Theodor Adorno and Film Theory

Copyrighted material – 9781137306135 Theodor Adorno and Film Theory The Fingerprint of Spirit Brian Wall Copyrighted material – 9781137306135 Copyrighted material – 9781137306135 Contents List of Figures ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: The Fingerprint of Spirit 1 1 The Subject/Object of Cinema: The Maltese Falcon (1941) 7 2 “A Deeper Breath”: From Body to Spirit in Kiss Me Deadly (1955) 39 3 Negative Dioretix: Repo Man (1984) 75 4 “Jackie Treehorn Treats Objects Like Women!”: Two Types of Fetishism in The Big Lebowski (1998) 117 Notes 153 References 165 Index 171 Copyrighted material – 9781137306135 Copyrighted material – 9781137306135 Copyrighted material – 9781137306135 Copyrighted material – 9781137306135 I NTRODUCTION The Fingerprint of Spirit Every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse. — Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia Adorno at the movies— given his fearsome reputation as an implacable critic of film, such a venture must smack of futil- ity, if not outright perversity. The well- known and widely anthologized “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002, 94– 136) stands as the beginning and, mauvaise fois, mostly the end of film studies’s engagement with Adorno. One powerful strategy to counter his reputation as an impenetrable elitist or mandarin aesthete is Miriam Hansen’s: in a wealth of detailed and rigorous essays, culminating in the recent Cinema and Experience (2012), Hansen patiently weaves together the many cinematic references that abound in Adorno’s texts, linking them always to his related thoughts on aesthetics, and also on history, sociology, and philosophy. Her ultimate aim is to discern amid these scattered points the lineaments of a cinematic aesthetics that Adorno never finally fleshed out. This entails a historicization of his engagement with film and technologically produced media, starting with his early writings on music, passing from Dialectic of Enlightenment and Composing for the Films (1947), through to late essays such as “The Culture Industry Reconsidered” (1963), and “Transparencies on Film” (1966) to culminate in his unfinished Aesthetic Theory (1970) itself. To counter all he excoriates as affirmative in film— from its industrial pro- duction to its ties to iconic representation to its instrumental Copyrighted material – 9781137306135 Copyrighted material – 9781137306135 2 Theodor Adorno and Film Theory ideologies— Hansen elaborates a rich countercurrent in his work, evoking affinities with writing and especially music that point toward evocative traces of another possible filmic practice that persists in his thought, though never program- matically given. She describes one of the forms it might take: From Adorno’s late writings on music we can extrapolate a model of thinking about cinematic mobility that would complement phenomenological, vitalist, gestaltist, and neuropsychological approaches currently in discussion with an aesthetic perspec- tive capable of historicizing and analyzing particular instances of film practice. We might imagine cinematic mobility as a striated dynamics governed by distinct and sometimes disparate tem- poralities— a multisensorial “moving carpet” (as Bloch wrote in 1914) made up of internally dynamic chunks, knots, or clusters of time and the relations among them, in tension with irrevers- ible linear time and the forward movement of narrative or other principles of organization. (Hansen 247) This is both a historical and a theoretical program that could only benefit film studies were it to be assayed, as it promises to link in a constellated form a broad range of aesthetic and philosophical modes. Hansen’s is a necessarily historical work that keeps faith with Adorno’s thought. David Jennemann’s immaculately researched and helpfully estranging Adorno in America (2007) adds another crucial piece to the puzzle, countering the cliché of Adorno’s mandarin aloofness with a wealth of historical detail drawn from Adorno’s years in New York and Los Angeles. What emerges is a portrait of a relentlessly public intellectual, everywhere and always engaged with film and radio— engaged finally with tracing the democratic and cultural possibilities that might emerge from a technological mass culture. As such the “Culture Industry” chapter and many other texts besides can never again be disparaged as the spiteful reaction of a snob- bish émigré, having now had their rootedness in concrete and historical experience affirmed. But here I will proceed in another direction. Despite the value of these and many other works that have attempted to introduce Adorno more fully into cultural thought— and there is a wealth of excellent introductions available1— their Copyrighted material – 9781137306135 