There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet
THE ANALYSIS OF JEAN-LUC GODARD’S CONTEMPT BRINGS MY book full circle and has permitted me to revisit some of the original questions posed in my opening pages, in the light of all that has been discussed in between. With this conclusion I intend to clarify how the methodology developed in this book might be utilized by more specific theoretical approaches and expanded to accommodate other film practices and modes of expression. No film is without an order of meaning, and no film manifests this otherwise than through its systems of reference, but neither is any film made outside of an industrial context or a material praxis completely detached from social values and political influences. The conclusions of this study, though enmeshed in the highly politicized rhetoric of French critical theory and the modernist texts of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, are aimed at a much wider understanding of where film and philosophy meet, but how might this be applied? There are more things in cinema than are dreamt of in this book, so where do other films meet with philosophy, or what might their philosophy be?
I have elsewhere argued for the seductive nature of the moving image, seductive in the Baudrillardian sense and applying to all types of cinema.1 On the opening page of Seduction, Baudrillard defines his titular term as “the artifice of the world,” claiming that “all things wish to lose themselves in appearance.”2 Although I have not examined here the industrial implications of such concepts—the dream factory, the star system, etc.—it is worth noting the degree to which all cinema is first and foremost a transparent surface appearance and resonance, a medium of light and sound. In other words all films—from Marienbad to Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986) to WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008)—are processes of becoming within the immanent field, processes of play that can and sometimes do refuse the monoliths of power and desire and, instead, seduce. As Baudrillard argues in terms that resonate strongly with the central theses of this book: “There is no active or passive mode in seduction, no subject or object, no interior or exterior: seduction plays on both sides, and there is no frontier separating them.”3 The immanent field is a site rich with the potential for seduction, and film connotation teeters on how this seductive capacity is tethered or liberated, resolved or left in question. I have explored this process in terms of a corpus of films from the 1960s that, to varying degrees, resist resolution and liberate the image to a multitude of possible meanings—but how might this theory of the immanent field and subject-object relations be applied to other types of cinema?
Deleuze himself does not rest with only the art-house canon of Resnais, Welles, and Antonioni but devotes quite a lot of time—especially in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image—to several mainstream Hollywood directors, including Howard Hawks, Vincente Minnelli, and Alfred Hitchcock. And there have been many noteworthy forays into the study of philosophy and mainstream cinema, including the books of Stanley Cavell, Stephen Mulhall’s On Film, and a number of “X and Philosophy” titles, where X equals anything from The Coen Brothers to Seinfeld.4 Garrett Stewart’s Framed Time and Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity do a great job of applying specifically Deleuzean analysis to, respectively, contemporary film and the popular genre of science fiction. The premise of my book, however, maintains that it is necessary not only to apply Deleuze’s terms but to systematize them, as I have done in my theory of film connotation and the immanent field, and to consider Deleuzean film-philosophy as only part of a larger philosophical world that includes and even overlaps with other methodologies such as phenomenology. To encourage further inclusion and symbiosis, I hope here to acknowledge how the work proposed in these pages might constructively intersect with other critical methods and types of cinema.
THE VIEWING SUBJECT IN THE SUSPENSE GENRE
Genre theory offers an important alternative methodology for film study, one that is not utilized in my work but that is widely useful given that genre strongly informs a large number of films because of its role in industrial practices and film reception. One genre in particular—the suspense thriller—reflects back on the attraction of cinema as a medium by centralizing voyeurism in both its form and content and, in doing so, has consistently challenged the normative principles of illusion and subjectivity. This can be seen in the films of Fritz Lang (from the German M [1931] to his Hollywood remake of Renoir’s La chienne [1931] Scarlet Street [1945]), Claude Chabrol (Les bonnes femmes [1960] and Les biches [1968] are perfect examples), and Brian De Palma (exemplary titles include Sisters [1973] and Blow Out [1981]). Nowhere is the role of voyeurism more central to the larger worldview of a director than with the master of suspense himself, Hitchcock, and the politics—both social and individual—of looking is central to his films’ stories, as well as to his unfolding of individual images and image sequences. With the speed of their transformations between subjective and objective representation and their all-encompassing moral ambiguity and skepticism for modernity, Hitchcock’s films provoke a profound reaction from viewers, threatening our sense of right and wrong and forcing us to wonder on what side of that binary we ourselves fall.
