of ridiculing the sacred without replacing it.31

In Man, Play and Games, however, the eclipse of the sacred in the modern era is not primarily an event to be mourned but an occasion to recognize how crucial aspects of civilization depend on this eclipse: “If the decisive and difficult leap, or the narrow door that gives access to civilization and history (to progress and to a future), coincides with the substitution, as bases of collective existence, of the norms of alea and agôn for the prestige of mimicry and ilinx, it is certainly proper to investigate through what mysterious and improbable good fortune certain societies have succeeded in breaking the vicious circle of simulation and vertigo.”³² Theater and cinema, then, are domesticated remnants of the precivilized sacred, of mimicry’s masked simulations, just as mountain climbing and skiing are domesticated remnants of ilinx’s vertiginous trances.³³ This domestication and secularization of the sacred into games is necessary for a society’s progress, even if the civilizing process dilutes and degrades the sacred.

Caillois’s double-edged presentation of the sacred’s relation to games responds to, without fully reconciling, the diverse theoretical and historical contexts that have shaped his conceptions of surrealism, play, and mimicry. Claudine Frank argues that the years Caillois spent in Argentina during World War II (1939–45) enabled a “progressive intellectual, ideological, and cultural change, which left him a convert to ‘civilization’—or to what he had previously sought to overturn and destroy.”34 In certain ways this observation seems accurate: the postwar Caillois of Man, Play and Games exhibits little of the tortured desire to embrace elitism or fascism itself as a weapon against fascist political forces (when faced with democracy’s apparent impotence) that characterizes much work in the College of Sociology from 1937 to 1939 and informs Bataille’s writing even earlier.³⁵ Still, the fact that Caillois retains the category of mimicry at all for his postwar study of games, considering the qualifications and exceptions this retention necessitates, suggests a remarkable continuity with his interwar, surrealist conception of mimicry and its decidedly ambivalent stance toward “progress” and “civilization.”

Indeed, Bataille’s influence seems to preside over both the interwar and postwar versions of mimicry for Caillois, particularly Bataille’s essay “The Notion of Expenditure” (1933).³⁶ Bataille’s interest in waste, destructiveness, and unproductive forms of economic activity can be detected in the turn from self-preservation to self-abandonment in “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” as well as in Man, Play and Games, where Caillois asserts that play is “an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money” and that this unproductive aspect of play, its separateness from “real life,” is central to its social importance.³⁷ Caillois cites the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg alongside a 1957 riot by Swedish youth in Stockholm that “can probably be correlated with the popular success of such American films as The Wild One [Laslo Benedek, 1953]” as examples of the danger contained within mimicry and ilinx. He points to a simultaneous repulsion from and attraction toward mimicry by claiming these two events share a “magnetic power” able to “precipitate a crowd into a monstrous frenzy.”³⁸ It seems as if the dangerous mimicry present in Nazi rallies, youth riots, and self-destructive animal behavior is finally not entirely separable from the progressive mimicry of films and “civilized” forms of simulation as play. Again, it is striking that Caillois uses the same term, mimicry, to cover both sorts of phenomena, no matter how significant their differences.

One crucial thread connecting dangerous mimicry and progressive mimicry for Caillois is embodiment.39 In Man, Play and Games mimicry becomes most dangerous when it is embodied in combination with ilinx: “the conjunction of mask and trance, in this dangerous domain where perception becomes distorted, is very frightening. It provokes such seizures and paroxysms that the real world is temporarily abolished in the mind that is hallucinated or possessed.”⁴⁰ For Caillois the echoes of these “seizures and paroxysms” can be found at the fairground or amusement park, where mimicry and ilinx once again combine—only this time the potentially dangerous conjunction is domesticated by the civilized rules of play and games: “The disconcerting reflections that multiply and distort the shape of one’s body, the hybrid fauna, legendary monsters, nightmarish detectives, the grafts of an accursed surgery, the sickly horror of embryonic gropings, larvae, vampires, automatons, and Martians (for everything that is strange or disturbing is of use here), supplement on another level the wholly physical thrill by which the vertiginous machines momentarily distort one’s sensory stability.”⁴¹ The remnants of mask in the fun house, along with the remnants of trance on the roller coaster, still contain the traces of dangerous embodiment—note Caillois’s emphasis on the “disconcerting,” “nightmarish,” “accursed,” “sickly,” “strange,” “disturbing,” and “distort[ing].” Given this unmistakably cinematic inventory of fairground attractions provided by Caillois, the question of cinema’s own attractions arises. Do cinema’s “attractions,” as Tom Gunning calls them when he investigates film’s origins in fairground aesthetics, also access the potential risks of embodiment?⁴²

