Making Sense of Mind-Game Films: Narrative Complexity, Embodiment, and the Senses 9781501337048, 9781501337079, 9781501337062

Table of contents :
Cover
Half title
Title
Copyrights
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Complex narratives in contemporary cinema
Defining mind-game films
Typical features of mind-game films: Subjectivity, deception, and matters of the mind
Solving complex narrative puzzles
Feeling complex narrative textures
Film, phenomenology, and theories of embodied spectatorship
Making sense of films that don’t always make sense
1 Seeing What Others Cannot See
Epistemological uncertainty and visual complexity in The Sixth Sense and The Others
Complex twist films and the disavowal of death
Death, vision, and embodied spectatorship
Visible gestures and invisible viewing subjects in The Sixth Sense
Light, perspective, and the materiality of the embodied observer in The Others
Sense hierarchies and perceptual reconfigurations
2 Solving Things Differently
Mental pathologies and embodied experience in Memento and Fight Club
Haptic openings, tactile beginnings
Tactile epistemologies and embodied knowledge in Memento
Corporeal estrangement and embodied experience in Fight Club
Productive pathologies revisited: Characters with mental conditions and embodied spectators
3 Getting Lost, Sensing the Way
Infinite worlds and impossible loops in Possible Worlds and Source Code
Setting the scene, settling into a world: Bodily orientation in (cinematic) space
Spatiotemporal (dis)orientation in complex cinematic worlds
Bodily displacement and being lost
Feeling coherence: Atmosphere, immersion, and perceptual maps
Cognitive riddles, immersive pleasures
Conclusion: Play It Again – Games with the Mind or with the Body and the Senses?
Notes
References
Films
Television
Index

Citation preview

Making Sense of Mind-Game Films

Making Sense of Mind-Game Films Narrative Complexity, Embodiment, and the Senses Simin Nina Littschwager

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 This paperback edition published in 2021 Copyright © Simin Nina Littschwager, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Film: The Others, 2001, Dimension Films © Everett Collection/Mary Evans Picture Librar All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Littschwager, Simin Nina, author. Title: Making sense of mind-game films: narrative complexity, embodiment, and the senses / Simin Nina Littschwager. Description: New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019007924 (print) | LCCN 2019018509 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501337055 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501337062 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501337048 (hardback: alk.paper) Subjects: LCSH: Senses and sensation in motion pictures. | Motion pictures–Psychological aspects. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.S286 (ebook) | LCC PN1995.9.S286 L58 2019 (print) | DDC 791.43/653–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007924 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3704-8 PB: 978-1-5013-7627-6 ePDF: 9781-5013-3706-2 eBook: 9781-5013-3705-5 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Uschi & Wolfgang Sometimes I feel a shape in the air, and I know you’ve been there.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction

1

Complex narratives in contemporary cinema 4 Defining mind-game films 7 Typical features of mind-game films: Subjectivity, deception, and matters of the mind 12 Solving complex narrative puzzles 15 Feeling complex narrative textures 20 Film, phenomenology, and theories of embodied spectatorship 23 Making sense of films that don’t always make sense 31

1 Seeing What Others Cannot See

35

Epistemological uncertainty and visual complexity in The Sixth Sense and The Others 35 Complex twist films and the disavowal of death 39 Death, vision, and embodied spectatorship 53 Visible gestures and invisible viewing subjects in The Sixth Sense 60 Light, perspective, and the materiality of the embodied observer in The Others 70 Sense hierarchies and perceptual reconfigurations 78

2 Solving Things Differently

83

Mental pathologies and embodied experience in Memento and Fight Club 83 Haptic openings, tactile beginnings 89 Tactile epistemologies and embodied knowledge in Memento 103 Corporeal estrangement and embodied experience in Fight Club 120 Productive pathologies revisited: Characters with mental conditions and embodied spectators 139

viii

CONTENTS

3 Getting Lost, Sensing the Way

143

Infinite worlds and impossible loops in Possible Worlds and Source Code 143 Setting the scene, settling into a world: Bodily orientation in (cinematic) space 149 Spatiotemporal (dis)orientation in complex cinematic worlds 161 Bodily displacement and being lost 169 Feeling coherence: Atmosphere, immersion, and perceptual maps 180 Cognitive riddles, immersive pleasures 194

Conclusion: Play It Again – Games with the Mind or with the Body and the Senses? 199 Notes 213 References 221 Films 232 Television 234 Index 235

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing this book has involved many of hours of solitude, yet I am fortunate that I have never been alone with this project; this is the place to acknowledge those whose support made it possible. Special thanks go to Allan Cameron and Martine Beugnet, for their kind advice and crucial encouragement to turn this research project into a book. Thanks also to Liz Watkins, who has provided me with an invaluable introduction to MerleauPonty and phenomenology that continues to inspire me until today. My gratitude further extends to Katie Gallof and Erin Duffy from Bloomsbury, for their enthusiasm in taking this project onboard, and for their patience in seeing it through to completion. My thanks also go to Philipp Schmerheim, for his thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript. Special appreciation is owed to my family, especially Lena Littschwager, who in an admirable fashion has been taking care of things in my absence—I’m so lucky to have you. Elfriede and Günter Littschwager have helped with an endless supply of parcels filled with chocolate to keep my spirits up and woolen socks to keep my feet warm. Dusty and Pancho, my two faithful feline lap assistants, also deserve an honorable mention, for making sure I keep that inner purr. But most of all I would like to thank my partner, Antony Kitchener, for his relentless support throughout the years, and for reminding me that watching and enjoying films always comes before any film theory. The award for outstanding awesomeness goes to no one else but him.

Introduction

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his essay “The Film and the New Psychology,” famously asserts that “the movies are peculiarly suited to make manifest the union of mind and body, mind and world, and the expression of one in the other” (1964 [1948]: 58). Yet this “union of mind and body, mind and world” Merleau-Ponty speaks of is not always immune to disturbance and interruption: sometimes mind, body, and world can be at odds with each other. In this book I argue that this is the case in mind-game films, in terms of both the stories they tell and the spectatorial experience they engender. In each of the case studies of this book—The Sixth Sense (1999), The Others (2000), Memento (2000), Fight Club (1999), Possible Worlds (2000), and Source Code (2011)—either body, mind, or world presents a problematic dimension of experience, one that also concerns us as spectators. In order to explore how, specifically, embodied structures of meaning shape and inform our understanding of these films, I draw on existential phenomenology and theories of embodied spectatorship as a theoretical framework, thus challenging the dominant view that mind-game films primarily engage our cognitive skills. Starting from the premise that watching a film always constitutes an embodied activity, and that therefore embodiment needs to be taken into account, I am interested in the following questions: What is the role and significance of the body in the mind-game film? How can we make sense of films that do not always make sense in a familiar way? Both mind-game films and theories of embodied spectatorship have been key areas of interest in film scholarship over the past two decades. “Mindgame film” is a term used by Thomas Elsaesser (2009, 2018) to address the surge of complex narratives, which became a global trend in cinematic storytelling from the 1990s onward and reached mainstream success around the millennium. Other customary labels for contemporary complex films include, among others, “puzzle film” (Bordwell 2006; Buckland 2009c, 2014a; Kiss and Willemsen 2016; Klinger 2006); “modular narrative” (Cameron 2008); “ontological twist film” (Wilson 2006); films with unreliable narration (Ferenz 2009; Helbig [ed.] 2006; Laass 2008); or “skepticism films” (Schmerheim 2015). Though slow to gain traction within scholarly circles at first, by now the films that fall into any of those categories have attracted a substantial amount of critical attention. Beginning with

2

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

Bordwell’s seminal article “Film Futures” (2002) on forking-path films and two early responses by Young (2002) and Branigan (2002), there now exists a wide range of studies that explore the phenomenon of narrative complexity in contemporary cinema. While the majority of works is devoted to individual films, there are nonetheless also a considerable number of more comprehensive chapters and articles (Eig 2003; Elsaesser 2009; Ferenz 2009; Klecker 2013; Panek 2006; Simons 2008; Thon 2009; and others), designated journal editions (Film Criticism 31.1/2, 2006), three anthologies (Buckland [ed.] 2009c, 2014a; Helbig [ed.] 2006) and five monographs (Cameron 2008; Campora 2014; Kiss and Willemsen 2016; Laass 2008; Schmerheim 2015) that all contribute to the bigger picture of understanding these complex narratives. In addition, many complex films have been incorporated into other studies on contemporary cinema, such as national cinema and identity (Martin-Jones 2006) or the emergence of a post-classical mode of narration (Thanouli 2009b). They have also been considered in wider contexts, in particular in connection with the intersections of cinema and new media structures (Eckel et al. [eds.] 2013; Kinder 2002; Manovich 2001). The interest in complex narrative films further crosses interdisciplinary boundaries between film and philosophy, most prominently in Philipp Schmerheim’s book Skepticism Films: Knowing and Doubting the Worlds in Contemporary World Cinema (2015). Many mind-game films feature in John Mullarkey’s book Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image (2009). Routledge has published anthologies on three mind-game films—The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Grau [ed.] 2009), Memento (Kania [ed.] 2009b), and Fight Club (Wartenberg [ed.] 2011)— as part of its series Philosophers on Film. While these volumes testify to a renewed interest in cinema as philosophy in general over the past decade, what is of particular interest in the context of this study is that some of the individual contributions within them also address phenomenological themes in the respective films they discuss (e.g., Bauer 2012; Sutton 2009; White 2009). These studies concur with my assertion that mind-game films articulate ideas about perception and experience, and about embodied ways of knowing and being-in-the-world. Besides experimenting with narrative structures that diverge from classical modes of storytelling, mind-game films have in common that they play tricks on, or mislead their audiences. Predominantly these games and deceptive maneuvers have been regarded as cognitive challenges: “Complex narrative puzzles to be solved with the mind” might be an apt tagline to summarize how these films have been approached. Exemplary in this regard is Miklós Kiss and Steven Willemsen’s book Impossible Puzzle Films (2016), a comprehensive study of the “cognitive-psychological impact” (2016: 4) of complex narratives on viewers, in which the authors categorize complex films according to “their ability to cause various states of cognitive puzzlement and

INTRODUCTION

3

trigger diverse mental responses in their viewers” (2016: 5). Even Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, in their book Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (2010), include several mind-game films in their chapter “Cinema as Brain,” referring to them to discuss several film theories that focus on cognitive processes and neural networks (2010: 154–55, 165–66). This is noteworthy not in itself but in the context of their entire book, which, as the subtitle An Introduction Through the Senses indicates, provides re-readings of major film theories based on how each considers different sensory faculties in the context of cinema. They thus acknowledge the bodily and sensory dimension of the film experience (as well the recent attention that it has received). Other chapters are devoted to, for instance, “Cinema as Eye,” “Cinema as Ear,” or “Cinema as Touch.” Yet mind-game films it seems are predominantly considered as brain-teasers, defined through eliciting modes of engagement in which the body and the senses play only a marginal role. Such emphasis on the spectator’s cognitive activities stands in contrast to the widespread influence of phenomenology and theories of embodied spectatorship that have been a dominant trend in film theory during the past two decades. Inspired by Vivian Sobchack’s seminal books The Address of the Eye (1992) and Carnal Thoughts (2004), as well as by Laura Marks’s The Skin of the Film (2000), there now exists a substantial amount of research that addresses cinema’s sensuous and affective dimension. Of particular importance for this project is Jennifer Barker’s book The Tactile Eye (2009b). In this book Barker expands on Sobchack’s concept of “the film’s body” to discuss the tactile, kinetic, and visceral ways in which all films—from narrative to avant-garde, from the early cinema of attractions to animation and CGI, from Hollywood to world cinema—engage and involve their spectators as corporeal viewers, each in a specific way. Other recent studies of cinema that draw on phenomenological concepts and sensuous aesthetics have explored more specifically French national cinema (Beugnet 2007), documentary film (Wahlberg 2008), the narrative mediation of ethics (Stadler 2008), affect, performance and Deleuze (del Rio 2008), genre, horror and emotions (Hanich 2010), auteur filmmaking in avantgarde cinema (Chamarette 2012), narrative feature film (Garwood 2013), realist cinema (De Luca 2014), 3D cinema (Ross 2015), and baroque cinema (Walton 2016). The diversity of these studies testifies to the versatility of embodied approaches to cinema and spectatorship, and there is no reason to exclude mind-game films from a phenomenological approach. Quite to the contrary, expanding the application of film phenomenology to this group of films, I reaffirm not only that this approach continues to be relevant but also that it can create new opportunities for thinking about films we thought we had already thoroughly analyzed, unraveled, and understood. But by bringing together mind-game films and phenomenology, I do not aim at putting theories of embodied spectatorship to the test. Instead, through exploring the experiential, sensory, and affective dimension of a

4

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

select number of complex narrative films, I seek to reveal how their appeal lies not only in the reordering of non-linear plots and finding solutions to narrative puzzles. The case studies discussed in this book deal with themes that are phenomenologically significant: not realizing one’s own death (The Sixth Sense, The Others); experiencing the world with amnesia (Memento) or multiple personality disorder (Fight Club); existing as a brain in a vat (Possible Worlds), or being a disembodied consciousness sent into the past in another person’s body (Source Code). These are stories about ruptures between body, mind, and world. Engaging us as embodied spectators with these stories, mind-game films are not only intellectually challenging but also experientially intriguing. They bring into conflict different regimes of knowledge and modes of experience and draw their specific appeal from eliciting conflicts between what we see and what we sense, between what we know and what we feel, and between cognitive puzzlement and bodily experience.

Complex narratives in contemporary cinema As a subgroup of complex narrative films, mind-game films are inseparable from this larger global trend that rose to prominence during the 1990s/2000s. The heterogeneity of complex films themselves, along with the diverse research contexts and the plurality of terms that have been applied to them, complicates any initial approach to the topic. For example, films like Amores Perros (2000), A Beautiful Mind (2001), Being John Malkovich (1999), Donnie Darko (2001), Enemy (2013), The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Fight Club (1999), Inception (2010), Jacob’s Ladder (1990), Lost Highway (1997), Memento (2000), Mulholland Drive (2001), Possible Worlds (2000), Primer (2004), Pulp Fiction (1994), Run Lola Run (1998), The Sixth Sense (1999), Source Code (2011), Spider (2002), Stay (2005), The Usual Suspects (1995), Vanilla Sky (2001), and Yella (2007), all share a tendency to depart from some of the traits typically associated with conventional narrative feature films, such as transparency, continuity, linearity, causality, unity, and closure. Instead, these films stand out through their formal experimentation with complex plot structures. They feature, for example, multiple and non-linear timelines, ontological and epistemological twists, parallel worlds, temporal loops, subjective plots, unreliable narrators, mentally deviant characters, and often ambiguous endings that invite another viewing. Yet within this larger group of contemporary complex narratives, there are also distinct types of complexity at work. Consider for instance the formal and thematic differences between Pulp Fiction and Run Lola Run on the one hand, and Fight Club and The Sixth Sense on the other. Both Pulp Fiction and Run Lola Run feature non-linear temporality and deal with

INTRODUCTION

5

questions of chance and contingency, whereas The Sixth Sense and Fight Club share ambiguous twist endings and a thematic interest in knowledge, truth, and character subjectivity. The former fit Cameron’s category of the modular narrative: films that “foreground the relationship between the temporality of the story and the order of its telling” (2008: 1), and that “address the rise of the database as a cultural form, while also gesturing towards broader shifts in the conceptualization of time” (2008: 2). The latter, by contrast, are examples of what I consider as a mind-game film in this book: complex films that feature mind-related motifs and novel techniques of (re)presenting the subjectivity of mentally unstable characters, and that have a tendency to disorient or mislead audiences through a self-referential play with what Elsaesser calls “the rules of the game” (2009: 39). At first sight these adjacent categories seem to match a distinction Bordwell makes between network narratives and subjective stories as subgroups of complex narratives (2006: 72–103). And yet neither of them can be defined through their complex plot structures alone, and they sometimes also overlap, as can be seen for example in Memento or The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which both fit the definition of modular narrative and the mind-game film. Different forms of narrative complexity, combined with specific themes and modes of audience address, warrant a further distinction, one that goes beyond categorizing films according to their plot structures alone. A similar observation is made by Kiss and Willemsen, who argue that “complexity does not lie in a story’s formal composition itself, but is best understood in terms of how the narrative hinders viewers’ comprehension and meaningmaking routines” (2016: 5). However, to look only at audience engagement risks certain limitations as well. Focusing on mental challenges and cognitive problem-solving during the viewing experience, Kiss and Willemsen differentiate between temporarily “disorienting but solvable puzzle films” and “permanently confusing . . . impossible puzzle films” (2016: 52). While theirs is a useful distinction to account for qualitatively different types of complexity, it leads to the exclusion of unreliable twist films, such as The Sixth Sense, The Others, The Usual Suspects, or Fight Club, because such films “do not challenge the ‘online’ process of making sense of the narrative during the viewing, and therefore . . . do not provide any complex, let alone confusing experience beyond the surprise effect” (2016: 55). This is problematic not only because the above named films are some of the most popular puzzle or mind-game films. The focus on cognitive puzzlement neglects that the particular nature of these “epistemological twist films” (Wilson 2006) leads to emotional and affective responses that differ from those in more traditional twist films. Dominik Orth, for instance, recounts his memory of a collectively experienced shock when watching The Sixth Sense and The Others in a theatre and it was suddenly revealed that the main protagonists of each film had been dead without being aware of this,

6

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

an experience that inspired him to explore the strategies of unreliable narration employed in these films (2006: 285). These two films, and in particular the twist sequences, will be discussed in detail in Chapter 1 of this book, where I will demonstrate how their cinematic complexity elicits a state of embodied perplexity that indeed goes beyond a mere narrative surprise effect. While this book is concerned with feature-length films, it is worth noting that the trend toward narrative complexity in cinema coincides with the rise of the complex television serial. The earliest example here is David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks, which premiered in 1990 and, after a hiatus of over twenty years, aired its third season in 2017. The series is a groundbreaking mixture of crime, mystery, high school, and sciencefiction drama that, despite solving the central murder case of Laura Palmer’s death, leaves more questions open than it answers. Yet while many complex television serials experiment with non-linear storytelling and modular narrative structures, only few feature the same extent of ongoing ambiguity, unreliable narration, epistemological twists, deception, paradoxical worlds, preference for mentally unstable characters, and subjective modes of narration that can typically be found in mind-game films, not to mention the emphasis on mind-related themes; perhaps the closest examples of mind-game television serials are Dark, Lost, Mr. Robot, and Twin Peaks. Thus while thematic and formal parallels exist between complex narratives in cinema and some complex television serials, the majority of television serials considered as complex (for instance, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Wire, True Detective, Game of Thrones) are defined through the challenges and opportunities offered by the long-form format. Their complexity often consists of a multiplicity of characters interacting in intricate webs of social relationships; complex story-worlds that generate their own mythology and even extend into other media such as ancillary books or websites; a lack of episodic closure and instead continuous and open-ended storylines across episodes and even seasons, with back and forth references between episodes and even across distinct shows (Dunleavy 2018; Johnson 2005; Mittell 2006, 2014, 2015; Piepiorka 2013). The relatively small number of mind-game television serials and the specific conditions of the long-form storytelling format make them less suitable as exemplary case studies for this project, and hence they will not be considered any further. Nonetheless, based on the findings of this book, a future phenomenological enquiry into the way mind-game television serials compare with, or differ from their feature-length companions, would seem like a worthwhile future pursuit. Narrative complexity in itself, then, is a flexible concept—some call it vague (Kiss and Willemsen 2016: 19–22; Klecker 2013: 128)—that can encompass a broad range of texts that engage and challenge their viewers in different ways to express a variety of themes or ideas. Rather than attempting to look at all films (or all audiovisual narratives) that have been

INTRODUCTION

7

called complex and asking to what extent they should be considered as more or less complex at all, the approach I pursue in this book is to explore the kind of complexity that makes mind-game films unique. In order to give a better understanding of mind-game films as a subcategory of contemporary complex narratives, the following section outlines in more detail how they can be defined and distinguished from other films that experiment with complex plot structures. Subsequently, these films will be located within the context of the debates they have generated about cinema and spectatorship.

Defining mind-game films The terms “mind-game” and “puzzle film,” as well as similar terms such as “mind-fuck film” (Eig 2003), “mind-tricking narrative” (Klecker 2013), “mind-bender film” (Thon 2009), “psychological puzzle film” (Panek 2006), or “impossible puzzle film” (Kiss and Willemsen 2016), have been used to refer to a largely identical albeit fairly heterogeneous corpus of films. In fact it seems that Bordwell’s observation about the puzzle film, that non-scholarly “viewers seem to apply the notion fairly broadly,” applies to academic audiences just as much (2006: 80).1 Some scholars cast their net wider than others, using the terms synonymously with complex narratives, while others argue for further refinements. Nonetheless, on the whole their subtly varying emphases, observations, and refinements are mostly complementary rather than contradictory. Yet despite a shared understanding that mind-game or puzzle films belong to the umbrella category of complex narrative films, there is no agreed-upon definition for either term that would allow us to determine unequivocally which films should be included or excluded. Nor is there a consensus that one term should be preferred over the other(s). While the term “puzzle film” may seem more prominent due to the two essay collections edited by Buckland (2009c, 2014a), each term carries different nuances, and there is a case to be made to employ both. The publication context of Elsaesser’s earlier essay on the mind-game film, prominently positioned as the first chapter in Warren Buckland’s first Puzzle Films (2009c) anthology, shows how blurred the lines are. In the “Introduction” to this anthology, Buckland himself suggests that “the puzzle film is the mindgame film seen from one theoretical perspective—narratology” (2009a: 8). Elsaesser, on the other hand, explains his continued preference for the term mind-game film with the fact that the term puzzle film has limiting connotations: implicit in the notion of a puzzle is the idea that it has a predetermined solution, and thus “the term puzzle film already assumes as given what might actually be the key stake” (2018: 7).2 With regard to the latter, I side with Elsaesser, hence my preference for the term “mind-game film.” Yet I am driven by a different set of questions in investigating what this key stake is, and consequently my understanding of mind-game films is

8

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

not identical with his in every respect. In the following I will briefly revisit earlier attempts at defining mind-game and puzzle films and discuss some of the films that these terms have been applied to, before I subsequently clarify further what I understand to be a (typical) mind-game film.3 The term “mind-game film” has been coined by Elsaesser in his seminal first essay on the topic, simply titled “The Mind-Game Film” (2009). Less concerned with questions of narratology, his discussion of the phenomenon stands out as a comparatively nuanced and multifaceted approach that is wide in its scope, shedding light on new types of cinematic storytelling as well as providing a sociocultural interpretation of the sudden prominence of mind-game films. Like other scholars he too points out elements of narrative complexity—non-linearity, inverted causality, multiple parallel timelines, ambiguity, chance, and contingency, among others—as some of their key features. Yet he further observes the recurrence of characters with pathological mental conditions and other mind-related themes, as well as a number of common motifs, for example, a protagonist who has to question his or her reality and existential status (e.g., The Others, The Sixth Sense, or Jacob’s Ladder); who has a friend that turns out to be a product of his or her imagination (e.g., Fight Club or A Beautiful Mind); or who is unaware of different, indistinguishable, and possibly parallel worlds, until an epistemological twist reveals to them (and us) that all prior events were founded on a false cognitive or perceptual premise (e.g., The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, or A Beautiful Mind).4 Early on Elsaesser thus corroborates that narrative complexity and stories and characters work in tandem in mind-game films. Ultimately he stresses that the significance of mind-game films must be seen in the resulting radically altered relationship between film and viewer: “Mind-game films at the narrative level, offer—with their plot twists and narrational double-takes—a range of strategies that could be summarized by saying that they suspend the common contract between the film and its viewers, which is that films do not ‘lie’ to the spectator, but are truthful and self-consistent within the premises of their diegetic worlds” (2009: 19). For him these films are therefore meta-films that are about “the rules of the game” itself: the conditions of spectatorship and the relation between film and audience (2009: 40). Buckland echoes many of Elsaesser’s observations about the key features of mind-game films, albeit with a stronger emphasis on narratology and a narrower focus on narrative complexity. In his introduction to Puzzle Films, his first edited collection of essays on the topic, he describes the “puzzle plot” as a “third type of plot that .  .  . is intricate in the sense that the arrangement of events is not just complex, but complicated and perplexing; the events are not simply interwoven, but entangled” (2009a: 3). Referring to Aristotle’s distinction between a simple plot—one single line of action following a linear and causal structure—and a complex plot—two causally interwoven plot lines that are unified in the end via

INTRODUCTION

9

reversal or a higher force of destiny—he notes that the entanglement of puzzle films resists such traditional actions and events, and consequentially also defies classical concepts of audience engagement like mimesis and catharsis (2009a: 5). Beyond this basic narratological distinction, he further lists a number of formal traits such as non-linear temporality, time loops, spatiotemporal fragmentation, omissions, duplicity, and ambiguity, as well as thematic preferences for mentally dysfunctional or already dead characters and unreliable storytellers as elements that contribute to the entanglement of puzzle films (2009a: 5–6). Similar to Elsaesser, Buckland thus gestures toward the way in which the complex plot structures of mindgame films are intrinsically linked with the films’ thematic concerns. He ultimately argues that the complexity of puzzle films “operates on two levels: narrative and narration. It emphasizes the complex telling (plot, narration) of a simple or complex story (narrative)” (2009a: 6; emphasis in original). Buckland’s definition of narrative complexity has been criticized by some as too general and vague (Kiss and Willemsen 2016: 19–22; Klecker 2013: 128) or even as “too permissive,” in the sense that it includes films whose plots do not seem that complex after all (Kiss and Willemsen 2016: 21). And yet this is not necessarily a shortcoming, as it allows the inclusion of complex twist films like The Sixth Sense or The Others, even though narrative twists themselves have been a long-standing plot device, whereas Kiss and Willemsen exclude these two films from their discussion of impossible puzzle films. The Sixth Sense and The Others are not the only films where such complications arise. Both Elsaesser and Buckland add a broad list of films to their respective chapters in the Puzzle Films anthology, some of which seem to be added intuitively rather than based on stringent selection criteria (2009). As Klecker points out, Elsaesser’s list even includes films that do not necessarily match his own definition, for instance The Matrix (1999) or The Truman Show (1998), which she argues do not exhibit the misleading and confusing character that he describes as typical of mind-game films (Klecker 2013: 129). The same could be said about Silence of the Lambs (1991), another film on Elsaesser’s list: its plot is not overly complex, nor is Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) a typical mind-game film protagonist, other than that her antagonist Hannibal Lector (Anthony Hopkins) plays a game with her. One might in fact argue that the goal-driven characters and the deadlinebased plot structure make this film seem more like a classical narrative, rather than a mind-game film. Elsaesser himself, on the other hand, draws a line between mind-game films with mentally ill characters, for instance, Fight Club or Donnie Darko, and A Beautiful Mind because here “the plot gradually dismantles the layers of invisible framing, so central to the mindgame film” (2009: 27). And yet his argument downplays that the film’s first half does align us with John Nash’s unique and mentally distorted perspective. Unlike Elsaesser, Berg therefore places A Beautiful Mind in the

10

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

same category as Being Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Donnie Darko, or Jacob’s Ladder, which all have in common that they “present the disorienting process of switching back and forth from external to internal worlds” (Berg 2006: 44–45). The film also resembles similar mind-game films, such as Fight Club or The Sixth Sense, which equally reveal how they misled audiences and presented them with a subjective rather than objective version of the film’s world, albeit during a twist that is placed toward the end of the film rather than in the middle. These exemplary divergences about individual films, rather than indicating conceptual shortcomings, can be attributed to the fact that the authors were observing and responding to new types of storytelling at a time where these trends were still in the process of emerging, which makes the relationship between a (potentially new) genre and its definition evermore unstable and subject to updates, adjustments, and refinement. But they also underline that the narrative complexity that is a signature trait of mindgame films has a distinct quality, yet one that is slippery and difficult to capture. At this point, instead of focusing narrowly on the question of what exactly narrative complexity is, it is also useful to keep in mind not only that complexity is a relative term but that, as will become clear throughout this book, complexity in cinema is not just a matter of narrative form and cognitive comprehension. Because of the difficulty to pin down a common denominator or a singular criterion that clearly marks a complex film as a puzzle or mindgame film, Buckland has more recently, in his second edited volume titled Hollywood Puzzle Films, suggested a “polytheistic definition” as a more productive approach to account for the specificity of these films (Buckland 2014b: 13, n. 1). This concept, similar to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance, assumes that each individual example of a wider group of films is marked by a combination of narrative characteristics and frequently occurring themes, characters, and motifs, neither of which alone is exclusive to mind-game films nor a necessary condition. Such a clusterbased definition is especially useful for a category of films that is fairly novel and still evolving, for it avoids confining them to a number of fixed and determinative attributes such as a certain type of plot structure. Instead, it differentiates between more or less typical examples, locating them in the core or periphery of the overall group. Figure 1 exemplifies how the typicality approach works when directly applied to mind-game films. The word-cloud is generated from the films that Bordwell (2006), Buckland (2009a), Eig (2003), Elsaesser (2009), Klecker (2013), Panek (2006) and Thon (2009) all either list or mention in their discussion of these films, as well as from those that have essays dedicated to them in the puzzle film anthologies edited by Buckland (2009b, 2014a).5 The larger the font size, the more often a film was mentioned. Memento, Fight Club, The Sixth Sense, The Usual Suspects, Inception, and Donnie Darko in particular stand

INTRODUCTION

11

FIGURE 1 Typical mind-game films.

out in this regard. On the one hand, the frequency with which attention has been paid to these particular films points to a degree of canonization that has taken place by now.6 Yet on the other hand, it suggests that certain films are viewed as characteristic examples of mind-game or puzzle films. Looking, for example, at the small font size of Pulp Fiction—often considered as a breakthrough film that made complex narratives mainstream compatible, sometimes dubbed “the Tarantino effect” (Berg 2006)—it can be argued that it is clearly a complex narrative, yet not necessarily a typical mind-game film. This can be explained with the fact that, despite the non-linear plot, Tarantino’s film offers a comparably straightforward and unambiguous solution and contains neither the emphasis on mind-related themes nor the epistemological uncertainty that films like Memento or Fight Club exhibit. Not all scholars might share this opinion. For instance, Jan Noël Thon considers both Pulp Fiction and Fight Club as equally representative of what he calls the mind-bender film (2009: 189), although he too observes the qualitative difference between Pulp Fiction and Fight Club that arises out of the fact that Pulp Fiction is neither unreliable nor does it contain any form of metaleptic narration (2009: 181).7 Yet arguing about whether or not Pulp Fiction should per definition be considered a mind-game film is besides the point: the advantage of the family-resemblance approach is that, even though there might be disagreements about individual films located in the periphery of the genre (those that are printed in relatively small font sizes as shown in Figure 1), overall there is an implicit agreement about films that count as a good representatives for this distinct group of films. In other words, a cluster-

12

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

based definition avoids a preoccupation with exclusionary definition criteria and instead allows thinking about the reasons why a particular film might be considered as a (more or less typical) mind-game film. Looking more closely at some of the most typical examples of mindgame films then—in particular Memento, Fight Club, The Sixth Sense, The Usual Suspects, Inception, and Donnie Darko—it is noteworthy that many of them have received attention by non-scholarly audiences as much as by scholarly ones. Two of the most prominent films in Figure 1, The Sixth Sense and Inception, were major box-office successes, with The Sixth Sense being the second top-grossing film in the United States in its release year 1999,8 and Inception being the top-grossing complex narrative film up to date.9 And even if not all of the above films yielded immediate commercial success, films such as Fight Club and Donnie Darko did gain a widespread cult following through subsequent releases on DVD. Notable is also that many popular mind-game films were released around the millennium, a peak period of production and reception which suggests that this is when the current cycle of complex narratives reached its zenith.10 Thus even though the examples discussed in this book are not completely identical with the above list of the most typical films, with the exception of Source Code they all come from this period, as it is this popularity with mainstream audiences that has brought a lot of attention to these films. Yet before addressing the question of spectatorship in the context of mindgame films, it is useful to have a closer look at some of their characteristic features.

