The Cinematic Body Sandra Buckley, Brian Massumi, and Michael Hardt TKECE? OUT OF BOUNDS ...UNCONTAINED BY THE DISCIPLINES, INSUBORDINATE... PRACTICES OF RESISTANCE ...Inventing, excessively, in the between... PROCESSES 2 The Cinematic Body Steven Shaviro 1 The Coming Community GiorgioAgamben OF HYBRIDIZATION The Cinematic Body Steven Shaviro Theory out of Bounds Volume 2 University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London Copyright 1993 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Fifth printing 2006 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Shaviro, Steven. The cinematic body / Steven Shaviro. p. cm.—(Theory out of bounds : v. 2) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. 1. Motion pictures—Aesthetics. 2. Film criticism—Philosophy. I. Title. II. Series. PN1995.S484 1993 791.43'01—dc20 92-41517 The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. Contents Preface vii i Film Theory and Visual Fascination i Appendix: Deleuie and Guattari's Theory of Sexuality 67 ii Contagious Allegories: George Romero 83 in Comedies of Abjection: Jerry Lewis 107 iv Bodies of Fear: David Cronenberg 127 v Masculinity, Spectacle, and the Body of Querelle 159 vi Warhol's Bodies 201 vii A Note on Bresson 241 VIM Conclusions 255 References 269 Index 275 This page intentionally left blank Preface The Cinematic Body is a transversal, exploratory work, one that cuts across disci- plinary boundaries and seeks to engage new currents in critical thought. Although the book focuses on the dilemmas of contemporary academic film theory, and con- tains close readings of a number of recent films and directors' oeuvres, it is not ex- clusively—perhaps not even primarily—a contribution to film studies. It is also a book about postmodernism, about the politics of human bodies, about the con- struction of masculinity, and about the aesthetics of masochism. It intervenes in current debates on the nature and use of pornography, and it is something of a manifesto for new forms of cultural expression. This book is grounded in so-called poststructuralist theory (most notably in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari), but it seeks to avoid the typical academic vices of self-referential jar- gon, theoretical obfuscation, and scholarly detachment. It is attuned more to cheap thrills than to judicious evaluations. Its goal is not to achieve a balanced and politically responsible critical comprehension of postmodern culture, but rather to communicate a sense of the inescapable ambivalences and affective intensities of this culture, and on that basis to elaborate and affirm a thoroughly postmodern sensibility. For all these reasons, The Cinematic Body is inescapably an ex- tremely personal book. Its forms of expression and processes of writing cannot be separated from the cinematic—or more broadly cultural—forms and processes with which it is concerned and to which it refers. Precisely because postmodernism dissolves any notion of fixed personal identity or of an integral and self-contained subject, fragments and traces of subjectivity (or, better, of "personality") are strewn more or less everywhere in the postmodern landscape. I discuss this seem- ing paradox most explicitly in chapter VI, on Warhol, but its effects are visible throughout. This book is "personal" first of all on account of its idiosyn- cratic choice of works to discuss; I'm aware of the incongruity of setting George Romero next to Robert Bresson, or Jerry Lewis beside Andy Warhol. By fore- grounding my own "taste" in this manner I seek to emphasize the roles of singular- ity and chance, against the objectifying scholarly tendency, which seeks to reduce particulars to generals, bizarre exceptions to representative patterns, specific prac- tices to the predictable regularities of genre. In the second place, this book is "per- sonal" in the sense that it foregrounds visceral, affective responses to film, in sharp contrast to most critics' exclusive concern with issues of form, meaning, and ideol- ogy. Film is a vivid medium, and it is important to talk about how it arouses corpo- real reactions of desire and fear, pleasure and disgust, fascination and shame. I try to evoke these prereflective responses in my own discussions of various movies. I also argue that such affective experiences directly and urgently involve a politics. Power works in the depths and on the surfaces of the body, and not just in the dis- embodied realm of "representation" or of "discourse." It is in the flesh first of all, far more than on some level of supposed ideological reflection, that the political is personal, and the personal political. All these considerations lead me to criticize and reject the psy- choanalytic model currently in vogue in academic discussions of film theory. viii.ix Psychoanalytic film theory has taken on all the