For the Caillois of Man, Play and Games the answer to this question is affirmative: the phenomenon of film stars as powerful “attractions” causes spectators to “live by them and in them, even to the extent that some are inconsolable when the stars die and refuse to survive them. These impassioned devotions exclude neither collective frenzy nor suicide waves.”43 But there are also tantalizing hints of possible responses to this question in “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” where Caillois sums up the depersonalizing assimilation into space characteristic of mimicry with the psychasthenic statement, “I know where I am, but I don’t feel that I am where I am.” This disconnect between knowing and feeling space, when “the subject crosses the boundary of his own skin and stands outside of his senses,” could be one way of describing the multiple cognitive and affective investments of cinematic spectatorship.⁴⁴ Indeed, the psychoanalyst and sometime surrealist fellow traveler Jacques Lacan refers specifically to Caillois on mimicry in his own famous essay “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (published in 1949 but based on an original version written in 1936), which was later adopted (however problematically) as a cornerstone text for psychoanalytic film theory of the 1970s and its influential formulations of spectatorship.⁴⁵

For Lacan, Caillois’s classification of mimicry as “an obsession with space in its derealizing effect” supports his own sense of how human mechanisms of identification cannot be reduced to comforting notions of adaptation and altruism but fall closer to aggression, fragmentation, and disintegration. Lacan is therefore sympathetic to interrogating those same restricted notions of rational, external reality as the basis for identification and for human knowledge that “the surrealists, in their restless way” recognized as limitations.⁴⁶ The intersection of Lacan’s identification with Caillois’s mimicry reveals a surrealist framework for understanding identification through the body rather than just the mind. When Lacan distills the function of the mirror stage, a developmental phase where the child recognizes its own reflection in the mirror for the first time, as a “drama” consisting of conflict between the inner world of the subject and the outer world of the social, he illustrates this drama through a fragmented body-image common in dreams: “It then appears in the form of disjointed limbs, or of those organs represented in exoscopy, growing wings and taking up arms for intestinal persecutions—the very same that the visionary Hieronymus Bosch has fixed, for all time, in painting, in their ascent from the fifteenth century to the imaginary zenith of modern man.”⁴⁷

Lacan’s fragmented body shares with Caillois’s mimicking body a radical blurring of boundaries between self and space that both men see reflected in the world of art. For Lacan it is Bosch’s bodies that cross these lines. For Caillois it is “Salvador Dalí’s paintings from around 1930,” whose fantastic forms stem from “the mimetic assimilation of animate beings into the inanimate realm.”48 This transformation of animate into inanimate, subject into object, and body into space that Caillois locates in Dalí crystallizes the progressive potential of mimicry. “The inclination to imitate,” explains Caillois, “remains quite strong in ‘civilized’ man, for it persists” in two related thought processes: “the subjective association of ideas,” or “the chance or supposedly chance links between ideas,” and “the objective association of phenomena,” or “the causal links between phenomena.” These associative thought processes of modern mimicry may be understood as informing not only the metamorphoses captured in Dalí’s paintings but also “the aesthetic instinct” writ large, which Caillois admits he has no problem reducing to “the tendency to become transformed into an object or space.”⁴⁹

In other words mimicry resides at the heart of artistic creativity for Caillois, especially as such creativity was defined by the surrealists as a matter of shocking or surprising associations between different images. Breton proclaims in his “Manifesto of Surrealism” that surrealist images emerge from “the fortuitous juxtaposition” of “two terms” from which “a particular light has sprung, the light of the image, to which we are infinitely sensitive. The value of the image depends upon the beauty of the spark obtained; it is, consequently, a function of the difference of potential between the two conductors.”⁵⁰ As with many of Breton’s proclamations, this influential definition of the surrealist image was one Caillois would eventually contest; he will claim that Breton’s privileging of surprise for evaluating an image’s “spark” misses the significance of the obvious, the evident, and the preparation of audience expectations.⁵¹ Still, Caillois’s alignment of mimicry with “the aesthetic instinct” and those associative processes of metamorphosis he detects in Dalí’s paintings testifies to a surrealist understanding of mimicry’s intersection with art—precisely the kind of intersection that later allows Caillois to describe progressive, “civilized” forms of mimicry as game alongside more dangerous forms of embodied mimicry as sacred in the cinema.

I would argue that it is not mere coincidence that one of Dalí’s most famous paintings from the era Caillois mentions as evidence for mimicry in art, “around 1930,” is entitled The Lugubrious Game (1929) nor that two of Dalí’s most important artistic achievements of this period are not paintings at all but his contributions to the films Un chien andalou and L’âge d’or.⁵² In short, Caillois’s concepts of mimicry include as many distinctively cinematic dimensions as they do gaming dimensions, with surrealism and embodiment uniting the two. Armed with Caillois’s mimicry as a theoretical framework, we are now prepared to return to the games of spectatorship played by Un chien andalou and eXistenZ.

Pikul is initially apprehensive about accepting this form of self-abandonment, but Geller encourages him to enjoy it as one of gaming’s pleasures; either way, he seems powerless to stop it. “I find this disgusting but I can’t help myself,” Pikul says as he feasts on the mutant amphibians. He adds, “I’m fighting it, but it isn’t doing me any good.” Nevertheless, he eats with lip-smacking relish and assembles the gun with eager precision. One of the pleasures provided by this scene is watching Pikul, who has always steadfastly resisted any “invasive” stimulation of his body, submit to an entirely different order of embodied behavior. As if to underline this transformation, Pikul insists that the teeth he removes from his mouth while eating—the gun’s “bullets”—must belong to the game’s version of his body, not his own “real” body (whose teeth are perfect). Just as Pikul’s “game teeth” mimic bullets, so, too, does his “game body” mimic his “real body,” thrusting him toward an embodied self-abandonment he has never permitted himself.