Typical features of mind-game films: Subjectivity, deception, and matters of the mind As diverse as typical and less typical mind-game films may be in terms of their commercial success and production background, a large number of them combine narrative complexity with subjective stories about unreliable or mentally volatile characters and share an interest in mind-related themes, from dreams and delusions to memory problems and indistinguishable boundaries between fantasy and reality. The representation of consciousness as a dominant subject matter in mind-game films, along with the prevalence of characters with unstable mental conditions, such as amnesia, schizophrenia, or paranoia, has been noted by several scholars (Buckland 2014b: 5; Eig 2003: n.p.; Elsaesser 2009: 24–30, 2014; Panek 2006). While it is important to note that extreme character subjectivity is a trend in mainstream contemporary cinema that extends to the emergence of postclassical narration as a whole (Thanouli 2009: 50–52), what sets mind-game films further apart is the combination of psychologically deviant characters

INTRODUCTION

13

with narrative deception or unreliability—another characteristic element of mind-game films that many scholars seem to agree on (Bordwell 2006: 81, 85–89; Campora 2014; Eig 2003: n.p.; Elsaesser 2009: 24–30; Klecker 2013: 134; Panek 2006: 86; Thon 2009: 183). Eig comments on the novelty aspect of such pathological character subjectivity in combination with twist revelations, writing that “the fundamental distinction between most earlier ‘surprise’ movies and films like Fight Club, Memento, Mulholland Drive, The Sixth Sense, and Donnie Darko lies in the nature of the hero’s identity. Tyler Durden, Leonard Shelby, Diane Selwyn, Malcolm Crowe, and Donnie Darko are all, to some degree, self-deluded” (2003: n.p.). Panek, writing on what he terms the “psychological puzzle film,” likewise sees a qualitative shift in this regard, arguing that “psychological puzzle narratives offer a narration that acts as a disruptive force, blocking the protagonist’s clear comprehension of events. Unlike classically narrated films, no proxy, no embodiment of the deceptive narrator exists within the diegesis. The deceptive narration is a manifestation of an aspect of the protagonist’s mind” (2006: 86). And it is not only the protagonist’s comprehension of events that is obstructed: the unsuspecting audience often unknowingly shares the hero’s epistemological predisposition. For Klecker, this is what constitutes the “mind-tricking” element of these films: their deceptive and disorienting maneuvers are storyrelated and motivated through a character’s distorted mind, rather than merely representing mental illness or a narrative surprise (2013: 134). She further points out how this often undermines traditional expectations of narrative closure, for “the disclosure in mind-tricking narratives . . . causes anything but relief, since it throws into doubt everything that we have seen before” (2013: 139). However, the mental aspects of the characters’ pathologies do not occur in isolation in the subjective stories of mind-game films. In fact a range of them thematically deal with death, a “condition” that is not as much mental delusion but a physical state. For example, The Sixth Sense, The Others, Stay, Yella, Jacob’s Ladder, Source Code, Possible Worlds, or Mulholland Drive are all films in which the main characters are initially unaware that they have died or are in the process of dying. Some of them continue to exist as unwitting ghosts in the world of the living, whereas others find themselves displaced into complex and labyrinthine inner or virtual worlds while their brain is (still) alive in another dimension. Yet for all of them the disturbance of the experiential unity of body, mind, and world not only manifests as mental misperception or distortion. Rather, their (dis)embodied states of being-in-the-world lead to a whole range of disorientating and confusing experiences in which embodied perception and intellectual sensemaking (or denial) are inseparably intertwined. The same can be said for films that more explicitly articulate stories about mental conditions. Films such as Memento, Fight Club, Spider, or Enemy all share in common that their main characters suffer from mental disorders such as schizophrenia or

14

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

amnesia, and the breakdown of rational, cognitive, or psychological ways of understanding the world goes hand in hand with altered bodily experiences and embodied forms of knowing and interacting with the world. Even in films that are less focused on mental illness and instead deal with other mind-related themes, such as the choice to erase one’s memories in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the fabrication of a false eyewitness account in The Usual Suspects, or the possibility to inhabit and manipulate another person’s dream in Inception, the boundaries between the mental and material aspects of these stories are all but clear-cut; instead, they mutually infuse and depend on each other, evident, for example, in the importance of material keepsakes or objects of inspiration in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Usual Suspects, or the often physically nauseating experiences in the different dream layers of Inception (and to a degree also in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). Notably, the latter two also belong to the category of films in which an inner experience is spatialized as a world. This world, though seemingly familiar, operates according to its own rules, and finding one’s way in this disorienting world is not only a mental challenge. Here we can, lastly, add a group of films that deal with the spatiotemporal complexities of time travel, and whose protagonists also tend to have psychological problems and take on a role as martyr to alter the past (Elsaesser 2018: 29–32; Panek 2006: 79–83), or otherwise experience a breakdown as a result of tinkering with time. Examples include films as diverse as Donnie Darko, Source Code, Primer, The Butterfly Effect (2004), 12 Monkeys (1995), The Jacket (2005), or Time Crimes (2007). This brief overview of the significance of phenomenological themes in mind-game films—the intertwining of body, mind, and world and the repercussions of their separation or disruption—suggests that an exclusive study of the mental or mind-related themes may miss an important point as far as typical characters and motifs are concerned. Moreover, given that the misleading and unreliable tendency of mind-game films and the subjective stories they tell are closely related, where does this leave the embodied viewer? Many scholars concur that engaging with mind-game films is primarily a cognitive activity. Common assessments of the relationship between these films and their audiences posit that “the mind-bender [is] a film designed specifically to disorient you, to mess with your head” (Johnson 2005: 129); that these films “strategically evoke and maintain dissonant cognitions in their viewers through internal incongruities (contradictions in their narration) and projected impossibilities (narrative structures or elements that disrupt the elementary knowledge, logic and schemas that viewers use to make sense of both real life and fiction)” (Kiss and Willemsen 2016: 6; emphasis in original); that they “invite dedicated viewers to lock into puzzle-film mode and to re-scan the movie for clues and narrational gambits” (Bordwell 2006: 86); and that thus in turn audiences “require enhanced intellectual capabilities” in dealing with complex films (Klecker

INTRODUCTION

15

2013: 139). Accordingly, many scholars treat mind-game and other complex films as narrative puzzles that we aim to solve by finding at least some kind of linear, causal, and spatiotemporal coherence, and by disambiguating them to establish an objective and thus valid and true version of the story. That “the nature of embodiment, indeed the very status of a (human) body in mind-game films” is an “overlooked or under-emphasized” element in the research of mind-game films has more recently been recognized by Elsaesser in his 2018 article on the topic, in which he revisits some of his earlier claims and develops further ideas about their sociological and philosophical significance, reframing some of his earlier observations via the notion of agency (2018: 13). Yet far from inciting a paradigm shift in the research on mind-game films and spectatorship, his comments on the relevance of the body and the senses remain on the representational level at large. Even though he briefly suggests that mind-game films might be “educating” their viewers’ senses and bodies to help them adapt to contemporary environments (2018: 33–34), his main focus is on how mentally dysfunctional characters might express a “recalibration” of mind-body relations and thus reflect “new thinking about the embodied mind, so that the somatic body can take precedence over the rational mind” (2018: 18). Taking such ideas to the next level, in this book I argue that mind-game films do not merely reflect or represent the redistribution of tasks, knowledge, and experience between somatic body and rational mind. They invite us as embodied viewers to actively participate in such perceptual shifts and sensuous entanglements (that in fact often undermine a dualistic conception of body and mind) in order to engage us more closely with the stories they tell, and are therefore much more than just complex narrative puzzles to be solved with the mind.

Solving complex narrative puzzles Despite the heterogeneity of research on complex narratives, within the field of film studies, the emphasis has been on the narrative structures of these films first and foremost, and on the challenges they provide for audiences a close second; their thematic concerns by contrast have received much less attention. Three main areas of inquiry can be distinguished: first, several types of complex narrative structures themselves have been investigated, along with the question of whether or not complex films signal innovation or even supersede traditional narrative forms. It is here where several attempts were made to group complex films into more or less encompassing categories, such as modular narratives (Cameron 2008), new types of twist films (Lavik 2006; Leiendecker 2013; Wilson 2006), films with unreliable narration (Ferenz 2009; Helbig [ed.] 2006; Laass 2008), riddle films (Kiss 2013), puzzle films (Bordwell 2006; Buckland 2009c, 2014a; Panek 2006), or even impossible puzzle films (Kiss and Willemsen 2016). Related to the

16

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

question of tradition versus innovation, a second important and ongoing concern is the question of how spectators might engage with these complex narrative films, with the overwhelming majority of scholars coming from a cognitivist school of thought. Complementing these approaches, a third area of inquiry has looked at aspects of contemporary culture—especially new media and digital culture—in the search for possible explanations of why narrative complexity has become so well-accepted by mainstream audiences around the millennial turn. Even though the discussion of mind-game and other complex narrative films has been significantly advanced since they first received scholarly attention, tracing the development of some of the most significant arguments in these three areas helps understand how research on the phenomenon has been dominated by narratological and cognitivist concerns at large and how this has led to some implicit assumptions. The debate around tradition versus innovation has been crucially shaped by David Bordwell’s article “Film Futures” (2002), in which he argues that forking-path films like Run Lola Run or Sliding Doors (1998) are a modified form of classical narrative and therefore do not present significant new storytelling trends. Yet scholars from various backgrounds have disputed this claim, united in critiquing Bordwell for downplaying the novel aesthetics in contemporary cinema. Rather than focusing on the many elements of classical cinema—goal-centered protagonists, deadline structures, romantic double-plots—that do indeed live on in contemporary complex films, they highlight the features that would have been unconceivable in classical cinema. Allan Cameron (2008), who discusses forking-paths films as a type of modular narrative, observes that unlike in classical narratives, no diegetic explanation for the forking of these stories exists. For instance, the three parallel paths in Run Lola Run lack any rational explanation and identifiable agency or mechanism that would explain why Lola gets a second and a third chance to rescue Manni (2008: 10–12). Likewise, Charles Ramírez Berg (2006) has established a taxonomy of altogether twelve complex plot types in contemporary cinema that in fact do formally part with the classical paradigm. Although he also points out some predecessors in film history, he argues that, unlike their contemporary counterparts, none of those earlier complex films would count as a mainstream narrative film. Not least Eleftheria Thanouli (2009), who like Bordwell is grounded in historical poetics, makes a convincing case in point about the level of innovation in cinema during the 1990s and early 2000s, postulating the emergence of post-classical cinema. Even Bordwell himself later significantly revised his initial position in his book The Way Hollywood Tells It (2006), conceding that: Another era of experimental storytelling was launched in the 1990s, when a fresh batch of films seemed to shatter the classical norms. Movies boasted paradoxical time schemes, hypothetical futures, digressive and

INTRODUCTION

17

dawdling action lines, stories told backward and in loops, and plots stuffed with protagonists. It seemed filmmakers were competing to outdo one another in flashy nonconformity. Offbeat storytelling became part of business as usual. (2006: 73) A slight exaggeration notwithstanding,11 this is a much greater acknowledgment of the significance of narrative complexity in contemporary cinema. However, while it may put the tradition versus innovation debate itself to rest, there is more at stake than issues of aesthetics and narrative form alone. There are two separate aspects to Bordwell’s initial argument about forking-path films that need to be unpacked: one concerns traditional narrative form; the other a cognitivist model of spectatorship. Consequently, his safeguarding of classical narrative form has also indirectly influenced how the spectatorship of contemporary complex narrative films has been approached. If in his “Film Futures” essay Bordwell (over-)emphasizes the extent to which seemingly innovative films must rely on familiar narrative patterns and cohesion devices in order to maintain a sufficient degree of narrative intelligibility, then he implicitly also reasserts some fundamental assumptions of a cognitivist model of spectatorship: namely that we primarily understand a film on the basis of visual cues and mental schemata, and that the conventions of classical storytelling correspond with fundamental cognitive capacities such as memory and attention (2002: 103). Unlike the debate around aesthetic tradition versus innovation, this aspect has rarely been critically addressed. This oversight is perhaps little surprising, given that most discussions of spectatorship and complex narrative films are based on a cognitivist model of spectatorship such as the one put forward by Bordwell. As Buckland comments, Bordwell’s seminal book Narration in the Fiction Film (1985) and his theory of schemata, cues, and gaps that spectators fill in serve as a grounding concept for many of the chapters included in the first Puzzle Films anthology (2009a: 6–7). Barratt’s (2009) chapter on The Sixth Sense, for example, focuses on the strategies that deceive and mislead us, while Ghislotti (2009) chapter on Memento discusses the cohesion devices that aid our mental memory and processing capacities and help us to keep track of the film’s non-linear plot. This trend continues in the follow-up anthology Hollywood Puzzle Films (2014), at least as far as the discussion of viewer comprehension is concerned, though it is noteworthy that there are exceptions (for instance Bolton 2014). Even beyond those volumes, a cognitivist understanding of spectatorship has been influential for many studies devoted to the relationship between spectatorship and the formal aspects of narrative complexity. For instance, scholars who apply the theory of unreliable narration to contemporary complex film ask how we might disentangle the subjective and objective perspectives in those complex films that are characterized by two or more

18

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

conflicting version of the narrative events (Ferenz 2009; Laass 2008; Orth 2006; see also the collection of essays in Helbig [ed] 2006). Although the concept’s origin in literary studies and the issue of narrative agency still lead to many differing definitions of what exactly counts as unreliable narration in cinema, the common assumption of the theory of unreliable narration is that we deal with the inconsistencies, gaps, and contradictions in films as diverse as Fight Club, The Sixth Sense, Memento, or Mulholland Drive by way of interpreting them as unreliably narrated, so that in retrospect we can establish a true and unequivocal narrative version of these ambiguous narratives. Crucially, the study of unreliable narration in literature too underwent a cognitive turn, during which literary scholars turned away from the emphasis on an unreliable narrator persona. Instead, the concept was redefined as an interpretative strategy that readers (and viewers) employ to establish at least some sense of an objective and truthfully represented world, which in turn helps to disambiguate inconsistencies in a work of fiction (Zerweck 2001: 151). This reception-based model allows for a much greater flexibility in the context of cinema, for it means that a discussion of the contested notion of the cinematic narrator12 can be avoided, and thus provides a distinct advantage when it comes to films that are perceived as unreliable and deceptive yet do not feature an identifiable narrator persona. Given that the latter applies to a significant number of complex films, including The Sixth Sense, Memento, Donnie Darko, The Others, A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Mulholland Drive, Spider, Identity (2003), The Machinist (2004), or The Secret Window (2004), the popularity of the theory of unreliable narration to analyze these films is hardly surprising. Eva Laass, whose book Broken Taboos (2008) provides the most comprehensive theoretical discussion of unreliable narration in film to date, accordingly underscores that her work does “not deal with ‘unreliably narrated’ films, but with films in which the attribution of unreliable narration helps assign meaning to in some way incongruent narrative material” (2008: 30). Drawing a distinction between explicit and implicit unreliable narration, between films with and without identifiable narrator persona, the framework put forward by Laass is an effective narratological tool to describe the different strategies with which films with and without voice-over narration subvert the conventional mechanisms of narrative cinema to convey subjective and objective character perspectives. Nonetheless, the premise that our engagement with a film is primarily a cognitive process remains a limitation of the concept. Another continuation of this trend is Kiss and Willemsen’s book Impossible Puzzle Films (2016), which primarily draws on cognitive narratology, combined with cognitive sciences, psychology, media theory, and game studies. Even though Kiss and Willemsen move away from a computational approach to spectatorship and adapt the newer trend in cognition-based research to consider embodiment as a necessary condition

INTRODUCTION

19

for cognition, the contribution of the body and the senses tends to come second, in their discussion of both the films themselves and the ways in which audiences deal with them. While they acknowledge that “bodily rooted dynamic patterns that internally organize our experience,” such as kinesthetic image schemas, contribute to the way we make sense of fictional and real-world situations (2016: 33), at the core of their book is the idea that complex narratives challenge human cognition as a mental problemsolving activity and evoke different types of “cognitive puzzlement” as a psychological effect (2016: 4, 26). In that way the dominance of cognitivist enquiries is neither questioned nor challenged, and the discrete role of the body and the senses in the context of mind-game films, in terms of spectatorship as well as thematically, remains under-explored. Beyond the immediate question of narrative comprehension, there is also the question of why complex films have become so popular with mainstream audiences during the past two decades. Historically, the emergence of complex narrative films during the 1990s coincides with the invention, distribution, and subsequent commercialization of the DVD in 1997, as well as the increasing popularity of computer games and other digital media during the 1990s and 2000s. A connection to these technological developments and accompanying consumer habits therefore has become almost a staple argument. A number of scholars see correspondences between complex films and our increased exposure to the internet, to (digital) networks and globalization, to virtual realities and video games (Berg 2006; Buckland 2014c; Cameron 2008; Campora 2009; Daly 2010; Kinder 2002; Manovich 2001). A common argument is that the logic of complex films resembles contemporary ways of processing, storing, and retrieving information: a new kind of “database cinema” that privileges the process of selection of a story’s elements over the story itself (Kinder 2002; Manovich 2001), where non-linear storytelling resembles hypertext linking and “the branched experiences of surfing the net” (Berg 2006: 6). Daly (2010) even posits the emergence of a “cinema 3.0” where the viewer becomes a “viewser” who has to actively take part in the game. Similar lines of argument are also prominent in Buckland’s Hollywood Puzzle Films (2014a) volume, in which several scholars explore possible connections between narrative complexity and new media (for instance Stewart 2014). While Buckland cautions against attributing all-too-easy causal relationships between technology, society, and its cultural products (2014b: 4), his own analysis of Source Code, in which he investigates how a number of structural rules of “video game logic” are “transcoded” into the film (2014c), is a further example of this trend. A variation of the technology and new media hypothesis is also Garrett Stewarts’s book Framed Time (2007), in which he traces the shift from analog to digital cinematic image as inscribed in a range of complex films, alongside subtle nuances between those from a European Art cinema and US American Hollywood context.

20

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

Among the numerous works that explore the cultural and historical dimension of contemporary complex films, one that stands out is Allan Cameron’s book Modular Narratives (2008), which explores comprehensively and in depth the experience of temporality expressed in complex modular films, structurally as well thematically. Cameron argues that these films are a response to a current shift in the experience of time brought on by digital media, noting how the notion of narrative itself, or material that is narrated, underwent a shift in the digital era, as it expands and “overflows its traditional containers and multiplied across media, from commercials to video games. Audiences are thus . . . hypersensitized to the rules and forms of narrative” (2008: 22). While a perceived rivalry between narrative and database in modular narratives might suggest a paradigm shift which could potentially diminish the role of narrative in favor of the database, Cameron sees, on the contrary, a reaffirmation of narrative and its role in articulating temporal experience. Altogether, for him modular narratives express and represent time in digital media and have a metanarrative dimension: “All of these films attempt to reconcile different ways of structuring time. In this sense, they serve as a collective referendum on the status and value of narrative in the digital era. Each film suggests a limit to narrative’s ability to mediate our experience of the world, although each also recuperates narrative in one way or the other” (2008: 170). However, the mediation of time is not exclusive to cinematic narratives, as Cameron in his (brief) exploration of modular narratives’ neighboring mediascape demonstrates (2008: 172–83). Nor is cinema itself inherently narrative, and thus one question we need to ask is how other means of signification might play a role in these films.

Feeling complex narrative textures Within a rapidly growing body of work that emphasizes the importance of embodiment and cinema’s sensuous dimension in discussing film spectatorship, complex narratives have rarely been considered thus far. Altogether, while much research has explored the cognitive processes stimulated by the narrative structures of mind-game films (and other complex films), asking questions about the rational and reflective strategies we can employ in order to disentangle and disambiguate their complex plots, little attention has been paid to other means of signification and the affective experience these films provide. The dominant direction that the discussion of mind-game films and complex narratives has taken can be summarized as follows: mind-game films are seen as puzzling objects that challenge our cognitive sense-making skills through their complex narrative structures. For many scholars, the question of how we make sense of these films means thinking about approaches that enable us to find plausible and objective

INTRODUCTION

21

explanations for the ambiguous and subjectively experienced stories that are told in mind-game films. The sense-making techniques they suggest are predominantly mental operations: reordering non-linear temporality, establishing causal relationships between events, simultaneously following multiple diegeses, or re-establishing narrative coherence by sorting out subjectively distorted, unreliable character perspectives from an objectively true and reliable version of a story. However, according to Sobchack, our primary and pre-reflective apprehension of a film is not based on its structure, be it narrative or database, but on the intelligibility of embodied vision itself (1992: 6). This consequently raises the question of how the aesthetic and affective experience of mind-game films, like all experience, is also grounded in embodiment as its existential condition. Attesting to the validity of Sobchack’s claim, there are, however, some noteworthy exceptions that defy the trend to privilege rational and analytical modes of spectatorship in thinking about how spectators engage with complex films. Perhaps the most prominent case in point are the films of David Lynch. While opinions are divided as to whether some of his films, including Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire, should be considered as radically ambiguous examples of complex narratives, or whether they should be seen as part of David Lynch’s oeuvre as an auteur,13 the aforementioned films of his have all been explored with a phenomenological framework.14 However, what makes these studies less useful as examples of what an embodiment perspective can add to the analysis of mind-game films is that they do not contextualize Lynch’s films as complex narratives. More fruitful in this regard is Phil Powrie’s (2008) discussion of 5 × 2 (2004), a film that tells of five stages of a relationship in reverse chronological order. Powrie focuses on Paolo Conte’s song “Sparring Partner” as a “haptic moment” in one particular scene, arguing that it creates an affective “haptic metaspace” through which meaning emerges beyond narrative order or emotional empathy with the characters. Lucy Bolton (2014) uses a similar approach in her reading of The Hours (2002). She contends that “approaching the three-stranded narrative as a puzzle film requires us to go beyond simply making narrative sense of the stories” (2014: 266). Combining close analysis with a phenomenological discussion of the theme of suicide in the film, Bolton argues that The Hours creates “a sense of moments in time” (2014: 270). One such key moment she singles out is the “egg-yolk-moment,” a minor occurrence that is of little narrative consequence, yet that evokes our sense of tactility and thereby engages us with the film’s concern of time passing (2014: 271–73). Both Bolton and Powrie thus deploy haptic theory to examine how individual scenes can come to our attention as cinematic moments in themselves, detailing how they contribute to an understanding of these non-linear films that does not as much oppose narrative structure but that arises as an additional, different layer of signification instead.

22

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

A further notable departure from the dominance of cognitivistnarratological approaches to complex narratives is Ian Garwood’s discussion of Amores Perros in his book The Sense of Film Narration (2013). Similar to Bolton and Powrie, Garwood focuses on a key moment, the crash sequence, in which the fates of the different characters converge, and which is repeated four times in the film. Beyond this key moment in itself, Garwood also considers how the unique tactile and sensuous qualities of each rendition of the crash sequence are linked with the remainder of the film, arguing that different textures, including sound, “contribute to the production of moments where the experiencing of the sensuous qualities of the film and the understanding of the significance of relationships within the story world become part of the same process for the viewer” (2013: 36). Garwood’s detailed “textural”—rather than textual—analysis effectively demonstrates how an embodied approach to spectatorship can be applied to a complex narrative such as Amores Perros to consider the “feel” of a film in its entirety (2013: 35–63). Again, this does not oppose or even contradict a narratological analysis of storytelling in itself. But as Garwood highlights, paying attention to a film’s distinct sensuous, textural, and material qualities beyond their representational function in the story can reveal important aspects of our engagement with a film’s (fictional) world and its inhabitants that elude a more traditional textual interpretation (2013: 62). In order to explore the affective and experiential dimension of mindgame films, I too utilize the idea of textural analysis in this book. Paying attention to a film’s texture as a critical method has been pioneered by Barker (2009b), Garwood (2013), and Donaldson (2014, 2015). Pursuing such “textural analysis,” as Barker explains, allows us: to demonstrate the ways in which careful attention to the tactile surfaces and textures involved in the film experience might illuminate complexities and significance that might be overlooked by a focus on visual, aural, or narrative aspects. Even those films that seem dominated by narrative and cognitive concerns might possess secrets that we miss at first glance, secrets we may only discover when we begin to scratch the surface with a more tactile form of analysis. (2009b: 25) Indeed, uncovering such secrets by “scratching the surface” of mind-game films and “digging up” deeper embodied structures of meaning contained in them is exactly what I aim to achieve in this book. Importantly, as Barker further elaborates, “texture [is] something we and the film engage in mutually, rather than something presented by the films to their passive and anonymous viewers” (2009b: 25; emphasis in original). In other words, tracing the “tactile and tangible patterns and structures of significance” reveals how meaning emerges as part of the (embodied) experience of watching a film, rather than pointing out the textual and narrative clues

INTRODUCTION

23

that we might pick up on in a more reflective mode of engagement (2009b: 25; emphasis in original). With a greater emphasis on a film as an aesthetic object, Donaldson understands a film’s texture as a comprehensive concept that applies to “both fine detail and composition” (2015: 27) and the overall “evocation of touch and surface, of the materiality of a film’s work” (2015: 28). Like Barker, she stresses the implications of analyzing a film’s texture for the sensory dimension of spectatorship, for it “expresses the sensuous ‘feel’ of a medium, material, or environment, and thus connects with the subject of touch. This in turn invites consideration of affect, and of the sensorial relationships between film and spectator” (2015: 27). Let me reiterate though that by pursuing this approach I do not depart from the discussion of mind-game films as a form of narrative cinema. Rather, following Garwood’s understanding, each of the textural analyses in this book “is sensitive to the sensuous capacities of cinema [and] considers how this might deepen, rather than distract from or supersede, the viewer’s interest in a film as a distinctive fictional world” (2013: 14). Applied to the mind-game films that are the subject of this book, then, this approach will allow me to illuminate another dimension of how these films engage us with the stories they tell: not via critical distance and mental problem-solving but through close and embodied modes of viewing and experiencing a film.

Film, phenomenology, and theories of embodied spectatorship As stated at the beginning, thematically the films dealt with in this book— The Sixth Sense, The Others, Memento, Fight Club, Possible Worlds, Source Code—are stories about ruptures between body, mind, and world. In my phenomenologically informed reading of these films and their stories and typical motifs, I combine close “textural” analysis with theories of embodied spectatorship, as well as with the examination of key moments such as twist sequences, opening titles, and opening scenes. The latter follows from an observation made by Martine Beugnet, who writes that focusing on such key moments “allows us to engage with the films as thinking processes . . . not to merely think about film, but to think with and through film” (2007: 19). Put differently, exploring a particular sequence from the perspective of embodied spectatorship, rather than considering its narrative function, will help unlock the epistemological and experiential potential contained within those sequences. Bringing phenomenology and theories of embodied spectatorship to the study of mind-game films therefore is a productive alternative that will allow me to explore how these films address our own sensuous and bodily registers in engaging us with the stories they tell. What I hope to reveal is how we can make sense of the often confusing and

24

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

challenging experience of watching mind-game films beyond the games they play with our cognitive skills and expectations. While I will return to the discussion of phenomenological concepts throughout this book, elaborating on and applying theory directly in combination with the textural analyses of mind-game films, let me provide in the following a brief overview of how phenomenological theory has been utilized in film studies, and in particular in the context of embodied approaches to spectatorship, in order to further establish the theoretical grounding of this project. The “synaesthetic turn” (Laine and Strauven 2009) in film theory is mostly associated with scholars of the 1990s and 2000s, the most influential being Vivian Sobchack and Laura Marks, even though theories based on the idea that watching a film engages the body and the senses date back to the early days of cinema. Rudolf Arnheim, for instance, describes conflicts between eye and body in his book Film as Art (1957). Walter Benjamin (1969), likewise, argues that a film as a—then still new—medium of expression exposes its viewers to perceptual shocks and jolts in his seminal essay “The Artwork in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Similarly, Antonin Artaud comments on the new medium’s capacity to haptically engage its viewers, writing that “the human skin of things, the epidermis of reality—this is the cinema’s first toy” (Artaud [1972], as quoted in Jamieson [2007: n.p.]). Another important early theorist of the corporeal dimension of film spectatorship is Siegfried Kracauer, for whom cinema was able to capture the material world in ways the human eye cannot, and thus capable of expanding and transforming our knowledge of the world (Hansen 1993: 448). Concurrent with the increased interest in the embodied viewing experience, Kracauer’s Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1961) has regained prominence in recent scholarship, such as in Brigitte Peucker’s book The Material Image (2007). Something similar can be said of the works of André Bazin, for whom film’s ability to capture reality often hinges upon material and sensuous details. In recent scholarship, his writings on the long-take have been utilized by Tiago de Luca in his book Realism of the Senses (2014), which explores sensory realist tendencies in the films of Gus van Sant, Carlos Reygadas, and Tsai Ming-liang. Even though some of these earlier theories are not always entirely compatible with contemporary ones, they share with them the assumption that the film experience is inherently embodied. In contrast to these earlier studies of cinema’s corporeal and sensory address, contemporary phenomenological studies of spectatorship as an embodied and (multi-)sensuous experience are characterized by two main theoretical influences: one is Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose existential phenomenology has been brought to film studies by Sobchack in her book The Address of the Eye (1992), and which is also a significant inspiration for Barker’s book The Tactile Eye (2009b).15 The other is Gilles Deleuze, whose ideas about cinema’s affective dimension have found their way into

INTRODUCTION

25

Marks’s book The Skin of the Film (2000), Elena del Rio’s Deleuze and the Cinema of Performance (2009), and Steven Shaviro’s The Cinematic Body (1994). This may seem like a radical difference, especially if one considers Deleuze’s explicit stance against phenomenology (del Rio 2010: 115). Yet as del Rio notes, what unites Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze is a shared concern with “a sensuous/sensational and affective approximation to the world [that] replaces the purely mental and visual methods of the disembodied cogito” (2010: 115).16 That this shared understanding of embodiment outweighs theoretical differences can not the least be seen in the variety of works addressing this “sensuous/sensational and affective approximation” to cinema and spectatorship. Even if not directly referring to either MerleauPonty or Deleuze, many scholars equally draw upon Sobchack and Marks in further advancing the field, since both shed light on different facets and nuances of how the body and the senses contribute to meaning in the cinematic experience. At the core of Sobchack’s seminal work The Address of the Eye is her reading of the significance of Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology for cinema. Expressing frustration with the disembodied spectator of the gaze and with notions of spectatorship as a primarily cognitive and audiovisual process, she understands her work as a response to the formalist, ideological, and psychoanalytical paradigms that were dominant at the time (1992: 14– 21). Drawing in particular on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the lived body and his understanding of intentionality as embodied, she argues that, first and foremost, film spectatorship is grounded in embodied vision: seeing that not only occurs distinctly through one’s own eyes but that moreover cannot be separated from the perceiving body as a whole. This notion dismantles the idea that we conflate the images of a film with our own vision, as apparatus theory has claimed; it also means that our understanding of a film neither solely depends on nor is entirely determined by structures of film form and narration. Cinematic communication, as Sobchack defines it more precisely, is based on (at least) two such embodied acts of vision: a double structure of experience and perception whereby, in the first instance, the film perceives a world as visible images and audible sounds, as well as a materially experienced and bodily inhabitable world. In the second instance, we as spectators perceive the film’s visible, audible, and to a certain extent tactile images as a world, or what she refers to as the film’s “viewed view.” At the same time, we perceive the film’s act of perception, what she calls its “viewing view” (1992: 203–08). Central to Sobchack’s understanding of the film experience is thus the idea that a film is more than just a visible and seen object. Instead, it is also a subject that perceives a world by means of technology, and visibly expresses acts of perception—its lived embodied vision turned “inside out”—to us as spectators (1992: 134–40). Sobchack’s related claim that a film has a body, not a metaphorical but a literal one as she insists (1992: 133), may have raised an eyebrow. And yet as Chapter 1

26

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

will demonstrate, it is a highly useful experiential category to capture, for instance, the visual or cinematic complexity at work in The Sixth Sense and The Others. Besides the distinction between a film’s “viewed view” and its “viewing view,” another important aspect of understanding of vision as embodied that Sobchack highlights is the “synesthetic” and “synoptic” nature of perception, the way in which the senses mutually inform and cooperate with each other. It explains how even though seeing and hearing are the two senses directly expressed and addressed in cinema, other senses are nonetheless involved and thus films can also address, for example, our sense of touch (1992: 76–84). The multisensory dimension of the film experience gains even more prominence in Sobchack’s later work Carnal Thoughts (2004), a collection of essays that deal with embodiment in a wider cultural context, including further observations on cinema and spectatorship. Unlike The Address of the Eye, these essays are less theoretical and vision-centered, and instead turn toward the corporeality of spectatorship itself. The essay “What My Fingers Knew” in particular shifts the emphasis from seeing to the synesthetic involvement of the other senses. Here, Sobchack characterizes cinematic spectatorship as essentially sensuous, tactile, and embodied. This is captured in the notion that as spectators we are “cinesthetic subjects” who “do not leave [our] capacity to touch or to smell or to taste at the cinema door” (2004e: 64). The idea that our experience of a film is informed by senses other than vision alone has been one of film phenomenology’s most pervasive claims, regardless of one’s theoretical grounding. Aside from Sobchack’s aforementioned essay, it prominently comes to the fore in the writings of Laura Marks, who takes an interdisciplinary approach in her book The Skin of the Film (2000), combining art history, ethnology, and film theory (in particular that of Deleuze) to investigate how intercultural cinema— experimental film and video works that deal with cultural diaspora—draws on touch or smell to encode and express the experience of living between cultures. A central concept she employs is the notion of “haptic images,” which can contain memories that are buried or hidden from official records. In this way critically gesturing toward the dominance of vision in Western culture, another important dimension of Marks’s work is the idea of sensual hierarchies and their cultural and historical dimension. Thus unlike Sobchack, who argues that our understanding of a film is universally grounded in knowing what it means to see as an embodied being, Marks emphasizes that talking about the body and the senses in film spectatorship does not mean an imaginary pre-discursive or natural mode of film viewing: she repeatedly highlights that “sensuous knowledge is cultivated” (2000: 144) and that “perception is never a purely individual act, but also engagement with the social and with cultural memory” (2000: 62). Initially these divergences may seem like a contradiction with regard to what embodied spectatorship means. Yet besides being attributable

INTRODUCTION

27

to a different theoretical grounding—as mentioned before, Sobchack’s theoretical background is Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology, Marks is more indebted to Deleuze—they also have to do with the complexity of embodiment and perception itself. Mark Johnson highlights that the body is never just a biological, individual, sexual, gendered, social, cultural, historical “thing”; instead, being an embodied subject means being informed by all of these different dimensions of embodiment (2007: 274– 78). Perhaps less nuanced than Johnson, Merleau-Ponty likewise draws a distinction between what he calls the pre-personal and the habitual body, really two dimensions of embodiment which can be separated only in theory (2002 [1945]). While the pre-personal body designates the way experience and perception are generally enabled by, and grounded in embodiment as their existential condition, the habitual body points to the way our bodies can adapt to different social circumstances and individual conditions, such as in his famous example of the blind man who learns to perceive the world by means of his stick (2002 [1945]: 165–66). This is no different in film spectatorship. Thus we can say that Sobchack emphasizes these prepersonal aspects of embodiment in The Address of the Eye, whereas Marks places greater emphasis on the habitual, social, and historical dimensions of embodiment (and in fact Sobchack also later repeatedly addresses its cultural dimension in the essays in Carnal Thoughts). Among the many other studies that explore film via phenomenology and theories of embodied spectatorship, let me single out Jennifer Barker’s book The Tactile Eye (2009b), as it has been particularly influential for this project. Like Sobchack, Barker builds her argument on Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology and the interlacing of vision and touch. Her notion of tactility, however, reaches not as much further but rather deeper than those of Sobchack and Marks, extending from the skin as a tactile surface to the musculature and down to the viscera. Barker expands on Sobchack’s concept of the film’s body to argue that such deeply embodied structures of meaning apply to both a film’s perceptive and expressive agency, as well as to our own corporeal viewing situation. The breadth of her examples further distinguishes Barker from Sobchack and Marks. Unlike Marks, she does not restrict herself to a very specific type of (experimental) film, thus realizing Sobchack’s claim that all films appeal to us as embodied spectators. Moreover, in contrast to Sobchack’s almost exclusively theoretical argument in The Address of the Eye, Barker’s detailed “textural analyses” not only very tangibly illustrate her claims but also give a new language to film criticism from an embodied perspective, which is another distinct contribution of hers to the field. It needs to be acknowledged that cognitivist film scholars too have by now recognized the importance of embodied approaches to spectatorship and expanded the field accordingly. Stephen Prince’s (1996) notion of “perceptual realism,” for instance, fits into this category, as do the works