Hitchcock’s work has received no lack of critical focus, from the Cahiers du cinéma crew’s cinephilic obsession5 to important feminist texts such as Laura Mulvey’s aforementioned “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and Tania Modleski’s The Women Who Knew Too Much, to more overtly philosophical or psychoanalytical works such as Slavoj Žižek’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). But what might Hitchcock’s films offer us in terms of the intersection between phenomenology and semiotics and the problem of film connotation? In their embrace and inversion of the role of voyeurism, Hitchcock’s films provide a contrary experience: we are sutured into the position of the viewing subject through the form but positioned in front of a world that makes us uncomfortable with our desires. This discomfort is particularly strong in what is arguably Hitchcock’s most innovative period during the 1950s, when he was making films such as Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), and Psycho (1960), all of which revolve around the nexus between viewing subjectivity, desire of the viewed object, and psychopathic projections or manifestations of this desire.
From the standpoint of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology I would argue that Hitchcock reveals the absolute viewing subject—conceptualized in classical philosophy and reified through the traditional codes of perspective and classical film editing—to be a mode of mania: a self-induced disconnection of the subject from the objective world brought about through the incapacity to be-in-the-world, to coexist as an object among others and to permit the subjectivity of the other. Moreover, as Deleuze reminds us, the image exists in tangent to other images, and, as such, the subject-object dynamic of the immanent field is constantly in flux, a process of ebb and flow. Thus, the complex precision in what seems to be such a simple connotation, the male gaze, is an alignment of at least three subjects: the character, the apparatus, and the spectator. And, as Modleski has pointed out regarding Hitchcock’s films, the positioning of cinematic subjectivity—be it the source of viewing or the focal point of action—is in constant flux.6 While many of Hitchcock’s early films allow for a breakdown of the philosophical logic of classical subjectivity only to restore this order at the end, at least guaranteeing transcendental subjective clarity for the spectator, in his darker films this restoration is not made, and instead of suturing the viewing subject, the form (think of Vertigo’s many spirals) ultimately negates the power of the subject—both diegetic and viewing—to apply control or anchor meaning.
SOUND WAVES IN THE IMMANENT FIELD
As becomes more evident in Hitchcock’s later films, such as Psycho, vision is not the only bearer of subjectivity in cinema (consider the mentally subjective sound accompanying objective images of Marion Crane driving down the highway); instead, the immanent field is made up of both sound and image, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in various stages of contradiction. Following the impact of films such as Psycho, the breakdown of sensory monism provided an important tool for the film-school generation that became New Hollywood’s spokespersons for the counterculture during the Vietnam War era. Indeed, Deleuze notes that the Vietnam War and the disillusionment and social splintering with which it coincided marked a definitive breaking point in the history of both cinematic and ideological classicism, “a crisis at once of both the action-image and the American dream.”7 This is well demonstrated in the films of De Palma and finds an apotheosis of sound-image conflict in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), which manifests the paranoid conspiracy fascination of the post-Watergate era in a total collapse of the delineation between subjective experience and objective world.
Coppola’s film articulates a very specific ideological skepticism born from the historical revelations of Watergate, Vietnam, and the political assassinations of the 1960s, positioning the problem of interior and exterior, real and imaginary, within the world of espionage and political intrigue, a sort of Hollywood admission that, for the concerns of a film like Resnais’s The War Is Over to work in American studio cinema, they have to be removed from the quotidian and set against a generic context of murder, money, and guns. This is similar in the ongoing narrative experiments of Coppola’s contemporary Martin Scorsese, whose Casino (1995) pushes the director’s frequent narrative play to include multiple voice-over narrators and innovative sound-bridges; however, this stylistic innovation is always applied according to very clearly distributed systems of reference and is aligned to guarantee a stable order of meaning that, while engaging with edgy content such as sex, violence, and crime, returns to the reliance on a monistic and absolute notion of subjectivity. De Palma’s Blow Out, in a similar spirit, offers a mind-boggling array of sound experiments, but even its most deconstructive moments are sutured within the director’s patented pastiche of intertextuality and self-reflexivity, setting his filmic play within the narrative context of a Foley artist working in the film industry.