True to Caillois’s interweaving of progressive, “civilized” mimicry with dangerous, more radically embodied forms of mimicry, eXistenZ never allows viewers to draw definitive lines between harmless “game” and threatening “reality,” nor between video game characteristics commonly perceived as “interactive” and cinematic characteristics often understood as “passive.” Does Pikul’s submission to the game reveal the interactive potential of video games or their confinement to the mere shadow of interactivity? Does the viewer’s spectatorship of Pikul’s submission to the game reveal cinema’s capability for delivering “active,” embodied experience for audiences or for generating only “passive” forms of experience? And where do the pleasures for the viewer/player emerge in this constellation of links and disjunctions between cinema and video games?

The fact that Cronenberg, as always, channels such questions toward the body—both onscreen and offscreen—means that mimicry’s embodied dimensions take center stage in eXistenZ. It is crucial that Pikul’s disgust while eating is mirrored by the viewer’s disgust at the sights and sounds of watching him eat, just as Pikul’s self-abandoning pleasure while eating echoes the viewer’s enjoyment of surrender to this spectacle (“I find this disgusting but I can’t help myself”). Geller’s reactions to Pikul also suggest a series of possible models for the viewer’s own reactions: she cringes with visceral distaste as Pikul eats, smiles as he submits to the “game urge,” reassures him that his responses are normal, and finally shrinks from him as he menaces her with the gun. Positing Pikul and Geller as the primary points of identification for viewer mimicry would support Caillois’s later claims about the attachments viewers express toward film characters or stars, but focusing solely on this sort of identification may minimize Caillois’s earlier arguments about mimicry as the lure of becoming space. Isn’t it possible that viewers mimic not only Pikul and Geller but also the setting of the game itself? That viewers desire to get lost in the world of the game (or the film) in ways beside or beyond character or star identification? Cronenberg seems quite aware of this possibility—a lurid advertisement for a game glimpsed earlier in the film is called Chinese Restaurant, indicating that this scene’s setting could be an attraction in itself.

Chinese Restaurant is not the only game on display in the “game emporium” explored by Pikul and Geller in eXistenZ. Other titles include Hit by a Car and Viral Ecstasy. Of course, these two game titles could serve as references to (or adaptations of) the Cronenberg films Crash (1996) and Shivers, respectively, highlighting the opportunities for mimicry of the author presented to the viewer/player of eXistenZ. Alongside desires to lose oneself within the film/game’s characters or settings comes the desire to lose oneself within the author’s imagination, to “play” in the Cronenberg universe. In other words, eXistenZ presents its invitation to interactivity through the reading strategies of art cinema, where the “competent viewer” searches the film for the author’s “stylistic signatures.”54 Indeed, the proclamation “Death to the demoness, Allegra Geller” recalls a very similar proclamation from Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), when Max Renn (James Woods) declares, “Death to Videodrome, long live The New Flesh.” “Videodrome” and “The New Flesh,” like “Cortical Systematics” and “The Realist Underground” in eXistenZ, refer to organizations whose mixtures of corporate, revolutionary, technological, and ideological elements always remain shrouded in ambiguity. Renn, like Pikul, accompanies his statement by wielding a gun that is equal parts animate and inanimate matter. For Caillois, as we have seen, one way of defining mimicry in art is through the melding of the animate and the inanimate. The set of intertextual moves performed in eXistenZ joins its networks of mimicry at the levels of story, image, and affect (Pikul imitates Geller’s assassin, bodies imitate machines, viewers feel as Pikul/Geller do) to networks of mimicry at the levels of art cinema authorship and spectatorship (Pikul imitates Renn, eXistenZ imitates Videodrome, viewers “play” across a number of Cronenberg films).

The specific type of play engaged in by viewers of eXistenZ will depend partly on their auteurist knowledge of Cronenberg’s films, but no previous knowledge at all is required to sense the game of mimicry that occurs between Pikul and the assassin. And it is this mimicking of the assassin by Pikul that foreshadows the revelations of doubled identities that conclude the film, when many of the film’s characters are unveiled as players testing a new game called transCendenZ; eXistenZ is consequently revealed as a gaming experience generated within transCendenZ. In one last burst of mimicry Pikul and Geller then assassinate the game designer of transCendenZ, declare “Death to transCendenZ!” and finally train their guns on the man who played the waiter they “killed” earlier in the Chinese Restaurant of eXistenZ. He pleads with them not to shoot him, then asks, “Are we still in the game?” Their silent reply is the final shot of the film: a straight-on, frontal view of Pikul and Geller, guns aimed, fingers on the trigger. Their weapons are pointed directly at this man but also at us, the audience (fig. 2.6).