28

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

of Carl Plantinga (2009), Greg M. Smith (2003), and Murray Smith (1995) on emotions and character engagement, or Torben Grodal’s PECMA flow model (2009). As mentioned previously, Kiss and Willemsen likewise greatly emphasize that their interest lies in the “(embodied-)cognitive activities that are implicated in making sense of complex stories” (2016: 5), even though the merely parenthetical inclusion of “embodied” is indicative of the fact that the embodied dimension of spectatorship is not addressed in much detail in their book, in favor of exploring the cognitive dissonance that they argue is evoked by “impossible puzzle films.” Nonetheless, these convergences signal not only the extent to which the discussion of embodiment is becoming more widespread but also that, in some ways, these two theoretical paradigms can work in complementary rather than contradictory ways. Phenomenology, after all, does not suggest that intellectual or cognitive processes are irrelevant, and some scholars pursuing a phenomenological approach, in turn, incorporate cognitivistnarratological concepts into their respective discussions, such as Jane Stadler (2008) in her discussion of the mediation of ethics in narrative cinema, or Julian Hanich (2010) in his taxonomy of fear responses typically evoked by horror films. However, there are some significant differences between phenomenological and cognitivist approaches to the corporeal and sensory dimension of spectatorship. Cognitivist research tends to assume a more empirical and scientific stance on perception and embodiment, evident, for example, in concepts such as Greg M. Smith’s (2003) notion of “mood-cues” that determine our emotional engagement with narrative characters, almost like a stimulus-response-model. In a phenomenological understanding, by contrast, the body and the senses discretely and uniquely contribute to knowledge and aesthetic experience. It is thus not merely a question of theoretical purism to maintain a distinction between these different approaches. On this point I concur with Anne Rutherford who writes that “the insistence on scientific models of the body derived from biomedical discourse and the concomitant occlusion of phenomenological concepts of embodiment, have persistently thwarted the articulation of an aesthetics of embodiment which recognizes the full resonance of embodied affect in the experience of cinema spectatorship” (2003: n.p.). This difference is not least reflected in linguistic terms. Approaches to embodied spectatorship that are more inclined toward empirical and science-based research traditions often take on an exclusively third-person perspective, speaking of “the viewer’s body” in general terms. Phenomenological understandings of embodiment and aesthetic experience, by contrast, often employ a first-person perspective in exploring how “our bodies” contribute to the way “we may experience” a film in a certain way. Neither the first person nor the conjunctive are to be read as a lack of validity or as “subjectivist blather” though, as phenomenology has sometimes been accused of (Hanich 2010: 41). Rather, they suggest that the subjectively

INTRODUCTION

29

lived body is a shared and intersubjective ground. Sobchack summarizes this position as follows: The proof of an adequate phenomenological description . . . is not whether or not the reader has actually had—or even is in sympathy with—the meaning and value of an experience as described—but whether or not the description is resonant and the experience’s structure sufficiently comprehensible to a reader who might “possibly” inhabit it (even if in a different inflected or valid way). (2004b: 5) What I set out to provide in this book, then, are indeed close readings of mind-game films that can be “inhabited” by a reader and viewer in a manner such as described by Sobchack, readings that are “resonant” with the embodied experiences stimulated by these films. A central assumption of cognitivist narratology is that there is a strong correlation between the ways in which viewers make sense of real-life and fictional scenarios. Bordwell for example argues that narratives are based on formal conventions combined with what he refers to as “folk psychology, the ordinary processes we use to make sense of the world” (2002: 90). An example he provides in his discussion of forking-paths films is how we, when thinking about our own biographies, might identify a number of turning points and imagine a number of possible future options and possible outcomes. However, humans make sense of the world as embodied beings, and therefore embodiment also pertains to our understanding of narrative, as recent embodied-cognitivist approaches to narratology testify to. Phenomenologist Gail Weiss similarly argues that narrative intelligibility should neither be equated with nor be reduced to the “presence or absence of coherent intentions and/or on the ability or inability of the agent to discern coherent intentions, intentions that are in turn rendered coherent to the extent that they can be situated within a unified narrative” (2008: 68). Her notion of “the body as a narrative horizon” is based on Paul Ricoeur’s (1991) distinction between an episodic/chronological and a configurational/ a-chronological dimension of narrative in general. Weiss suggests that our comprehension of the “intersubjective dramas that intertwine human beings in other another’s narratives” is grounded in the mutual condition of embodiment (2008: 65). This is not to say that factors like goals, motives, intentions, emotions, or desires, not to mention narrative form—be it a simple, complicated, puzzle, or impossible puzzle plot—are irrelevant for engaging with a narrative. However, Weiss argues that we can construct and make sense of a narrative as a meaningful experience even if we do not understand the characters and their goals, desires, and so on, and even if a narrative remains ambiguous to such an extent that it resists our ability to identify a fictional agent’s intentions, emotions, and so on as its main drive (2008: 68). Although Weiss’s notion of the body as a narrative horizon

30

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

is based on language-based texts, it is applicable to cinematic narratives just as much. Sobchack writes that “our carnal thoughts make sense and sensibility not only of the lived body’s subjective sense perception but also of its objective representation” in cinema (2004b: 7–8). Similarly, Laura Marks reminds us that a “film is not grasped solely by an intellectual act but by the complex perception of the body as a whole” (2000: 145). Analyzing the works of Korean video artist Seoungho Cho, for instance, she describes how “the experience of the placeless traveler in Cho’s tapes also appeal to the body and not only the psyche” (188–89). Applied to mind-game films, then, we can say that narrative may have taken on a new form in these films; yet form is not the only way to express and understand the stories they tell. Sobchack’s distinction between what she describes as cinema’s “primary” and “secondary” means of signification further helps illuminate the relationship between narrative and cinematic complexity. By drawing a distinction between the “primary, and embodied language” of seeing itself on the one hand, and plot structures, narrative agents, levels of narration or other means of “secondary signification” on the other, she highlights the fact that when we watch a film our viewing experience does not necessarily hinge upon the organization of plot structures, be they complex or not. Instead, we understand a film—“an act of seeing that makes itself seen, an act of hearing that makes itself heard, an act of physical and reflective movement that makes itself reflexively felt and understood”—because we are embodied perceiving beings (1992: 3–4). Altogether, Sobchack defines the film experience as “a system of communication based on bodily perception as a vehicle of conscious expression. It entails the visible, audible, kinetic aspects of sensible experience to make sense visibly, audibly, and haptically” (1992: 9). Sobchack thus acknowledges formal conventions of narrative films, such as, the way they often shift between the representation of the characters’ subjective perception and the supposedly immanent and objective perspective of the camera. Yet for her these conventions disguise what she refers to as “film’s body”: the material source whose act of perception is visibly expressed to us and enables us to experience a usually coherent and seamless narrative. While these “secondary codings of subjectivity” and the disguise of the film’s body are usually not experienced as problematic, Sobchack argues that films which interrupt and upset these narrative conventions make visible the film’s primary act of viewing itself, and moreover draw attention to the viewer as its existential implication (1992: 225–29). Mind-game films thus draw attention to a film’s own material presence inscribed in the act of viewing and the reality it inhabits (1992: 221). It is this expressed and perceived experience of mind-game films, what I consider their cinematic complexity, that approaches which remain within the constraints of a cognitivist-narratological framework have neglected. Accordingly, in this book I set out from the belief that over-emphasizing the notion of narrative complexity in mind-game films is a limited view of

INTRODUCTION

31

these films, as it downplays their particularly cinematic complexity, along with the embodied experience thereof. Cinematic, in this context, refers to Sobchack’s understanding of cinema as a perceptual and expressive technology, whereby a film manifests as an expressive viewing subject in its own right, an intentional and embodied agency defined by its visible acts of perception and expression; yet whose existence is commonly disguised through the conventions of narrative continuity (1992: 227–29). Because spectatorship is based on embodied vision, rather than abstract visual processes, the key to approaching cinema as a perceptual technology and its affective and epistemological impact is not primarily to be found in our cognitive engagement with narrative structures, but first and foremost in embodiment as the existential condition for all cinematic, in fact for any kind of experience. However, even though this book thus starts from a fundamentally different premise, I do not consider it to be positioned in categorical opposition to the aforementioned cognitivist and narratological approaches. Rather, it explores a different set of questions as far as the relationship between spectator and film is concerned. In short, what happens with the body in the mind-game film?

Making sense of films that don’t always make sense The intricacy of mind-game films goes beyond the question of how to solve a complex narrative puzzle with cognitive means. Films like The Sixth Sense, The Others, Memento, Fight Club, Possible Worlds, and Source Code raise not only the question of what has happened; they also ask how we experience and make sense of the world and, by extension, a film. Thwarting the narrative comprehension skills that we are familiar with, mind-game films instigate reflection upon the epistemological premises and means of knowledge that we habitually employ when we are watching a film. Their self-reflexive foregrounding of perception and embodied experience extends to the themes of mind-game films, which often feature characters who come to mistrust or question their own perception and have to doubt the reality status of the world they operate and exist in. Malcolm (The Sixth Sense) and Grace (The Others) unknowingly disavow their own death and persist as ghosts among the living, while struggling to understand the inexplicable changes of the world they inhabit. A different variant of this is George (Possible Worlds), who gets lost within the complex maze of his inner, imagined possible worlds, seemingly unaware that he only exists as a brain in a vat in the outside world. Colter (Source Code) comes to question both his identity and his existence for similar reasons, being little more than a lifeless, mutilated body hooked to a machine in one timeline, and inhabiting another, past timeline as another (dead) man. Others like

32

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

Leonard (Memento) and Jack (Fight Club) continue to inhabit the world with their full bodily existence, yet do so with a highly idiosyncratic style of being that is a result of pathological mental conditions such as amnesia or multiple personality disorder. Foregrounding embodiment as a subject’s existential condition in such a manner, the stories told in mind-game films concern the relationship between body, mind, and world; between mental and material modes of knowing and being-in-the-world; and between vision and other modes of sensual perception. Because we as audience have to make sense of such films that do not always make sense in the traditional way, these perceptual and embodied sense-making skills and experiences also apply to our encounter with them. The three basic parameters of experience mentioned throughout this chapter—body, mind, and world—provide the theoretical underpinning of this book as a whole. It is organized in three main chapters. In each of them, one of these experiential categories emerges as a prominent dimension within the films that I analyze. To keep in line with the concept of carving out ideas that are contained within the films themselves, rather than imposing an external (theoretical, philosophical, narratological, scientific) framework onto them, each of the individual chapters follows its own logic, albeit one that is determined by the specific themes of the films. Prioritizing theme is of course not to say that the formal elements of plot construction in mindgame films are not important—after all, the complex structures not only relate to the characters’ subjective experiences but also significantly shape our experience of mind-game films and contribute to the games that they play with us. But as I shall demonstrate throughout this book, a too-narrow focus on narrative structure alone misses crucial elements with regard to theme and spectatorship. Following a rationale that is in line with the cluster-based definition of mind-game films, other selection criteria were popularity and typicality. With the exception of Source Code the films discussed in this book have in common that they come from around the millennium. As mentioned earlier, this is a period where mind-game films had noticeably entered mainstream filmmaking, even if not all of them gained commercial success, or at least not immediately. It is no coincidence that The Sixth Sense, The Others, Memento, and Fight Club, some of the best known mind-game films, were made during this time. Source Code, on the other hand, released in 2011, along with the box-office success Inception from 2010 (which I do not discuss in detail in this book), is an example of a Hollywood blockbuster mind-game film; and while Inception, with its spatiotemporal complexity and thematic emphasis on dreams, would have been a suitable candidate for analysis as well, the choice was made in favor of Source Code to avoid discussing two films by the same director, Christopher Nolan (whose careerdefining film was Memento). The focus on such prominent examples means that with the exception of the Canadian small-screen production Possible

INTRODUCTION

33

Worlds, most of the films discussed in this book come from a comparatively mainstream US American background. Thus even though mind-game films transcend long-standing categorizations such as commercial, independent, auteurist, or national cinema, with films coming from all over the world and especially from North America, Europe, and Asia (Elsaesser 2009: 15, 2018: 11–12), their diversity is not covered in this book at large. Nonetheless, at the end of each chapter I offer brief discussions of mind-game films that are similar to the ones closely analyzed. Overall, my aim is to bring a new perspective to the study of mind-game films, rather than expanding our understanding of these films as narrative genre. A deliberate focus on mostly canonical films that have received a great deal of scholarly attention allows me to reveal nuances of these films that have elsewhere been overlooked, and thus to demonstrate the significant contribution that embodied theories of spectatorship and phenomenologically informed textural analyses can make to further our understanding of the film phenomenon at stake. This will become particularly clear in Chapter 1 via close textural analysis of The Sixth Sense and The Others. Both films are organized in a linear manner and reveal in a twist ending that the main protagonists have been dead throughout the film without being aware of their existential state. Nevertheless, the films differ slightly in their construction of the plot twist itself. This difference provides a most suitable starting point to demonstrate how a cognitive-narratological understanding of spectatorship is perfectly suited to reveal how the films mislead us; whereas an embodied approach allows exploring how both films play with our embodied understanding of what it means to see and thereby closely implicate us into the disembodiment dramas of their protagonists. Thematically, the chapter focuses on the body and the embodied nature of perception, and especially on seeing as an epistemological practice that is informed by the other senses. The key concepts that underpin this analysis are Sobchack’s notion of the film experience as grounded in the embodied act of viewing, the film’s body, and the spectator as “cinesthetic subject.” Paying specific attention to the twist sequences, I demonstrate the limits of a mechanical understanding of seeing as an information input process, as it cannot capture what these films have in common: that they both subvert our understanding of what it means to be an embodied seeing being. The chapter further draws on Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the phantom limb to explore the connection between vision, death, and (dis)embodiment in these films, with regard to both the characters and spectatorship. Overall the chapter suggests that both films perform a perceptual shift from disembodied to embodied vision, and from vision to hearing and touch. Chapter 2 analyzes Memento and Fight Club, with particular focus on the portrayal of the main protagonists’ mental disorders, anterograde amnesia, and multiple personality disorder. These two films are exemplary for a group of mind-game films that Elsaesser refers to as “productive pathologies”: films about characters with mental dysfunctions (such as

34

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

amnesia, schizophrenia, or paranoia) that are not concerned with finding a clinical cure but instead unlock tactile forms of knowledge and embodied experience through the suspended mental faculty of their protagonists. Analyzing these films texturally will reveal how the games they play are not only about being deceived and finding the true solution to the story but also about a “reorientation of the body and the senses” (Elsaesser 2009: 39). I suggest that embodied knowledge and corporeal experience play a crucial role in these films. Using Marks’s distinction between haptic and optical visuality, I explore the importance of tactile epistemologies and tacit knowledge in Memento: first for Leonard in compensating for his cognitive memory disorder, and second for us in engaging with his way of making sense of the world. Barker’s concept of cinematic tactility that further encompasses kinetic and visceral structures of meaning provides a useful framework for Fight Club, where I argue that Tyler Durden, the main protagonist’s hallucinated alter ego, is simultaneously symptom of a deepseated estrangement as well as its solution, reminding the narrator—as well as us—what it feels like to be alive and in touch with the world. Chapter 3 will look at Possible Worlds and Source Code, two films that are characterized by ontological plurality and an “entanglement” of inner and outer worlds (Buckland 2014b: 5–6). Unlike the other films discussed in this book, Possible Worlds is little known and does not belong to the common canon of mind-game films. Yet the film’s thematic emphasis on the brain (the main character exists as brain in a vat in one of the worlds) is of immediate relevance for an enquiry into mind-game films and embodied spectatorship. The main point of interest here is how the film expresses inner experience as world, and more specifically as a complex and discontinuous spatiotemporal maze of “possible worlds” in which one can get lost. Likewise in the discussion of Source Code the main question is to what extent the experience of bodily dislocation and disorientation, and the character’s entrapment in an impossible Möbius strip–like temporal loop carries over to our own spatiotemporal experience as embodied spectators. Following Barker’s assertion that watching a film is a form of “being in two places at once,” I argue that the body serves as a reference point for spatiotemporal orientation in these films. I discuss how the films play with and unhinge our own sense of bodily position and stability and in doing so evoke feelings of disorientation and being lost. Additionally, the chapter introduces Juhani Pallasmaa’s (2005, 2014) notion of atmosphere and immersion to the analysis of films and embodied spectatorship, exploring the ways in which a film’s ambient elements inform our experience of these films.

1 Seeing What Others Cannot See

Epistemological uncertainty and visual complexity in The Sixth Sense and The Others “I see people. They don’t know they’re dead. They only see what they want to see.” These chill-inducing lines from The Sixth Sense (1999), spoken by a boy named Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) while the camera slowly closes in on the face of his child psychiatrist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), are famous for their double meaning that reveals itself only in hindsight. The uninitiated first-time audience does not know at this point halfway through the film that Malcolm himself is one of these dead people, or ghosts, who “only see what they want to see” and “don’t know they are dead.” Contrary to his initial diagnosis that Cole suffers from childhood schizophrenia and severe hallucinations, Malcolm gradually accepts throughout the second half of the film that the ghosts that Cole sees are real within the fictional world. Once this has been established, they become a visible part of the film’s world, and we learn that they seek Cole for help with some unfinished business. Yet only in the last minutes of the film the truth dawns on Malcolm, along with the unsuspecting first-time viewer, that he too is one of these dead people who needed Cole’s help as much as the boy needed his. Despite the numerous and, in retrospect, more than obvious hints, spectators do not necessarily have reason to suspect that something is wrong with Malcolm until his existential state is disclosed during the film’s notorious twist. Here, Malcolm’s own realization is intercut with three brief flashbacks showing previous scenes in a new light. For example, a reframed part of a restaurant scene makes clear that the dinner had seemed awkward not because Malcolm’s wife was angry at him but because she could not see him. Another flashback brings us back to the film’s prologue, during which Malcolm was shot by a former patient. Initially, the film’s beginning only showed us the act of shooting itself, so that when intertitles introduced the

36

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

subsequent scene as set in “The next Fall,” the inference was that Malcolm had taken some time to recover. Now, the shooting scene is extended up until the moment Malcolm dies, and we realize that we have been tricked into not doubting Malcolm’s status as a living person through a number of cinematic conventions, such as the elision of narrative time or framing techniques. A thematically and formally similar film is Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001). While there are a number of significant differences between the two films (which I address in the following section), they have in common that the main protagonists are dead without being aware of it. Grace Stewart (Nicole Kidman) and her children Anne (Alakina Mann) and Nicholas (James Bentley) live with three recently hired servants in an isolated manor around the time of the Second World War. At first, the children’s photosensitivity and the lack of electricity purport to provide a credible explanation for the dark and gothic atmosphere of the mise-en-scène, especially the setting. Yet soon enough strange sounds and occurrences— footsteps, piano music, doors opening and closing at random—foster the impression of a haunted house tale that initially does not seem to stray far from convention. However, during a twist sequence near the end of the film, Grace and the children suddenly find themselves in a room full of strangers holding a séance. It then turns out that these “intruders,” as Grace calls them, are the actual flesh-and-blood inhabitants of the film’s fictional world, who are similarly spooked by inexplicable events in the house, whereas Grace and her children (as well as the servants) are in fact the ghosts that haunt it. A traumatic event that Anne alluded to several times throughout the film is revealed as the moment when a depressed and desperate Grace suffocated her children and subsequently committed suicide. Like in The Sixth Sense, a number of situations in The Others take on a new meaning in hindsight and, besides putting a number of improbable or inexplicable events into context, can be identified as ambiguous narrative hints whose significance is initially elusive. Next to the repeated allusions to “the terrible thing Mommy did that day,” they include Anne’s gasping breathing fits or her description of ghosts wearing white gowns and rattling chains, which matches her own appearance more than anyone else’s. In addition, death and the question of whether dead children go to limbo are topics frequently addressed by Grace in her homeschooling lessons. On the one hand, the twist endings in these films provide explanations for a number of narrative inconsistencies and improbabilities. In The Sixth Sense one might have questioned Malcolm’s office being located in the dusty basement, his futile attempts to open the basement door, or a funeral party ignoring the presence of an adult stranger. Similar doubts could be raised in The Others about the permanent fog surrounding the Stewarts’s manor, the unexpected emergence of Grace’s missing husband out of nowhere when she loses her way in the fog, followed by his equally inexplicable

SEEING WHAT OTHERS CANNOT SEE

37

disappearance only a day later. Yet, on the other hand, the implications of each twist lead to new questions. On the level of fiction, the very revelation itself that Malcolm and the Stewarts did not realize they were dead makes one wonder: How could they possibly stay unaware of their own death? Given that both films feature a number of ambiguous narrative clues that indicate the protagonists’ existential status or point to the volatile nature of vision and the potential unreliability of visual representation, this question also concerns the audience: How could we not suspect that they had been dead all along? The radical reversal of the ontological premises of the fictional world is distinctive for The Sixth Sense and The Others, as well as for similar twist films that fall under the umbrella category of complex narratives. While more conventional twist films carefully conceal a more or less surprising solution to a central mystery, films like The Sixth Sense and The Others keep out of sight the very existence and true nature of the problem itself (Lavik 2006: 56). For instance, toward the end of The Sixth Sense it is already an established fictional truth that the “dead people” Cole sees are not the fictitious product of a child’s disturbed mind, but that they seek his help because he is the only person who can actually see them. However, while some viewers may already—and as this chapter suggests most literally— sense that Malcolm too is one of these ghosts, only the final minutes explicitly express this hitherto hidden truth. Similarly in The Others, we are carefully guided to be suspicious of the three servants and their intentions. This hunch is proven true when Anne and Nicholas discover tombstones with the servants’ names engraved on them and Grace simultaneously finds a photograph that shows all three servants as corpses and is dated “December 1891,” which is approximately fifty years prior to when the current events are set. From then onward the most pressing narrative questions concern the servants: whether they are dead nor not, and what their intentions might be. Yet these fade into the background when it turns out that the actual issue at stake is Grace’s denial of killing her children and subsequently herself. Thus unlike more traditional twist films, which typically precipitate a surprise along with a eureka moment when causal relationships or characters’ motivations are presented in a new light and a central narrative problem is solved, these complex twist films insinuate that we have missed—in a very direct sense—a vital issue in the first place (Lavik 2006: 56). George Wilson describes The Sixth Sense and The Others, and similar complex films such as Fight Club (1999) or The Usual Suspects (1995), as “epistemological twist films” because “global aspects of the epistemic structure of their narration are clarified, in a surprising way, only toward the end of the movie” (2006: 89). By “epistemic structure” he refers to the way in which narrative films are commonly structured through a set of cinematic conventions that represent either objective or subjective perspectives within

38

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

the fictional world. The final turn in epistemological twist films, however, reveals that what had seemed like a clear boundary between subjective and objective is in fact obscured; instead, there is the simultaneous existence of different kinds of truth or different levels of reality that intermingle with each other. As a consequence, narrative transparency itself is called into question and the audience is suddenly confronted with doubts about the cinematic reality that has been presented in these films. While there are a number of mind-game films that undermine narrative transparency in such a manner, Wilson makes a further refinement: The Sixth Sense and The Others belong to a group of films wherein “agents with nonstandard perceptual powers” are able to perceive more than the other characters with standard human vision; by contrast, films like The Usual Suspects or Fight Club conceal that the narrative action represents a character’s mental disposition (2006: 82). Looking even more closely at the stories told through such complex twist films, Bernd Leiendecker (2013) suggests that they should be categorized according to their narrative content. He differentiates between four significant types: the “unconscious death,” “the retroactive mode of dream representation,” “the lying flashback,” and “the concealed split personality.” While complex twist films from all of these categories can share certain elements, for example, the use of focalization techniques to mislead the audience, or the revelation of narrative truth through flashbacks during a twist sequence, such a thematic refinement allows us to look beyond the mere forms and strategies of complex narration. It turns our attention to the way in which these strategies are not merely used for their own sake but also serves to express certain themes. The Sixth Sense and The Others belong of course to the “unconscious death” type, in which “the character’s death is caused by a trigger event—usually a car crash or a murder—early in the story while the plot twist that reveals this fact usually takes place near the end of the story” (2013: 263), a type of twist that harks back to Herk Harvey’s film Carnival of Souls (1962), which itself is based on Ambrose Pierce’s short story “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” According to Leiendecker, the “unconscious death” twist in film occurs in three main variations: the character imagines the future internally, in form of a liminal flash-forward; the character continues to exist in some kind of in-between reality that initially cannot be differentiated from the diegetic reality itself; or the character lives on in the diegetic reality as a ghost (2013: 263–64). While The Sixth Sense clearly belongs to the last category, The Others could be considered as an example of the second or third type, depending on whether one considers the film as containing one or two diegetic realities. Examples of the liminal flash-forward are Jacob’s Ladder (1990), a film that is often cited as marking the beginning of the trend to experiment with complex narration in the 1990s and 2000s, as well as Marc Foster’s film Stay (2005), and depending on one’s interpretation, Christian Petzold’s Yella (2007) and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001).

SEEING WHAT OTHERS CANNOT SEE

39

Characters who are mistaken about their existential status are one of the typical motifs of mind-game films (Elsaesser 2009: 17), though perhaps the notion of the mind-game in the strict sense is misleading here. While much of the dramatic tension during a first viewing of The Sixth Sense or The Others has to do with the question of whether the ghosts that some characters perceive are real or imagined within each film’s respective fictional world, the revelation that the protagonists are dead yet were under the delusion of being alive defies the understanding of hallucinations and seeming misperceptions as mental dysfunctions per se. Neither being alive nor being dead is solely a cognitive process: both states of being also crucially concern our identity as bodily selves, our embodied sense of being in and of this world. Accordingly, those mind-game films that feature characters unaware of their own death, sometimes also referred to as “post-mortem films” (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010: 155), center around a crisis that foregrounds corporeality as a quintessential condition for experience and existence while thematizing its loss as an existential threat. As this chapter sets out to demonstrate, the uncanny connection between vision and the characters’ disavowal of their own death, which is symptomatic for the disruption of their lived bodies, disturbs our carnal knowledge of what it means to see and perceive and to live an embodied existence. The twist sequences of The Sixth Sense and The Others not only expose the narrative tricks used to mislead spectators but also cast substantial doubt on what we believe to have seen in these films. In doing so, they draw attention to the activity of seeing as an epistemological practice itself, and by extension to its role in cinematic spectatorship. Yet this is not just a play with the conventions of narrative logic and our visual and cognitive attention. The Sixth Sense in particular highlights the embodied nature of seeing, while The Others foregrounds the connection between vision and tactility and the materiality of the seer. On the premise that, unlike Malcolm and Grace, we as spectators are fully alive embodied human beings, and are moreover what Sobchack refers to as “cinesthetic subjects,” our viewing experience is informed by our embodied vision throughout the film (2004e: 67). While the twists in these films undermine vision as the most directly addressed sense and primary means of cinematic signification, both films perform an epistemological shift that revalues the significance of other senses, in particular hearing and touch, in cinematic spectatorship.

Complex twist films and the disavowal of death The misleading nature of The Sixth Sense and The Others is inextricably interwoven with the credibility and plausibility of the fictitious scenarios they present. Much research has focused on the films’ narrative form and to what extent they allow for a consistent reconstruction of the story, once the

40

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

premises of their fictional worlds are turned upside down as a consequence of the twist (Barratt 2009: 66; Lavik 2006: 57, 59). In this regard The Sixth Sense has attracted greater critical attention than The Others, which, given the audacious cleverness of its plot, is hardly surprising. Despite letting us witness how Malcolm gets shot in the opening sequence, the film tricks us into believing—or rather never doubting—that he is perfectly alive and well, albeit giving us the impression that he still needs to come to terms with the traumatic event. Here lies an important difference to The Others, which commences after Grace killed her children and committed suicide, an event that is conveyed only indirectly and in retrospect. Thus as audience we are not deceived into believing that Grace and her children are (still) alive to the same extent that the temporal gap between the prologue and the beginning of the main story effects it in The Sixth Sense. Another key difference between The Sixth Sense and The Others is that the latter does not switch indistinguishably between living and dead characters throughout the film. Malcolm moves and acts among the living, oblivious to the fact that they are unaware of his presence, and yet simultaneously unable to see any of the other dead people himself. By contrast, The Others stays exclusively on the side of Grace and her children until the twist sequence. Apart from very few exceptions, the Stewarts do not interact with the living human beings with whom they, unbeknown to each other, share the haunted manor. This lack of direct interaction enables them to maintain a relatively coherent system of their everyday life within the fictional world of the film. In retrospect, it also adds a greater degree of consistency to their story. The same cannot be said for The Sixth Sense, where critical viewers might question how, over the course of several months, Malcolm could not notice that nobody except a young boy interacts with him, or how his study had inexplicably been moved into the basement. While we have to accept the premise that it is possible to ignore one’s death in both films, the credibility of The Others does not hinge upon the blending out of dead story time, perfect timing, and mise-en-scène that is crucial for The Sixth Sense. Another point where the two films differ is the flashback of the twist sequence in The Sixth Sense, the like of which is absent in The Others. Grace and her children recount only verbally how they died, and it is upon us to imagine a number of scenes we might remember (or re-watch) in a new light. One might envision, for instance, how the intruders would have behaved during a scene in which Grace, spooked by inexplicable sounds, frantically ripped off furniture covers in the room she was in to see if anyone was hiding underneath. By contrast, the flashback sequence in The Sixth Sense, as mentioned earlier, even caps the revelation of the twist by exposing the formal finesse of singular scenes and the overall plot by showing them in a slightly varied manner. These repeated scenes suggest a correspondence between the film’s field of vision and Malcolm’s restricted awareness when they disclose offscreen space to contain telling elements that he was

SEEING WHAT OTHERS CANNOT SEE

41

seemingly oblivious to, such as a table blocking the basement door that he repeatedly tried to open. But more importantly, they also reveal how our own understanding and ongoing interpretation of the story have been shaped by the film’s formal means of expression. An often-cited example of the clever construction of The Sixth Sense is the carefully composed combination of long-take and slow camera movement in the anniversary dinner sequence, during which Anna appears to give Malcolm the silent treatment because he was late and can only talk about his work. The camera starts out from a long shot behind Anna’s back before gliding slowly, almost at a snail’s pace, past her toward Malcolm as he enters the restaurant and sits down opposite Anna. It then stays focused on Malcolm’s face throughout most of the sequence, only redirecting its gaze toward Anna when a waiter enters the frame from the left to put the bill on the table. Numerous scholars have pointed out how this departure from the conventions of narrative cinema—which would have been a division into shorter segments and editing the (pseudo-) dialogue into a succession of shot/reverse shots—prevents us from realizing that Anna is unaware of Malcolm’s presence and their complete lack of mutual interaction. This diversionary tactic is further enhanced by the timing of Anna’s only line, wishing Malcolm a happy wedding anniversary, when she exits the scene (Barratt 2009: 75–78; Lavik 2006: 57–58; Orth 2006: 298). According to Daniel Barratt (2009), both long-take and traveling shot even anticipate the path of our foveal vision (seeing that occurs at the center of the retina where vision is the most precise in anatomical terms), thereby manipulating our visual attention so that we automatically focus on Malcolm’s face. Thus we cannot but fail to notice Anna’s ignorance of his presence, while narrative information such as “wedding anniversary dinner” and “lateness”— conceptual frameworks or “schemas” in cognitivist terms—automatically leads us to conclude that she is mad at him (2009: 75–77). A similar example from another moment of the film is a long shot that, in the foreground, shows Lynn and Malcolm sitting opposite each other in silence, as if just having suspended a conversation. When in the background a door opens and Cole enters the flat, both characters turn their heads toward him. Only when these scenes are repeated during the twist sequence we realize that Malcolm had not been engaged in conversations with Anna and Lynn at all. Barratt (2009), focusing on the unsuspecting first-time viewer of The Sixth Sense who fails to properly read the clues signifying Malcolm’s death, argues that the entire film exploits the limits of our visual and cognitive attention. He explains this with an effect that he refers to as “twist blindness”: just like Malcolm and the other ghosts only see what they want to see, audiences only see what allows them to construct a coherent story and are inclined to overlook all other, seemingly excessive information. Barratt’s analysis of The Sixth Sense is rooted within a cognitivist framework. Similar to Bordwell’s (2002) argument about forking-path films, it is based on the premise that

42

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

FIGURE 2 Only Cole can see Malcolm in The Sixth Sense (1999).

our mental resources to process narrative information are limited, and that “the viewer’s mind-brain contains various ‘assumptions’ about the nature of the world,” such as the validity of physical laws that only become noticeable as such when they get violated (Barratt 2009: 66). Applied to The Sixth Sense this means that “we ‘assume’ that a person who is apparently capable of walking and talking also possesses the properties of ‘existence,’ ‘life,’ and ‘being human’” (2009: 66). Following this line of argument, Barratt describes how the film’s formal and stylistic “priming procedures” manipulate our ongoing narrative comprehension into constructing Malcolm as a living person, while distracting our long-term memory from the fact that he had been shot in the beginning. Barratt further points out how the film, besides “priming” us that Malcolm is alive and well, also quickly channels our attention toward new fictional information and emotional investments, such as Malcolm’s emerging relationship with Cole and Lynn Sears, or his apparent marital crisis—narrative developments that, in cognitivist terms, activate a number of cognitive schemata, or interpretative blueprints, that we habitually apply (2009: 75–77). Considered from such an angle, The Sixth Sense looks chiefly like a calculated act of deception, and the film’s aesthetic means of expression would seem to serve primarily as an accessory to its manipulative strategies, directing our visual attention away from Malcolm and his lack of interaction with any character other than Cole. Beyond doubt, the camera work and mise-en-scène in the dinner sequence and other, similar moments in The Sixth Sense are important means to fully develop the effect of the twist and help keep story and plot relatively consistent even upon another viewing. Yet the comparably high amount of attention paid to Shyamalan’s carefully

SEEING WHAT OTHERS CANNOT SEE

43

devised flashback sequence detracts from the fact that, besides their thematic parallels, both The Sixth Sense and The Others provoke an intensely jarring effect through the revelation of Malcolm and Grace’s existential state, respectively. While the cognitive (re-)construction of the story is undeniably a crucial part of the viewing experience of each film, the twist sequences affect viewers in a manner that goes beyond a mere surprise about being misled. It is this affective dimension of the twist sequences that I set out to explore in the following two sections. As I shall argue, in order to fully understand how The Sixth Sense and The Others play with our perception and have a deeply unsettling effect, an embodied understanding of vision and spectatorship is paramount.

