VISUALIZING LEVINAS: EXISTENCE AND EXISTENTS THROUGH MULHOLLAND DRIVE, MEMENTO, AND VANILLA SKY Holly Lynn Baumgartner A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2005 Committee: Ellen Berry, Advisor Kris Blair Don Callen Edward Danziger Graduate Faculty Representative Erin Labbie ii © 2005 Holly Lynn Baumgartner All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT Ellen Berry, Advisor This dissertation engages in an intentional analysis of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s book Existence and Existents through the reading of three films: Memento (2001), Vanilla Sky (2001), and Mulholland Drive, (2001). The “modes” and other events of being that Levinas associates with the process of consciousness in Existence and Existents, such as fatigue, light, hypostasis, position, sleep, and time, are examined here. Additionally, the most contested spaces in the films, described as a “Waking Dream,” is set into play with Levinas’s work/ The magnification of certain points of entry into Levinas’s philosophy opened up new pathways for thinking about method itself. Philosophically, this dissertation considers the question of how we become subjects, existents who have taken up Existence, and how that process might be revealed in film/ Additionally, the importance of Existence and Existents both on its own merit and to Levinas’s body of work as a whole, especially to his ethical project is underscored. A second set of entry points are explored in the conclusion of this dissertation, in particular how film functions in relation to philosophy, specifically that of Levinas. What kind of critical stance toward film would be an ethical one? Does the very materiality of film, its fracturing of narrative, time, and space, provide an embodied formulation of some of the basic tenets of Levinas’s thinking? Does it create its own philosophy through its format? And finally, analyzing the results of the project yielded far more complicated and unsettling questions than they answered. These far more interesting speculations had seemingly iv little to do directly with the book or the films under discussion, and instead challenged certain understandings of genre, method, and theory. The purpose became a voyage through a vesica piscis of multiply contested spaces: philosophy, film, ethics, and the processes of theory-making. v This dissertation is for my grandmother, Viola Bussell, how I wish you were here, and for E. L. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It is rather ridiculous to think we can ever really thank people who have given us years of support, belief, or hands-on help. But, of course, we eternally try. First, I must thank my committee to whom I am so grateful that I actually get to write these words. I thank Kristine Blair, who surely had her patience tried, but still allowed my study of rhetoric to spill over into philosophy. I thank Edward Danziger and Erin Labbie for serving on my committee and showing interest in spite of the meandering path my work took. Most of all, I thank Ellen Berry and Don Callen who have been so generous with their intellectual gifts, listening as I revised my self over and over, never overturning my thinking, just nudging me a bit to keep me working through my materials. I thank you also for being encouraging even when I absolutely hated this project, helping me keep faith until I learned to love it again. I also thank Mercy College who financially supported my doctoral work and valued me enough to see it through along with me. I thank my family are, I’m sure, just glad it’s over. Finally, I thank the friends who came along for the ride: Sally Bayley and Joyce Richards for listening to me vent – both frustration and ideas; Doreen Piano for walking every painful step with me; David Hawes for reading the whole bloody thing; and Jesse Duran for the loan of his mother. And then there’s Susan Duran: friend, sounding board, pseudo-therapist, diva. (Susan, who now claims she understands Levinas as if she’d actually read him.) Without your help, your insane amount of help – faith, comments, insights, brainstorming – without your elegant eye, without you endlessly repeating, “almost there, almost there,” I wouldn’t be “there.” And every dissertation writer needs to thank that shoulder s/he cried on. vii The Silent Screen Grey sparks of celluloid that convulse: a couple of well paid silent screen stars flicker into life - grimace and grin extortionately – then die. This is the silent screen: plays all day, and all night – A story of love and grief. Like gazing into Munch’s scream, you long for someone to turn the volume up, To come out and say it like it is. Lately, I sit afternoons and watch Hitchcock films, hoping that the suspense will kill me - waiting for the murder to strike, for the noise to be let out: those huge splinters of sound like a knife hitting the screen – then falling away: the victim’s body spinning down a gorge - the oblique silence that marks the end - the curtain falling down over your eyes. -- Sally Bayley viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………………... 