When Buñuel attended the theatrical premiere of Un chien andalou, he carried stones in his pockets to hurl at the audience “in case of disaster.” After hearing the applause that greeted the film’s conclusion, Buñuel dropped the stones “discreetly, one by one, on the floor behind the screen.”55 But in the end perhaps Buñuel had not averted disaster. In a prefatory note to accompany the publication of Un chien andalou’s screenplay in a 1929 issue of the journal La révolution surréaliste, Buñuel complains, “A box-office success, that’s what most people think who have seen the film. But what can I do about … this imbecilic crowd that has found beautiful or poetic that which, at heart, is nothing other than a desperate, impassioned call for murder?”⁵⁶ Buñuel’s harsh words for his audience must be contextualized with his need to please an extremely demanding Surrealist Group that often looked suspiciously on popular success, but still, one wonders whether he ultimately regretted his decision not to throw stones at his viewers. Buñuel echoes Breton’s similarly provocative statement in the “Second Manifesto of Surrealism” (1929), published in the same issue of La révolution surréaliste: “The simplest surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level.”⁵⁷ Breton and Buñuel deliberately overstate their cases to achieve a scandalous effect, but one feels clearly their surrealist rage for change in both art and life, as well as how their public audience inspires not only a desire to create but also fear and contempt. They worry that they will not succeed in communicating their surrealist anger to their audience; they fear, in other words, the failure to accomplish interactivity.

The final shot of eXistenZ carries the weight of this same fear, with its realization that the games initiated between author and audience are at once deeply playful and deadly serious. One of the last statements made by Yevgeny Nourish (Don McKellar), the game designer of transCendenZ, prior to his assassination is that he was “disturbed” by the antigame theme that surfaced while playing eXistenZ. He comes to the uncomfortable conclusion that since the antigame theme could not have originated with him, it must have been devised by the players—the interactive audience. The danger posed to the author by the audience runs along both edges of interactivity: failed interactivity diminishes the effect of the artwork, but successful interactivity risks the audience’s returning to the author with input he cannot process, with desires he cannot fulfill, with interpretations he did not foresee.

Cronenberg speaks about the origins of eXistenZ in the lethal fatwa issued when author Salman Rushdie was accused of blasphemy against Islam for his novel The Satanic Verses. The spark for the film, according to Cronenberg, grew out of “the question of a writer having to deal with what he has created, that what he creates becomes a living thing out in the world that can come back to haunt you in many ways or stalk you, [as] in the case of Rushdie.”58 This “living thing” that Cronenberg refers to is not a novel or film in isolation but the interactivity established between author, artwork, and audience. In Rushdie’s case some extremist readers participated in such a fully interactive exchange with his work (or at least an imagined interactive exchange) that they called for the author’s murder. The stones in Buñuel’s pockets were carried by the director as a defensive measure against an audience the director feared might attack his film or perhaps even his body during the screening: “I was a nervous wreck. In fact, I hid behind the screen with the record player, alternating Argentinian tangos with Tristan und Isolde.”⁵⁹ So for Buñuel the film screen is a site for interactivity—it simultaneously exposes him to and hides him from the audience, presenting the author as a silent, unseen presence, as well as an active “speaker” through the film’s images and the accompanying musical selections.

What unites Buñuel, Rushdie, and Cronenberg is a powerful understanding of interactivity’s pleasures and dangers, how the desire for an audience to be so deeply affected by your work that they mimic acts of authorship through active responses of their own may become realized as direct or indirect aggression toward the author. And the author, in turn, may wish to lash back at the audience—witness Buñuel’s stones or Cronenberg’s final, confrontational shot in eXistenZ. “Are we still in the game?” is a question that cannot be answered by anyone within eXistenZ because Cronenberg recognizes how it ultimately addresses the audience outside the film, the audience that makes or breaks the interactive loop. It is toward them (us) that the guns are pointed, just as it is they (us) that have the power to hold the author at gunpoint over the work he has created. In this image we can detect signs of art cinema’s transformation into interactive art cinema: the viewer’s search for the author’s “stylistic signatures” has become something simultaneously more of a (risky) game and less of a(n) (innocuous) game. And this is precisely the kind of game found within both eXistenZ and Un chien andalou in the shape of surrealist interactivity.

Un chien andalou pursues the lure of mimicry not only through doubled characters but also as a chain of associated images that imitate each other formally. The film’s opening sequence, as I have argued above, relies on a number of graphically matched images and movements rather than narrative causality for connections between the shots. This practice of graphic matching continues throughout the film. In fact, the initial connection between the film’s first and second sequences is not the presence of Mareuil but the graphically similar patterns of diagonal stripes that appear on both the tie of the man with the razor and the rectangular box carried by the androgynous bicyclist. When this box is opened by Mareuil, its contents include a tie with similar diagonal stripes. When the dark-suited man appears in Mareuil’s apartment, his presence initiates a return to the circular imagery presented in the film’s opening sequence when the thumb, moon, and eye are matched. Ants emerge from a circular hole in his hand, and then, in a series of dissolves: a patch of armpit hair that resembles the shape of the swarming ants around the circular hand hole; a circular sea urchin whose spiky surface resembles the strands of hair; and a circular iris framing an overhead shot of a person with a cane prodding a severed hand.