The twist sequence in The Sixth Sense The final sequence of The Sixth Sense begins with a notably high bird’seye view shot of Malcolm entering his home. Presumably, he wants to reconcile with his estranged wife Anna, whom he finds asleep on the couch, along with a videotape of their wedding running in the background. For a first-time viewer, their relationship is the only unsettled conflict that needs to be resolved in order to achieve narrative closure. Yet after a brief and ambiguous conversation—it turns out that Anna is mumbling in her sleep; nonetheless her replies match Malcolm’s lines and thus suggest she might unconsciously be hearing him—a wedding ring falls out of Anna’s hand and rolls across the floor. Mysteriously drawn toward Malcolm, the ring gradually comes to a halt in a circling motion on the floor. A sudden closeup of the ring is followed by a reaction shot of Malcolm looking away from the ring and casting a glance toward Anna. A subsequent close-up of Anna’s hand shows her wedding ring still on her finger. Then, a focal shift attends to Malcolm’s hand as he slowly lifts it into the lower left corner of the frame: it is missing this very ring. This moment, which links the ring as symbolic and material signifier of their marriage with Malcom’s dawning recognition, is more than just visual data waiting to be processed. Sobchack writes that a “visible shifting of focus also transforms the viewing subject’s relations with the world” and inverts the relationship between figure and ground (1990: 28). Turning Malcolm’s ringless hand into a figure of great visual prominence, the film thus draws our attention to him as a bodily subject and his relationship to the world. For us, the ringless hand, becoming figure through the shifting of focus, may primarily be an object made visible through the film’s act of seeing. But for Malcolm, this is not just any hand: it is his own hand that belongs, or rather belonged, to his own body, or what Merleau-Ponty (2002 [1945]) refers to as the lived body. According to Merleau-Ponty, the lived body is constitutive for each embodied individual’s identity, and therefore inseparable from

44

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

any experience that is lived through it. He explains: “We do not merely behold as spectators the relations between the parts of our body, and the correlations between the visual and the tactile body: we are ourselves the unifier of these arms and legs, the person who both sees and touches them” (2002 [1945]: 173). Thus Malcolm, instead of merely registering that he is no longer wearing the ring through seeing it fall from Anna’s hand and noticing its visible absence on his own, experiences a keenly felt absence: an absence not just of the ring, but of his identity as a fully embodied, flesh-and-blood human being. In his ghostly existence he can be described as someone whose perceptual system has gone awry. Having hitherto relied only on vision and hearing, the two senses characterized as distant, now he is suddenly brought close again to his own body, and simultaneously confronted with a conflict between what he senses and what he sees. This conflict is triggered by his ringless hand, which is more than just a symbolic reminder of the happier days of his marriage to Anna. It is also a material signifier, evoking the memory of a lost tactility, and of a lost, fully embodied material existence. It is in this very moment that Malcolm, starting to realize the true extent of his loss, loses his sense of being physically grounded, of being bodily anchored in the world. As a moment of rupture, the beginning of the twist sequence also draws our attention to what according to Sobchack (1992) is the defining element of the cinematic experience as a communicative process: the embodied act of viewing itself. The latter links spectator and film in what she defines as a “dialogical and dialectical” relationship in which both possess an embodied existence as viewing subjects (1992: 23). Crucially, Sobchack considers a film not only as a visible object viewed by the spectator, but also as a viewing subject that sees and visibly makes sense of a world that it materially inhabits. As mentioned previously, she differentiates between a film’s “viewed view”—what is seen in front of the camera—and its “viewing view,” which designates the film’s vision as the meaningful activity of an embodied other, “an existential and intentional visual activity of choicemaking” that we understand on the basis of our own visual and embodied being (1990: 21). What we perceive as a film’s visible images, then, is not a given world as it is, but an organized and structured perception of this world, the visible conduct of the intentional consciousness of another subject (1992: 24). This other subject is what she refers to as the film’s body: not a human body, but a viewing subject in its own right. Taking up the psychoanalytical distinction between primary and secondary identification, Sobchack further argues that our empathetic engagement with a film’s narrative elements, such as characters, are secondary modes of cinematic identification, whereas primary identification takes place between the viewer and the film’s embodied act of seeing itself (2004e: 65).1 Her differentiation between these different acts of viewing is instructive in further unpacking the visual complexity of the twist sequence and the shocking effect it elicits.

SEEING WHAT OTHERS CANNOT SEE

45

Starting with the visible shift of attention from Anna to Malcolm’s ringless hand, the film noticeably reasserts its own status as a viewing subject. Although the initial shot of Anna’s hand in the background is taken from a spatial position near Malcolm’s subjective point of view, the hand that is brought into the frame is conspicuously not bodily congruent with his act of viewing. Thus the film, directing its own intentional consciousness toward a materially ambiguous subject such as Malcolm—a viewing subject both seen and unseen—brings to our attention that we are not seeing him with our own eyes. Instead, it is the film’s seeing that is making him visible for us. These three distinct acts of viewing—Malcolm’s, the film’s, and our own—get separated further when the short series of flashbacks, intercut with Malcolm’s ongoing process of realization in the present tense, sets in. Emulating Malcolm’s emerging sense of dizziness, the shaky hand camera in the present-tense scenes marks a notable contrast to the smooth, stable, and controlled camera movement of the previous scenes, amplifying the arising feeling of unsteadiness and tumbling. Yet these movements do not merely serve to imitate Malcolm’s proprioceptive conduct. Through such a selfconscious movement through space, the film also makes its own material presence visibly felt. The flashback moments in themselves serve as a further demonstration of how the film’s vision has mediated our experience of the fictional world. First, it takes us back to the famous scene in hospital in which Cole had confessed his para-perceptual powers to Malcolm and characterized the ghosts through their specific mode of visual attention: “They only see what they want to see.” Their dialogue continues as voice-over while a number of other scenes are repeated. As mentioned earlier, these include moments in which Malcolm had seemingly interacted with other characters, such as his wife or Cole’s mother; or Malcolm rattling at the basement door, unable to open it. When watched a second time, these scenes take on a different meaning: it becomes clear that although for us Malcolm was visible within the same frame as Anna or Lynn Sear, within the fictional world these other characters were unable to see him. In particular Anna’s low mood and apparent indifference toward Malcolm, which had previously seemed like intentional behavior to express her marital frustration, now make sense as an expression of grief and loneliness. Finally, a swift backtracking camera move from a closeup of the door that Malcolm repeatedly tried to open widens our field of view and reveals a sideboard with books blocking said door. Its placement a few inches underneath the doorknob and just outside the frame in the previous scene suggests that the offscreen space represented aspects of the world that Malcolm did not want to see and that were excluded from his awareness. Subsequently, a part of the film’s beginning is repeated, showing again the moment when Malcolm got shot—only this time, the scene is extended up until the moment he dies.

46

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

The twist sequence of The Sixth Sense renders the film’s visible world ambiguous in retrospect. It brings to our explicit attention that what we have seen has been a mediated act of vision, an act of perceiving a world— the film’s “viewing view” in Sobchack’s terms—that was visibly expressed to us, rather than a world that we saw directly with our own eyes. We might assume that we were presented with either Malcolm or Cole’s subjective perspective throughout the film. However, the film carefully avoids any impression that we have seen the fictional world as seen through their eyes. Apart from the bird’s-eye shot at the beginning of the twist sequence, there are several long shots throughout in which the film—and with it the audience—observes Malcolm and Cole from a distance while they are walking and talking next to each other. Similarly, in many dialogue scenes edited with shot/reverse shot patterns the camera is placed at odd angles and distances that do not match shifting viewpoints between characters. One possibility to read such spatial distance and detachment would be to regard them as symptomatic for Malcolm’s own displacement from the physical world. Yet in experiential terms, these shots, which are often characterized through very slow, subtle, and narratively unmotivated movements, are also the film’s way of inscribing its own material presence, visible for us only through its acts of viewing itself. But the mere sudden awareness of the film’s mediated act of perception and expression alone is not what makes the twist sequence in The Sixth Sense a disturbing experience for many viewers. Its affective power stems from the difference between our own situation as lived-body subjects and Malcolm’s ambiguous corporeal state. According to Sobchack, a moment of rupture and divergence in cinema brings us back to the discreteness and concreteness of our own embodied being-in-the-world because it makes us aware of the similarities as well as the differences between our own body and the film’s body (1992: 286). In The Sixth Sense, however, the twist sequence, as such a moment of rupture, additionally makes us aware of the difference between our body and Malcolm’s. As human viewers we might initially feel closer to him as a character than to the film’s embodied being. Yet Malcolm’s experience—being dead without being aware of it—exceeds our own, and very quickly a bodily jolt tells us that his existence negatively reverses our carnal knowledge of what it means to see. Through our own experience of being subjects of vision, as well as being subjects for vision, we know that the activity of seeing is inextricably linked to an embodied existence: I am a seeing being because I have a body with eyes that can see. Yet the revelation of Malcolm’s ambiguous bodily state—he is neither entirely materially absent nor present, neither visible nor invisible, neither fully embodied viewing subject nor purely transcendental apparition—calls into question his existential status as a corporeal viewing subject that visually makes sense of the world it inhabits. Thus the film draws upon our own carnal

SEEING WHAT OTHERS CANNOT SEE

47

knowledge of embodied vision at the same time as it subverts it. While the film’s vision, like Cole’s, is quasi-superhuman in that it perceives more than we do, materially the film’s ghostly presence is closer to beings like Malcolm than to us, flesh-and-blood viewers. There are further questions to be asked, then, about the nature of perception, embodiment, and death in a film like The Sixth Sense. I will address these in subsequent parts of this chapter, where I also expand on the way in which The Sixth Sense utilizes cinematic means of expression continuously—and not just in the twist sequence—to bestow latent uncertainty upon vision while simultaneously drawing our attention to other modes of perception and their epistemological function in the film. But first, a closer look at the twist sequence in The Others.

The twist sequence in The Others The twist sequence in The Others begins with close-up shots of Anne and Nicholas hiding inside their bedroom wardrobe. A faint offscreen voice starts whispering, “come with us,” and during a dizzying rapid dolly zoom the door suddenly opens. On the other side, it reveals a mysterious old woman that we have briefly seen in an earlier scene, whose blind-eyed empty gaze is as mesmerizing as it is disturbing. The film then cuts to Grace who, prompted by her children’s terrified screams, anxiously feels her way upstairs through the darkness and toward the room from which the voices can be heard. As if pulled by some invisible power, the camera slowly moves toward the door straight on, while Grace, initially outside the frame, simultaneously approaches the door from the right. Once she pushes it open, the film cuts to a long shot from a position immediately in front of her, letting us share Grace’s point of view along with the rather unsettling sight that she is confronted with: the room no longer resembles the bedroom of her children, and a group of strangers is gathered for a séance around a candlelit table. Once in the room, the camera initially emulates the path of Grace’s visual attention through a slightly unsteady right-hand pan from the strangers—the “intruders”—to Anne and Nicholas cowering in a corner. Some of the shots work as reaction shots, showing the exchange of glances between Grace and her children, and the altering expression on Grace’s face as she comes to grips with the significance of what she is witnessing. Yet as soon as Nicholas starts whimpering “don’t tell her, don’t tell her,” the film parts with Grace and takes on its own, increasingly mobile gaze. During the further unfolding of the scene its attention is directed at Grace and her children as well as at the intruders. The disturbing effect of this moment in the visually complex twist sequence originates in the lack of any noticeable reaction of the intruders to neither Grace entering the room nor to the talking and then screaming

48

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

children. Looking simultaneously at, as well as back and forth between them, the camera highlights how the Stewarts, in particular, are seeing, seen and invisible subjects at the same time. This perceptual and perceived ambiguity extends to sound: the Stewarts hear each other, and later on try to make themselves heard forcefully by repeatedly screaming “we’re not dead!” Yet with the exception of the old woman who acts as a medium, Grace and her children remain inaudible to the members of the séance group. The intruders’ obliviousness to her and her children’s presence gives rise to a process of realization similar to the one Malcolm goes through in The Sixth Sense. Seeing (and hearing) the intruders without being seen (nor heard) by them in return, Grace is subjected to a sudden discrepancy between embodied knowledge and visual information. Her experience can be explained as a negative reversal of what Merleau-Ponty has coined in his unfinished late work The Visible and the Invisible (1968) as “chiasm”: an inseparable intertwining of vision and the visible, an intuitive awareness of what it means to see that is deeply ingrained in us as seeing beings, and that we thus take for granted. Merleau-Ponty describes this as follows: As soon as I see, it is necessary that the .  .  . vision be doubled with a complementary vision or with another vision: myself seen from without, such as another would see me, installed in the midst of the visible. (134) He who looks must not himself be foreign to the world he looks at . . . he who sees cannot possess the visible unless he is possessed by it, unless he is of it, unless . . . he is one of the visibles capable, by a singular reversal, of seeing them—he who is one of them. (134–35; emphasis in original) This fundamental reciprocality of vision, whereby our self-image as seeing subject always goes hand in hand with the knowledge that we are a visible object for others at the same time, is undermined in the twist sequence of The Others. Reinforced through the mutual exchange of glances with Anne and Nicholas, who look back at her but remain equally unseen by the séance group, Grace fails to find this visual reversibility fulfilled when directing her vision at the intruders. Instead, her gaze, bouncing off the evidently ignorant expressions on their faces, gets redirected at her own self: a seeing subject that is not—or rather no longer—seen by other visible and seeing beings in return. To borrow from Merleau-Ponty: Grace and her children suddenly become aware that they are no longer “installed in the midst of the visible” world, no longer fully embodied human beings, no longer “visibles” who are “seen from without,” no longer “one of them” (1968: 134). The film’s title takes on an interesting ambiguity at this point: from our perspective as living embodied spectators, the eponymous “others” can either refer to the intruders—who are others for Grace and her children as the main protagonists of the film—or to the ghosts, whose

SEEING WHAT OTHERS CANNOT SEE

49

existential status now marks them as others for us, made visible through the film’s seeing alone. Notably, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the chiasm is not a concept of exclusively visual perception. On the contrary, he posits that this irreducible circularity, initially contrived through his famous account of the right hand touching the left, the “crisscrossing . . . of the touching and the tangible” where the distinction between touching and touched hand becomes suspended indefinitely, needs to be expanded to our being-in-the-world as a whole (1968: 133). It is this intertwining of vision, embodied experience, and the world, that Sobchack transfers to the encounter between us as “cinesthetic subjects” and a film itself. She argues that because in cinema the directly addressed senses are seeing and hearing, there is a consequential sensual gap that the body’s intentional behavior seeks to fill. Bringing Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the inseparable intertwining, through which the body knows itself as subject of experience and object for experience at the same time, to bear on the activity of watching a film, Sobchack describes the cinematic experience as follows: In most sensual experiences at the movies the cinesthetic subject does not think his or her literal body . . . and is not, as a result, rudely thrust offscreen back into his or her seat in response to a perceived discontinuity with the figural bodies and textures onscreen. Rather, the cinesthetic subject feels his or her literal body as only one side of an irreducible and dynamic relational structure of reversibility and reciprocity that has as its other side the figural objects of bodily provocation on the screen. (2004e: 79; emphasis in original) Thus although the film experience is somewhat reduced in comparison with direct experience, this doubled bodily reflexivity ensures that our bodies, sensing their own sensuality, are fully engaged by means of the whole sensorium when we watch a film, and not just through seeing and hearing what happens in the world on the screen. This bodily reflexivity is brought to our explicit attention in the twist sequence in The Others, a rare cinematic moment in which we perhaps do think our literal bodies after all. While it is not us but Grace who is “rudely thrust” back into the reality of her existence “in response to a perceived discontinuity” with the embodied humans she encounters (Sobchack 2004e: 79), this moment also conjures up our own embodied presence. Because we are cinesthetic subjects—rather than cinematic ghosts—we can bodily relate to Grace’s process of realization that in turn is based on the reciprocity of knowing oneself as a seeing and seen, living being. Yet at the same time we come to realize that there is indeed a discrepancy between ourselves and at least some of the bodies we see on-screen. Furthermore, given that for us there is no visible difference between the Stewarts and the intruders,

50

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

between the dead and the living represented in the fictional world, we have to question our embodied relationship to this world and its inhabitants. And while for Grace the fact that she and her children are still visible for each other as well as for the servants has contributed to their illusion of being alive hitherto and remains to be comforting for them, it is unsettling for us, for it defies the notion that ghosts are invisible, disembodied, and transcendent apparitions. The inherent ambiguity of the visible world of The Others further increases in this sequence through the fact that even though the ghosts are neither seen nor heard by the intruders, and even though they are no longer corporeal human viewing subjects, they make themselves felt as a material presence in the room nonetheless. As the sequence continues, the film’s vision alternates between shots of two equally true versions of the events in the room. In one set of shots, both the intruders and the ghosts are visible within the same frame; yet these are intercut with shots that only show either the ghosts or the intruders. Significantly, neither of these ontological switches is diegetically motivated or unequivocally represents the subjective perspective of any of the characters. This becomes most noticeable in a succession of shots that switch between two ontological versions of the scene while jumping between different spatial positions that are distinctly incongruent with that of any of the characters. In the first of these shots, Grace dashes toward the table, positions herself amid the group, and starts violently shaking the table. Her actions are paralleled by the crescendoing screams of Anne and Nicholas who insist, “We’re not dead!” The next shot, however, shows only the intruders staring at the

FIGURE 3 Visual complexity in The Others (2001).

SEEING WHAT OTHERS CANNOT SEE

51

rocking table in disbelief. Then, the subsequent shots show Grace grabbing a pile of paper sheets and tearing them apart. Again, these alternate with shots that show only the intruders, who are visibly taken aback by the pieces of paper that appear to be torn apart mid-air by an invisible force. To them, and momentarily for us, Grace and her children remain invisible (as well as inaudible) in these shots, yet they are able to impact the material world and make objects move. The ghosts’ invisible yet physically manifest existence thus undermines vision as the primary mode of access to this visually ambiguous world, a fact that is poignantly reiterated during the final moments of The Others, shortly after the twist sequence. The last scene begins with an interior closeup profile shot of Grace and her children as they look out of a window, the contours of their faces traced by a soft and diffuse light reminiscent of the milky haze of a foggy winter’s day. Then, the camera, now placed on the building’s exterior, shows the frontal view of a large window. At the frame’s center are the ghosts, standing in an intimate embrace on the inside, or “other” side, glancing toward the outside and almost directly into the camera. The window forms a translucent yet material barrier that separates the ghosts from the world of the living as well as from us. Reflected in its glass pane are, unexpectedly, trees and a blue sky with a few clouds, suggesting that the world as the living perceive it is not characterized by the perpetual fog that has dominated the world of the film thus far. Subsequently, while the camera slowly tracks backward and moves away from the house, the ghosts begin to visibly disappear before our eyes, while the reflection of the world bathed in sunshine remains. To some extent this scene can be read as a self-referential cinematic moment that echoes Stanley Cavell’s notion of the screen as a barrier that “screens me from the world that it holds—that is, makes me invisible. And it screens that world from me—that is, screens its existence from me” (1979 [1971]: 24). Indeed the window pane reminds us not only of the ghosts’ invisibility for the human protagonists within the world of the film but also of the fact that the film’s vision has granted us a privileged mode of access to a world in which we ourselves are invisible, to both the ghosts and the human characters. Soon thereafter we see the intruders’ car traveling down the driveway of the estate, along lawns and trees that are now lush and green, rather than the barren and shadowy gray figures that they have been throughout the film. Their departure anticipates the moment when, only minutes later, we too will rise from our seats and leave the film’s ghostly presence behind. Unlike the ending in The Sixth Sense, which finishes with Malcolm whispering “I think I can go now,” the gradual detachment from Grace and her children in The Others turns us into the intruders who leave; whereas the ghosts reclaim the house as theirs, a space they do not just haunt but inhabit, invisible for human embodied others yet materially present nonetheless.

52

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

There is another aspect worthy of attention with regard to the complex relationship between vision, visibility, and the material world in both The Others and The Sixth Sense. Although the ghosts are invisible for the living inhabitants of each film’s respective world, and although we can only see them through the film’s mediating vision, their invisibility is not a property inherent to their ghostly bodies as such. Quite the contrary, their visible presence for the film as well as for select characters within each film (the child-seer Cole, the blind old woman) characterizes visibility as a relationship between sentient beings rather than as a quality of a seen object. The old woman in The Others is an interesting figure in this regard. Her blindness distinguishes her from the other flesh-and-blood human characters and evokes depictions of mythological blind seer-figures like Tiresias (Jay: 1993, 25). However, unlike Tiresias’s third-eye that enabled a pure inner vision or foresight, the blindness of the medium in The Others constitutes an expanded knowledge of the material world. Interestingly, this knowledge is nonetheless described as visual. For instance, Anne, who has contact with the intruders throughout the film, states in an earlier scene: “It is as if she is not looking at you, but she can see you.” Similar to The Sixth Sense, where the different characters’ perceptual capacities play a significant role throughout the film, The Others thus undermines a strictly functional notion of vision as a sense modality that supposedly translates visual information from the outside world in a one-to-one process. To some extent the manner in which the blind woman acts as a medium and relays her own perceptual contact with Grace and her children to the other members of the séance, who themselves are neither able to hear nor see the ghosts, can be likened to the communicative process by which the film makes the ghosts visible for us. Yet while the human medium relies on words, cinema as a technology of perception and expression is unique, according to Sobchack, because a film makes “the introceptive and subjective features of vision objectively visible for the first time” and expresses vision as it is “lived from within” (1992: 166). She argues that watching a film is an experience akin to perceiving an intentional trajectory of another consciousness. That is, it is not experienced as our own act of viewing, but as that of the film as an anonymous embodied other, whose private and unique vision we are invited to share from within (1992: 166). The film body’s exterior invisibility, then, places it in greater proximity to the ghosts than to us. Like Grace and her children (and for that matter also Malcolm and the other ghosts in The Sixth Sense), it remains invisible for us as well as for those within the world that it lives in, perhaps haunting the latter as much as inhabiting it. Barker, expanding on Sobchack’s work in her book The Tactile Eye, perfectly captures this paradox in her description of the film’s body as a “ghostly entity . . . eluding our direct gaze, slipping through our fingers, skirting past us as we approach it. Just as characters slip from

SEEING WHAT OTHERS CANNOT SEE

53

the edges of frames . . . the film’s body slips from our grasp” (2009b: 10–11). Through altering our knowledge of the film’s world, the twist sequences in The Sixth Sense and The Others thus bring to our attention that the visible, or what is visible for us, does not contain a film’s world in its entirety, and that a film may grant us visual access to phenomena that we could have not seen ourselves.

Death, vision, and embodied spectatorship Inviting us to reconsider and revisit our perceptual relation to the film we have just seen, the twist sequences in The Sixth Sense and The Others redefine the story in each film as an existential crisis in which vision is inextricably linked with questions of death, identity, and (dis)embodiment. In particular the explicit reference to sight in The Sixth Sense, which characterizes the ghosts via their attribute to “see only what they want to see,” entails a deeply unsettling inference as it associates it with the ghosts’ pathological inability to acknowledge their own death. For this reason Aviva Briefel describes The Sixth Sense and The Others as examples of what she coins the “spectral incognizance genre” that “reassuringly presents death as an event that can be overlooked” (2009: 95–96; emphasis added). Furthermore, according to her, such films are about the “representation of dying as an intellectual experience” (2009: 98), whereby death is figured as a “cognitive process” extended by narrative (2009: 97). She further explains: “Narratives of spectral incognizance are predicated on the idea that dying is not only a corporeal failure, but also a cognitive act: those who overlook their death are not really dead. Instead, they lead a liminal existence scattered with clues signalling their passing: they can only transition into real death once they have interpreted these clues properly” (2009: 97). Notably, Briefel’s description of the protagonists’ activity reflects many vision-centric understandings of spectatorship, and particularly those that are based on a dualistic notion of cognition and perception. Likening Malcolm and Grace to the disembodied observer posed by early cognitivism and theories of the gaze is indeed not too far-fetched. Both characters try to make sense of their world and the events eluding their comprehension by relying primarily on sight and hearing, interpreting mainly visual information, and additionally paying attention to aural clues as well. These two senses are often described as the distant senses because they can stretch out far beyond our immediate physical surroundings. Unlike the proximal senses (smell, taste, and touch), they enable us to perceive without the need for physical contact. Malcolm and Grace’s reliance on these distant senses thus fortifies the notion that as ghosts they are to some extent “out of touch” with their bodies and disconnected from them.

54

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

Furthermore, both characters try to find more or less rational explanations for events and phenomena that elude their immediate grasp, referring to traditional systems of knowledge and belief such as psychology (Malcolm) and religion (Grace) to interpret these events. And of course, altogether the existential status of Malcolm and Grace could not be more befitting in the context of the disembodied observer. The reverse implication of such a resemblance, however, would seem rather disconcerting: given that the activity of spectatorship also relies to a significant degree on seeing and hearing as the two senses directly representable in cinema, films such as The Sixth Sense and The Others potentially place us as viewers in an uncanny proximity to these incognizant dead. Accordingly, an exploration of the role of embodiment and the body in The Sixth Sense and The Others precedes the question of how these films on the whole address us as embodied cinesthetic subjects. Notably, while they might be unaware of their death, neither Malcolm nor Grace quite resemble the imaginary perfect observer of Cartesian vision who is freed from the restricted viewpoint of their body. In fact the opposite is the case. Both characters continuously experience their limited capacity for action not only as inexplicable but also as distressful and disconcerting, and the experience of no longer being a fully embodied subject—rather than being a Cartesian subject no longer in a body—becomes an issue at the core of the films. Moreover, Malcolm and Grace are distinctly characterized as sentient subjects beyond sight and vision. For example, in The Others Grace pierces her skin while doing embroidery and exclaims “Ouch!,” which raises the question of how a disembodied spirit can be capable of feeling physical pain. In that way the representation of the ghosts’ state of being dead—an oxymoron in itself—defies the common notion that they are mere apparitions that lack physical substance and are untethered from the material world. Therefore, rather than focusing on what the characters fail to perceive, I argue that it is pertinent to ask: In what way do perception and embodiment enable the ghosts’ neither fully physical nor entirely transcendental persistence among the living? And to what extent do these essential elements of life allow them to continue their lives with a sense of continuity and consistency, despite the actual absence of their physical bodies?

Phantom bodies Against a Cartesian notion of existence, or death for that matter, MerleauPonty writes that the body “is in world as the heart is in the organism [and] keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly” (2002 [1945]: 235). Thus if, as he further argues, the body is indeed the vital core of our “being-in-the-world” and the pivot of all meaning

SEEING WHAT OTHERS CANNOT SEE

55

(2002 [1945]: 94), then it must also pertain to our understanding of death. Contrary to a dualistic conception of death, Mark Johnson highlights that the notion of the eternal soul shuffling off its mortal coil in dying is indeed untenable from a phenomenological perspective. In a thought-provoking passage directly addressing the reader, he asks us to envision what being dead might feel like from an embodiment point of view: The person you are cannot survive the death of your body. . . . If there is anything that survives the death of your body, it could not be the you that we know and love. For your experience is made possible by the working of your (human) brain, within the workings of your (human) body, as it engages its (human-related) environments. Any you that survived bodily death would lack your memories, your experience, your emotions, and your grasp of the meanings of things. (2007: 280–81; emphasis in original) Johnson’s insistence on the inextricable intertwinement of embodiment and identity, not only in lived experience but also beyond, is highly relevant for the ways in which The Sixth Sense and The Others imagine the experiences of the ghosts, bereft of their physical bodies, in terms of embodiment nonetheless. The representation of Malcolm and Grace’s bodily conduct goes far beyond the mere narrative practicality that in order for the twists to work, we need to see them as beings with a human body. Consider again the notion that Malcolm “only sees what he wants to see.” Unlike those everyday instances where we pretend that we have not seen a familiar face on the opposite side of the street, or deliberately ignore a disagreeable comment we would rather not discuss, Malcolm’s symptomatically impaired vision is not based on any prior cognitive decision, not even a split-second one—for if it was, any such decision would presuppose the conscious realization of being dead in the first place. He does not rationally determine, for example, that in order to maintain his illusion of being alive he must never look at the table that is blocking the door to his office. The same could be argued for The Others, where Grace and her children do not choose to see each other and the servants, but not the intruders, in order to keep their worldview intact, for any such conscious decision would require a deliberate agreement among all of them. A cognition-based concept thus falls short of being able to explain how the ghosts maintain their false impression of being alive over time. At this point it is useful to recall Daniel Barratt’s (2009) notion of the viewer’s “twist blindness,” which in turn is inspired by the concept of inattentional blindness. The most famous case study of inattentional blindness is the “invisible gorilla” experiment, in which a large number of observers watching a basketball match miss a man in a gorilla costume crossing the

56

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

field—not because of a physiological error of their eyesight, but because they are distracted with the conscious task of counting passes (Simons and Chabris 1999).2 And while it is interesting to note that not all participants in said experiment fail to notice the gorilla, which complicates the stimulusresponse model of perception underlying a cognitivist framework in itself, what is relevant in the context of The Sixth Sense and The Others is that the ghosts’ ongoing “existential blindness,” as one might call it, cannot be explained as such an attention deficit. Consider again Malcolm’s repeated attempts to open the door to his office, which are among the few instances where we see him actively attempting to do something with his hands. In the flashbacks during the twist sequence, these moments are retrospectively revealed as his failure to notice the sideboard blocking the door. The manner in which he is rattling the doorknob in vain, along with his habitual reach for the keys in his pocket, does suggest a latent awareness of the conflict between his sensorimotor goal and the frustrating inability to realize this basic task. Significantly though, rather than Malcolm attentively looking out for one thing while unwittingly ignoring another, this awareness is afforded by a vision that directs its intentionality away from the desk as a potential signifier of his physical handicap. That is to say, Malcolm’s conduct points to a willful and directed mode of perception that nonetheless bypasses the cognitive and reflective circuits of the brain. It is a pre-reflective engagement with the world that is distinctly corporeal, rather than intellectual, and as such it defies a dualistic notion of existence and, by extension, death, whereby the role of the body is reduced to that of a vessel that contains the spirit only temporarily. Further integral to the ghosts’ identities as fully embodied human beings, for them and for us, are brief visual encounters with their body image. Seemingly irrelevant for the course of narrative action, both films repeatedly feature moments in which the ghosts encounter a reflection of their bodily selves in a mirror. Whenever Malcolm comes home he casually looks into the mirror of a dressing table next to the entrance hall. His visible mirror image contradicts the common idea that otherworldly beings are easily recognizable by their visibly absent reflection. In The Others the reverse is even the case. When Grace unexpectedly faces her own mirror image as she pulls a sheet off a dressing table, both her and our attention are immediately drawn to the reflection of a slowly closing door behind Grace’s back. Failing to reveal whoever just slipped out of the room, this uncanny mirror image contributes to the blurring of clear ontological distinctions within the film. Initially, it seems to confirm that Grace is haunted by spirits. Yet in retrospect it signifies the presence of a flesh-andblood human subject who was spooked by Grace pulling sheets off the furniture in what would have seemed to them like an empty room; and yet the mirror shows a reflection of Grace rather than that of the fully embodied

SEEING WHAT OTHERS CANNOT SEE

57

human being. This emphasis on the ghosts’ reflections brings to mind psychoanalytic concepts that emphasize the importance of recognizing the visible image of oneself in the process of identity formation, most famously the Lacanian mirror stage. From such a perspective one might conclude that the ghosts’ surviving psyche denies physical death and unconsciously created an illusory, quasi-present body brought on by the narcissistic ego’s wish to sustain the integrity of its incapacitated body. Yet as mentioned previously, both Malcolm and Grace are distinctly characterized as sentient beings who see and hear, and even experience pain. Moreover, despite being invisible for the majority of the living human characters, the ghosts remain a perceptible part of the physical world of each film. Consider for instance how in the twist sequence of The Others, they even make themselves felt so forcefully that they expel the terrified flesh-and-blood occupants of the house. Such instances defy a hallucinatory or psychological line of argument. However, just as the ghosts cannot sufficiently be grasped as purely transcendental apparitions, a sort of free-floating unbound consciousness, it is on the other hand entirely unfeasible to conceive of them as animated corpses who continue to experience random sensual stimuli that trigger some sort of residual consciousness.3 For despite being incognizant of their own death, they are nonetheless characterized as conscious beings whose cognitive function is largely intact. Moreover, despite their ability to experience pain, strictly speaking the ghosts no longer have an actual physical body that could respond to such stimuli. In other words, it is equally unfathomable to conceptualize their sentience as a physiological misperception, given that Malcolm and Grace have ceased to exist as fully embodied human beings. What, then, are we to make of Malcolm and Grace’s ambiguous existential state: neither a fully embodied presence nor an entirely immaterial absence, neither fully alive nor entirely dead? One option is to accept that the conundrums of the ghosts’ hypothetical existence in films like The Sixth Sense and The Others will necessarily be accompanied by certain gaps, and to concede that these stories ultimately lack credibility, something we need to overcome with a willing suspension of disbelief. Another option, however, is to consider whether framing the problem as an either/or question is precisely what is missing the point. Considered as a pathological case study, the strangeness of Malcolm and Grace’s existence comes in many ways close to the paradoxical experience of the phantom limb. This phenomenon refers to physical sensations felt in a missing body part. An experience regularly reported by amputees, the phantom limb similarly constitutes a problem that neither psychology nor physiology can sufficiently resolve. On the one hand, physiological attempts to describe it as a stump sensation that causes some

58

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

sort of internal representation of the missing limb falls short to account, for instance, for the experience of changes of the phantom limb, or the failure to anesthetize it when it causes pain. On the other hand, a solely psychological explanation is complicated by the fact that there is neither an optical illusion accompanying the sensation of the phantom limb, nor do patients actively think that the limb is actually there (Straus 1970: 133–34). Although not identical in every respect, Malcolm and Grace can be considered as extreme examples of such a phantom limb. The main difference is obviously that most if not all amputees would be consciously aware of their absent limb, whereas the ghosts are initially ignorant of their missing physical bodies. Yet what they have in common with the phantom limb is that neither a mental nor a physiological explanation accounts for their experience, along with the paradoxical notion that, even though they no longer live a fully embodied existence, they are capable of sensation and perception. Instead of trying to fit the phantom limb into an either/or way of thinking about body and mind, Merleau-Ponty offers a third way of thinking about this medical phenomenon and its implications. He suggests that it can only be understood through what he calls “the perspective of being-in-theworld” (2002 [1945]). This “being-in-the-world” refers to a primordial, prereflective, and “pre-objective” active bodily engagement with the world that he subsequently refines as the concept of the lived body (2002 [1945]: 92). As mentioned earlier, the lived body, denoting the body I distinctly know as mine, is always more than just the biological premise for one’s existence in and experience of the world. According to Merleau-Ponty, “I am conscious of the world through the medium of my body” (2002 [1945]: 94–95), and therefore the lived body enables “the synthesis of one’s own body” and ultimately provides the existential link between the physiological and the psychological dimension (2002 [1945]: 171–77). Thus for Merleau-Ponty, the ambivalence of the phantom limb ultimately proves for him that the “union of soul and body is not an amalgamation between two mutually external terms” (2002 [1945]): 102), and that therefore thinking about body and mind as separate entities is unproductive so far as lived experience is concerned. The manner in which Merleau-Ponty further describes the phantom limb comes strikingly close to the stubborn persistence with which Malcolm and Grace continue to exist. Indeed we can say that their experience is that of a phantom body, which enables them to live their ghostly lives to their best abilities, and completely at odds with the fact that their physical bodies no longer exist. Consider the following passage from The Phenomenology of Perception: What it is in us which refuses mutilation and disablement is an I committed to a certain physical and inter-human world, who continues to tend

SEEING WHAT OTHERS CANNOT SEE

59

towards his world despite handicaps and amputations and who, to this extent, does not recognize them de jure. The refusal of the deficiency is only the obverse of our inherence in a world, the implicit negation of what runs counter to the natural momentum which throws us into our tasks, our cares, our situation, our familiar horizons. To have a phantom arm is to remain open to all the actions of which the arm alone is capable; it is to retain the practical field which one enjoyed before mutilation. The body is the vehicle of being-in-the-world, and having a body is, for a living creature, to be intervolved [sic] in a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be continually committed to them. (2002 [1945]: 94) In the case of Malcolm and Grace, thus, to have a phantom body is their means of what we might call “still-being-in-the-world.” This phantom body is not just an accessory to their illusion of being alive—rather, it is the necessary link that anchors them within their worlds, the crucial connection between mind, body, and world without which meaning would be lost. Having a phantom body allows the ghosts to retain a certain normality of their daily lives, to commit themselves to the physical world, and to remain at least receptive toward the course of action that only a fully embodied person can realize. In other words, these characters do not perceive the world as if they still had a body, but because they once had a body and experienced the world through precisely this body that was theirs. Yet indisputably, no longer being alive also means that there is an irreparable rupture of the existential bond between body, mind, and world, one that even the improbable persistence of the phantom body cannot compensate for. Considered from this perspective, Malcolm and Grace’s selective and predominant reliance on seeing and hearing is not symptomatic of a disembodied engagement with the world, but rather a side effect of this fissure, of the disruption of the synthesis of their (no longer) lived body. According to Sobchack, human perception is always synesthetic and synoptic, a system of cooperation and conversion among the senses, rather than the sum of different sense impressions that occur separately from each other. Writing about vision, for example, she notes, “My sight is never only sight—it sees what my ear can hear, my hand can touch, my nose can smell, and my tongue can taste. My entire bodily existence is implicated in my vision” (1992: 78). This point is specifically important for Sobchack to put forward the notion that cinematic spectatorship, an activity during which only seeing and hearing are directly addressed, is nonetheless an activity that always involves the spectator’s entire sensorium along with their lived body. This idea is also particularly relevant for The Sixth Sense and The Others and the uncanny relation between ignoring one’s own death, seeing, and spectatorship. In terms of relating our experience to Malcolm and Grace’s state of being, it is of course safe to assume that their fictitious experience

60

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

exceeds our own lived experience to a significant degree. But aside from that, since we as embodied spectators have not relied on phantom bodies, and thus our vision has not been de-synchronized, the next question is how our situation as cinesthetic subjects informs our experience of The Sixth Sense and The Others throughout.

