All of it: This is no doubt what so many so-called apocalyptic films deal with, each in its own way. But they do so bit by bit, step by step.
When destruction is propagated on screen like a wave that goes from thing to thing, what would like to appear, that which is seeking to lend itself to sight, is the way one thing refers to another. In other words, the interlacing of things, the fabric of their relations with and references to one another. In short, what we call a world.
That things hold onto one another, or thanks to one another, that they give one another support becomes clear when they start to collapse like a row of dominos. Thus, in the famous cyclone sequence in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1928), we see not only one collapse after the other, like a house of cards, but also the interlocking or the articulation that arranges beings among themselves. The blasting wind makes barrels roll and a whirlwind out of pieces of paper, bits of newspapers or torn-off posters that, unstuck from their original spot, get attached elsewhere, vibrant in the insistence of their will to be hooked onto something somewhere. The facade of a building crumbles and takes an electricity pole along with it, which itself stretches and extends the wire it is carrying, making it tremble and sway for a moment like a pure link, a pure relation waiting for its terms.
Charles Reisner and Buster Keaton, dirs., Steamboat Bill, Jr., 1928
People seek shelter in basements; the nurses and the sick flee the city’s hospital (the scene was shot in Sacramento, California), whose roof and walls fly away as if the lid of a pan were being taken off, uncovering the hero alone and surprised in his bed, where he was being treated for the blow he had taken to his head. Steamboat Bill, Jr., gets up, takes his jacket, and puts his hat on the hot-water bottle covering his skull while the public library caves in. He just barely misses being buried in the ruins and throws himself back into his bed, which at that point starts moving and takes him far away, but not without a brief stop in a stable among unblinking horses.
It is at this point that Keaton’s no doubt most memorable trick takes place. He’s hidden under his bed, in the middle of the street, while the wind blows stronger than ever. The facade of the house in front of which he stands starts to crack; it slowly detaches itself. The bearded man living in the house jumps through the window and lands on a mattress that seems to have been placed there just to break his fall. And when the bedding also flies away in a gust of wind, Keaton stands up, shaken and bewildered by all this fury: He rubs his neck, shakes his head, and seems to take his time while the facade gains speed in its inexorable fall. But as it falls over him, at the last second, he escapes what seemed certain death by squashing: He was standing where the open window was placed.
If this shot has remained famous, it is in part because it is said that Keaton risked his life when he filmed it.1 But if I recall it here, it is instead to underline what it presents as the fitting or mounting par excellence. The fact that, as one says in English, “it fits.” The elements of the world—the hero and the facade with its windows cut out—are put together and match up with each other like brick and mortar.
In short, it all links up. And this linkup is one of the constitutive characteristics of the being-world of the world.
To analyze the worldliness of the world, Heidegger, in Being and Time, proposes that we start with the tool. With what makes a tool a tool, or with what we might call its ustensility [outilité].2
Yet there is never one sole tool: “There is,” writes Heidegger, “no such thing as a utensil” (Being and Time, 64, translation modified). A tool can be the tool that it is only because it participates in a system of tools. Because a tool is essentially in reference to, its ustensility already takes it to things other than itself. And its way of adjoining, assembling, or inserting itself into the network of ustensility is always to be in view of. This is in fact why the tool as such disappears; it melts and dissolves into the infinite reticulated references in the lacework of things. When it works, it goes unnoticed.
Of the four episodes of the Terminator saga, it is perhaps in the third (Rise of the Machines, directed by Jonathan Mostow in 2003) that one finds the most striking images of this referring interlocking that constitutes the very structure of ustensility. The plot, as you know, is in a way suspended between the before and the after, between the pre- and the postapocalyptic: From a future following the nuclear holocaust initiated by machines, these machines take the apocalypse backwards and send androids into the past preceding the catastrophe to destroy in advance the survivors who will remain and, led by John Connor (Nick Stahl), organize humanity’s resistance. After a prelude that is constantly crossing back and forth over this temporal limit,3 we see two Terminators arrive, one after the other, stark naked and then covered in clothes. A T-X (Kristanna Loken) working for the Skynet artificial intelligence network has been given the task of killing the future human rebels. The T-850 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) must protect them.
This is the narrative backdrop or pretext onto which infinite visual variations will be projected concerning the cinematographic themes of fitting, plugging in, and articulation, in short, of the abutment or the abutting of things.
