The Squid Cinema from Hell 66281_Brown281_Brown & FFleming.inddleming.indd i 225/03/205/03/20 112:432:43 PPMM For Tarran and Cordelia 66281_Brown281_Brown & FFleming.inddleming.indd iiii 225/03/205/03/20 112:432:43 PPMM The Squid Cinema from Hell Kinoteuthis Infernalis and the Emergence of Chthulumedia William Brown and David H. Fleming 66281_Brown281_Brown & FFleming.inddleming.indd iiiiii 225/03/205/03/20 112:432:43 PPMM Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © William Brown and David H. Fleming, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd Th e Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Monotype Ehrhardt by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 6372 0 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 6374 4 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 6373 7 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 4744 6375 1 (epub) The right of William Brown and David H. Fleming to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 66281_Brown281_Brown & FFleming.inddleming.indd iivv 225/03/205/03/20 112:432:43 PPMM Contents List of Figures vi Acknowledgments vii Beaky Prepostface (to sucker you in) xi 1. Introducing the End 1 2. Pulp Fiction and the Media Archaeology of Space 45 3. Encounters with a 4DX Kino-Kraken 83 4. Actorly Squid/Sets and Cephalopod Realism 108 5. The Erotic Ecstasy of Cthulhu 130 6. Cosmic Light, Cosmic Darkness 151 7. The Backwash of Becoming Cthulhu, Or, L∞py, Tentacular Time 188 8. From the Modern Prometheus to the Modern Medusa 234 Bibliography 279 Index 303 66281_Brown281_Brown & FFleming.inddleming.indd v 225/03/205/03/20 112:432:43 PPMM Figures 1.1 Still from Digital Cinema Media ident 7 2.1 Tentacular Dancing in the video for Valentino Khan’s “Deep Down Low” 52 2.2 The tentacle-tongue hydrostats of the Hollowgasts 53 2.3 Note that Maldacena and Susskind’s sketch involves not eight legs but seven, making of it a heptapod à la Arrival 61 2.4 Adidas’s creative octopus 66 2.5 Creativity as cephalopodic 66 2.6 Facebook’s tentacles 67 2.7 Share Lab website 68 2.8 Facebook and Cambridge Analytica modus operandi 68 2.9 Cthulhu for President 69 2.10 Trump octopus 69 2.11 Trump peril 70 2.12 Murdoch’s Media Octopus 70 3.1 Submarine vision 88 3.2 Dynamic surfaces in 4DX 89 3.3 Immersive depths in 4DX 89 3.4 4DX effects 91 3.5 Spraying capital 103 5.1 A recreation of The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife in Hokusai Manga 133 6.1 “Best Tentacle Hentai” 165 8.1 Poster for The Dunwich Horror 242 66281_Brown281_Brown & FFleming.inddleming.indd vvii 225/03/205/03/20 112:432:43 PPMM Acknowledgments THE SQUID CINEMA FROM HELL was written between 2016 and 2019, together and apart, at different speeds and rests, as we wended our way around and between many different places and spaces, including Canada, the People’s Republic of China, Italy, Spain, Sweden, the UAE, the UK, and the USA. Along the way, too many people to mention have directly and indirectly impacted us with their generous comments, stimulating ideas, suggestions, and feedback. Nonetheless, we would like to begin with very special thanks to Gillian Leslie at Edinburgh University Press for her interest and support in pub- lishing what is essentially a very weird book. You are a star. The journey to EUP involved help from many readers and recom- menders, and these include (in alphabetical order) Erick Felinto, Donna J. Haraway, Dominic C. James, Akira Mizuta Lippit, Laura U. Marks, Bill Marshall, David Martin-Jones, Dan Mellamphy, Patricia Pisters, Claudio Rossi, Eugene Thacker, C. Derick Varn, Cary Wolfe, and our anonymous peer reviewers at EUP. Many thanks to all of these for their courtesy, time, and informative feedback, as well as to Eliza Wright at EUP. Simultaneous to the book’s plasmatic peregrinations, we have also been performing Kinoteuthis in the flesh as we have prepared for publi- cation. To this end, we would like to extend a huge thanks to Christine Daigle and Terrance McDonald, whose invitation to attend the inau- gural Posthumanisms Research Network workshop, “Expressions and Images of the Posthuman,” allowed us to road-test work in progress with a range of interdisciplinary thinkers at Brock University, includ- ing Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Lukas Brasiskis, Russell Kilbourn, and Anna Mirzayan. Various of our eight limbs would also like to thank (again, in alpha- betical order) Andrés Bartolomé Leal, Wendy Bednarz, Celestino Deleyto, Andrew deWaard, Kelli Fuery, Graeme Harper, Seung-hoon Jeong, Angelos Koutsourakis, Lars Kristensen, Maja Manojlovic, and Michael Witt, for inviting us to present