Visible gestures and invisible viewing subjects in The Sixth Sense The Sixth Sense, whose title is instructive in this regard, is as much a film about death and (dis)embodiment as it is about vision and other modes of perception as an epistemological practice. The twist sequence may bring this most acutely to our attention; yet starting with the question of whether or not the dead people Cole sees are real or imagined, the entire film is based on visual relationships between different characters and their particular ability to see more or less, or simply differently, than others. While Malcolm and the other ghosts “only see what they want to see” and cannot see each other, the normal human characters like Anna and Cole’s mother Lynn have standard vision4 and reciprocally see only other living people. The exception among them is Cole, whose surname Sear (pronounced seer) is befitting: his gift—or burden—is that he sees “dead people walking around like normal people” and knows no one else can. Furthermore, the film itself undergoes a gradual perceptive and expressive transformation: it is only after Cole’s confession in hospital that the ghosts (other than Malcolm) become seen and visibly expressed to us by the film. Yet prior to this narrative turning point, their presence (including Malcolm’s) is already signaled through other perceptive and expressive channels, while a number of hints equally indicate that some elements of the fictional world are inaccessible to (our) sight. The film’s visual complexity also directly concerns the audience, insofar as it systematically subverts, if not even inverts, the visual transparency traditionally afforded by narrative cinema’s conventions based on sight. As mentioned earlier, The Sixth Sense carefully avoids the impression that it represents either Malcolm or Cole’s subjective visual perception through the frequent use of longer takes, distant framings, and non-POV perspectives, with even some dialogue scenes foregoing editing at large (Lavik 2006; Wilson 2006). These cinematic techniques create the impression of an objective representation of the film’s world, in which, by convention, what we see is what every character is able to see. Yet at the same time, the film gradually reveals the characters’ heterogenous perception. The Sixth Sense does not at all dispense with editing techniques and other cinematic means to express character subjectivity, often deploying them to subtly draw attention to the

SEEING WHAT OTHERS CANNOT SEE

61

fact that the film’s world is all but a transparent reality whose visibility is immanent. In particular during the second half, shot/reverse shot patterns are used to emphasize the characters’ disparate vision, which goes against the grain of creating diegetic unity as well as perceptual coherence with such techniques. This play with narrative conventions eschews the objective disclosure of the diegetic world, long before the twist sequence reveals the full extent of the film’s ontological discrepancies. The issue at stake, then, is not alone the uninitiated viewer’s “twist blindness” (Barratt 2009), for such an error in interpretation could easily be corrected in another viewing. The Sixth Sense lets us encounter a visible world that is inherently ambiguous throughout: it presents (in)visibility not as a trait that a character possesses but instead as a relationship between different characters with distinct perceptual abilities. In doing so, it bestows a sense of epistemological uncertainty upon sight throughout. The film therefore not only plays with our visual attention and cognitive capacity for narrative detail. It also questions the “culmination of the eye as the center of human subjectivity and meaning, the receptacle of truth” itself, which has been the long-standing foundation for the ocularcentric paradigm of the “ideal spectator of the motion pictures,” the legacy of psychoanalytically inflected film theory of the 1970s (Mayne 1993: 56). Significantly though, The Sixth Sense does not disparage vision as such. Instead, it undermines only a mechanical and disembodied notion of vision, one that claims primacy over the other senses as a means of knowing the world. Furthermore, the film sensitizes us to other modes of perception, reminding us of their epistemological capacities as well as of the fact that the traditional hierarchy of the senses is all but a fixed biological order of perception.

The limits of vision Aside from Malcolm himself, a key figure to explore the film’s visual complexity is Cole. Cole experiences his para-vision as a threat for two reasons. On the one hand, he is terrified by what or rather whom he sees and those who see him in return: ghosts with ominous intentions and often mutilated bodies, such as a boy with an open gunshot wound on the back of his head, or a woman with slashed wrists. Yet, on the other hand, he also suffers from the impossibility of coming to terms with these traumatic experiences through sharing them with others, knowing that none of the normal characters will believe him. He is well aware that his classmates and even his teacher regard him as a “freak” because his fearful reactions are visible, yet visually unjustified to them (a fate he shares with Vincent Grey, Malcolm’s former patient who shoots him at the beginning). Consequently, he has learned to neither verbally nor otherwise express his spooky

62

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

encounters. Cole’s awareness of the normal characters’ visual abilities and of their disbelief in his experiences corresponds to a long-standing dualistic conception of vision and knowledge, one that is based on the premise that the visible qualities of the world are located in the seen objects themselves, readily awaiting to be discovered by the diligent observer. Conversely, the privileging of vision in acquiring and sharing knowledge also means that anything that is not seen by everyone hardly appears to be in and of this world: the unseen nearly amounts to the non-existent in such an ocularcentric perspective. Yet early on in the film a number of occurrences subvert the normal characters’ vision, raising the possibility that there may be limits to their visual grasp of the world, if not to vision itself. A key moment in this regard is a scene set in the Sears’s kitchen, which introduces us to Cole’s mother Lynn, who is shown running hectically back and forth between laundry and kitchen, getting herself dressed for work and Cole ready for school. Tracking back and forth with her in one single take, the slightly unsteady camera actively takes part in this morning mayhem, and initially there appears to be nothing out of the ordinary in this scene. However, when both Lynn and the camera leave the kitchen for a little less than ten seconds, upon their return they find almost all of the previously shut cabinet doors and drawers wide open, and Cole sitting at the kitchen table with a disturbed expression on his face, his hands clenched onto the surface. The unease stirred by the lack of any immediately identifiable explanation for the opened doors and drawers is amplified by the uninterrupted temporal continuity of the long-take, as it makes clear that Cole could have not opened them himself during the short time that Lynn and the camera had left the kitchen—and yet there is nobody else visible in the room. When, at about two minutes into the scene, the sound of the doorbell releases Cole from Lynn’s ensuing interrogation, the film cuts to a close-up that matches Lynn’s line of sight. It shows a sweaty palm print of Cole’s hands on the surface of the table, already in the process of dissolving into thin air. Disappearing within seconds, this evanescent trace of Cole’s presence just a moment ago unsettles faith in vision in two ways: first, it fortifies the impression that he is withholding knowledge about whoever might have opened the cupboard doors and drawers. Second, it visually signifies that there is no visually fixed and stable, objective version of the scene. Cole’s fading palm print undermines some of sight’s most praised attributes, and in particular its distant, simultaneous, and durational, rather than successive and fleeting, grasp of the world. In that way the scene effectively dismantles some of the important qualities of vision that benefited the notion of objective knowledge as entirely independent from the viewing subject, and consequently subverts sight’s supposed epistemological superiority over the other senses (Jay 1993: 24–25). The initially visible trace of Cole’s presence in the room just seconds before he

SEEING WHAT OTHERS CANNOT SEE

63

left is an additional subtle hint that vision cannot access this film’s world in its entirety. Photographic recording technologies used in The Sixth Sense contribute to the ambiguity of its visible world and further increase the viewer’s epistemological skepticism as far as vision is concerned. In one scene, Lynn looks at a wall with family photographs and is startled to discover lens flares in every single picture of Cole. Given that in the photographs Cole also casts a subtle glance into the direction of these ominous speckles, the phenomenon suggests that ghosts were present when the photos were taken (a conclusion we might draw only in retrospect). Having captured visible traces of supernatural beings that are invisible to most but not all characters, these images undermine photography’s capacity to visually reproduce the world. They consolidate the uncertainty bestowed upon sight and remind us that what we see fundamentally depends on what the film allows us to see in any given moment, a mediated act of perception that draws attention to its own variability. At the same time, however, photographic recording techniques also help to partially reinstall our faith in vision in the end. This is established through the story of Kyra Collins, one of the ghosts seeking Cole for help. Kyra summons Cole to pass on to her father a videotape on which she has recorded her mother’s act of poisoning her. The visual testimony of the video camera, a technological stand-in eyewitness, recuperates the link between sight, knowledge, and truth that characterizes ocularcentric thinking (Jay 1993: 24–25). It is thus important to note that, even though The Sixth Sense successfully subverts this link throughout, it does not dismantle vision as a means of knowledge as such. Rather, it questions its absolute veracity and supremacy in the hierarchy of the senses while at the same time reminding us of the epistemological capacities of other senses.

Beyond vision: The knowledge of the other senses Another sense The Sixth Sense discretely draws attention to is hearing. Hearing, like sight, is a distant sense and, more importantly in the context of film spectatorship, also a sense that can be reproduced in cinema. In The Sixth Sense it functions as an intermediary between the world of the living and the world of the dead, and moreover instills in us the notion that the world of this film extends beyond the realm of the visible, or rather, what is visible for us. The first time this becomes evident is when Cole attends a birthday party and suddenly gets drawn to a closet from which a male voice pleading for mercy can be heard; yet none of the other characters seems to be aware of it. The ghostly voice is what Michel Chion has called an “acousmêtre,” “a kind of talking and acting shadow” (1999: 21). As such it is most powerful when its bodily source is not visibly revealed, and thereby

64

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

“changes .  .  . the relationship between what we see and what we hear” (1999: 19). Thus in that manner, and before it eventually makes the ghosts visible for us, the film nudges us early on toward being mindful of other sense modalities that we have to our avail when faced with phenomena that elude our visual grasp. It is no coincidence that Malcolm’s epistemological transition, from doubting to believing Cole, is linked to hearing and sound recording technologies. Initially, after Cole confesses his “secret” to him in hospital, Malcolm attests that the boy suffers from “some form of childhood schizophrenia,” notably a diagnosis he captures on his dictaphone. Some time later, he relistens to old recordings of his sessions with Vincent Grey, his former patient who shoots him at the film’s beginning, and in whose behavior he recognizes striking parallels to Cole’s case. Suddenly startled by the fact that Vincent’s mood changed from chatty and cheerful to silent and disturbed after he was left alone in the room briefly, Malcolm rewinds the tape and turns up the volume during the moments of dead time, only to discover on the recording the voice of a ghost talking in Spanish to the terrified Vincent. Even though Malcolm continues to neither hear nor see any (other) ghosts, these sonic traces captured on tape are sufficient evidence for him to entertain the possibility that Cole really does see ghosts. Attentive viewers sitting through the end credits will even hear the same ghost crying and whispering in Spanish at the very end of the film, a cinematic acousmêtre echoing eerily through the post-screening darkness. Both Malcolm’s act of media repetition and the voice of the ghost are subtle prompts for us that we too may have to revisit the recorded images of the film, and that when we do so, we will have to revise and readjust our perceptual attention and carefully listen out for what we can hear, in addition to looking out for what we can see in this film. Besides vision and hearing, the third sense explicitly highlighted in The Sixth Sense is touch. A key moment in this regard is a scene in which Cole and Malcolm walk down an empty school corridor when Cole suddenly freezes and stares at a set of steps. Three brief cutaways to a flight of stairs reveal the cause of Cole’s fright: three hanged ghosts who are dangling from the ceiling with ropes around their necks. The subsequent succession of shot/ reverse shots makes it clear, however, that Malcolm does not see them. “Is something up there?” he asks, turning his head in the direction of the stairs. The following two shots—one long shot looking down at Malcolm and Cole from the top of the stairs, one mid-shot looking up from the bottom with Malcolm and Cole in the foreground—show only a void where the ghosts should be. In that way establishing the characters’ dissimilar vision, this is the first of a number of scenes where editing undermines the visual unity and diegetic coherence usually afforded by the alternation of shot and reverse shot.

SEEING WHAT OTHERS CANNOT SEE

65

FIGURE 4A AND 4B The characters’ dissimilar vision in The Sixth Sense (1999).

At the same time, the subsequently unfolding dialogue between Malcolm and Cole points to some alternatives when a phenomenon distinctly evades sight: MALCOLM: I don’t see anything. COLE: When you’re real still, sometimes you feel it inside— like you’re falling down real fast, but you’re really just standing still. Do you ever feel the prickly things on the back of your neck? MALCOLM: Yes.

66

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

COLE:

And the tiny hairs on your arm—you know, when they stand up? MALCOLM: Yes. COLE: That’s them. When they get mad, it gets cold. MALCOLM (turning his head again): I don’t see anything. On the one hand, Cole’s references to bodily symptoms of more or less irrational fear point to experiences that many of us would be familiar with, not least because they aptly capture some of the bodily responses typically associated with supernatural ghost stories. Goose bumps, shivers, and hair that stands up are some of the most common reactions when we experience fear while watching a horror film, as Julian Hanich observes (2010: 21, 149). In fact “the shock experience seems to literally set the surface of our body into motion: it makes our skin crawl; it gives us the creeps; it sends a shiver down our spines” (2010: 149; emphasis in original). On the other hand, Cole assigns an epistemological function to these pre-reflective sensory responses and thus elevates them from being mere tactile responses triggered by a stimulus. The scene occurs after Malcolm has listened to the tape recordings, and thus he is more open to Cole’s ensuing lesson in sensing the presence of ghosts when sight fails to disclose them. Yet given that Cole addresses Malcolm’s literal blind side here—after all, Malcolm relies on the distant senses because his phantom body is out of sync—his attempt to sensitize his psychiatrist to the knowledge of the perceptive body may seem futile from the outset. Unlike Malcolm, however, we as cinesthetic subjects have bodies that are not out of sync. For the main part, then, Cole does not teach Malcolm but us. Even though at this stage the film has begun to make the ghosts visible for us, these instructions also teach us to pay attention to tactile signs. From now on we know, for example, how to read the frequently dropping temperature in the Sears’s home: it is not the result of a broken thermostat, as Lynn suspects, but instead indicates the presence of ghosts, even if they are not visibly expressed to us by the film in those moments. Likewise, Anna’s breath clouds in the final sequence visibly foreshadow Malcolm’s existential state just seconds before the falling ring triggers his process of realization. Of course, as tactile signs that are visible rather than felt by us, such moments operate within the perceptual modus operandi that a film can express and address directly, so that the next pertinent question is to what extent The Sixth Sense engages our embodied perception beyond seeing and hearing.

Tactility in cinematic spectatorship Similar to its concern with visual and audio recording technologies, The Sixth Sense explicitly addresses the question of how touch and tactile memories can be recorded and deciphered. During a seemingly minor scene

SEEING WHAT OTHERS CANNOT SEE

67

that takes place in Anna’s antique shop, Anna advises a customer couple that they should choose an item that specifically speaks to them. Her sales pitch includes the imagined backstory of a ring the customers are interested in buying. She suggests that it may have belonged to a woman who loved a man she could not be with and that it continues to communicate her longing, a story that in hindsight mirrors her own, reflecting the significance of tactile epistemologies in her personal grief for Malcolm. According to Marks, “Tactile epistemologies conceive of knowledge as something gained not on the model of vision but through physical contact” (2000: 138). Echoing Marks’s emphasis on touch as a way of knowing, Anna explains to her customers: “A lot of the pieces in this store communicate . . . I think that maybe when people own things and then they pass away, a part of themselves gets printed onto those things, like finger prints.” Recalling also the earlier image of Cole’s disappearing palm print on a table, Anna’s belief in tactile epistemologies sheds light on the reason why she holds on to Malcolm’s wedding ring as a keepsake,5 or what Marks might call a “fossil”: it is meaningful to Anna “by virtue of an originary contact” (2000: 84), and unlike the wedding tape video that perpetually plays on the TV in her bedroom, it allows her to actualize invisible memories of Malcolm that are intimate and mimetic. The film’s emphasis on such invisible traces that our material presence in the world leaves behind, and how these can be decoded and actualized via touch, consequently raises the question of how viewers might engage with The Sixth Sense in a tactile manner. A proximal and tactile mode of spectatorship may seem not immediately evident in connection with the film. At first glance, and consistent with the normal characters’ Cartesian notion of vision and knowledge, its distant and observant style appears to accommodate vision as a privileged mode of access to the world. The dominance of distant framings, longer takes, and often minimal editing, seems particularly suited to foster a mode of spectatorship that allows us to discretely observe the unfolding of events on-screen: detached and primarily visual, rather than proximal and multisensory. It certainly does not encourage the kind of haptic visuality that Marks has described, a mode of vision that is evoked by images that are precisely not characterized by illusionistic depth and visual clarity, and instead invite close exploration of textures and surfaces (2000: 161). However, while Marks’s understanding of haptic visuality is based on the idea that touch is a surface phenomenon that takes the skin as its primary interface (a concept to which I return in Chapter 2), there are other, deeper ways in which we can conceptualize the tactile encounter between viewer and film. Barker, expanding on Sobchack’s work in her book The Tactile Eye, considers tactility as “a mode of perception and expression wherein all parts of the body commit themselves to, or are drawn into” (2009b: 3, emphasis added). Applying this definition to cinema, she writes,

68

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

Cinematic tactility . . . is a general attitude toward the cinema that the human body enacts in particular ways: haptically, at the tender surface of the body; kinaesthetically and muscularly, in the middle dimension of muscles, tendons, and bones that reach toward and through cinematic space; and viscerally, in the murky recesses of the body, where heart, lungs, pulsing fluids, and firing synapses receive, respond to, and re-enact the rhythms of cinema. (2009b: 3) Barker’s inclusion of other bodily experiences in the definition of cinematic tactility, such as motion or visceral reactions, expands the understanding of the film experience as embodied. She emphasizes the communicative dimension of this deep-seated cinematic tactility, a kind of muscular and visceral encounter between viewer and film. Significantly, such “kinesthetic empathy” has its roots in a non-reflective dimension of embodiment and cannot be reduced to the level of narrative identification: This empathy between viewer and film isn’t simply a matter of the viewer sharing a character’s physical location by means of point-of-view shots and first-person narration, for example. It is instead a kind of empathy between our own body and the film’s body that happens even in a nonnarrative film or one without actors, for example. Our bodies orient and dispose themselves towards the body of the film itself, because we and the film make sense of space by moving through it muscularly in similar ways and with similar attitudes. (2009b: 75) This definition of kinesthetic empathy is instructive to explain how The Sixth Sense not only represents senses other than vision and hearing on the screen but also invokes the tactile sensibility of the spectator’s body itself. Although The Sixth Sense is a calm and composed film, it is never quite still. One of its most distinct features is a recurring slow forward camera movement that is not linked to any particular character. Although noticeable throughout, this camera movement is particularly prominent in another sequence that uses a long-take. However, unlike in the dinner or the breakfast sequence, the long-take here has no immediate dramatic function. The sequence starts with a long shot of Cole and Malcolm walking next to each other on a sidewalk, with the camera positioned at quite a distance from the two characters. Once they begin walking toward the camera, the latter reciprocates their movement by slowly traveling toward them in return, as if to meet them half way. At the same moment as Cole and Malcolm stop at an intersection, the camera has reached them at arm’s length and circles around them in a clockwise quarter turn, almost like one friend meeting another at a street corner. Unlike with the two previously mentioned longtakes, nothing overtly dramatic happens in this scene: the long-take neither serves to distract from Malcolm being invisible to another character like in

SEEING WHAT OTHERS CANNOT SEE

69

the dinner scene, nor does the temporal duration of the sequence fulfill any dramatic function like in the breakfast scene. Thus in terms of style and narrative nothing would seem to justify this cinematographic emphasis on slowness and duration. Consistent with the film’s distanced and observant style, the camera’s initial position in this scene is also faraway enough to make clear that it does not represent any character’s subjective perspective; and yet its slow, slightly jerky, not quite smooth movement subtly prevents the impression that this is the objective viewpoint of a disembodied mechanical eye simply recording whatever happens in front of it. Sobchack writes that camera movement is the most clearly expressed manifestation of cinematic embodied presence. According to her, “It is the camera that functions as the bodily agency through which the film’s intentionality can be seen and its actional [sic] projects accomplished” (1990: 22; emphasis in original). In contrast to elements that move in front of the camera, the movement of the camera itself turns the latent “kinetic tension” inherent in every frame into material and embodied action (1990: 24). Thus the recurrent slow camera movements and unclaimed tracking shots in The Sixth Sense are not just the narrative foreshadowing of the existence of ghosts. Rather, they can be seen as an instance of cinematic embodied empathy through which the film, itself an invisible yet embodied viewing subject much like the ghosts, draws our tactile attention to those beings of the fictional world that elude our immediate visual grasp. Through slow and subtle camera movements such as the above-mentioned forward tracking shot, The Sixth Sense engages the kinesthetic empathy of the viewer’s body throughout, making us receptive to the existence of the ghosts even when we cannot see them ourselves. Inscribing its own visual intentionality and embodied agency, the film becomes a muscularly felt presence itself in those moments, reminding us once again that what we see is not a visible but a seen world. Altogether The Sixth Sense makes us consciously aware of our own embodied being, as well as of our status as “cinesthetic subjects” who, as Sobchack famously wrote, “do not leave [our] capacity to touch or to smell or to taste at the cinema door, nor, once in the theatre, .  .  . devote these senses only to [our] popcorn” (2004e: 65). It may happen, then, that some spectators watching The Sixth Sense for the second time (or more) will primarily admire M. Night Shyamalan’s crafty filmmaking skills that tricked us into believing that Malcolm was still alive. Yet it may equally be the case that some of us will watch the film with a heightened sense of perceptual awareness, or even that some viewers claiming to have seen the twist coming all along were already attuned to experience film’s ambiguous visible world through their own “sixth sense” so to speak. Neither part of the traditional hierarchy of the senses nor a scientifically defined mode of perception, the notion of a “sixth sense,” refers, first, to the ability to perceive psi phenomena through inexplicable, para-perceptual powers such as the ones possessed by

70

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

Cole (Jütte 2004: 309). Second, the term “the sixth sense” has also been used in connection with proprioception “that sixth and grounding sense we have of ourselves as positioned and embodied in worldly space” (Sobchack 2004a: 192). Similar to how other characters in the film might sense the presence of ghosts, the film becomes a proprioceptively felt presence for us and may well give rise to an uncanny sense of dizziness or evoked the prickly feeling that was mentioned by Cole.

Light, perspective, and the materiality of the embodied observer in The Others Despite the higher degree of ontological continuity—no ongoing blurring of ghosts and humans, living and dead, visible and invisible—the complexity of The Others is on a par with The Sixth Sense as far as the relationships between seeing, seer, and the seen, between visibility, invisibility, and the material world, are concerned. Amenábar’s film, released two years after The Sixth Sense, may subvert cinematic conventions of narrative coherence and transparency less boldly than its predecessor and lacks the abundance of explicit references to seeing that characterize The Sixth Sense. Yet here too the ghosts’ obliviousness to their own death is associated with distanced modes of vision and hearing, and the primacy of sight in cinematic spectatorship is subtly called into question throughout the film. While in The Sixth Sense camera movement and editing contribute to doubts cast on vision as the singular most truthful sense, in The Others a similar effect is achieved through a chiaroscuro lighting style and compositions that foreground architectural geometry and central perspective. In that way the film engages us with intellectual traditions that hark back to ancient Greek philosophy and European enlightenment. Both a heliocentric imagery of light and the development of central perspective, along with sight’s ability to apprehend the visible world over duration and from a distance, have significantly influenced the ocularcentrism characteristic in Western thought. Martin Jay elaborates in detail how light and the sun as well as the sense of vision have all served as long-standing metaphors for objective knowledge and truth since classical Greek philosophy, evident, for instance, in phrases such as “to illuminate an idea” or “to leave someone in the dark” (1993: 24–25). Centuries later, during the Renaissance, another important step that advanced the rationalization of vision was the discovery of linear perspective, the use of parallel lines, vanishing points, and the horizon, which allowed to represent objects in space and create a three-dimensional effect on a flat surface. With reference to John Berger’s seminal work Ways of Seeing (1972), Jay describes how central perspective effectively gave rise to “a visual

SEEING WHAT OTHERS CANNOT SEE

71

practice in which the living bodies of both the painter and the viewer were bracketed” (1993: 55), and in which the embodied observer thus became detached from the visible world and instead turned into a disembodied onlooker from a superior yet separate vantage point: “If the beholder was now the privileged center of perspectival vision, it is important to underline that his viewpoint was just that: a monocular, unblinking fixed eye (or more precisely, abstract point), rather than two active, stereoscopic eyes of embodied actual vision, which gives us the experience of depth perception” (1993: 54–55). As a consequence, a theoretical differentiation was established between the physiological eye as a passive receptor and transmitter of the visual world, on the one hand, and the disembodied and introspective eye of the mind that sees ideas as mental image, on the other. The geometrical principles of perspective cohered with the dualistic worldview propagated by Descartes, who, at least in theory, separated the supposedly superior mind from the body, diminishing the latter to a mere physiological object. That this distinction is still influential today can be seen in the higher ranking of objective, theoretical, abstract, and visual information over subjective, experienced, concrete, material, and embodied knowledge. This cultural and philosophical context is important to keep in mind, for The Others, like The Sixth Sense, does not question vision in itself, but only the dualistic model of vision that is understood in the mechanical sense and does not cooperate with the other senses. It does so through subverting precisely those two central elements of Cartesian vision that are associated with sight’s status as a superior instrument of knowledge: light and central perspective.

Seeing and being in the dark Light exists as an omnipresent motif throughout the film. Yet it stands out as a source of illumination just as much as by virtue of its absence. Darkness and shadows dominate many of the scenes, with candles, lanterns, or a log fire commonly being the only diegetic light sources to brighten a room. The majority of the scenes are set indoors, and often it is impossible to tell whether they take place during the day or the night. Even the few distinguishable daytime scenes are characterized by a dim and diffuse light. The chiaroscuro lighting style is further evident in the distinct use of key lights directed at the characters, whose physical features often mark a visible contrast to the unlit background. A recurring visual motif is that of a face or a figure illuminated by candlelight, emerging out of the darkness or being surrounded by it. The film provides narrative explanations for the overall lack of interior brightness. Introducing the rules of the house, Grace informs Mrs. Mills that her family has become so accustomed to living without electricity

72

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

during the war that they do not see a need to change this again. But even more importantly, they also have to minimize natural light by keeping all curtains, windows, and doors shut because the children suffer from photosensitivity, a physiological condition which causes severe skin burns through the slightest exposure to natural light. Such justification of the perpetual darkness that permeates The Others reverses the common association of light with safety and the alignment of darkness with threat, one of a number of clear boundaries and long-established distinctions obscured by the film. Virtually concretizing the proverbial darkness that makes it hard to see one’s hand before one’s eyes, one consequence of the interior lack of light is the obstruction of vision. In particular its function to orientate and locate oneself in relation to one’s surroundings is impacted. As Grace mentions to Mrs. Mills, “Here, most of the time you can hardly see your way. It is often difficult to make out if there is a table, a chair, a door, a sideboard, or one of my children playing hide and seek.” Yet just like we do not usually need to see our hand in order to know that it is right there, in front of our eyes, Grace and her children do not need to rely on vision in order to navigate through their house. Knowing it “like the back of their hands,” they move through the rooms and corridors with the intuitive apprehension of an embodied subject’s familiarity with spaces that they know through inhabiting them, the memory of their phantom bodies navigating the way. Nonetheless, in most scenes, there is always just enough light for us to discern some details of the film’s interior and exterior spaces, and it often accentuates another dominant visual motif of the film: the manor that the Stewarts live in. As the home that Grace and her children never leave and ultimately claim as theirs, it is the center of the world in which they exist and demarcates their boundaries. The building’s striking architecture not only adds to the film’s gothic atmosphere but also provides an important backdrop for a number of classically staged compositions that emphasize spatial depth and perspectival design. While they might suggest that the visible world in The Others is readily structured, geometrically ordered, and rationally manageable, they are, however, counterbalanced with compositions that feature odd angles and conspicuous objects, such as banister rails and pillars, that interfere with a direct and linear line of sight. Reminiscent of cinematic traditions that reach back to German expressionism, those compositions obstruct the idealized vantage point of linear perspective that is associated with a homogeneous space freed from any subjective distortion (Jay 1993: 54). Thus revealing the artifice of disembodied and distanced modes of observation, these images undermine the optical mode of spectatorship that the classical compositions initially seem to foster. Atmospheric phenomena further hinder sight and complicate the expectation of one definite and objective version of the film’s fictional

SEEING WHAT OTHERS CANNOT SEE

73

world. The Stewarts’s manor is surrounded by an enduring and thick, and indeed most literally impenetrable fog. As a result the majority of daytime exterior shots are characterized by a dim and diffuse light, and even the few interior shots with opened curtains have a subdued quality. Because of the film’s setting on the Channel Islands, the foggy atmosphere might as well be a natural weather occurrence and thus may not raise any suspicions at first. Yet even Grace herself repeatedly complains that the fog “has never lasted that long” and that it makes her “feel totally cut off.” One way to read the relative absence of both artificial light and the sun would be to consider it as an allegory for the ghosts’ state of ignorance, their existential confusion literally leaving them “in the dark” and their suppression of the memory of Grace’s murder suicide fogging their minds. Jay describes how truth and knowledge-related metaphors often draw on vision, light, and the sun, an epistemological tradition that, like so many others, harks back to Greek philosophy (1993: 24–25). It was Plato, for instance, who singled out sight from the other, more material and proximal senses and elevated it to a status on a par with human intelligence and the mind (1993: 26). Thinking further of Plato, one could almost liken Grace and her children inside their dark manor to the situation described in his cave allegory, where an imperfect physical vision mistakes shadowy illusions for reality, rather than seeing the truth and things as they are, which in Plato’s concept is only possible through a pure vision enabled by the eye of the mind. Considered from this perspective, it seems hardly a coincidence that the children are cured of their photosensitivity after the twist sequence, and, following the ghosts’ existential realization, the fog seems to have disappeared in the film’s final scenes. Yet several aspects speak against such a purely allegorical interpretation. First, for Anne and Nicholas the knowledge that light is no longer causing them physical harm is first and foremost a felt difference. Consider the moment in which Nicholas tests his new light tolerance. He carefully approaches a window whose curtains are opened with his stretched-out hand first. Then, habitually shielding his face with one hand while at the same time reaching out toward the window with the other, he allows himself to touch and be touched by light for the first time without pain. Second, it also remains unclear as to whether the fog has actually lifted in the end, or whether it continues to exist within the ghosts’ perception of the world. Immediately prior to the film’s final exterior scene in which there is a blue sky and the entire estate is bathed in sunshine, an interior shot shows Anne in front of a large window with the fog still on the outside. As mentioned earlier, this suggests that only the living are able to perceive a sunny version of the film’s world. Furthermore, the servants, who unlike Grace are aware that they are dead, also frequently comment on the fog, doing so in a knowing manner that implicitly suggests an intrinsic connection to their state of being and rather practical implications.