The spectacle of the severed hand brings Un chien andalou “full circle” in a number of different ways. First, this hand that is literally cut off from the body literalizes film language by evoking the earlier close-up of the dark-suited man’s hand, when the framing distance of the shot figuratively “cuts off” the man’s hand from the rest of his body. This literalization of film language across the body repeats the film’s opening sequence, when film editing, or “cutting,” results in the literal cutting of an eye. Second, the chain of associated circular images that appeared initially in the film’s opening sequence (thumb, moon, eye) now comes “full circle” spatially, narratively, and thematically by presenting this second chain of associated circular images (hole in hand, hair in armpit, sea urchin, round-shaped iris) as the shared vision of Mareuil and the dark-suited man. They stare down together from the apartment window at the severed hand in the street as the series of dissolves concludes, just as they stared together at the ants streaming from the dark-suited man’s hand when the series of dissolves began. Their collective point of view organizes space (eventually “rationalizing” the overhead angle after a crowd assembles—forming yet another circle—around the severed hand), narrative (providing the continuity of return to the same apartment with the same characters), and theme (the act of seeing as the film’s subject and object of attention).

The look down into the street at the severed hand also integrates the mimicry of graphic matching with the mimicry of character doubling, merging (and ultimately replacing) the psychological interiority of character identity with the spatial exteriority of formal surfaces. In a cinematic enactment of Caillois’s mimicry as self-abandonment and becoming space, Un chien andalou substitutes spatial association for psychological depth. Mareuil and the dark-suited man witness together a chain of circular images that culminates with an iris surrounding the person whose cane jabs at the disembodied hand. Additional shots reveal this person as an androgyne, a woman whose masculine features (including a tie) compete with her feminine ones (including women’s shoes). So this androgyne with the cane becomes yet another double for the dark-suited man, who appeared earlier as the androgynous bicyclist glimpsed from this same vantage point at the window by Mareuil. This doubling is further bolstered when a policeman places the severed hand inside the same rectangular box with diagonal stripes originally carried by the bicyclist and then gives the box to the androgyne with a cane. When the crowd encircles this androgyne, film language is again made literal flesh as the iris becomes a physical ring of bodies. And we are again returned to the film’s opening sequence not just through the graphic similarity between the circular crowd and the eye but through bodily violence. Just as the eye slicing closed the film’s opening sequence, here the death of the androgyne by collision with an automobile ends this one. Although the intertitle “about three in the morning … ,” which marks the official end of this second sequence and the beginning of the third, does not appear until slightly later, the death of the androgyne generates the sexually aggressive frenzy in the dark-suited man that motivates the remainder of the second sequence. This frenzy, which causes the dark-suited man to fondle Mareuil and to chase her around the apartment, subsides only when Mareuil traps his grasping, ant-infested hand in the door (“severing” the hand once more), and he reverts to the form of the androgynous bicyclist. This transformation brings the sequence to its official conclusion by highlighting the doubled identities of the two androgynes. They share the motif of the severed hand, while the death of one ultimately provides the energy necessary for the “rebirth” of the other.

Mimicry, whether in terms of character doubling or graphic matching, functions as a spectatorial game of spatial assimilation in Un chien andalou. The chains of associated circular or diagonal images, like the series of characters that substitute for each other, frustrate narrative logic and instead invite viewers to experience mimicry as Caillois’s “lure of space.” If mimicry’s attraction involves, as Caillois claims, a “depersonalization through assimilation into space,” then Un chien andalou makes room for such assimilation on the part of viewers by refusing to let conventional character development or linear narrative override the lure of becoming space.61 It is the transformation of objects in space that compels the film’s viewers; the film’s “story” revolves not so much around characters and narrative as objects and spaces. In fact, Roland Barthes’s description of Bataille’s surrealist pornographic novel Story of the Eye (1928) as a story not about characters but about an object—the eye—could apply equally well to Un chien andalou. They are both stories of the eye, where the “story” is not a narrative in the traditional sense but an account of how the eye passes “from image to image, so that its story is that of a migration, the cycle of avatars it traverses far from its original being.” In Bataille’s novel the eye “migrates” toward metaphorically similar “globular” objects such as eggs and bull testicles while becoming metonymically exchanged with a second metaphoric chain of “moist” objects such as tears, milk, egg yolk, semen, and urine.⁶² Likewise, the sliced eye in Un chien andalou emerges as the most striking component in a metaphoric chain of circular objects such as thumb, moon, hand hole, and sea urchin, as well as a metonymic switch point for other chains of objects like the diagonally striped tie and box.⁶³