attributes of a religious cult, com- plete with rites and sacred texts. Twenty years of obsessive invocations of "lack," "castration," and "the phallus" have left us with a stultifying orthodoxy that makes any fresh discussion impossible. It is time to recognize that not all problems can be resolved by repeated references to, and ever-more-subtle close readings of, the same few articles by Freud and Lacan. The psychoanalytic model for film theory is at this point utterly bankrupt; it needs not to be refined and reformed, but to be discarded altogether. Such is the main polemical thrust of this book. Rejecting Freud and Lacan, I draw instead upon a variety of theoretical sources: Benjamin, Bataille, Blanchot, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari. My aim is not to promote a new orthodoxy, but to suggest that there are other al- ternatives besides blind faith in psychoanalysis on the one hand and alleged essen- tialism and apoliticism on the other. Nothing is ever definitive. The success of a work of theory should be measured by its capacity to provoke diversities of re- sponse, and not by its ability to compel unanimous acceptance. In its theoretical stance, this book once again bears explicit traces of the partial, the excessive and unbalanced, the "personal": I embrace special pleading and the enthusiasm of the fan as a way of avoiding any appearance of objectivity and universality. I trust that many of my readers will not want to follow me into certain of the more embarrass- ing, abject, and politically suspect byways of my argument. Precisely to the extent that a book like this is "personal," it in- volves an indebtedness that can never adequately be paid or even fully enunciated. I'm aware also that any public show of gratitude is something of an aggressive ges- ture, since it involves the Other in what may well be an unwanted position of com- plicity. The ritual of acknowledgment is thus yet another instance of the excruciat- ingly unresolvable ambivalence that is a major theme of this book. Nonetheless, I P re fa ce will state that even an incomplete list of the many people whose conscious or un- conscious assistance was important to me in the writing of this book would have to include the names of Kathy Acker, Charles Altieri, Safar Fathi, William Flesch, Therese Grisham, Michael Hardt, Faye Hirsch, Katurah Hutcheson, Paul Keyes, Filip Konstantinovic, Casy McNeese, Brian Massumi, Tatjana Pavlovic, Roddey Reid, Mark Savitt, Barry Schwabsky, Steve Tackitt, Robert Thomas, Thomas Wall, Laurie Weeks, and Philip Wohlstetter. x, xi I Film Theory and Visual Fascination Blue Steel KATHRYN BiGELOw's Blue Steel is a relentlessly violent and beautifully photo- graphed genre movie, with a feminist twist. The premise is familiar: a cop who's been unjustly suspended from duty for the alleged use of excessive force is the only one who can save the city from a demented serial killer. The twist is that the cop, Megan Turner (played by Jamie Lee Curtis, a veteran of John Carpenter's Hal- loween and various other slasher/psychopath movies), is female. Bigelow gleefully inverts the usual gender cliches: Turner is a woman with a big gun, and the psy- chotic murderer, Eugene Hunt (in Ron Silver's edgy performance) is a yuppie male who is helplessly fascinated by the phallic power of her weapon. He goes on a gory rampage, inscribing her name on the bullets with which he murders his vic- tims. Throughout the movie, cravings for intimacy and sexual obsessions can find an outlet only in acts of gratuitous violence. The killer romances the cop, and con- tinually places her in ambiguous, emotionally compromising positions. She mo- mentarily falls in love with him, but finally has to kill him. Curtis's fine performance displays a vulnerability that coexists with, but does not compromise, an underlying toughness. Megan Turner can be as cold-blooded as Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry, but she's also open enough to ac- knowledge her insecurities and emotional needs—something that Eastwood's eerily repressed persona never does. Her character combines stereotypically "mas- culine" and "feminine" attributes, but the effect is a radical redistribution and re- definition of gender roles, rather than the projection of a drag persona. So there's more to the film than just role-reversal parody. Bigelow isn't content merely to show that girls can do it as well as boys; she entirely transforms the macho action genre by inhabiting it from within and creating it anew. Blue Steel is all at once— in outrageous juxtaposition—a tense thriller, a crowd-pleasing orgy of blood and destruction, an affirmative revalorization of female subjectivity and desire, a twisted and creepy but ultimately compelling love story, and a satirical send-up of psychoanalytic theories of the phallus and castration anxiety.