Copyrighted material – 9781137306135 The Fingerprint of Spirit 3 very sweep seems to stand in an odd relation to some aspects of Adorno’s own thought. For one of the prevalent issues that arises from Adorno’s aesthetics, philosophy, and sociology has everything to do with the fate of the particular. Indeed, the Culture Industry itself is reviled for its uniformity, for its assertion of a constraining identity. I wish to proceed then not from the point of view of these historical surveys of Adorno’s work, valuable, even essential as they undoubt- edly are, but rather from the inside out, beginning with the particular— such necessarily broad engagements need the dia- lectical complement of an engagement with particulars, here particular films. Less pressingly, perhaps, I feel the absence in Adorno’s own work of a sustained analysis of a particular film. This is necessary, too, to the extent that film studies now seeks to leave behind the putative excesses of “French” theory for a new “posttheoretical” age.2 If film theory must now account for itself and leave behind its totalizing tendencies, it might do so by adopting another of Adorno’s key methods: immanent critique. Ironically, both film theory and cultural studies approach specific films from a transcendent vantage point: theory often subsumes film into its preexisting sys- tem of thought, as does a more cultural analysis, the signal difference being that for the cultural historian of film those preexisting values are political and material rather than philosophical. Following Adorno I wish to proceed by immanent critique, seeking to remain within the terms of a particular film or text and fastening on the contradictions inherent there so that those contradictions might speak to the material conditions in which a film was made. But such a consideration of the particular film also necessarily implies that particular films are meaningful, that they have a truth content, and that they are not necessarily reducible to the material contexts from which they emerge. Film has a cognitive content that persists alongside its aesthetic, affective, and ideological aspects and that is pointedly nonconceptual. Such a claim brings to a head the conflict- ing characterizations that inform theoretical and cultural analyses of film, with the former privileging an explicit or implicit valuation of film as art, while for the latter film is Copyrighted material – 9781137306135 Copyrighted material – 9781137306135 4 Theodor Adorno and Film Theory a commodity or ideology. Of course it is both— but in the context of film, and especially the narrative films I have cho- sen as my objects here, the latter is assumed while the former must always be proven. Adorno writes, “Technology opens up unlimited opportunities for art in the future, and even in the poorest motion pictures there are moments when such opportunities are strikingly apparent. But the same principle that has opened up these opportunities also ties them to big business” (Adorno and Eisler 2007, xxxvi), and while his own attention found more focus on an art that sought to renounce consumption, nonetheless there is here a crucial opportunity to ask if there persists in some filmic commodi- ties a truth that resists commodification and exchange value. What Adorno’s thought gives a politically committed, materialist film studies is an unflinching and rigorous opportunity to scrutinize its unthought precepts, suggesting it must start not from a fixed agenda but from a utopian desire: a wish for freedom, for an end to suffering. It must do so not just to avoid dogmatism and contradiction— for Bordwell and Carroll (1996) the legacy of the heyday of theory— but also to recognize that film writes checks that cannot be cashed, continually promises freedom, happiness, and an ameliora- tion of misery. The conclusion Adorno would have us draw from these unfulfilled promises is not simply that culture is sheer ideology but rather that there is not yet a social or political context in which such promises could be kept. I wish here to remain sensitive to and critical of the various broken promises of mass culture, but also continually to register the extent to which such promises always testify to their own impossibil- ity in advance, in the unseasonable climate of late capitalism. The films I have selected offer opportunities to be considered in their own historical contexts, of course; but as well, each insists in a variety of ways on its own irreducibility to such contexts. Put slightly differently, much in these films goes without saying— and yet at the same time something within them never gets said but hangs there naggingly on the edge of awareness, as if these films—like art— cannot say what they are.

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