We might also apply this approach, though, to cinemas that have entirely different cultures of everyday sound or different normative practices, such as Bollywood films, for which the role of music and song is very different from that in Hollywood. Bollywood has a strong tradition of direct address and spectacle that does not subscribe to Hollywood’s illusionist rules; does this mean that Indian audiovisual culture manifests a different philosophical framework? I would argue not, as mainstream Indian cinema is strongly escapist and tends to formulate similar closed orders of meaning within the immanent field, determining a specific engagement—albeit different from that in Hollywood—by which the spectator might access its meanings and messages. But I must admit that I am not an expert on Indian cinema or Indian philosophical traditions and thus invite others to assist me in this endeavor; similarly, I must acknowledge that Hollywood itself presents a number of exceptional moments and constantly pushes toward the conventionalization of new forms of representation.
THE CODE OF SUBJECTIVITY IN MILLENNIAL HOLLYWOOD
Much interest in Deleuze and cinema has involved a recent attempt to utilize Deleuze in the resurrection of Hollywood film analysis, a move in Deleuzean studies that has the joint aim and effect of extending Deleuze’s influence beyond art or experimental cinema and also reviving critical validation of mainstream American movies. Two exemplary and oft-cited texts that challenge (albeit superficially, in my opinion) monistic or absolute subjectivity in a supposedly Deleuzean fashion are David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) and Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000), instant cult classics by two of Hollywood’s most critically and commercially successful directors who retain, nonetheless, the cachet of being edgy auteurs. Despite clever misdirection, each of these films provides carefully sewn narrative structures to produce an ambiguous textuality wherein the ambiguity is derived from the psychological impairment—schizophrenia and amnesia, respectively—of the film’s protagonist; nonetheless, they are two of the most commonly selected films to analyze in Deleuzean terms because of their ability to throw the status of the image into question.8
What separates these films from the texts selected in my study is the double negation of their anomalous representations: unlike the average characters caught in experimental modes of thinking in films such as Last Year at Marienbad and Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Fight Club and Memento justify their film experiments as expressions of their diegetic subjects’ mental instability: these sick images are the product of sick minds within the text. As such, to whatever extent the films’ formal experimentation may offer new ways of unraveling plot information, or visual tricks to confuse the audience, these are inherently stigmatized as the products not of a philosophical alternative but, quite the contrary, a deranged subject. This holds true for Nolan’s subsequent action block-buster Inception (2010) and the Wachowski brothers’ special-effects-driven Matrix trilogy.
Mainstream action films have, however, developed a number of editing tendencies that merit consideration, balancing Deleuze’s focus on montage with a newly revived notion of Tom Gunning’s cinema of attractions. Gunning’s theory of modern subjectivity, derived from the work of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer,9 posits the modern subject as being deprived of attention span; this condition was accommodated by the advent of film, according to Benjamin, in which “perception in the form of shock was established as a formal principle.”10 This is perhaps best manifested in the frantic, MTV-inspired rapid editing of action films by filmmakers such as Michael Mann and reaches a somewhat grotesque apotheosis in the chaotic camera jolts and jump cuts of Paul Greengrass’s The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). Such editing and camera movement is difficult to place within an aesthetic genealogy connected to that of Resnais’s early films, but might the connotation be similar? The identity question at the narrative center of the Bourne trilogy aside, is Greengrass’s film depicting the fractured subjectivity of the postmodern world, connoting a splintered experience through miniscule shot durations and hundreds of tons of twisted metal? Could this perhaps be considered not even a question of subjectivity anymore but, in Merleau-Pontian terms, the extension of the objective world into our perceptual apparatus, a sort of hyperrealism?