1 A Claim to This Subject [tivity]………………………………………… 1 Contested Spaces ………………………………………………………. 2 A Word on Vocabulary………………………………………………….. 5 The Other……………………………………………………….. 6 The Subject ……………………………………………………… 7 Existence………………………………………………………… 7 Who Is Emmanuel Levinas in (Not Quite) Ten Words or Less ………… 8 Scope: Existence and Existents ………………………………………… 12 A Note on Heidegger……………………………………………. 14 Existence in a Nutshell ………………………………………… 17 Film …………………………………………….………………………. 20 Film and Philosophy ……………………………………………. 20 The Art of Film …………………………………………………. 23 The Films ………………………………………………………. 25 Methodologies ………………………………………………………… 28 Film Methods ………………………………………………….. 28 Rhetorical Method ………………………………………………. 29 Phenomenology ………………………………………………… 32 Coloring Outside of the Lines…………………………………… 33 Emphasis ……………………………………………………….. 33 Approaching Levinas …………………………………………………… 34 FILM SUMMARIES …………………………………………………………… 36 Memento ……………………………………………………………….. 37 Vanilla Sky ……………………………………………………………. 41 Mulholland Drive …………………………………………….……….. 45 The Transformative Event ……………………………………………… 48 THE IL Y A OR THERE IS…………………………………………………….. 51 Memento ………………………………………………………………. 53 ix Vanilla Sky ……………………………………………………………… 56 Mulholland Drive ………………………………………………………. 63 Il y a Triangulated ………………………………………………………. 67 INSOMNIA …………………………………………….………………………. 69 CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS ……………………………. 73 THE WAKING DREAM ………………………………………………………. 79 Positioning the Dream ………………………………………………….. 79 Prelude to a Dream ……………………………………………………... 80 Astonished by Being ……………………………………………………. 86 Weariness and Indolence ……………………………………………….. 89 Vanilla Sky ……………………………………………………………… 90 Scope of the Dream ……………………………………………… 90 Signs of Survival, Signs of Replacement ………………………… 91 Weariness ……………………………………………………….. 92 Mulholland Drive ………………………………………………………. 94 Scope of the Dream …………………………………………….. 94 Signs of Survival, Signs of Replacement ………………………… 97 Indolence ………………………………………………………… 100 Memento ………………………………………………………………… 101 Scope of the Dream ……………………………………………… 101 Signs of Survival, Signs of Replacement………………………… 102 A Coupling of Fatigue and Indolence…………………………… 106 EFFORT …………………………………………….…………………………... 112 Mulholland Drive ……………………………………………………….. 114 Vanilla Sky …………………………………………….……………….. 117 Memento ……………………………………………………………….. 120 The Instant of Effort …………………………………………………… 125 THE WORLD ………………………………………………………………….. 130 LIGHT…………………………………………………………………………... 147 HYPOSTASIS …………………………………………….……………………. 152 The Present and Hypostasis ……………………………………………. 155 x The Present and Time ………………………………………………….. 157 TIME AND THE OTHER ……………………………………………………... 160 The Definitive Past …………………………………………………….. 160 The Present …………………………………………………………….. 166 Mulholland Drive………………………………………………. 169 Memento………………………………………………………... 173 Vanilla Sky……………………………………………………… 179 Pardon …………………………………………….……………………. 186 CONCLUSIONS: AND THEN I WOKE UP ………………………………… 188 WORKS CITED ……………………………………………………………..... 202 Baumgartner 1 INTRODUCTION: A Claim to This Subject [ivity] This dissertation begins and ends in violence. My first committee meeting with my dissertation chair, Dr. Ellen Berry, was at 11 AM on September 11, 2001. How to even discuss something so trivial-seeming as a paper when the Twin Towers were burning, and no one knew where the tragedy was leading or what it meant? However, Dr. Berry pointed out that it had everything to do with my, at that time, (undefined) interest in subjectivity and the other. The 9/11 catastrophe kept me circling the questions of subjectivity and otherness as my research took shape. The images and rhetorics of the Second Gulf War repeated endlessly: the pale-drifting ashfall and thick, white coating around Ground Zero suggesting new beginnings – its strange beauty the potential in a winter landscape, all in horrifying contrast to the shocked and ravaged faces of the victims; the eerie silence of still photos covering every media source was in stark juxtaposition with the nauseating thumps of contact from people preferring to leap to their deaths rather than to burn alive. As a writer, literary images immediately insinuated themselves into my sense-making processes: the torn and bleeding city presented a landscape straight from H. G. Wells or H. P. Lovecraft. Throughout this tragedy, I was struck increasingly by how the visual influenced my conception of the philosophical. The event itself