74

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

Materially making sense of the world Throughout the film, the fog exists as a barrier, obstructing a distant apprehension of the world as much as preventing the ghosts from moving beyond their estate—an impenetrable visual and material threshold they cannot cross. This becomes poignantly clear during a scene in which Grace attempts to walk to the nearest village to get help from the local priest. Yet this plan is immediately marked as doomed when Mrs. Mills, seeing Grace march off into the distance, knowingly remarks to the gardener Mr. Tuttle: “The fog won’t let her get very far.” Indeed, the further Grace ventures the denser the fog becomes, and soon her determined pace decelerates into a faltering and unsteady motion. Initially, a straight avenue lined with trees that, similar to railway tracks, converge in a distant vanishing point marked a clear path to follow; yet the thicker growing fog turns the trees into shadowy silhouettes, until they eventually disappear from the visual field entirely. Once the visible world has lost its familiar contours, Grace is unable to visually orientate herself in relation to her immediate surroundings— in the near white-out conditions that lack any visible bearings she loses her way. Watching Grace trying to regain her spatial orientation, we too may feel a little lost during this scene, struggling to make sense of these prolonged moments in the fog that seem of little immediate relevance for the development of the story. But it is not only the disruption of narrative progress that is bewildering. Sobchack writes that the film’s vision “not only understands the world haptically but also proxemically, that is, in terms of spatiality that is lived as intimacy or distance in relation to the objects of its intentions” (1992: 133). While the film’s vision often facilitates our understanding of cinematic space in that way, in this scene its proxemic grasp of the world temporarily suspends sight as a means of spatial orientation. There is one brief moment in which the camera, initially moving along with Grace at its own pace and at variable distance to her, loses sight of her too, and the gray mass of fog fills the entire frame. As soon as her moving body becomes a distinguishable figure against the misty ground again, the film stays physically closer to her so not to lose her again, fixing its mobile gaze onto her. Yet as a side effect of the film’s visual attention being held steadily on her moving body, against the monochromatic and flat ground that lacks any elements conveying spatial depth and dimensionality, we can neither tell which direction Grace is moving in nor gauge the distance she travels. The way our visual perception of movement is at odds with the actual movement in the scene is amplified by our own stationary bodies, an effect similar to the vection illusion inside a stationary train at a railway station, when a train on the opposite platform starts rolling, and yet for a brief moment it seems that the train we are in is the one that moves. The impossibility to establish a clear spatial

SEEING WHAT OTHERS CANNOT SEE

75

relationship between Grace’s moving body, the film’s own mobile embodied agency, and the surroundings through sight alone defies Cartesian vision as a superior element of apprehending the world, and thus by proxy of Grace stumbling through the fog, the film redirects our gaze and attention to the embodied observer instead. As an expression of the film’s embodied act of seeing, the significance of this scene lies in the way it attunes its viewers to the epistemology of touch, texture, and materiality that pervades The Others on the whole. It marks a transition during which the film’s vision shifts from distance to proximity, from Cartesian to embodied vision, and from seeing to touch, and in doing so it invites us to readjust our vision as well. Describing the capacity of the film’s vision to materially make sense of the world, Sobchack writes that what is seen on the screen by the seeing that is the film has a texture and solidity. This is a vision that knows what it is to touch things in the world, that understands materiality. The film’s vision thus perceives and expresses the “sense” of fabrics like velvet or the roughness of tree bark or the yielding softness of human flesh. (1992: 133) With little other potential targets for the intentionality of our own vision in this scene, the film guides our attention to the materiality and tactile sensibility of Grace’s body. Seeing how she is rubbing her cold and clammy hands together, we become acutely aware of the fog’s physical impact on her. Thus invoking our perceptual knowledge of some of the different states of matter that water molecules can aggregate in—liquid (running water, rain), gas (clouds, fog), solid (ice), with sometimes even transitional phases (drizzle)—this scene accommodates a mode of vision that is based on proximity, corporeality, and material contact with the world. Through our own tactile memories of such basic physical configurations of water, our embodied vision is familiar with their concrete textural and material specificities or their temperatures. It knows, for instance, that we cannot touch the thick accumulation of tiny water droplets in the same way we can glide over, or rub against, the smooth and solid surface of a block of ice with the surface of our hands. Yet our embodied vision also knows that fog is neither an entirely immaterial nor intangible thing. Quite the contrary, although we can never quite see how it touches our bodies, most of us would have experienced how its material concreteness can dampen our clothes, skin, and hair, and how it can even chill us to our bones—an invisible force with the potential to penetrate our bodies to their core. Given that both the fog and the ghosts alike are of a material elusiveness that nevertheless knows how to touch, this scene thus makes us sensitive to a world that cannot always be neatly divided into binary categories such as visible or invisible, tangible or intangible, material or immaterial.

76

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

The touch and texture of light Similar to the fog, the implications of light in The Others are twofold. On the one hand, the interplay between light and darkness is a visible reminder of the frailty of vision and of its dependence on physical circumstances, such as plainly enough light to see. This is particularly noticeable in the numerous shots in which darkness is a dominant visual element. As mentioned before, the film often frames the faces and bodies of the characters emerging out of darkness, their visibility thus distinctly enabled by a diegetic source of light, such as candles, lanterns, or log fires. Yet on the other hand, light is more than just a physical medium that makes things visible, and more than just a means of enabling the eye to see what is important. This is a point made by Cathryn Vasseleu, who describes light in terms of texture, rather than transparency and illumination. For her, “light is a fabrication, a surface of a depth that also spills over the interstices of the fabric” and “the invisible interweaving of differences which form the fabric of the visible” (1998: 12). Drawing upon the writings of Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Irigaray, she further argues that the texture of light reveals an intrinsic connection between vision and touch that consequentially questions traditional concepts of knowledge based on the hierarchical separation of the two senses, such as the dichotomy between objective and theoretical reflection on the one hand, and subjective and immediate experience on the other (1998: 12). This is quite befitting for The Others, where the texture of light, defying the clearcut distinction between transcendence and immanence, affirms the material existence of the ghosts for, and before our eyes. Following Vasseleu’s line of thought, the use of light in The Others can thus be considered as a sensible expression of the film’s vision through which the ghosts are not only made visible, but also inextricably bound together with the visible and physical world of the film, interwoven into its material fabric, or perhaps what Merleau-Ponty would refer to as flesh, “the incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being” (1968: 139). Beyond a solely figurative meaning then, both fog and light (or rather its relative absence) have a number of immediate epistemological implications as far as seeing is concerned. In particular, they impair sight’s ability to “have the world at a distance” (Merleau-Ponty 1964 [1961] : 166). In doing so, they put out of action some of the very characteristics that have contributed to its idealization. Jay describes how the fact that vision allows the observer to overcome a physical gap, and thus helps them maintain a critical distance to the object of sight, has significantly contributed to its allegiance with the notion of objectivity as a neutral and abstract form of knowledge (1993: 24–25). Hindering such a distant and critical glance, fog and the qualities of light in The Others compel us to adopt a closer, more tactile mode of vision, one that encourages us to pay attention to the corporeality and materiality of the ghosts and their in-between state as neither fully embodied, living

SEEING WHAT OTHERS CANNOT SEE

77

human beings nor entirely immaterial and transcendental apparitions. Yet our experience of the film is informed not just by the act of looking at this interweaving of the visible and the tangible that bonds together Grace and her children with the film’s fabric. After all, Sobchack reminds us that “the cinesthetic subject both touches and is touched by the screen—able to commute seeing to touching and back again without a thought” (2004e: 71; emphasis in original). While Vasseleu primarily focuses on the moment in which light physically touches the eye, Barker emphasizes that light can come into contact with the body in other places than the retina. For her, the entire skin enables a sensible encounter with light that is characterized by reflection or absorption: Light has been described by physicists either as a particle or a wave, terms that aptly describe light’s touch upon the skin. It is described as hitting the skin, where it bounces off or sticks like a speck of dust or it is thought to wash over the surfaces of the body like a wave of water, thick and tangible. If light didn’t make contact with the skin so directly, how would we know the welcome warmth of a bright winter sun or the coolness under a shady tree? (2009b: 30) Barker’s description of light’s tactility, something even a blind person would perceive, resonates with the distinctly tactile quality of light in The Others. Consider again the initial danger light poses for Anne and Nicholas, who are at risk of being burned by its rays; but also the comforting curiosity with which they later approach it: “Look, Mummy, it doesn’t even hurt anymore!” says Anne with a smile on her face at the end, stretching her arms and turning around in front of the window, a somewhat positive reassurance of their continued existence. The visible touch of light on their skin confirms that they still exist not only in the world, but are still part of its material fabric as well. With its emphasis on materiality and tactility, the film crosses the threshold of the directly representable senses, putting us in touch with Grace and her children in more than just the metaphorical sense. Barker suggests that the tactile qualities of light are relevant to the encounter between the sensitive bodies of both the film and the viewer: “The substance of cinema touches us in the same way, coming at us like particles or washing over us like a wave, and it leaves a trace on our skins, warming them, scratching them or drawing forth shiver” (2009b: 30). Evoking the image of a darkened theatre room illuminated by the light of the projector (or, for that matter, a living room lit by an LCD or LED display), with shafts of light bouncing off the screen and faintly touching us as spectators, the comparison Barker draws between light and “the substance of cinema” makes it possible to argue that the texture and materiality of light establishes an intimate bond between the ghosts, the film, and us, one that we may not consciously reflect on but

78

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

FIGURE 5 The texture of light in The Others (2001).

feel with our phenomenal bodies. Our bodies’ material sensibility is aware of the differences between the ghosts’ bodies, the film’s body, and our own. But it also knows that there is something we have in common: the touch of light weaves us all into the same fabric or flesh of the world. In that way the film thus partially remedies the rupture between the different acts of viewing it had caused in the twist sequence. Thus like The Sixth Sense, The Others heightens our perceptual awareness of the distinct epistemology of touch underlying its narrative, and thereby provokes a shift from distant to proximal modes of engagement with the film. In this respect Mrs. Mills’s last words of wisdom to Grace, who asks how they should deal with potential future intruders into their home, also read like an apt instruction for us as viewers how to deal with these cinematic ghosts: “Sometimes we will sense them, sometimes we won’t.”

Sense hierarchies and perceptual reconfigurations This chapter has demonstrated that the cinematic complexity at work in The Sixth Sense and The Others is intrinsically connected with the themes of perception, embodiment, and mortality in these films, and thus their discussion needs to go beyond the notion of narrative and formal complexity. The twist sequences reframe the crisis experienced by the main protagonists, whereby death becomes a major theme that is linked with epistemological and ontological concerns. Looking at the role of the body and the senses and how they are figured in these stories of death and (dis)embodiment, the textural analysis of these films has shed light on the ways in which the characters’ phantom bodies allow them to temporarily

SEEING WHAT OTHERS CANNOT SEE

79

maintain their identity as living subjects while their pathological reliance on seeing and hearing simultaneously prevents them from becoming aware of their death. This inherent link between perception and embodiment is one of phenomenology’s key concerns. Elena del Rio writes that “if, as phenomenology teaches us, embodiment is an inescapable condition of human perception, it must be present in all forms of perception, even in those .  .  . that allegedly take place in a disembodied state” (2010: 114). Films like The Sixth Sense and The Others suggest that even in our fictitious imaginations of death, arguably the most radical state of disembodiment, the body and the senses indeed play a crucial role, given that their ghosts are characterized as sentient beings. With their emphasis on touch, on the one hand, both films appear to confirm Marks’s claim that “the close senses, which index both the material world and the materiality of the body that perceives with them, insist upon mortality” (2008: 129; emphasis in original). Yet on the other hand, it can equally be argued that both films make a stand for the opposite: Grace and Malcolm’s experience of mortality, their existential unawareness enabled only by their phantom bodies, asserts the significance of the lived body as the ultimate condition for all lived experience. Thus although both films ultimately (re)present death as the irreversible existential loss of the lived body, they also revalue the body and its carnal knowledge for us through the way they speak to our own lived experience as embodied human beings. Notably, the connection between death, perception, and the body is also reflected in a number of other mind-game films that combine a narrative twist with the “unconscious death” theme (Leiendecker 2013). Similar to The Sixth Sense and The Others, the eponymous protagonist Yella (Nina Hoss) in Christian Petzold’s Yella (2007) walks out of a river after a car crash, unaware that she has died, and takes on a new job in a different city.6 Throughout the film she experiences moments of intensified hearing, where sounds connected with her death—water, wind, a crow’s voice—act as disturbing forces that intrude on her present “life,” and which make sense to us only in retrospect. Marc Foster’s Stay (2005) too is based on the motif of the last seconds of life unfolding in the moment of dying. Yet here, rather than evolving into a story around characters that carry on with their lives as if nothing had happened, these moments expand into inner or alternative worlds (in a manner similar to other mind-game films that are set in an interior mind-space, for instance, Possible Worlds or Inception). Stay is a particularly striking example of how colors, textures, patterns, objects, sound snippets, and not least the people who try to resuscitate the film’s main protagonist Henry (Ryan Gosling), all seep into the atmosphere of the inner world that he creates. As his vitality is getting weaker, the more unstable this world becomes—a connection we only understand at the end of the film. Yet long before that there are jump-cuts, sudden perspective shifts, jarring cuts between spaces and canted geometrical patterns that

80

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

destabilize our embodied experience of this world with increasing tendency. The body in these films is more than just a necessary visual accessory then. The hypothetical reality of the phantom body and the perceptual disruptions that the characters experience deeply resonate with our embodied knowledge of what it means to be alive, and also and necessarily with its inversion: what it will mean to be dead. As epistemological twist films that subvert sight’s privileged role in film spectatorship, The Sixth Sense, The Others, and similar films also reverse the traditional (Western) hierarchy of the senses, in which vision and sound are valued as the “higher senses,” capable of generating knowledge and aesthetic experience, whereas the proximal senses are considered as lower in value and primarily regarded as vehicles of pleasure (Marks 2008: 127–28). The traditional five senses have often been ranked in the following order of importance: first comes sight, followed by hearing, and then smell, taste, and touch. Yet this order, which can be traced back to the ancient Greek, is not a fixed, physiological hierarchy of the senses. Neither the primacy of vision nor the privileging of the distant over the proximal senses are biological facts. Instead, the manner in which our sensorium is configured and individual senses are assigned various roles and values, from epistemological and aesthetic capacities to vehicles of pleasure and stimulation, depends on evolutionary, cultural, and historical circumstances, as well as on personal predispositions (Jütte 2004: 61–71). Moreover, individual senses can also be threatened or enhanced through technological advancements, and thus specific time periods, such as the era of industrialization and its accompanying pollution through noise and fumes, or inventions like the stethoscope or the microscope that sharpen the gaze, can greatly influence our perception of the world (2004: 180, 187). The cinema too is such a technology that can shape our perception, even though as audiovisual technology of perception and expression it seems predominantly suited to a mediation of sight and hearing (Sobchack 2004b: 137–38). Conventional terms for the act of watching a film make it easy to forget that our experience at the movies is always informed by the entire sensorium and the mutual cooperation of the senses: the term “spectator” is derived from the Latin verb spectare, which means “to look,” just like the term “audience” comes from the Latin verb audire, which means “to hear.” Sobchack’s term “cinesthetic subject,” by contrast, captures the multisensory dimension of film spectatorship, being an amalgamation of the terms “cinema,” “synesthesia” (the crossover of perception between different senses), and “coenaesthesia” (a term for one’s general awareness of bodily states and stimuli) (Sobchack 2004e: 67). Dismantling a disembodied mode of vision (as well as hearing), films like The Sixth Sense and The Others thus remind us that we never watch a film only with our eyes and ears, and increase our awareness of the other senses and their epistemological value.

SEEING WHAT OTHERS CANNOT SEE

81

Such epistemological reconfigurations of the senses can have implications for further viewings of the films as well. Since the twists irrevocably change our knowledge of the films’ ontological premises, the analytical focus on repeat viewings has often been on the question of how viewers engage in a reassessment and reinterpretation of narrative facts (Barratt 2009; Bordwell 2006; Lavik 2006). However, given that The Sixth Sense and The Others subvert our customary reliance on vision as a primary and privileged mode of access to a film, do repeat viewings merely consist of engaging with different narrative facts, or do we also engage differently with the films themselves? If we consider repeat viewings of The Sixth Sense and The Others in the context of an epistemological shift from disembodied vision to embodied perception, then the emphasis is on seeing things differently, rather than on figuring out how we were deceived or what clues we might have overlooked. For instance, a scene in which Cole has inexplicable knowledge of his school’s history and his teacher’s past and then almost collapses in a fit of rage during which he repeatedly yells, “stop looking at me,” now can be understood as being haunted by a ghost whose invisible presence is inscribed in the camera’s subtle shifts of position and movement. Listening out more deliberately for sounds, likewise, we might be struck by the echo of Malcolm’s footsteps on the pavement or the resonance of his voice. Notably, hearing is also linked to Malcolm finding his peace after he follows Cole’s advice to talk to Anna while she sleeps, thus the film suggests that with her eyes closed, she might be more perceptive toward his voice and, by extension, his ghostly existence. Chion sees an intrinsic link between the acousmêtre and cinematic representations of ghosts, for “the voice enjoys a certain proximity to the soul” and thus, “What could be more natural in a film than a dead person continuing to speak as a bodiless voice, wandering about the surface of the screen?” (1999: 47). Just like Malcolm’s footsteps—the sound of physical contact between feet and the ground—defy the notion that he has become an entirely immaterial apparition, his voice functions as a sonic signifier that testifies to his presence, rather than his absence. We might also become more perceptive of how the ghosts reaffirm their persistent material presence through physical contact, similar to the twist sequence in The Others. Consider how Malcolm smashes the glass door of Anna’s shop when he sees her in close embrace with a supposed rival who courts her; or how Cole’s dead grandmother moves the bumblebee pendant to another place in the house, which frequently frustrates Lynn and leads to her wrongly accuse Cole. One of the film’s well-known hints is that everything that has been touched by the ghosts is marked by the color red, such as the doorknob to Malcolm’s office that we often see him rattling in vain, or Cole’s makeshift tent in his room. While it makes little sense to assume that these and other items only turned red after the ghosts touched them, or vice versa, that the ghosts only touch red things, these tactile signifiers serve to increase

82

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

our awareness of touch. Aware that the film’s material world is not made visible for us in its entirety, and attuned to an embodied mode of vision, we might thus not merely regard the film’s numerous hints indicating both Malcolm’s death and the presence of other ghosts solely as visual cues and additional information that helps us to reinterpret the narrative, and instead engage with the film itself in a heightened state of perceptual awareness. We might further become more aware of the film’s embodied acts of perception and expression, what Sobchack calls its viewing view and its viewed view, shifting our attention not only to the film’s world as a visible, but also as a seen, heard, and bodily experience of a world.

2 Solving Things Differently

Mental pathologies and embodied experience in Memento and Fight Club “Facts, not memories—that’s how you investigate.” This is the modus operandi of Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), the main protagonist of Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000), and also the issue at the core of the film. Leonard suffers from anterograde amnesia, a rare memory disorder that prevents him from forming any new long-term memories.1 That he forgets everything he learns and experiences after approximately five to fifteen minutes severely complicates his mission to kill John G., a drug dealer on the run who, according to Leonard, has raped and murdered his wife and caused his condition. In order to compensate for his impairment, Leonard relies on an elaborate mnemonic system that includes habitually internalized tasks, annotated Polaroid photographs of people and places, and essential facts of his quest tattooed onto his body. The priority that Leonard assigns empirical facts over personal memories gets somewhat undermined though when it becomes evident how easily other characters, such as Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) or Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), manipulate him for their own benefit. Teddy is a corrupt cop who feigns friendship and exploits Leonard’s condition by delivering him a number of pseudo-John G. that match the evidence—really drug dealer accomplices he wants to get rid off—so that Leonard kills them. Natalie is the girlfriend of such a killed drug dealer and wants to take revenge on Teddy by turning Leonard against him. As if their double-crossing Leonard did not complicate things enough, at the end of the film Teddy suggests that Leonard’s wife survived the actual assault and died of an insulin overdose injected by Leonard himself. Brief ambiguous flashbacks and subliminal shots match Teddy’s version of the story and contradict Leonard’s account of the events, thus rendering him potentially unreliable and blurring the distinction between objective facts and subjective

84

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

memories even further. Confronted with Teddy’s uncomfortable version of his past, Leonard then turns the tables. He manipulates the “facts” in a way that will later, once his memory has reset, make him believe that Teddy is the John G. he is looking for, which ultimately leads him to shoot Teddy. While this may set things straight for Leonard, the truth about his backstory— and thus the narrative puzzle that Memento poses—is never unambiguously revealed. Anyone who has seen Memento will remember the film not just for the story but for its equally intricate plot. Memento is well known for its two main alternating timelines: one is shot in black and white and progresses in a forward linear order; the other is shot in color and is temporally reversed. That is, although each sequence of the color timeline (with the exception of the opening sequence) moves temporally forward in itself, the sequences follow on from each other in a backward chronological order. Starting with Leonard murdering Teddy in some abandoned industrial area and ending at the same place with his murder of Jimmy Grants (one of Teddy’s pseudoJohn G.) in the final sequence, this timeline is dedicated to Leonard’s pursuit of John G. By contrast, the forward-directed monochrome timeline is set predominantly in Leonard’s motel room and contains little action. Instead, it shows Leonard alone with his collection of facts and evidence, having phone conversations with Teddy, and getting increasingly paranoid. The alternation of these two timelines results not only in a discrepancy between story time and screen time but also in a reversal of cause and effect. This challenges our habitual narrative comprehension skills considerably because we have to make sense of a cause only after we have seen its effect (Ghislotti 2009; Carroll 2009). Requiring us to recollect the events of previous scene(s) and reinterpret them as consequences of the actions of each current scene, Memento thus provides a meta-experience in which we are “invited to use [our] cognitive and memorial skills to comprehend what the main character is unable to master” and, as far as memory is concerned, “can ‘feel’ our own capabilities, because the main character lacks his own” (Ghislotti 2009: 105). Yet even though our own memory in all likelihood functions much better than Leonard’s, the plot structure makes it difficult for us to fully grasp all aspects of the film, especially when watching Memento for the first time. Not memory loss but an imagination spinning out of control is the main trouble for Jack (Edward Norton),2 the narrator and main protagonist of David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999). Jack suffers from insomnia, hallucinations, and multiple personality disorder. Yet the full extent of his mental pathologies is only revealed toward the end of the film, when it turns out that his friend and co-conspirator, the charismatic Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), is only a figment of his schizoid mind. Tyler, as we are initially led to believe, is a chance acquaintance who saves Jack from a meaningless existence devoted to consumerism and not much else. Together they start a

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

85

popular underground fight club movement that later mutates into “Project Mayhem,” a revolutionary terrorist organization whose aim is to destroy the debt records of the population and wipe out capitalism. Both characters are also caught up in complicated relationships with Marla (Helena BonhamCarter), who, like the audience, does not realize that the extreme behavior of Jack/Tyler is due to his split personality. Most of the film is framed through Jack’s flashback perspective and voice-over narration, without upfront disclosure that he and Tyler are the same person. Similar to the effect of Memento’s non-linear double plot, Fight Club’s narrative form thus places us into a position that resembles Jack’s distorted state of mind. That is, we (mis)take Tyler for a real character throughout most of the film, and like Jack, we cannot distinguish between his and Tyler’s actions. As an ontological twist film that fits into the “concealed split personality” subcategory (Leiendecker 2013), Fight Club is sometimes likened to the previously discussed twist films The Sixth Sense and The Others, in which the twist leads to a conflict between a retrospective interpretation of the film and our actual experience of what we have seen. Yet aside from thematic differences, it is important to note that The Sixth Sense and The Others allow for the construction of an objective version of events, whereas Fincher’s film blurs the boundaries between subjective experience and objective representation to such a high level of indistinctness that a clear understanding of what might count as the film’s objective reality is obstructed, even in hindsight. Similar to The Sixth Sense and The Others, there are many ambiguous moments prone to reinterpretation. Like in The Sixth Sense, there is also a corrective flashback that provides alternative versions of previous scenes: Jack beating himself up in a parking lot, raising his beer bottle to an empty place next to him, or surveillance camera shots intercut with Jack’s version of a scene. However, while in The Sixth Sense and The Others there are two competing objective realities, each shared by two different groups of beings with distinct perpetual abilities, the crux in Fight Club is that Jack’s subjective reality is intermixed with, and superimposed on, what would count as the film’s objective reality, and thus the film presents a unique mode of experiencing and perceiving the world as it is available only to him. Moreover, Tyler’s persona and visual appearance, once he enters Jack’s life, dominate in many of the scenes and drive the action until the end, so that we would have to imagine an almost entirely different film in order to get an objective account of the fictional events, an activity that would seem to defeat the experience of watching the film in the first place. The way both Memento and Fight Club privilege their characters’ private experience over an objective version of the fictional world, a style of film narration that has been referred to as “subjective realism” (Campora 2014; Thanouli 2009), is a significant commonality between the two films. Such depiction of extreme character subjectivity is not exclusive to mind-game

86

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

films. Its popularity in mainstream narrative cinema is a characteristic of post-classical cinema (Thanouli 2009: 153–56) and can be seen in films as diverse as Requiem for a Dream (2000) and Amélie (2001), where the “representation of the psychological states and feelings is . . . significantly hypermediated and excessive, while it remains accessible and coherent for the viewers” (2009: 50). Nonetheless, Campora (2014) suggests that complex films or what he calls “multiform narratives” (a term borrowed from Janet Murray) are particularly prone to experiment with new forms of representing subjectivity on-screen, with examples ranging from relatively easily accessible films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) or Inception (2010), to the comparably more experimental and oblique Mulholland Drive (2001). With its overtly self-conscious narration, Fight Club is a prime example of this trend toward subjective realism. Its narrative form corresponds with Jack’s “innermost experiences and transforms the film entirely into his visual stream of consciousness” (Thanouli 2009: 153), whereby “the screen is taken over by his mental images” (Thanouli 2009: 154). Memento, likewise, is a subjective realist complex film because of the way in which narrative structure and the careful control of information make us empathize with Leonard, yet at the same time do not allow us to clearly distinguish between the character’s true and false/imagined memories (Campora 2014: 94–111). Because of their tendency to mislead viewers about the true extent of the mental conditions of their main characters and the lack of one overarching and unambiguous truth within their fictional worlds, both Memento and Fight Club have been discussed as films with unreliable narration (BrusbergKiermeier 2006; Ferenz 2009; Laass 2008; Steinke 2006). This approach is easily applied to Fight Club and similar films with a lying flashback, for instance, The Usual Suspects (1995). In such films, the main characters relay their story via voice-over and thus function as “pseudo-diegetic narrators” who “appear to be in charge of the images we see and the sounds we hear,” and who can be identified as the source of inconsistent and incorrect factual information (Ferenz 2009: 263). While there has been some debate over the applicability of the concept of unreliable narration to films like Memento and other complex films (including The Sixth Sense, The Others, Mulholland Drive, Spider (2002), Identity (2003), or The Machinist (2004)) that lack a voice-over narrator, Eva Laass (2008) argues that these films “clearly encourage the attribution of unreliable narration” because of their deceptive and misdirecting nature, and thus should be considered as examples of “implicit” unreliable narration (2008: 28). Her suggestion reflects a recent shift in the theory of unreliable narration, away from a narrator-based concept and instead toward an audience-centric approach, whereby the attribution of unreliable narration is considered as an interpretative strategy that helps viewers deal with incongruent and narrative material (Laass 2008: 30; Zerweck 2001). As such it is a cognitive mode of interpretation

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

87

that, in hindsight, allows us to disentangle ambiguous narrative information as either “objectively accurate” or “subjectively distorted” (Laass 2008: 44– 45), often in a way that identifies the characters deemed responsible for the distortion of the truth as deviant in terms of their psychological, moral, or cognitive dispositions (Laass 2008: 48–51). Altogether, the mental faculty3 emerges as a prominent dimension of Memento and Fight Club: first, as part of the story, where the characters’ conditions that led to the subjective distortion of the film’s objective reality are explicitly referred to as dysfunctions of the brain. In Memento, Sammy Jankis—a former client of Leonard’s who also has anterograde amnesia, and to whom he often refers to describe his predicament—is diagnosed with a damaged hippocampus. In Fight Club, the opening sequence starts in the amygdala, the fear center of Jack’s brain. Second, the films pose a cognitive challenge on a meta-level, because their non-linear, unreliable, and subjective modes of storytelling undermine traditional narrative experiences of cause and effect and the external representation of goal-centered protagonists, and require new sense-making strategies instead. One way, then, in which we can apprehend Memento, Fight Club, or similar films, is through refined strategies of reasoning and rationalization. For example, to find out the truth behind Leonard’s story, we might try solving Memento’s narrative puzzle by reordering the events in a linear fashion (Ghislotti 2009; Carroll 2009). Or we might attempt to determine what counts as objective reality in Memento or Fight Club, attributing narrative inconsistencies to subjective and objective focalization strategies, and interpret the films as unreliably narrated (Brusberg-Kiermeier 2006; Ferenz 2009; Laass 2008; Steinke 2006) or reimagine what we have seen (Wilson 2006; Wilson and Shpall 2012). With their combination of narrative complexity, subjective realism, and emphasis on mental themes, Memento and Fight Club are mind-game films in the most direct sense. Both films tell highly personal stories of characters who seem to have lost control over their minds and lives, and their narrative structures put the audience in a position that brings them closer to these dysfunctional states of mind than a traditional narrative would allow. Furthermore, both films are prime examples of what Elsaesser refers to as “productive pathologies”: an idea that applies to those mind-game films in which the main protagonists suffer from various mental disorders, most commonly amnesia and schizophrenia (2009: 24). Though perhaps the notion “to suffer” does not quite capture the key attribute of these pathologies, Elsaesser notes that mental illness in these films functions as a modus operandi rather than being a dysfunctional and incapacitating state of mind. He describes characters such as Leonard or Jack as “subjectivitiesin-action” (2009: 30), whose mental instabilities, despite constituting a handicap in some ways, are “assets and not just an affliction” (2009: 26). We can see this in Memento in the way Leonard’s elaborate mnemonic

88

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

coping system allows him to search for his wife’s killer and moreover to rid himself of Teddy in the end. Similarly in Fight Club, Jack’s alter ego Tyler is not only a symptom of, but also the improbable cure for, a deep-seated existential crisis that was triggered by the empty consumerist lifestyle he led. Thus for these characters, in Elsaesser’s words, “their disability functions as empowerment, and their minds, by seemingly losing control, gain a different kind of relation to the man-made, routinized, or automated surroundings” (2009: 31). Questions of truth and morality aside, then, what stands out about Leonard’s and Jack’s mental pathologies is that they are precisely not characterized as aberrant internal states of mind, but instead as altered ways of acting and being-in-the-world. Both Memento and Fight Club therefore reopen the question of embodiment in mind-game films, albeit under a different configuration. Although these films may present us with mental images at large, the ways in which dysfunctional mind and physical abilities are closely entwined in these films reflect the perspective of embodiment, according to which neither memory nor hallucination (or imagination in general) can be seen as cognitive processes alone. Both films are almost surprisingly physically driven, showcasing their main actors’ well-trained physique on several occasions. This is particularly noticeable in Fight Club, where Tyler Durden— supposedly a mere figment of Jack’s mind—regularly strips off his clothes and exposes his alter ego to a range of ambivalent tactile, kinesthetic, and visceral sensations. Moreover, with their rational and analytic sense-making skills and strategies suspended, both Leonard and Jack rely on embodied means of knowing things and assigning meaning to their experience. For example, in Memento tactile forms of knowing and remembering play an important part in Leonard’s mnemonic system and partially compensate for his cognitive deficiencies, while his reliance on embodied ways of learning new skills enables him to adapt and ultimately stand his ground against his cognitively unimpaired opponents. The relationship between knowledge, experience, and embodiment also pertains to the relation between spectator and film. The issue is not only that Memento and Fight Club are ambiguous to such a degree that definite objective versions of the stories they tell cannot be established. What is notable is the fact that conventional narrative closure, for instance, in the form of a clinical cure or the unshakeable truth, is neither sought by the characters nor presented as solution by the films themselves. So how do we, presumably in full command of our functional mental faculty, engage with the productive sides of these mentally disturbed characters and their subjective stories? To what extent do their embodied experiences, knowledge, and skills resonate with ours? And how, and at what level, do these films engage us beyond questions of narrative truth and coherence? In contrast to a solution-oriented approach that focuses on the penultimate part of a film as a moment that usually reveals the truth and provides closure, then, the

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

89

following readings of Memento and Fight Club will “begin at the beginning,” as the King in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland so famously insisted (1971: 106). By this I mean that this chapter will begin with an analysis of the opening sequence of each film. In their pre-narrative function, the opening sequences can be considered as epistemological entry-points to the story. Subsequently, I will turn my attention to the characters themselves: How do they know things about the world? How do they experience their world in a meaningful way? And how do the films draw on our own bodily registers in engaging us with these pathological characters and their altered ways of being-in-the-world?