aspects of this work at research seminars at (from C to Z) Chapman University (funded by Erasmus Mundi), New York University Abu Dhabi, Oakland University, the University College 66281_Brown281_Brown & FFleming.inddleming.indd vviiii 225/03/205/03/20 112:432:43 PPMM viii THE SQUID CINEMA FROM HELL of Skövde, the University of California Los Angeles, the University of Leeds, the University of Roehampton, and the University of Zaragoza (funded by Erasmus+). Thanks must also be extended to Stacey Abbott, Radhika Aggarwal, María del Mar Azcona, Caroline Bainbridge, Alice Bardan, Anita Biressi, Robert Burgoyne, Dennis Chua, Enrica Colusso, Julia Echeverría, Luis Miguel García Mainar, Pablo Gómez, Chris Home- wood, Deborah Jermyn, Amos Katz, Aleksandr Krawec, Gillian McIver, Murray Pomerance, Judith Rifeser, Jamie Rogers, Tova Shaban, Gauti Sigthorsson, Eddie Troy, Jamie Uy, and Hunter Vaughan for their inter- actions and hospitality in and around these sessions. Thanks equally to the organizers of and delegates at various of the recent Film-Philosophy conferences, especially in Edinburgh (2016), Lancaster (2017), Gothenburg (2018), and Brighton (2019), as well as at La filosofia, il castello e la torre in Ischia in 2018. Across these events, we received valuable feedback on work that now appears in the pages that fol- low. Special mention here to Anna Backman Rogers, Lucy Bolton, Mashya Boon, Mark Cauchi, John Caruana, George Crosthwait, David Deamer, Elena del Río, Pansy Duncan, Steven Eastwood, Matthew Holtmeier, Joseph Jenner, Laurence Kent, Dario Llinares, Raffaele Mirelli, John Ó Maoilearca, Agnieszka Piotrowska, Chiara Quaranta, Timna Rauch, Richard Rushton, David Sorfa, Francesco Sticchi, Catherine Wheatley, and Dan Yacavone, among many others. We would also like to thank Adam Knee for forming panels on Scar- lett Johansson, respectively with four and then all eight of our limbs, at the Shanghai Theatre Academy (2014) and the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (2015). Likewise to Clifton Evers, who formed a panel with us for the Screen Conference on Animals and Animality at the University of Glasgow back in 2015, and whose ideas have invariably polluted ours. Meanwhile, we are also indebted to Paul Martin, who worked with four of our limbs on an ill-fated interdisciplinary article that remains to emerge in print. Some of the material and research used for this unpublished piece have, with Paul’s permission, gained a repurposed afterlife in Chapter 2— and these parts wouldn’t have been half as good were it not for their ludic past. Those same four limbs would also like to thank Melissa Brown for bouncing around ideas in a shared office, and for gifting us with beautiful octopus artwork. We would also like to thank Rory Perrott for his concept art, which was inspired by the book’s gestation, and which we have used during various presentations and performances around the world since. DHF would expressly like to thank Mira for her unbending love and support . and for enduring so many weird tentacle films during the production of this book. Thanks also to David and Moira, Michael and 66281_Brown281_Brown & FFleming.inddleming.indd vviiiiii 225/03/205/03/20 112:432:43 PPMM ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix Ellen, Ruth and Kenny, Maurice and Anouk, and the wider Fleming clan. Special shout to the Porty Sharks too. Finally, to Phaedra and Tarran, my thunder and lightning. WJRCB would also like expressly to thank Mila Zuo for reading draft work, engaging in discussions, and bearing moans, with credit also due to the Brown, Bullen, and Cambola clans, together with various other friends. Once you become “the guys doing the squid book,” others send to you pretty much everything they encounter on cephalopods, including films, books, articles, and clickbait. Some clickbait aside, this is a wonder- ful experience, and so thanks to all of those who have helped to add to our film- and bibliographies (most are named above, but this is also a “sorry if we’ve forgotten you” moment). Once we get going on the media and mud project that will follow Kinoteuthis Infernalis (tentatively titled Here’s Mud in Your Eye!), surely infinite recommendations are to follow. FYI, parts of Chapter 7 originally appeared as David H. Fleming and William Brown, “Through a (First) Contact Lens Darkly: Arrival, Unreal Time and the Chthulucene,” in Film-Philosophy, 22:3 (2018), pp. 340–363. Finally, we know that this book is a bit crazy. And we’ll not say out- right to what extent its contents constitute a metaphor or a weird reality that we believe in (the more accurate answer is both).