When Barthes, whose investments in surrealism and Bataille were explored in chapter 1, describes the migration of objects in Story of the Eye as traversing a “cycle of avatars,” he inadvertently touches on a term that will become central to video games years later: the avatar.⁶⁴ In video games the avatar is the figure standing in for the player within the video game’s world. In eXistenZ the avatars for Pikul and Geller mimic their actual bodies so closely that the two forms are virtually indistinguishable; changes in clothing and hairstyle, for example, are relatively minor when compared with the fact that Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh portray both the players “outside” the game and the avatars “inside” the game. Indeed, the avatars allow the players to assimilate into the space of the game in a manner that Cronenberg compares with the workings of film language on the perceptions of film spectators. When Pikul and Geller first enter the eXistenZ game together, the transition from “real” world to “game” world is articulated within the film through a classic film editing mechanism: the eyeline match. Pikul’s look upward is matched to a shot of a game character walking down a flight of stairs, making the traversal between worlds a seamless one. Pikul is so stunned by the nature of the transition that his avatar comments to Geller’s avatar, “That was beautiful.” Pikul’s avatar then feels his own body and face, checking to make sure he is “all there” within the game’s space. “I feel just like me,” he comments. Then he asks Geller’s avatar, “Is that kind of transition, that kind of smooth interlacing from place to place … ?” As he trails off, Geller’s avatar answers, “It depends on the style of game. You can get jagged, brutal cuts, slow fades, shimmering little morphs.”

Geller’s inventory of cinematic editing devices, which merges the analog era of “cuts” and “fades” with the digital era of “morphs” as easily as it blends the realms of cinema and video games, calls attention to how eXistenZ invites viewers to assimilate into space along lines tested in Un chien andalou. Buñuel, from the slicing of the eye via graphic matching to the severing of the hand via close-up to the shaping of the crowd via iris, converts film language into body language. One effect of this embodying process is a sense of assimilation into space within the film and outside it—film language becomes spatialized as embodied objects, while film viewers follow the “migrations” of these objects in space rather than a “story.” At times viewers mimic the space inhabited by these embodied objects so closely that they “feel” the objects at the level of the body. It is physically difficult to watch the slicing of the eye, to resist closing one’s own eyes in queasy discomfort. Lesser but still pronounced jolts of embodiment accompany the spectacles of ants crawling out of a wound in a palm and a cane prodding the soft flesh of a severed hand. These spectacular objects migrate not only from one object form to another but also from screen space to viewer space through bodily sensation.

Cronenberg, too, invests his cinematic/gamic objects with embodied dimensions that meld the space of the film with the space of the viewer. To play the eXistenZ game requires jacking one’s nervous system into a “game pod,” a hybrid animal-machine composed of living tissue and electronic circuits. A “bioport” drilled into the spine of the player’s body allows an “umby cord,” a combination of an umbilical cord and a power cable, to connect the game pod to the player. The mixtures of animate and inanimate matter that characterize the hardware of eXistenZ (game pod, bioport, umby cord) recall Caillois’s sense of mimetic assimilation into space as a metamorphosis “of animate beings into the inanimate realm.”65 But in eXistenZ the metamorphosis occurs in two directions simultaneously: animate matter becomes inanimate (bodies mimic machines) as inanimate matter becomes animate (machines mimic bodies). Still, Caillois’s characterization of mimicry as becoming space is upheld in eXistenZ as persuasively as it is in Un chien andalou. Cronenberg’s moaning game pods, infected bioports, and bleeding umby cords are the progeny of Buñuel’s sliced eye and severed hand: embodied objects that generate visceral responses from embodied viewers. These objects and the sensations they provoke close the space between screen and viewer, often in shockingly immediate ways. The winces offscreen that accompany the images of a sliced eye or a bleeding umby cord onscreen testify to the powers of spatial assimilation enacted in these films. Their interactive dimensions finally belong to the surrealist realms of mimicry and games, to the transformations of space performed within the film and encouraged in viewer perceptions of the film. Becoming space in these films as an act of spectatorship contains both assaultive components (attacks on viewer sensibilities through mimicked sensation) and reactive components (erasures of viewer subjectivities through mimicked spatial assimilation).⁶⁶

This sort of surrealist interactivity, with its emphasis on becoming space, is different from but not unrelated to the action-based interactivity often used to describe video games. If we return now to Galloway’s definitions of cinema as “moving images” and video games as “actions,” we can see more clearly how his deployment of these definitions to separate cinema and video games misses the potential intersections between surrealist interactivity and action-based interactivity. For Galloway the rise of video games as a prominent feature of digital culture means that “what used to be primarily the domain of eyes and looking is now more likely that of muscles and doing, thumbs, to be sure, and what used to be the act of reading is now the act of doing.”67 Of course, cinema as eyes and looking contrasted with video games as bodies and doing obscures how the varieties of onscreen and offscreen mimicry in films from Un chien andalou to eXistenZ constitute forms of interactivity that resist eye/body and looking/doing distinctions.⁶⁸ And it is precisely through resistance to these distinctions that the games played in these films emerge as deeply playful and deadly serious. In these games the spectator’s very senses and sensibilities are the ultimate stakes.