Haptic openings, tactile beginnings Despite their diegetic integration into each film’s narrative action, the opening title sequences of Memento and Fight Club stand out through a self-conscious and expressive style that distinctly makes use of haptic images and sounds. This in itself may not be too remarkable. As Marks has observed, haptic images are often found in opening sequences of commercial cinema “as though to slowly ease the viewer into the story” (2000: 176–77). However, Marks further notes that the use of haptic imagery as a transitional device is particularly suited for films that “are predicated on the audience’s uncertain or false knowledge” because “haptic images .  .  . make viewers unsure of their relationship to the image and the knowledge it implies” (2000: 177). Among the examples she gives are The English Patient (1996) and The Usual Suspects (1995), the latter a complex twist film that reveals at the end that almost everything that we have seen has been a lying flashback in which real and fabricated events are indistinguishably interwoven. Haptic images in the opening sequences of Memento and Fight Club have such an epistemologically unsettling function too. They do not merely set up thematic links and narrative expectations. Confronting us with images that are familiar and unfamiliar at once, they arouse the tactile sensitivity of our bodies and make us perceptive toward the underlying embodied logic of each of these so-called mind-games or brain-teasers—a logic that often undermines, contradicts, or counterpoints each film’s objective and factoriented side.

Haptic and optical visuality in Memento’s opening sequence Initially Memento opens as a simple credit sequence. The display of studio graphics is followed by the names of the main cast and crew superimposed in short intervals onto a black screen. Simultaneously the melancholic

90

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

synthesizers of the score fade in and soon swell in volume so as to aurally attune us to the film’s main theme of loss and irreversibility. Once forty seconds have passed, the title appears in capital letters and cues the film’s first actual image to fade in. From then onward, the sequence is divided into two distinct parts. The first, lasting about seventy seconds, consists of a stationary close-up of a hand holding, and intermittently shaking, a Polaroid photograph. The photograph depicts a crime scene with a dead body, which will later be revealed to be the body of Teddy. The second part, lasting only thirty seconds and thus of a significantly shorter duration than the previous one, consists of a succession of fourteen shots that show some more details of the crime scene, including the act of murder itself. The difference between the two parts is also marked aurally: the stationary shot of the Polaroid is accompanied by a slow, almost grave synthetic string theme that poignantly evokes a feeling of sadness and loss; the second part comes with an indistinct and subtle ambient sound that confers a sense of unease and potential danger. Memento’s opening sequence, often considered a stylistically amplified variation of the backward progression of the plot (see, for instance, Ghislotti 2009: 93), connects Leonard’s quest with the film’s own tactile and uniquely temporal grasp of the world. From a narrative point of view, the moment that shows how Leonard kills Teddy and subsequently takes a photograph with his Polaroid camera to remind himself that he has completed his mission, is the story’s endpoint, even though we will only understand the full context of these events once we have watched the entire film. Experientially, the sequence stands out through its use of reverse motion cinematography, a startling effect similar to watching a film in real-time rewind mode, which was technically achieved through using a reverse magazine inside the camera (Mottram 2002: 132, 142). The first visible manifestation of this effect is the Polaroid photograph, which fades from developed image to blank photographic paper, followed by the reversed movement of objects and physical actions connected with the murder, such as the triggering of the gun. Furthermore, introducing one of the most salient features of Leonard’s mnemonic system—his use of Polaroid photography—Memento’s opening contains a meta-dimension that engages us with cinema as a technology and medium of perception and expression itself, or what Sobchack refers to as “the residual logic of the cinematic” (2004d: 161). In that way the sequence prefigures Memento’s theme of the irreversibility of time and actions in a manner that speaks directly to us as cinesthetic subjects. It also introduces us to both optic and haptic epistemologies as well as to the insolvable ambiguity between the facts and the feel of the film’s world. From its first moments, Memento demonstrates a film’s ability to bring us closer to an object than our own human eyes would ever allow us to do; and yet this does not necessarily result in a clear, sharp, and easyto-read image. As mentioned above, the film begins with a close-up of a

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

91

hand holding a Polaroid photograph diagonally into the frame, with the title “MEMENTO” in all-capitalized typeface still superimposed over the image. The camera is stationary, and if it was not for the hand’s slight quiver causing the photograph to flutter against the immobile frame, one might initially mistake the entire shot for a still image. The camera angle suggests that we are sharing the subjective viewpoint of the person holding the photograph, and yet the distance between camera and both hand and photograph is beyond the human eye’s minimum focal distance. This closeup of the Polaroid can be described as an image that is both optic and haptic at the same time, following Marks’s distinction (2000: 162). It is optic because it lets us immediately recognize the object we see: in terms of representation there is nothing unclear or ambiguous about the mere fact that what we see is a human hand holding a Polaroid photograph, the latter distinctly marked by its white margins, with enough space at the bottom to hold it firmly between thumb and fingers without touching the image. Yet these optical qualities are juxtaposed with haptic ones that hinder a clear sense of the situation we are witnessing. The image is rendered flat through a shallow depth of field that leaves the monocolored background indistinct. The low-key lighting of the overall shot and the low quality of the Polaroid itself make it difficult to discern the details of the photographed scene. Large red blots on a tiled wall and an unidentifiable blue bundle in the shape of a human body suggest that the photograph might bear testimony to a crime scene, but the colors bleed into each other and wash out the contours. Marks’s distinction between haptic and optic concerns not only a film’s intrinsic qualities but also the way in which it is perceived. She writes that “a film or video (or painting or photograph) may offer haptic images, while the term haptic visuality emphasizes the viewer’s inclination to perceive them” (2000: 162; emphasis in original). The same goes for optical images and optical visuality. Far from terminological hairsplitting, this distinction is as

FIGURE 6 The opening shot of Memento (2001).

92

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

subtle as it is significant, for it characterizes the relationship between viewer and film as variable and non-deterministic, rather than as a prescribed and fixed effect. Marks even notes that “any of us with moderately impaired vision can have a haptic viewing experience by removing our glasses when we go to the movies,” whereas other viewers “may be disposed to see haptically because of individual or cultural learning” (2000: 170). Vice versa, a film can have “intrinsic haptic qualities, to which a viewer may or may not respond” (2000: 170). Cinematic spectatorship, as Marks understands it, thus depends on individual and singular factors as much as cultural and historical ones. Applied to Memento’s close-up of the Polaroid, we can say that it has such “intrinsic haptic qualities” that prevent immediate narrative immersion and indeed invite the kind of spectatorial engagement that Marks calls haptic visuality. In this mode of engagement, our eyes tend “to graze rather than to gaze” over the surface of an image (2000: 162), dwelling upon textural details such as the lines of the skin, the play of light and shadow, or the materiality of the image itself, for example, its grain or scratches that are specific to the medium of cinema (2000: 162–63, 170–76). However, a viewer’s inclination toward perceiving the opening shot in a more or less haptic way, or even the intensity with which they do so, also depends on their personal familiarity with a Polaroid camera itself. Its narrative significance and representational context still unknown to us, the Polaroid’s texture and blurry image and the way the film foregrounds the material process of its creation amplify the intrinsic haptic attributes of the opening shot. The fascination instant cameras hold for us is best explained by contrasting them with their conventional analog counterparts. Unlike a conventional (analog) photograph, taken at one point in the past and delivered as a fixed image and object at a much later time, the specificity of instant photographs lies in their self-developing nature and resulting temporal immediacy. An instant (photographic) camera already contains the photographic paper, whose multiple layers already contain all the chemicals necessary to develop a photograph. This combination allows it to create both image and object within approximately one minute after the event. Furthermore, the self-developing process through which a Polaroid photograph slowly comes into being foregrounds the materiality of the process itself: an emerging visual imprint bearing witness to a moment just gone by, already frozen in time but not quite yet visibly fixed. The close-up of the Polaroid in Memento’s opening shot immediately draws our attention to this double-status as both material artifact and visual reproduction, something to hold and behold at the same time. The longer the opening shot continues, the more it attracts both our haptic and optical attention at the same time. This need not be seen as a contradiction, as haptic and optical visuality are not mutually exclusive terms. “The difference between haptic and optical visuality is a matter of degree,” as Marks asserts: “In most processes of seeing, both are involved,

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

93

in a dialectical movement from far to near” (2000: 163). As further credits continue to fade in and out, the hand starts shaking the Polaroid intermittently, a medium-specific gesture of impatience indicating that the self-processing photograph has been taken seconds before and is yet to fully develop. A sense of eager anticipation may also befall us in this moment. More and more wavering between optical and haptic modes of engagement, we might start asking factual questions: Is what we see on the photo really a body? If so, is the person holding it the murderer? If so, why did he or she do it? But we might also develop an increasingly haptic fascination with the Polaroid itself and its visibly transforming surface. “Both film and video become more haptic as they die,” writes Marks further of haptic images (2000: 172). She describes an almost intrinsic connection between haptic images, (analog) film, death, and temporal irreversibility: “Every time we watch a film, we witness its gradual decay: another scratch, more fading as it is exposed to the light, and chemical deterioration, especially with color film” (2000: 172). Yet in Memento’s opening sequence it is the opposite of decay that has this effect: because of the reverse motion cinematography, the image is “un-decaying” and “undeveloping” before our eyes. The colors desaturate instead of becoming clearer, and the shapes progressively lose their contours instead of becoming more defined, until—after altogether seventy seconds of screen time—there is nothing left to see but a blank white piece of photographic paper, along with Christopher Nolan’s name superimposed as the last line of the credits. Thus much to our bewilderment, the longer we look the less we see: the disappearing photograph, now an invisible rather than visible imprint of the photographed event, has transformed from an optical into a haptic image, inciting “an acute awareness that the thing seen evades vision and must be approached through other senses” (Marks 2000: 191).

FIGURE 7 The disappearing Polaroid in Memento’s opening sequence (2001).

94

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

The disappearance of the photograph marks the transition between the long-drawn-out, contemplative gaze of the first part of the opening sequence and the much quicker succession of shots of the second part. And if until here we have not had much time to consciously grasp the uncanny oddity of the fading photograph, the actions of the second part corroborate that we are witnessing the “re-unfolding” of events in real-time temporal reverse. A swift cut to a frontal medium close-up shows the hand fiddling with the photograph once more. Then, the hand, closely tracked by the film’s mobile gaze, passes it on to the other hand, which inserts it back into the camera’s slot. Next, the camera swallows the photograph; the distinct sound of a shutter is heard; a flash is triggered; the hand pushes the shutter release button; and finally, the film pans upward to allow us a first glimpse of Leonard’s face. The direction of his stare corresponds with the direction the Polaroid camera is pointed at, yet the film still denies us a view of the overall scene. Instead, a succession of close-ups, some of them extreme close-ups marked by minimal depth of field, reveals details that clearly suggest a crime scene: a bullet on the floor; blood oozing up (not down!) a wall; a pair of shattered glasses; and lastly the head of a lifeless person in a puddle of blood and dirt. Subsequently, the scene fully appears to come to life: a gun leaps backward into Leonard’s stretched-out arm; the bullet case starts rolling across the floor; the glasses magically lift up in the air as if pulled by invisible strings and eventually jump back onto the face of the man lying on the floor; the bullet jumps back into the gun which is then fired by Leonard; and finally, the dead man (Teddy) comes to live again, eerily re-animated through the film’s reversal of time. As he turns his head toward Leonard and the camera with a muffled scream the film cuts him off, a moment which brings the opening sequence to its end. Even more so than the Polaroid’s visible surface fading into whiteness, the reverse motion cinematography in the second part of Memento’s opening sequence has a deeply unsettling effect. Sobchack writes that the experience of watching reverse motion cinematography is particularly “unheimlich . . . when it is put to the service of a narrative or thematic emphasis on the essential irreversibility of human temporality and physical animation, and on mortality” (2000: 135). This is true of Memento’s opening sequence, which makes palpable the connection between time and the body—not just our human but also the film’s body. Unlike a film, the human body is limited by its irrevocable forward momentum, and thus the sequence plays on our own bodies’ lived temporality. Since we know that the reversal of time is physically impossible, the reverse motion cinematography gives rise to a conflict between our bodies sensing the film’s images streaming forward, and our eyes seeing the reverse momentum on-screen. The unnatural jerkiness of the movements we see incites a latent sense of embodied unease, a haptic effect that is fortified through the extreme close-ups and the shallow depth of field that foreground the texture of objects linked to Teddy’s murder.

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

95

In particular the bullet is not just visual evidence of a crime scene but linked to it through its concrete thingness itself: a tiny object with substantial physical impact and the power to end a life. The uncanny experience engendered by the reverse motion cinematography is fortified by medium-specific traits of the photograph and the film, and the different aesthetic responses each engenders. Sobchack, drawing on seminal writings on photography such as Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1980) and André Bazin’s “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (1967), describes how a photograph serves to “fix a ‘being-that-has-been’” and “has something to do with loss, with pastness, and with death” (Sobchack 2004d: 146). A film, by contrast, functions as “a ‘coming-into-being’” and “has something more to do with life and the accumulation of experience—not its loss” (2004d: 146; emphasis in original). Thus while still photography is inherently linked with mortality, a film, due to its capacity for movement and its continuously forward streaming images, is associated with life: “The photograph freezes and preserves the homogeneous and irreversible momentum of a moment” (2004d: 144; emphasis in original), whereas the cinema transforms the latter by way of its “subjectively experienced temporalization of an essential moment into lived momentum” (2004d: 145; emphasis in original).4 Un-freezing the Polaroid’s visible imprint of Teddy’s dead body, and then letting the moment regain its momentum through the temporal reversal of the—de facto irreversible—progression of the actions that led to his death, Memento’s opening sequence thus neatly encapsulates how, according to Sobchack, the cinematic emerges out of the photographic: “Cinematic technology animates the photographic and reconstitutes its materiality, visibility, and perceptual verisimilitude in a difference not of degree but of kind. The moving picture is a visible representation not of activity finished or past but of activity coming into being and being” (2004d: 146). In that way Memento’s opening sequence lets us feel the difference between the temporality of the film’s body and our own. Both are bound to materiality and linearity, and yet the film is able to transcend time in a way our human lived bodies cannot. Thus Memento’s opening sequence is a meta-cinematic moment that foreshadows the film’s theme of the irreversibility of actions and the irrevocable difference between life and death. One common line of interpretation is to suggest that the opening sequence, and in particular the fading photograph, is a representation of Leonard’s inability to form new (visual) memories from his experiences. Such an allegorical reading makes sense, given also the role of instant photography in Leonard’s mnemonic system. As we will soon learn, the Polaroids partially substitute his visual memory and provide optical links to important places and possessions, as well as to the people he interacts with. However, memory as a form of perception is not a solely visual process, a point greatly emphasized by Marks throughout The Skin of the Film (2000). Nor, as we

96

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

have just seen, is a photograph (and, by extension, a film) reducible to its optical aspects alone. Foregrounding some of the material characteristics of celluloid photography—the emulsion, the paper, its indexical nature, the chemical process, and the possibility of its decay—the sequence exemplifies Sobchack’s description of how a “photograph’s film emulsions [are] analogically marked with (and objectively ‘capturing’) material traces of the world’s concrete and ‘real’ existence” (2004d: 142). Her understanding of a photograph as “filled with a currency of the real” (2004d: 143) is evidently tied to analog technology. To highlight photography’s indexical powers might strike one as anachronistic at the beginning of the twenty-first century, where the prevalence of digital recording and postproduction possibilities have pushed the manipulability of photographs and films to new, unprecedented levels, an issue also acknowledged by Sobchack herself (2004d: 142, n. 12).5 And yet as we shall see later on, in relying on a technology that was already outdated at the time of the film’s making, Leonard places a high emphasis on precisely those material and indexical qualities.6 The disappearing Polaroid in Memento’s opening sequence is more than just a visual metaphor then: it is a concrete and material interface between different epistemological reference systems—haptic and optical knowledge, the facts and the feel of the film’s world, the causal and the associative order—that suffuse the entire film. Not only does it incite our narrative curiosity. It also fosters a haptic mode of viewing that encourages us to pay attention to the tactile qualities of objects and surfaces, and to consider what may lie beneath them, hidden from plain view yet available to other senses nonetheless.

Tactility and immersion in Fight Club’s opening sequence In contrast to Memento’s beginning, which derives its unsettling effect from emphasizing the film as a haptic surface and reversing the flow of cinematic time, Fight Club’s opening sequence deeply affects and potentially disturbs our body’s sense of position and direction far beyond the outer layers of the skin, making sure that we feel the film’s kinetic and visceral presence right from the start. Lasting approximately ninety seconds, it is of a similar duration to the opening of Memento. But beyond that they have little in common. Unlike Memento’s largely stationary camera and somber music, Fight Club opens with a nauseating, CGI-effected backward roller coaster ride that first leads along neuronal pathways and networks, then sweaty skin, and lastly the barrel of a gun stuck in its protagonist’s mouth. And while Memento slowly reveals the strangeness of what initially seems like a familiar image, Fight Club is unsettling from the beginning. With the help of CGI, the sequence takes us to a place that our own bodies could never inhabit themselves: Jack’s amygdala, the part of the brain associated with the

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

97

experience of emotions, and in particular the sensation of fear. Yet for most of us the inside of a human brain is not routinely familiar, and the microscopic detail of the CGI exceeds our own perceptual and bodily capacities, leaving us unsure how to apprehend the images we encounter. The disorientating geography of this cerebral world is as alien as the uncharted landscape of a planet in a science-fiction film, and its peculiar textures evoke sensations that oscillate between tactile curiosity and revulsion. A pounding drum & bass track, created by the Dust Brothers, musically amplifies the hyper-nervous feel of the sequence, pushing us to our limits if not beyond them, before the film even properly begins. Continuously wavering between pleasure and pain, altogether the sequence anticipates the range of conflicting bodily experiences that will come to define the relationship between Jack and Tyler throughout the main part of the film. Plunging its unsuspecting audience straight into the film’s innermost, deepest and darkest place, Fight Club’s opening initially denies any sense of visual orientation and calls on all our senses to stay alert. Once a thirtysecond display of studio logos has passed we are exposed to near pitchblackness, accompanied by electronic sound effects of no discernible origin. The latter immediately invoke a mode of hearing that can be described as haptic. In her brief discussion of sound Marks suggests that haptic sounds are perceived by our ears as undifferentiated “aural texture” rather than as “aural signs” that we consciously listen out for (2000: 183). The aural texture of the beginning of this sequence is not only indistinct but also unfamiliar: a strange gurgling is followed by a crackling white noise, a brief succession of musical beats, and a scratching sound reminiscent of a record being manipulated on turntables. And if the unknown source of these sounds already causes unease, this feeling is by no means mitigated when faint light lets us catch a first glimpse of a strange texture that neither our eyes nor any other part of our perceptive body can readily identify. Touch and the sensation of disgust are closely related, as Barker notes (2009b: 47). Without knowing exactly what these obscure surfaces are—some of them look furry, while others appear to be of a sticky viscosity—they remain something we would rather not feel against our skin. Thus right from the beginning, and throughout the sequence, the textural strangeness of the environment, amplified by the camera’s shallow depth of field, invokes a latent sense of haptic unease and aversion. As soon as Fight Club’s opening ride starts gaining momentum, conflicting kinesthetic sensations are added to this tactile ambiguity. Before long the camera starts pulling backward,7 not allowing much time for our eyes to dwell on the dark and fuzzy, moist and murky looking textures gliding past. Fast-hammering music now replaces the haptic sounds. The camera moves at a moderate pace at first, floating through a perilous gap between two horizontal planes. Suddenly, a gaseous black substance spouts from some nearby crater-like holes. As if triggered by this mysterious emission, the

98

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

FIGURE 8 Unfamiliar textures in Fight Club’s opening sequence (1999).

camera swiftly accelerates its backward movement, narrowly riding over a crest and then maneuvering a left-hand bend in a dizzying move. From then onward it continues swerving and skirting at variable speed along, and right through, an entangled network of fibers and narrow pathways. Yet despite its near impossible proximity to these surroundings, the camera pursues its course quite smoothly, without ever bumping into an obstacle, and completely unperturbed by the flurry of tiny particles whirling and buzzing around, veering and steering through this cerebral labyrinth with seemingly unbreakable confidence, narrowly missing yet always managing to avoid collision. The camera’s movement evokes the principle kinetic pleasure of the ride. Simultaneously, however, it stirs unease because it denies us a clear sense of direction. One of the most basic forms of kinesthetic empathy between the film’s body and ours, according to Barker, is a similar proprioceptive behavior. This is evident, for example, in the shared inclination to move through the world upright and forward (2009b: 81). In denying us precisely this forward direction, the backward pull of the immersive brain ride unsettles our body’s dominant mode of orientation: it is not just that we do not know where we are—we have no idea where we are going. With the camera’s reverse motion thus at odds with our bodies’ proprioceptive attitude toward the world, the ride has both an exciting and dizzying effect. The muscular empathy between viewer and film is not solely based on likeness. In fact one of the distinct kinetic pleasures of cinema is that films can move in ways we cannot. Barker describes how in particular actionadventure films generate a great deal of their attraction from playing on the kinetic differences between the film’s body and ours. Such films, with their high-speed chases and audacious escapes, often evoke a whole range of ambivalent sensations ranging from exhilaration to exhaustion, from tease and thrill to frustration and fear (2009b: 106–19). In some action films this leads to a “constant feeling of being pulled and yet pushed” at the

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

99

same time (2009b: 107). The same can also be said of Fight Club’s opening sequence, where it is indeed hard to determine whether we are being pushed or pulled by the film’s erratic traversal through Jack’s brain. Yet this ride is neither a chase nor an escape sequence in the direct sense. The film remains unclear on whether it is fleeing from or rushing after something. Rather than directing its attention and muscular energy toward another subject within its cinematic world, the film here celebrates its own kinetic abilities and presence, a cinematic joyride that indulges in thrilling and alarming its audience to equal degrees. Barker argues that such ambivalent kinetic sensations are even more common in recent CGI films, as these push the differences between the film’s body and our own to new extremes. She asserts that while we still experience CGI-generated movement as actual rather than as pseudomovement, the way in which a virtual camera moves feels different to physical camera movement nonetheless. With specific reference to some of Fight Club’s other CGI sequences, she suggests that tactile ambivalence might be inherent in such imagery because “these shots don’t correspond to our body’s experience at all” (Barker 2009b: 117–18). Considered from the perspective of kinesthetic empathy, CGI therefore not only concerns the relation between camera and pro-filmic reality. Rather, we also need to consider how it allows a film—and by extension its audiences—to kinetically inhabit unfamiliar spaces, and to experience the world in new and untested terms of speed, proximity, and distance that are neither available to human viewers nor to a physical camera. The common notion of CGI as visual effects is perhaps misleading then, because they are not just an optical phenomenon. Instead, CGI sequences such as Fight Club’s opening brain ride are haptic and kinetic explorations of cinema’s digital potential that afford novel embodied experiences, for both viewer and film.8 Once the camera exits the cerebral labyrinth of Jack’s brain through a hair follicle, in a smooth and effortless passage that only CGI can provide, it gradually dawns on us that we have been traveling through the inner spaces of a brain. Sobchack has famously described how her fingers carnally “knew” what she saw in the opening shot of The Piano (1993), before she consciously identified a blurred close-up of fingers (2004e: 61). Despite the defamiliarizing effect of microscopic enlargement, a similar sense of haptic recognition may befall us when the camera glides past some grotesquely magnified pores, beads of sweat, and facial hair, and lastly a metal rail that turns out to be the barrel of a gun stuck in Jack’s mouth. Here, the ride ends, and finally we appear to be back in familiar territory: the music fades out, and a seamless focal shift finally reveals the clearly identifiable image of a human face. Some viewers may well experience a sense of physical relief when the start of the narrative is signaled by the infamously ambiguous opening line of Jack’s voice-over: “People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden.” In the subsequently unfolding scene the film segues straight

100

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

into the narrative. Yet before looking at the entire film, another aspect of Fight Club’s opening sequence is left to address: the tactile ambiguity it evokes is as much owed to the textural qualities of Jack’s brain and the motion of the camera as it is to the sound. The drum & bass music, functioning as the film’s electronic pulse, significantly contributes to the accelerated feel and intensity of the ride, and it is here where the sequence touches us at our deepest. Far from attuning us gently to the film, the fast-hammering title track sets in immediately after the haptic sound effects mentioned earlier.9 In combination with the stroboscopic lightning flashes that intermittently illuminate the dark surroundings for a few split seconds, along with the phosphorescent light that pulsates through some of the fiber cables, it sets an atmosphere evocative of the flickering frenzy of an underground techno-club. Compared with the sound level of the remainder of the film, its relative volume is clearly meant to have significant impact. Fast syncopated break-beats and several intersecting drum loops— typical characteristics of drum & bass music—convey a sense of nervous energy and propelling urgency. While lower frequency beats impel the 4/4 rhythms throughout, high-pitched screeching and shrieking sounds pierce through the darkness at several moments. The music adds to the hyper-nervous feel of the sequence in more than one way. To begin with, it amplifies the kinetic appeal of the ride. In fact, anyone at home watching the sequence with muted sound would find that, stripped of its sonic counterpart, the journey through Jack’s brain suddenly feels much slower, almost ungainly so. Johnson (2007) argues that music, as a temporal art form, shares an intrinsic connection with movement. According to him, “Music is meaningful because it can present the flow of human experience, feeling, and thinking in concrete, embodied forms” and “appeals to our felt sense of life” (2007: 236). It is thus through our body’s understanding of time and motion that we can grasp music as a non-representational form of expression. While it ultimately depends on individual and cultural predispositions whether one finds joy or discomfort in drum & bass, a very particular kind of contemporary music of the late 1990s, our bodies generally can relate to the “felt sense of life” that it calls on in a non-judgmental and non-reflective way. However, similar to the kinetic ambivalence evoked by the backward ride, the opening title track leads to an experiential conflict between our bodies’ predisposition to respond to the music and our actual situation of being seated in front of a screen. Its breakneck tempo teases our inclination to get up and get moving again, rather than sit still for another two hours to watch a film, and some viewers may well find that their feet are eagerly tapping along to the beat. Rhythmically regulating the film’s passage through a space that in itself is distinctly visceral, the music in Fight Club’s opening sequence further interferes latently with our bodily rhythms. Our visceral connection with a film, according to Barker (2009b), is the third element of cinematic tactility.

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

101

She suggests that this deep mode of cinematic experience stems from similar temporal structures of embodiment, arguing that “we find a film’s rhythms riveting, perhaps even eerily human, because they are, in fact, founded on and perpetually indebted to our own imperceptible human rhythms” (2009b: 128). To illustrate the idea of the cinematic viscera, she likens a number of a film’s mechanical components to human inner organs, writing that “power source, light source, sprocket holes, projector’s gate, and other parts of the mechanism keep light and celluloid moving through the camera and projector in the same way that our viscera keep blood and other vital fluids moving through our bodies” (2009b: 127). Yet she also emphasizes that “the idea of the viscera as something common to both viewer and film hinges more on function than on biology or mechanics” (2009b: 126). In light of the close connection between music, motion, and temporality, it is possible to argue that a film’s musical beats and rhythms have a visceral function and effect as well, and Fight Club’s opening title track is a perfect case in point. Although there is no straightforward causal relation between our own heartbeat and that of the film, the loud and fast-paced music in this sequence may lead some viewers to experience a sense of visceral unease, perhaps even propel an uncomfortable quickening of their pulse. Listening to music played at high volume can have a deep and full-bodied impact. For instance, Don Ihde recounts an experience that anyone who has ever stood too closely to the speakers at a rock concert or in a techno-club will most certainly find familiar: “The bass notes reverberate in my stomach, and even my feet ‘hear’ the sound of the auditory orgy” (1976: 45).10 The visceral connection between music and the body becomes even more evident through the way both human heart rate and musical tempo can be referred to as “pulse,” and can be measured in beats per minute (bpm), a value that is particularly important for electronic dance music such as drum & bass, where this information is often explicitly added to a song. In Fight Club’s title track, the most dominant rhythmic element is an underlying bass track pounding at eighty-three beats per minute. This beat is still located in the upper range of what would be considered normal within the range of human heart rates, which are roughly between 60 and 100 bpm. Yet there is also a two times faster drum loop that, at 166 bpm, is significantly quicker than anyone’s healthy resting pulse. Our bodies are thus required to resist the impulse to attune themselves to the film entirely, and yet the music’s fullblown intensity is a pervasive force that is hard to withstand. Implicit in the understanding of a kinetic and visceral connection between music and the body is the notion that the perception of sound is not limited to the ears, which is an aspect of cinematic spectatorship that tends to be overlooked even by those theorists that understand it as an embodied activity. Consider for instance Marks’s differentiation between the “haptic hearing” of indistinct ambient sounds as opposed to a more

102

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

concentrated and directed effort of listening out for particular noises (2000: 183). Though useful to describe different modes of aural engagement with a film, this concept of sound and embodied spectatorship is limited by the assumption that we only perceive sounds with the ears. “My ears are at best the focal organs of hearing,” as Ihde acknowledges the part of the body most commonly associated with sound (1976: 45; emphasis in original). However, he emphasizes that sound gets absorbed by and becomes meaningful through the whole body: “Sound permeates and penetrates my bodily being” (1976: 45). A similar point, but more specifically about film sound, is made by Steven Connor, who writes that “the sound of the screen is not ‘on’ the screen, but in the listener” (2000: n.p.). Such a sonic understanding of sound, based on the fact that sound travels in the form of invisible waves that can touch every part of the body, is not to say that hearing is not important to understand its effects. Rather, it expands our understanding of how sound contributes to cinematic spectatorship, shedding light on the possibility that film music enables a more intimate relationship between viewer and film than vision ever could. Indeed, Fight Club’s opening sequence visually obscures a number of boundaries to the effect of indistinctness, such as the seamless CGI ride that defies the idea of a boundary between the inside and outside of Jack’s brain. Yet it is the transgressive, perhaps even invasive effect of sound and music, that most immediately implicates the spectator in this spectacle, overcoming the skin as a barrier, and transcending the notion of a clearly defined boundary between viewer and film. Other readings of Fight Club’s opening sequence, aside from pointing out the immediate narrative context of Jack being under threat and experiencing fear, often focus on the thematic link between Tyler’s ambiguous status as a figment of Jack’s dysfunctional mind-brain and the theme of mental illness. For example, Anthrin Steinke suggests that Fight Club’s opening sequence makes visible the association processes and rhizomatic thought-patterns that underlie the entire narrative as an organizing principle (2006: 149–51). In a similar vein, Patricia Pisters (2012) emphasizes rhizomatic thinking and the neuroscientific details of the sequence in support of her claim that a new type of image she coins the “neuro-image” has emerged in contemporary cinema. Following Deleuze’s dictum “the brain is the screen” for her Fight Club’s opening “exemplifies the fact that with the neuro-image we quite literally have moved into characters’ brain spaces” (2012: 14). This is true not only of Fight Club but of a number of contemporary films that indeed take place in such an interior world, one that is decidedly expressed in spatial terms (an issue that will be addressed in Chapter 3 of this book). However, as far as the main part of Fight Club is concerned, it is crucial that Tyler exists as an external projection in the world outside of Jack’s mind. Moreover, as my textural analysis of Fight Club’s opening sequence has demonstrated, the immersive brain ride yields a somatic experience that is owed to the tactile qualities of Jack’s brain as well as to the film’s kinetic

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

103

behavior and sound’s ability to transgress the bodily boundary between viewer and film. Just like the opening sequence, the remainder of the film therefore warrants an embodied approach, one that reaches beneath the haptic surface and extends to kinetic and visceral structures of embodiment. But first, I will turn my attention again to Memento and the way in which tactile epistemologies inform the film throughout. Although both films, once their opening sequences segue into the narrative, accommodate optical visuality to a stronger degree, they continue to encourage tactile modes of engagement, doing so to bring us intimately close to their mentally disturbed characters and the productive aspects of their conditions.

Tactile epistemologies and embodied knowledge in Memento Featuring an amnesiac detective as main protagonist, Memento joins a cinematic tradition that has prompted its frequent classification as a neonoir (Cameron 2008: 101; Knight and McKnight 2009: 147–66; Laass 2008: 201–09).11 However, looking primarily at Leonard’s dysfunctional side, his inability to recall his past experiences since the accident, provides only a partial view of this intriguing character. To recall Elsaesser’s notion of mind-game films as productive pathologies: characters like Leonard are “subjectivities-in-action” (2009: 30) whose mental impairments, despite constituting a handicap in some ways, are “assets and not just an affliction” (2009: 26). Leonard’s mnemonic system and his conscious reliance on embodied techniques of knowing and remembering when his cognitive memory fails him distinguish him not only from the typical noir hard-boiled detective but also, within the context of the film, from the incapacitated Sammy Jankis who, like Leonard, suffers from anterograde memory loss. Through Leonard’s unique way of being-in-the-world, Memento thus explicitly thematizes ways of understanding and being (un)familiar with the world. Memory is not only crucial for our sense of identity—knowing who we are and where we have come from (in the broadest sense of the term)— but also plays an important role in learning skills and the acquisition of knowledge. John Sutton (2009), who explores the complex interplay between the different kinds of memory in Memento, distinguishes between personal memory (remembering autobiographical events), factual memory (general knowledge about the past and the world), and embodied habit or procedural memory (knowing how to do things). All of these inform Leonard’s current experience and drive his actions, and by extension, the narrative of the film (2009: 66). Significantly, many of the different kinds of knowledge and memories that he relies on have a distinctly material and

104

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

tactile dimension. Yet the film does not set up rivalries, hierarchies, and binary oppositions between cognitive and embodied forms of knowledge. Rather, cognition and embodiment, along with optical and haptic modes of engagement, constitute a complex web of meaning in which the (in) disputable and irreversible narrative facts and the feel of the film’s world are interwoven if not entangled. Beyond addressing such epistemological issues through narrative and representation, Memento extends them to the level of spectatorship. As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, because we know about the future outcome of Leonard’s actions before we come to understand which events caused or preceded them,12 the film emulates—at least to a degree—Leonard’s experience for us. It is widely agreed upon that the two intersecting timelines and the reverse chronology of the color sequences pose a challenge to our cognitive capacities and short-term memory. Yet a plot-centered perspective accounts only for one aspect of the way Memento “puts us into Leonard’s epistemic shoes,” to borrow a phrase from Andrew Kania (2009a: 3). Namely, it considers our character engagement only in relation to his inability or lack. However, as I set out to demonstrate, the film also calls on our tactile and tacit familiarity with the world in order to engage us with Leonard’s way of being-in-the-world and with his remaining abilities, which are based on embodied epistemological techniques to a large extent. In the following sections I extend the discussion of haptic images and visuality in Memento’s opening sequence to a broader discussion of embodied knowledge in the film, for even though optical visuality becomes a more dominant mode of engagement after the opening sequence, our haptic engagement with the film does not end there. Tactile epistemologies, defined by Marks as those that “conceive of knowledge as something gained not on the model of vision but through physical contact” (2000: 138), permeate Memento as a whole. However, they are double-edged: on the one hand, the film haptically encourages us to take interest in Leonard beyond his role as a narrative agent, and to consider instead the way in which habit, “tacit knowledge” (Polanyi 1967), and other tactile and material forms of knowledge contribute to his “skillful coping” techniques (Dreyfus 2002). On the other hand, it is through haptic images and tactile knowledge that the film also raises further doubts about Leonard’s story, ultimately frustrating our expectation that the film might offer an unambiguous, objective, and true version in the end.