THE CODE OF OBJECTIVITY AND THE POETRY OF DOCUMENTARY CINEMA
While these other genres, world cinemas, and directors demonstrate a range of practices in fiction filmmaking, there are many more horizons of moving-image culture than the feature-length fiction film. The code of objectivity, so central to the establishment of cinematic realism in fiction film, is also the basis for—and guiding connotative principle of—nonfiction or documentary cinema. As I discussed in chapter 5, the truth-codes of nonfiction film have historically been tied to advents in fiction cinema, and the cinematic code of objectivity has had a crucial influence on new information technology and media, from television to the Internet. In the last thirty years, however, there has been a gradual shift in the clear differentiation between fiction and nonfiction codes enacted by the “mockumentary” genre. Originating with films such as Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap (1984) and Christopher Guest’s Waiting for Guffman (1996) and extending across genres, with the digital aesthetic of The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Cloverfield (2008), this popular trend has gone so far as to become the new standard premise for sitcom television (see NBC’s The Office and Parks and Recreation). The use of documentary codes to heighten the irony of comedy and to deepen the shock of horror merits an extensive study that cannot be provided here, but I think it important to note this development in order to complement a similar breakdown in the clear status of documentary film.
With the rejuvenation of the film essay and the commercial and critical success of Michael Moore’s films (Fahrenheit 9/11, in particular, which in 2004 became the highest grossing documentary film in U.S. history and won the Cannes Film Festival’s top honor, the Palme d’Or), the documentary genre has become as highly valid a commercial venture as it has a rhetorical tool for topical ideological warfare. Major documentary film events such as Fahrenheit 9/11 or Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me (2004) reinvent the documentary film as part information, part rant; however, they are all spectacle, and the intersection between fact and spectacle poses a fascinating philosophical nexus. Jacques Rancière points out that documentary cinema is not the opposite of fiction film but is, instead, just another way of distributing the sensible.11 This basis for dismissing the border between real and imaginary—after all, even fictions are part of our real world, and our ways of arranging them speak deeply about our philosophical and ideological values and practices—is crucial in overturning our hierarchies of meaning, hopefully leading not to a nihilistic theater of the absurd but, instead, to a more dialogic embrace of uncertainty and the possibility of change.
As the lines between documentary and fiction film blur further, we must become more and more aware of the importance of the moving image as a philosophical tool—not only regarding the content of its actors’ speech but regarding new organizations of the immanent field. Cultural literacy has made it the norm to use prefabricated images as the raw material for more complex signifying systems, and as our image-based modes of expression become more complicated, we need more than ever a theory of connotation for the moving image. As our use of the image grows more sophisticated, we must not lose sight of how important it is to understand our uses of it on a basic level. I have attempted in these pages to illustrate how the form of film—including the frame of the image, the juxtaposition of image-types, and the combination of sound and visuality—can be understood as the essential source of its significations, a precognitive breeding ground for philosophical methods churning in the dynamic relationships built through formal relationships. I have tried here to build a model of film semiotics from a more metaphysical structure, the basis of which is the phenomenological concept of subject-object relations. In order to illustrate this concept’s relevance to film, I have looked at how the deconstruction of cinematic codes reveals film as a dialogic site of interaction between various sets of relations and structures of discourse, how film’s capacity to redistribute the sensible allows it to foster great experiments in thinking, radical subversions of classical philosophical principles.
By analyzing the works of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, I have looked at how the cinematic organization of subject-object relations provides for a fundamental structuring of film connotation, arguing—through the example of these filmmakers—on behalf of a cinema that, in the tradition of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, challenges the classical division between interior and exterior, real and imaginary, subject and object. By using specific examples of film signification to illustrate my theory of subject-object relations, I hope to have made clear how phenomenology and semiotics can find mutual ground in the study of film. The reconciliation of these two critical positions holds much promise for the future of film theory, and this book is offered as a step in that direction.