If we return once more to the opening of Un chien andalou and reinspect the man with the razor played by Buñuel, we will notice that one more object must be added to the chain of associated circular images that includes thumb, moon, and eye: a watch. As Buñuel sharpens his razor and peers at the sky from his balcony, he wears a watch on his left wrist. But during the slashing of the eye, the watch is missing. The absence of the watch and sudden appearance of a tie with diagonal stripes suggests that the eye slashing, although spatially continuous with previous shots through graphically matched images and movements, may not be temporally continuous.⁶⁹ This impression of temporal discontinuity builds on the film’s opening title, “once upon a time …” and is further supported by the intertitle that follows the eye slashing: “eight years later.” But soon the viewer realizes that each of the film’s intertitles holds out only the mirage of temporal orientation. The film’s subsequent intertitles, “about three in the morning … ,” “sixteen years before,” and “in spring … ,” all refer to time but in ways that do not aid at all in ordering the film’s images chronologically. The intertitles present a parody of temporal structure, just as the film’s loose “story” presents a parody of a romantic affair. It’s as if Buñuel provides hints of familiar conventions, whether in terms of chronology or narrative, only to underline how inadequate these conventions are when viewers face the film itself.

And yet the emphasis on mimicry in Un chien andalou that I have described as surrealist interactivity does not simply abandon order, convention, or narrative. The chains of associated objects and their migrations offer alternate forms of structure for spectators to experiment with as they make their way through the film. When the object of the watch, which disappeared during the eye slashing, reappears during the film’s closing moments, it reminds viewers that these alternate forms of structure pertain to time as well as space. The watch rematerializes on the wrist of Mareuil’s seashore lover, who gives her an initially chilly reception by confronting her accusingly with the sight of the watch.70 In a striking close-up Mareuil’s face occupies the left side of the screen while the lover’s hand, wrist, and watch fill the right (fig. 2.7). This frame composition echoes the earlier eye slashing because we again witness a close-up shared by Mareuil’s face and a man’s hand; only this time the watch is present, and she lowers his hand (fig. 2.8). The substitution of the watch for the razor as the central object in the frame presents a spatial discontinuity with the eye slashing, but Mareuil’s action of lowering the lover’s hand suggests a certain sense of temporal continuity, as if she remembers or anticipates the figurative action of the eye slashing and chooses to defuse its violence now. The subsequent shots of Mareuil and her lover bolster this impression of remembering the past or anticipating the future in order to choose a different course of action: they come across the diagonally striped box (now broken) and the feminine clothing of the bicyclist as they stroll the shore, and discard them indifferently after a brief survey. For the couple these once powerful objects no longer carry the same significance; time has revealed the objects as only one way of organizing space, not the only way. In other words the film offers spectators multiple temporal pathways to follow, as well as multiple spatial associations to connect. In this sense the “misleading” intertitles may also be interpreted as temporal markers of an alternate kind: invitations to spectators to organize and reorganize the film’s chronology.

Even the final shot of Un chien andalou, a grim tableau where time seems to stand still, features more than enough ambiguity to make the film’s final title, “The End,” seem just as malleable as the previous intertitles. Who is the male figure buried in the sand beside Mareuil? Why is her gaze directed upward and his downward? Where should we, the spectators, direct our gaze? One possible way of addressing this last question, Buñuel seems to suggest, is a matter of time as much as space. Viewers are encouraged by the film’s evocation of (but resistance to) conventional chronology to revisit the film and seek out alternate chronologies, to assemble different versions of Un chien andalou the way a participant in an exquisite corpse game might contribute different sorts of words or images depending on the round that shift the game’s outcome.

The final line of dialogue in eXistenZ, “Are we still in the game?” functions as a similar invitation for viewers to revisit the film and reorganize its spatial and temporal dimensions, this time along lines of “inside the game” and “outside the game.” And as in Un chien andalou, these alternate chronologies offer something closer to a series of possible permutations than to a “correct” version of the film’s events—permutations that suggest the games played by the film can and should be continued by viewers after the lights have come up. In this way Un chien andalou may be seen as a precursor to the kinds of “puzzle films” once considered squarely within art cinema traditions but whose popularity has increased significantly with the advent of new media and moved into the mainstream—films with tricky, sometimes labyrinthine spatial and temporal structures that encourage multiple viewings in the quest for solutions to the film’s puzzles.71 Puzzle films like David Fincher’s The Game (1997) and Fight Club (1999) or Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000), The Prestige (2006), and Inception (2010), like eXistenZ itself, are constructed with an acute awareness of the computerized technologies, particularly the DVD, that their viewers understand as familiar tools for navigating and reexperiencing a film. Surfing through the chapters of a DVD to reorganize a film’s chronology is certainly something the puzzle films expect their viewers to do physically as part of the film’s afterlife, but the films are also constructed in such a way that they invite viewers to perform similar functions mentally during the theatrical screening as well. This aesthetic of reorganization and revisiting is a prominent feature of cinema in the age of digital media, but it is also a crucial component of surrealist interactivity.