John Connor has just come across his childhood friend Kate Brewster (Claire Danes) in her veterinary clinic. All of a sudden, the T-X, who has located Kate, is, as a result, able to identify John. She is on the verge of firing directly at Kate to keep her from running away when the T-850, at the wheel of a pickup, speeds up to her and crashes into her, embedding her in a wall. Impassive, the T-580 emerges surrounded by fire. The T-X’s hand also emerges from the ruins, and under our very eyes, her liquid metal shield takes on the (cyber) organic appearance of human skin.
Cinematography then becomes mechanography: Starting from now, we watch a gigantic mechanical construction kit that proceeds through numerous interlockings.
John and Kate flee in the clinic’s pickup truck. The T-X takes a truck crane to chase them down, but not without having first located the fugitives. And how does she go about doing this? Well, she opens the door of the cop car that had since arrived; her index finger turns into a finely pointed drill—she is a virtual toolbox, ustensility in person; her index finger dives down near the steering wheel until it reaches the integrated circuitry and the electronic chips that connect directly to the police’s telecommunications network.
The chase can then begin. And it’s quite a chase that’s being prepared, with John and Kate at the head of a pack made up of the T-X’s crane-truck, which itself also remotely controls a driverless squad of two police cars with their sirens screaming and a fire truck, and, closing out this frenzied parade, the T-580 sent on their tracks on his motorcycle.
There is no way to describe the amplitude of the damage, the monumental smashup, the immense dilapidation of the car bodies which this memorable machine chase produces on screen. In this sequence of pulverized metal that lasts almost ten minutes, I extract one incredible moment that could stand in for the whole in an exemplary way: the moment when, in the middle of the roaring motors, the T-X raises her truck’s crane.
What we see at that moment goes far beyond the debauchery of special effects whose goal is, as we say, to give us an eyeful. Of course, the big metallic arm of the crane-truck, extended at a right angle to the direction of the chase, bumps up against and clears everything in its way: the cars parked along the sidewalk leap and explode one after the other, as do the electrical and telephone poles, the stoplights.… For a brief interlude the fugitives’ pickup takes over and lays waste to the lawns of the houses along the road, and then we find Schwarzie hanging on to the crane that, in the midst of the crash of broken glass and dented sheets of metal, sweeps up shipping crates, entire offices, pieces of warehouses, or bits of facades. What an expenditure! But in the middle of all the jumble and rubble, at the center of this general rockslide that comes close to threatening to bury sight itself under the ruins, we see something like a fantastic apparition emerge: All of a sudden, the crane seems to be a huge jib crane, like the ones used for shooting a film; all of a sudden, we watch it as it seems to be taken away along the rails of a frantic traveling shot, in a crazy recording, as if it had gone mad wanting to capture everything, swallowing up all the world’s props, all the Earth’s decors, to feed the insatiable image that keeps asking for more.
Universal devastation’s cine-potlatch.
Consummation and consumption of film and for film in an apocalyptic arche-traveling shot that leaves nothing untouched.
As if it were a matter of unfurling and retracing the integrality of the relations between things, of experiencing their general interlacing through their very consumption.
Long before the twists and turns of the narrative that lead to the final holocaust, it is here, in this sequence that is not all that different from Buster Keaton’s house of cards, that the nuclear holocaust of the movie’s last images is being prepared. This holocaust, triggered by Skynet on July 25, 2004 (6:14 P.M.), really does nothing more than visually repeat the cine-mechanography of the propagation from thing to thing while extending it on a planetary scale. Indeed, it is from hundreds of points across the Earth’s surface that missiles are shot into the sky. Their trajectories arc, as we see one atomic mushroom cloud, then another, while the radius of the explosions expands and sweeps up everything in their path. Finally, the camera leaves the planet and rises into the extra-earthly atmosphere to show the paths of the missiles that cross each other’s trajectories and weave a veritable fabric around the Earth. This is the way the world’s chain-linking is sketched out, the way a net-world is woven, on the verge of tightening up in order to become embodied and gain consistency just before the fade to white brings us into the afterwards of the holocaust that has taken place.
Jonathan Mostow, dir., Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, 2003
The world was very close to becoming present or totalized as such. But at this point there is nothing more than the gray ash that floats in the air around the still reddening eye of a Terminator who has died.
The world is no longer. It almost was [Il a bien failli].4