As I pointed out in chapter 1, this is not to say that DVDs cannot also work to limit viewer engagement with a film, to restrict the range of possible interpretations available to viewers. Nor would I claim that puzzle films constitute an inherently adventurous and challenging refiguration of cinematic spectatorship practices; quite often the puzzles reveal a renewed investment in standard narrative devices rather than a questioning of them.⁷² But the proposition presented to film viewers by the DVD is finally not unlike the proposition presented to visitors of a museum: they can be guided to varying degrees, by design or against design, by the author-curator. Within the limits of the institutions of the cinema and the museum (institutions, it must be noted, that are undergoing a rich cross-pollination in the new media era),⁷³ some author-curators welcome a wider range of interactive possibilities, some less. The same can be said for the viewer-visitor. Still, these convergences of the author with the curator and the viewer with the visitor suggest additional possibilities for imagining a viewer-curator and an author-visitor at the crossroads of art cinema, surrealism, and digital media—a crossroads where interactive art cinema meets curatorial cinema.

A number of the projects Cronenberg has pursued in the wake of eXistenZ stand at this crossroads. These projects include Spider (2002) and A History of Violence (2005), two films that play authorship games with Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979) and The Dead Zone (1983), respectively, in much the same manner as eXistenZ does with Videodrome—games, in other words, that present authorship as a search term for cinema in a new media landscape where the author and viewer curate a digital database that includes the present film’s relation to the author’s previous films.⁷⁴ And then there is Camera (2000), Cronenberg’s poignant short film that could be summarized as an encounter between old and new media under the sign of art cinema as film festival cinema (filmed in digital video with the exception of the 35 mm final shot and produced to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Toronto International Film Festival). Like eXistenZ, Camera shares an intimate relation with Videodrome and its concerns with interactive media, new and old: it stars Les Carlson, a featured cast member of Videodrome, and the film itself can now be found, appropriately enough, on the special edition DVD of Videodrome issued by the Criterion Collection.

More recently, Cronenberg guest-curated the exhibition Andy Warhol/ Supernova: Stars, Deaths, and Disasters, 1962–1964 at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto) in 2006. Cronenberg’s revision, condensation, and extension of an important Warhol exhibition that originated at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) is a remarkable double illumination: it shows us Warhol through Cronenberg as well as Cronenberg through Warhol, expanding our sense of both artists simultaneously.75 Central to achieving this feat is Cronenberg’s audio commentary, which accompanies the exhibition in a manner similar to the director’s commentary feature included on many DVDs. But the museum context, with its presentation of art through physical spaces to be navigated, endows this commentary with specific curatorial qualities that can sometimes be suggested only latently (if at all) on a DVD. What emerges from the exhibition’s implicit attempt to resituate Cronenberg’s films through Warhol’s art (something the poster ads for the exhibition make use of, asking visitors whether Crash, The Dead Zone, and A History of Violence are really Cronenberg films or Warhol themes) is another version of the interactivity that characterizes eXistenZ. In other words, Cronenberg’s use of museum curating to remap his own work helps illuminate new media’s capacity to search, index, juxtapose, and rearrange cinema—to present cinema as a shared curatorial project between author and spectator. In a way, Warhol’s explicit rerouting of photographs from magazines in his paintings mirrors the implicit rerouting of Cronenberg’s films through this exhibition: the original artifacts are lifted into new contexts and transformed, their “intended” and “correct” meanings splintered into a series of constellations that then must be negotiated between artist and audience. This recontextualizing move, so often associated with digital media, is also, of course, a hallmark of Dada and surrealism.

Un chien andalou can also be located within a trajectory of curatorial acts. Not long before making the film, Buñuel traveled from Paris to Madrid as the curator of a film program he presented at the request of a lecture society at his alma mater, the Residencia de estudiantes. According to Buñuel his program included “René Clair’s Entr’acte [1924], the dream sequence from [Jean] Renoir’s La fille de l’eau [1925], [Alberto] Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures [1926].” When Buñuel realized how “aristocratic” his audience was, he was tempted to “announce a menstruation contest and award prizes after the lecture.”76 Almost twenty years later, in 1947, Buñuel again contributed curatorial material to a film program, this time for an avant-garde film exhibition held at the San Francisco Museum of Art entitled Art in Cinema.⁷⁷ Although the exhibition was not of his own design, Buñuel’s written contribution, “Notes on the Making of Un chien andalou,” recalls his earlier Madrid film program by framing Un chien andalou with the contemporary avant-garde cinema of its day, including the work of Clair and Cavalcanti. For Buñuel (at least from the vantage point of 1947) Un chien andalou “represents a violent reaction against” this contemporary avant-garde cinema addressed “to the reason of the spectator.” His collaboration with Dalí, in contrast, functions on a “purely irrational” level, where the images “are as mysterious and inexplicable to the two collaborators as to the spectator.”⁷⁸ To place Un chien andalou between these two curatorial acts is to remind ourselves that Buñuel always imagined the film as an alternative to avant-garde cinema, as a volatile engagement with spectators trained by the conventions of earlier avant-garde films as well as popular romance narratives. Again, we might well dub this alternative “interactive art cinema.”