Leonard’s epistemological anchor: The feel of the world One of Leonard’s key challenges is that a significant part of his life-world permanently renews its strangeness in more or less regular intervals and

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

105

thus never ceases to be unfamiliar and uncertain. “But it’s not amnesia. I just can’t make new memories,” he explains the specifics of his condition— anterograde amnesia—to the motel’s receptionist Burt (Mark Boone Junior) early on in the film. This distinguishes it from total memory loss; yet it nonetheless complicates his life in a serious way. Because his current memory goes blank within a time frame of approximately ten to fifteen minutes, or whenever something unexpected distracts his conscious attention, he continually finds himself in circumstances whose prior context eludes his present understanding. When one is faced with such constant and potentially overwhelming unfamiliarity, even the most fundamental types of knowledge gain significance, for they provide comfort and serve as epistemological anchor. For Leonard, this fallback is what he refers to as “the feel of the world,” an intact part of his remaining factual memory that is essentially tactile knowledge (Sutton 2009: 67). About thirty minutes into the film, in a key scene between Leonard and Natalie, a visibly distressed and doubtridden Leonard engages her in a heated exchange of questions and mutual accusations. At the end he suddenly breaks down and the following dialogue takes place: NATALIE: LEONARD: NATALIE: LEONARD:

Trust yourself, trust your own judgment. You can question everything, you can never know anything for sure. There are things you know for sure. Such as? I know what that’s gonna sound like when I knock on it [Sound of someone knocking on wood]. I know what that’s gonna feel like when I pick it up. [He picks up a glass ashtray]. See? Certainties. It’s the kind of memory you take for granted. You know, I can remember so much. The feel of the world—and her—she is gone. And the present is trivia, which I scribble down as fucking notes.

With this statement Leonard explicitly articulates his reliance on perceptual knowledge in a moment where his cognitive short-term memory, along with his system of notes and evidence, has failed him yet again. His statement quoted at the beginning of the chapter—“Facts, not memories, that’s how you investigate”—must therefore be taken with caution. Contrariwise to his earlier insistence to rely only on objective and factual information, supposedly provided by his meticulous notes, here the knowledge he has acquired through subjective and bodily experience emerges as his most dependable alternative. Throughout the film Leonard indeed often operates and relies on tactile and subjective certainties, in particular in situations in which he finds himself lost, be it temporally, spatially, or emotionally. He repeatedly likens the process of regaining his grip on the world, whenever his memory has reset, to awakening in the morning, where we often gain

106

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

tactile awareness of our immediate surroundings before we open our eyes and visually adjust to our environment. In several scenes Leonard orientates himself in such a way, grasping hold of the things in his immediate proximity, as if reminding himself of “the feel of the world,” before visually exploring his wider surroundings. Similar to the way the convoluted plot aims to place us in a state of cognitive confusion akin to that of its main protagonist, Memento’s visual style mirrors Leonard’s tactile way of finding his bearings, inviting us to share the subjective feel of his world, and to consider epistemological alternatives to objective facts. Although the film does not entirely forego traditional establishing wide shots, many scenes open with a close-up or extreme close-up, followed by a mid-shot, before the framing distance gradually increases. The first scene after the opening sequence (the first scene of the forward progressing, monochrome timeline, and thus the other temporal end of Memento’s story) is exemplary in this regard. The first shot is an extreme close-up showing Leonard’s face in profile, with the camera slowly moving upward from his lips to his eye, drawing our attention to details of his skin rather than to his identity and role as a fictional character. Then, a progression of shots performs a gradual shift from haptic to optic visuality, from proximity to distance, from details and textures to visual and spatial orientation. First, there is an extreme close-up of a set of keys in a trinket bowl with Leonard’s hand grabbing them, his fingertips feeling over their surface. Next, there is a frontal close-up of Leonard’s face, his eyes skittishly moving around. Emulating his searching glance through sideways and upward movement, in the following two shots the camera starts scanning along the interiors, the walls, and the wardrobe, now framing things from a mid-distance. The last shot of the scene is a long shot: from a high-angle vantage point near the ceiling, a perspective resembling the view of a surveillance camera, we can see Leonard sitting on the bed in the middle of the anonymous motel room he has just described via voice-over, and of which we have thus far seen only very few interior details. Thrust so suddenly at an optical distance, we finally gain an overview of the room and Leonard’s position in it—and yet we are not necessarily any closer to understanding what is going on. Early on Memento thus makes it clear that we will have to be “thinking with [our] skin” and rely on our senses and “the intelligence of the perceiving body” (Marks 2000: 190). The previously cited dialogue works as an explicit reminder that what works for Leonard works for us too. Our experience of the film is shaped by the same basic certainties that he relies on, knowledge that we often take for granted. We do not need to see the surface Leonard knocks on, for example, in order to know that it is wooden. Our fingers know the smooth feel of a glassy object such as the ashtray he picks up, as well as its weight and its gravitational pull would we hold it in our own hands. This might sound trivial in any other context. Yet here it

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

107

FIGURE 9 Memento—Leonard’s feel of the world (2001).

is instructive for the way in which the film draws on our haptic familiarity with the world to help us stay in touch with its main character and not lose our narrative bearings. There are numerous close-ups and extreme closeups of objects that Leonard engages with, including those that he regards as clues, as well as everyday items that he simply picks up, such as the Bible he finds in a motel room drawer. Furthermore, at the beginning of each color sequence, there is a short moment of overlap that repeats the ending of the previous color sequence. These moments function as “mnemonic devices” that, from a cognitivist perspective, “encourage the viewer to make the operation of mental rotation, which consists in putting the events of the two sequences in the right chronological order, to verify the temporal and the causal relationships” (Ghislotti 2009: 96). Yet especially when these overlapping moments contain close-ups of things that Leonard grasps, such the Polaroids, they also work on a tactile level. Sobchack describes how in Repo Man (1984), “material signifiers,” rather than causality or character motivation, connect the scenes and establish a sense of coherence (2004d: 157). The mnemonic close-ups in Memento similarly provide tactile anchors to help us get a feel for the film’s world, even if we find it hard to follow the causal connection of the events at times.

Habit and routine The “feel of the world” is what gives Leonard assurance in situations when he is temporarily lost. Yet as Sutton notes, “Leonard’s spared capacities .  .  . extend much further than an acquaintance with the basic properties of things” (2009: 69). Particularly intriguing is the elaborate set of skills and techniques that Leonard has put in place to counteract the deficiencies of his cognitive memory. It comprises of an intricate personal map pinned

108

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

onto the wall of his room, annotated Polaroid photographs, an exclusive reliance on notes written in his own handwriting, and lastly, reading other people’s body language as well as effectively manipulating his own. But before exploring this mnemonic system in more detail, it is worth pointing out that the mere fact that he has managed to devise such a system is a remarkable feat in itself, given that the ability to memorize new facts and rules is the foundation of learning in the first place. Consider Sammy Jankis, a former client of Leonard’s from his earlier life as an insurance claim investigator. Like Leonard, Sammy had anterograde amnesia and serves as a case study to help illustrate the condition. As Leonard informs us, “Sammy could do the most complicated things as long as he had learned them before the accident.” However, he was unable to learn even the simplest new task, such as keeping a pen and a notepad to record phone calls. Leonard, by contrast, has successfully adapted and manages to live a relatively independent life. The key to Leonard’s adaptability lies in a highly disciplined regimen of “habit and routine,” a set of actions and techniques that are performed without the need for conscious recall and deliberation. Leonard himself casually downplays his achievement as a matter of “conditioning, acting on instinct,” a self-description that matches Elsaesser’s characterization of him as a “smart-bomb, a repeat-action projectile on autopilot” who has bypassed his cognitive deficits through inscribing “repetitive tasks into the body” (2009: 28), yet who can be willfully manipulated by strangers to further their own interests (2009: 29). The latter may be true and points to some of the flaws of Leonard’s mnemonic system; yet the notion of the preprogrammed body is nonetheless only a partial view of the skills that he has acquired, refined, and combined. It moreover does not do justice to the role of the body in this accomplishment. Merleau-Ponty explains bodily habits, or more generally the acquisition of new motor skills, as the result of a complex interaction between body, mind, and world. According to him, “It is the body which ‘understands’ in the acquisition of habit” (2002 [1945]: 167). He describes the ability to touch-type on a typewriter (or a computer keyboard, for that matter) as “knowledge in the hands” (2002 [1945]: 166). With that he accounts for a typist’s acquired skill to “know how to type without being able to say where the letters which make the words are to be found on the banks of the keys” (2002 [1945]: 166), thus drawing attention to the pre-reflective nature of numerous similar tasks that we learn to perform without having to think about them. An example from Memento is the way in which Leonard does not simply use the Polaroids as visual memory aids. He also habitually stores them in certain pockets, ordered by people, places, or possessions. Moreover, in any situation he finds himself in, he always and immediately knows which pocket he needs to reach to access the photograph that is relevant in a given instant. This ability to discern and act according to

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

109

different contexts without prior deliberation defies the common notion of such seemingly pre-programmed automatic patterns of behavior as a blind execution of a stimulus-response command. Rather, as Merleau-Ponty might say, Leonard’s reliance on habit is an embodied “process of grasping a new meaning” through the body (2002 [1945]: 177). Of course, as the notion of process implies, new habits are not formed overnight. A theory that sheds light on both the duration and the complexity of learning new tasks is Hubert L. Dreyfus’s (2002) theory of skill acquisition, which is based on Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of habit.13 Drawing a distinction between two forms of intelligence—bodily know-how and intellectual knowledge of rules and facts—Dreyfus describes five stages of learning: the novice, the advanced beginner, the competent, the proficient, and the expert performer stage. Each consists of a different configuration of conscious effort and bodily skill, and the less a learner consciously has to rely on rules and facts, the more expert they become (2002: 367–72). Given that Leonard’s intellectual ability to learn new rules and facts is impaired, we cannot fully transfer this model to Memento. And yet it is worth noting that Leonard has managed to partially overcome his cognitive limitations through tattooing the important facts of his quest and rules for certain tasks onto his body. Furthermore, he has evidently had time to practice his skills, and has become what Dreyfus would call a remarkably competent, perhaps even proficient performer. In many everyday situations, such as when asking for directions or when dealing with the motel receptionist, Leonard “simply sees what needs to be achieved, rather than deciding, by a calculative procedure, which of several possibilities should be selected” (Dreyfus 2002: 371). In some instants he even exhibits the “immediate intuitive situational response that is characteristic of expertise” (Dreyfus 2002: 372), for example, when he does not stall and panic when Dodd tries to shoot him, and instead escapes without having to think about it and later even reverses the chase. Perhaps the most salient example of Leonard’s “skillful coping” (Dreyfus 2002: 377) is the penultimate sequence in which Leonard finds out the truth about Teddy and subsequently, with an uncanny quickness, comes up with a plan of action that defies the limited time span of his intellectual memory. After a brief moment of shock and self-doubt, he “not only sees what needs to be achieved” (kill Teddy) but immediately “sees how to achieve this goal” (manipulate his facts and rules) (Dreyfus 2002: 371–72). Within a matter of minutes, in “a steady flow of skillful activity in response” to Teddy’s revelation (Dreyfus 2002: 377), he steals and throws away Teddy’s car keys to distract his opponent; adds the note “do not believe his lies” to Teddy’s Polaroid; burns the Polaroids of the dead Jimmy and of himself after killing the real John G.; and lastly writes down Teddy’s number plate along with the reminder to tattoo this as “Fact 6.” At first sight, this act of self-manipulation that sets off the entire causal chain of actions and events that until here we

110

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

have seen unfold in reverse may seem like a carefully hatched plan. And yet, Leonard does not hesitate for a minute or deliberate over different options and their potential outcomes and consequences. While many viewers, even after knowing all the facts, would still struggle to connect the causal links and implications of his decision in this very moment, he simply knows how to readjust the facts according to his bodily habits so that he can achieve his goal. Leonard therefore is not, as Elsaesser describes him, “the amnesiac hero [who] is in his pathology programmable like a weapon” (2009: 29). Rather, he is a survivor, as Natalie calls him in one scene, whose reliance on habit allows him to reconfigure his intellectual and tactile skills according to his condition. Or, as Merleau-Ponty might say, Leonard’s “body has understood . . . and assimilated a fresh core of significance” (2002 [1945]: 169). At the heart of Dreyfus’s distinction between factual knowledge and bodily know-how lies the idea that the acquisition of new motor skills is only possible through learning by doing. Leonard himself points this out, explaining that his process of internalizing new habits is “like how you learn riding a bicycle.” Given that, unlike Leonard, we do not perform any physical acts of repetition akin to his while watching the film, this raises the question to what extent Memento’s strategy to epistemologically align us with its main character may be limited in this regard. As many of us will likely remember from our first attempts at mounting a bicycle (or learning similar bodily activities), it is nearly impossible to master complex physical pursuits simply by watching someone else pushing the pedals: at some point our bodies need to directly experience the proprioceptive challenge of steering a frame on two wheels and practice the moves required to maintain balance and not fall to the ground. However, even though our spectatorial bodies are not directly carrying out any of the tasks we see on-screen, they are not entirely passive either. To recall, according to Barker, our capacity for kinesthetic empathy extends to the manner in which we engage with a film itself and not just its characters (2009b: 75). Certain camera movements or editing patterns can be considered as a cinematic bodily gesture that “evokes a corresponding, but not pre-determined, gesture from our bodies,” a corporeal response that might be as simple as tilting our heads to adapt to a tilted camera angle (2009b: 80, 91). Thus if, as Barker suggests, “the meaning and impact of [a film] makes itself felt in our muscles and tendons just as strongly as in our minds” (2009b: 119), then it is possible to argue that our kinesthetic memory can retain a film’s behavioral patterns as well, despite our situation of relative inertia. In a manner similar to Leonard’s reliance on habit and routine, Memento enacts repetitive patterns of behavior that facilitate the skillful coping of its spectators, teaching us new narrative comprehension skills in the process. A good example to illustrate this idea is the repetition of camera movement in Memento’s first and final sequence. Each time Leonard drives to the

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

111

abandoned industrial building where he kills both Jimmy and Teddy, a stealthy and slow-moving tracking shot approaches the site in exactly the same manner and direction. Especially as first-time viewers, our cognitive capacities might be too exhausted at this stage to consciously remember and recall this stylistic detail when watching the final sequence; yet our bodies may well remember this particular cinematic gesture, having formed tactile memories that differ from the factual memory of a film’s narrative clues and details. In a similar manner the regularly intersecting timelines and the mnemonic devices that bookend each color sequence can be seen as cinematic gestures that speak to the spectator’s attentive body and their sensorimotor learning abilities. Performed with persistent repetition, at the same time as they challenge our own habitual engagement with a film and our cognitive grip of the facts, they invite us to partake in the gestures of habit and routine that we witness on-screen, and thus directly engage us with Leonard’s process of repetition that allows him to cope.

Tacit skills and skillful coping Reinforcing the notion that Leonard’s reliance on habit and routine is an example of skillful coping, John Sutton points out that “the range of embodied memory capacities that Leonard labels ‘conditioning’ or ‘instinct’ . . . actually include some sophisticated skills” (2009: 68). One important skill that Leonard has acquired while working as an insurance claim investigator is paying attention to, and knowing how to read, other people’s body language. He further expresses an explicit preference to look people in the eyes when he talks to them, a nod to the popular notion that “eyes don’t lie.” Even though Leonard casually downplays these strategies as “acting on instinct,” he himself proves that such non-intellectual types of knowledge, often also referred to as intuition, are much more complex than an innate biological pattern of behavior. They vary, for example, according to social context, and moreover depend on cultural as much as individual factors, a fact that Leonard seems to be aware of when he explains: “If someone scratches their nose experts tell you it means they’re lying. It really means they’re nervous. People get nervous for all sorts of reasons.” Neither a physical stimulus-response reaction nor a hard fact that would hold up as the empirical evidence that Leonard elsewhere claims he prefers, his ability to read body language falls into the category of what Michael Polanyi (1967) has defined as “tacit knowledge.” With this concept Polanyi accounts for different types of everyday knowledge that often cannot be explained easily with deductive reasoning or even put into words. A good example is the ability to instantaneously pick up someone’s mood without

112

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

having to consciously reflect on it first. Requiring the perceptual registers of the body before the intellect, tacit knowledge is not learned through mentally internalizing a set of fixated rules—rather, it is available to us because we are embodied subjects (Polanyi 1967: 4–5). While Polanyi ultimately sets out to argue that all knowledge is based on subjective and bodily knowledge to some degree (1967: 15),14 tacit knowledge in particular is so ubiquitous that we tend to take it for granted; in fact it often only comes to our conscious attention in situations that are suffused with contradictions, ambiguities, or doubts. Indeed this applies to Memento, where Leonard deliberately relies on such knowledge to reduce his own uncertainty in social situations. In the process he also makes some of it more explicit, thus drawing our attention to it as well. Even though the socially most important form of tacit knowledge identified by Polanyi, the ability to recognize a familiar face (1967: 4–5), is unavailable to Leonard,15 tacit skills help him when dealing with other people. Trained through his prior experience before the accident, he now employs his knowledge of body language in a variety of social contexts. It is particularly useful in situations in which he has doubts about another person and needs to gauge their trustworthiness. Leonard may initially be at a disadvantage because he cannot remember the details of his relationships to Teddy or Natalie (and the space for notes on the Polaroids is limited, not to mention the often ambiguous nature of his notes). Yet he stays highly alert for signs of tension in their bodily conduct, as these could signal potential deceit. Tacit knowledge enables him, in his words, “to read through other people’s bullshit.” It also empowers him to act confidently in anticipation of social interactions. His expert eyes search for signs of recognition in other people’s glances so that, in turn, he can fake recognition himself (notably, a tactic also employed by Sammy Jankis). This strategy only fails when Leonard is supposed to meet Natalie and does not “recognize” her because she is wearing sunglasses. He further employs tacit techniques to modulate the impression he makes on others. For example, he often briefly pauses to straighten his shoulders before he enters a room, and puts on his best poker face to unsettle his vis-à-vis and disguise his insecurity. By contrast, whenever we see him alone in his motel room in the monochrome scenes, he seems at risk of losing his countenance, and we get a more authentic glimpse of what the real Leonard might feel like: nervous and skittish, even paranoid at times, with a facial expression that speaks of alienation and feeling lost. We, unlike Leonard, become more and more aware of the other characters’ duplicity, which culminates in Teddy’s revelation and alternative account of Leonard’s story in the final sequence. One might object, then, that Leonard’s reliance on tacit knowledge fails him nonetheless, given how blissfully ignorant he seems of the other characters’ deceit and the ease with which they manipulate him. For example, he quickly forgets

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

113

FIGURE 10 Tacit skills in Memento (2001).

Teddy’s and Burt’s candid confessions of exploiting his condition; or Natalie deliberately provoking him into hitting her by insulting him and his wife, only to allege Dodd beat her up and ask Leonard for help a few minutes later. Nonetheless, Leonard does outmaneuver Teddy in the final sequence when he willfully and successfully manipulates the “evidence” that will make him believe Teddy is the killer of his wife. Furthermore, on several occasions Leonard tricks and tests other people’s reliability through simulating to be affected by his own condition even when he is currently not, such as when he initially pretends not to know Teddy in the final sequence, only to take the latter by surprise and confront him about Jimmy Grants. Thus even though Leonard may not operate on a level playing field in terms of being able to trust other people, his reliance on tacit knowledge allows him to better his chances and sometimes even gain the upper hand. Following Leonard’s lead, Memento invites us to bring some of our own tacit knowledge into effect. Yet while for Leonard such knowledge minimizes the complexity of social interactions, the opposite is the case for us: it contributes to the entanglement of the story, whether we are aware of our tacit engagement with the film or not. Notwithstanding the differences between real-life social interactions and those that we witness on-screen, reading another person’s intentions through their body language is something we have learned to do on a habitual basis, and it applies to spectatorship just as much.16 In many of the dialogue scenes Memento stays near the characters, encouraging us to pay attention to what their eyes and other subtle bodily expressions might give away or conceal. Consider for example the diner sequence, in which Natalie meets Leonard to hand over the crucial piece of information about the license plate that will identify Teddy as John Edward Gammell, or “John G.” While this is Natalie and Leonard’s last meeting in the chronology of the story, it is

114

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

the first time we encounter Natalie in the progression of the plot, and we share much of Leonard’s uncertainty about her person and their mutual involvement. Initially she openly mocks Leonard for his condition and exhibits open disdain. Yet the perceptive registers of our ears also pick up the modulations of her voice, which seems to express genuine sympathy and affection for him later in the scene. A subtle change in her ambiguous smile, from derisive to mischievous, likewise leaves us wondering about the unspoken complicity between her and Leonard that is latent throughout their encounter. In that way, Memento not only draws on our tacit knowledge to let us share Leonard’s way of being in the world. It also invites us to form our own critical judgment of the film and its main characters, including Leonard. In a number of scenes, the shot/counter-shot pattern of a dialogue is disrupted with a cutaway to a close-up of a character’s hands fiddling with something, in a style that is distinctly reminiscent of the flashback shots that accompany Leonard’s account of body language. Significantly though, the film does not make a difference between Leonard and the other characters when it draws our attention to these signs of nervousness. In doing so, it suggests that Leonard too might have something to hide, subtly prompting us to question his character long before the final sequence casts a doubt on his version of the events. As Sutton observes, there are also moments in which Leonard might remember more than he is willing to admit (2009: 66). After hitting Natalie, for example, his attention is strangely drawn to his hands and knuckles, even though his demeanor suggests that he cannot consciously recall that he hit her. Such moments underscore that, ultimately, Leonard also effectively hides from us how much he actually remembers about his past. The basic premise of Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge is that “we can know more than we can tell” (1967: 4). What makes Memento such an ambiguous film is not just the ultimate lack of a single, definite, and objectively true version of Leonard’s background but also the ambivalence of the central characters, including Leonard. Has his wife survived the attack or not? Was there a second attacker or not? Was it Leonard who blackened parts of the police file? Was Leonard’s wife diabetic and the unwed Sammy Jankis a conman? Is Leonard a fugitive from a psychiatric institution? How many “John Gs” has Leonard killed so far? Notwithstanding the calculative malice with which Teddy and Natalie manipulate Leonard into performing actions that serve their own interests, rather than his, both characters also treat Leonard with compassion on numerous occasions. Leonard’s poker face on the other hand underscores that, ultimately, we do not know for sure what he knows and what drives him either. The difference between Leonard and us is, of course, that we do remember and collect information about the characters in a way he would not. Yet in denying us a clear and unambiguous solution to Leonard’s story, the film ultimately leaves it up to us to rely primarily on the hard facts or consider our subjective and intuitive knowledge as well.

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

115

Hidden from sight, revealed through touch: Material traces in Leonard’s mnemonic system In addition to tacit knowledge, there are other types of subjective and embodied epistemologies that play an integral part in Leonard’s mnemonic system, which is built on tactility and materiality as much as it is on visual, factual, and abstract information. His handwritten notes, Polaroid photographs, and tattoos are not merely optical reminders whose sole purpose is to reproduce visual memory snippets and provide objective facts. Rather, they imbue his system with material traces of his subjective experience that are meaningful only to him, and that intermingle with the objective facts of his quest. Handwritten notes are, at first glance, the perhaps least remarkable aspect of Leonard’s system. Yet while for ordinary people, scribbling down a note on a piece of paper may be merely a quick and convenient way to record a thought, explicitly relying on his own handwriting allows Leonard to store and authenticate essential information in a way he deems the most secure. Early on he tells us that he only trusts notes in his own handwriting because, “you have to be wary of other people writing stuff for you that is not gonna make sense or is gonna lead you astray.” The vigilance with which Leonard makes sure that no one, and in particular not Teddy, gets hold of any of the Polaroids, and only reluctantly writes down information Teddy gives him about Natalie, may even point to a latent degree of awareness that Leonard has of Teddy’s duplicitous companionship. In another scene Leonard detects that he is subject to a fraud in the motel because he spots a paper bag with his handwriting on it (though it is not without irony that he does not get the chance to write this information down, forgets it immediately thereafter, and thus continues to be charged for two rooms at the same time). Beyond their pragmatic function to record and verify factual information, the tactile dimension of common everyday handwriting practices such as to-do lists or paper notes allows Leonard to retain a tangible link to his immediate past. Much like a signature that proves the authenticity of a legal document, for Leonard handwriting functions an inscriptive method that provides him with material markers of his identity and recent personal history that he can no longer consciously recall. Polaroid photography, as mentioned previously in the discussion of the opening sequence, is another important component of Leonard’s mnemonic system. As an analog technology, it fits within the film’s overall emphasis on tactile and material forms of knowledge. The instant photographs that Leonard takes, annotates, and carries in his pockets provide not only visual clues about things, places, and people that Leonard has interacted with. Similar to his handwritten notes they bear tangible traces of his past, remnants of experiences that his mind is unable to remember and recall.

116

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

They tell Leonard: “I have touched this car before” (even if the Porsche he is driving has belonged to Jimmy Gants until recently); “I have been in this motel before” (even if he does not realize that he is being conned into renting out two different rooms at the same time); “I have met this person before” (even if he does not remember anything about them and does not even recognize their face). Enhanced by his handwritten notes on their white margins and backs, the Polaroids imbue his system with traces of his subjective experience, recollections that are meaningful only to him. Thus even though Leonard overestimates the factual accuracy and reliability of his method, Polaroid photography, for Leonard, “authenticates experience, others, and [himself] as empirically real” (Sobchack 2004e: 143) and adds “a real trace of personal experience” (2004e: 144). Much like the mind stores and remembers different types of information in a manner that cannot always be neatly compartmentalized, subjective and objective knowledge, personal memories and empirical facts, are not polar opposites in these photographs: they uniquely merge and validate each other and allow Leonard to maintain continuity in his personal experience despite his inability to form new memories in his mind. One of the most striking features of Leonard’s mnemonic system is the way he uses his body as an inscriptive surface, a practice that he considers to be a more extreme variation of his obsession with handwritten notes: “If you have a piece of information which is vital, writing on your body instead of on a piece of paper can be the answer. It’s just a permanent way of keeping a note,” he explains, shortly before revealing the full extent of the tattoos he has all over his body. They comprise of a number of general and personal reminders, such as “shave,” or “John G. has raped and murdered my wife,” as well as of the crucial facts that he believes will lead him to find John G., such as “white,” “male,” “drug dealer,” and “SG137IU” (the license plate number of Teddy’s car). However, even though these tattoos appear to store primarily factual information, in keeping with the emphasis on tactile epistemologies their significance extends much beyond the words and symbols that are visible on the surface of his skin. There are two different ways in which Leonard engages with his tattoos so as to refresh their meaning: one way is optical and consists of looking at them from a distance, sometimes even via a mirror; the other way is tactile and consists of retracing the words with his fingers. Though not exclusively, in particular the tattoo on the back of Leonard’s left hand that reads “remember Sammy Jankis” elicits such a tactile engagement. Sutton points out how, in several scenes, Leonard seems startled by this tattoo and rubs it almost compulsively, as if trying to retrieve additional information that is inaccessible to sight via touch, “allowing the words again to acquire their affective significance for him” (2009: 83). That this tattoo in particular—rather than the ones that remind him more immediately of his wife and his quest to kill John G.— provokes such an intimate mode of access suggests that it carries a hidden

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

117

meaning, one that is not as much etched onto Leonard’s skin but hidden underneath. Sutton writes of Memento that one of the film’s core themes is that “bodies, and the traces they conceal, carry the past, whether it is explicitly and fully detected or not” (2009: 67). While he focuses primarily on Leonard’s body, his observation can also be transferred to the relation between viewer and film. As Cameron argues, “Just as Leonard reads his own body in order to make sense of the past, the film itself becomes a ‘body’ marked with mnemonic traces, which the audience is invited to decipher” (2008: 97). Yet these mnemonic traces, inscribed into and concealed by the film’s celluloid skin, are not necessarily easy to access. Barker describes the skin—both human and cinematic—as a threshold and a contact zone at the same time. It “functions always as both a covering and an uncovering” and is “a functional boundary and mingling place between the inside and the outside of a body” (2009b: 28). Echoing Sutton’s observations about Memento, she describes how the film’s skin and ours come together in the cinematic experience: The revealing and concealing functions are enacted with every touch of my skin upon the film’s skin and vice versa. In the moment that my skin and the film’s skin press against or envelop one another, the film becomes accessible and transparent to me. At the same moment, though, it is also partially inaccessible and opaque, because I may touch the film’s surface, but I cannot touch either the entire process of its making or the pro-filmic world of which it is a trace. (2000b: 9) Just like Leonard is able to read his own body with his eyes as well as retrieve some of his hidden memories directly through touch, we as audience must approach Memento through tactility and not just vision alone if we want to unravel Leonard’s secret and understand his past. Yet even though Memento brings us as close as possible, deploying haptic images that distinctly emphasize and visibly enlarge this haptic contact zone, where Leonard’s skin, the film’s skin, and ours intermingle, we may ultimately have to accept that there are some hidden secrets that neither the film nor its character are prepared to lay bare.

Haptic entanglements Touch as a way to bring back buried memories adds further nuances to Leonard’s backstory during his recollections of his life before the accident, and it is here where haptic images resurface. In particular, the memories of his wife are explicitly based on tactility and the materiality of physical contact. Notably, he does not seem to have kept any photographs of her,

118

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

a peculiar absence that comes to the fore when Natalie shows him a snapshot of her and Jimmy posing as a happy couple, making us aware that Leonard seems to have no equivalent photograph to match. Instead, he holds on to a number of material keepsakes, some of which he even uses as props for a self-therapy ritual during which he attempts to relive the night of the accident with the help of a hired escort, only to burn these items afterward. As a result of Leonard’s reliance on such “fossils” (similar to Malcolm’s ring that Anna holds on to in The Sixth Sense) that bear invisible traces based on direct contact (Marks 2000: 84), for us his wife remains an elusive presence throughout most of the film. One notable exception, however, is an emotionally charged moment in which Natalie prompts Leonard to tell her more about her. When Leonard articulates a rather clichéd account of his wife’s visual beauty, Natalie interrupts him and says: “Don’t just recite the words—close your eyes and remember her” (the italics mark Natalie’s accentuations). Leonard indeed closes his eyes, and all diegetic sound is muted apart from his voice-over while a haptic montage of brief closeups and blurred, out-of-focus images allows us glimpses of his wife during ordinary domestic situations. Leonard’s account of what it feels like to remember “the little bits and pieces that you never bothered to put into words” until you get “the feel of a person” distinctly recalls Marks’s account of tactile memory as the “fabric of everyday experience that tends to elude verbal or visual records [that] is encoded in these [non-audiovisual; S.L.] senses” (2000: 130). Intensifying Leonard’s tactile memory at the expense of vision, the haptic images in the flashbacks are a tangible expression of the irrevocable dimension of his loss. However, haptic images gain a more nuanced and potentially subversive dimension when contrasted with the flashback scenes that show Leonard’s account of Sammy Jankis’s story, which are embedded in the monochrome sequences. Evenly lit and with little camera movement, this story within the story is the closest Memento’s visual style comes to a conventional narrative. Almost throughout all of these flashbacks, the camera stays at a greater distance to the characters than at any other time in the film. This optical style constitutes a stark contrast to, in particular, the haptic flashbacks of Leonard’s wife. It invokes a corresponding mode of optical visuality that “assumes that all the resources the viewer requires are available in the image” (Marks 2000: 163). And yet, in the end, Teddy’s insistence that Sammy was a swindler suggests that these optical images are the least truthful of everything that we have seen. Optical visuality is thus subverted here, as these flashbacks take us even further away from what may or may not be the truth of Memento, whereas the elusive haptic images of his wife may be closest and most intimately true moment of Leonard’s experience. Marks considers the difference between haptic and optical also in relation to narrative, where, according to her, “the haptic image forces the viewer

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

119

to contemplate the image itself instead of being pulled into the narrative” (2000: 163). While there is a certain slippage between haptic and optic visuality on the one hand, and narrative on the other (as well as a slight contradiction to her later assertion of the non-coercive relationship between film and viewer [2000: 170]),17 Marks’s distinction makes it tempting to apply it to Memento’s two main timelines, one monochrome and more reflective, the other in color and more action-oriented. Each of them engages us with different aspects of Leonard’s experience: his paranoia when he is alone in the motel room, and his confidence when he (inter)acts in the outside world. However, both timelines exhibit a range of haptic and optical qualities from which such a binary allocation would detract. For instance, both feature the infamous subliminal shots—Leonard instead of Sammy in the hospital, Leonard fiddling with a syringe—that can be considered as moments of haptic disruption because they are too brief to allow us a clear understanding of what we have seen. Yet, from a more holistic perspective, it is possible to consider Memento in its entirety as a haptic narrative.18 The temporal reversal of cause and effect, the repeated need to adjust and correct our understanding of the characters and their motivations, and the lack of clarity about Leonard’s personal history, altogether do not encourage the same kind of spectatorial absorption that a conventional linear (or optical) narrative would invite. They go not only against the forward linearity of our own lived experience but also against the grain of our habitual narrative comprehension skills. And even though Memento may lastly confirm narrative linearity and causality through the manner in which allows us to reconstruct Leonard’s actions and decisions in the end (Cameron 2008: 98), it challenges us not only to follow the reversed order of events in the color timeline but also to pay attention to the way in which the crosscutting of monochrome and color segments constantly fills in some gaps about his backstory, while opening others. Kania offers the image of the two black tiles on Leonard’s bathroom floor as a metaphor for the way we are constantly “connecting narrative dots,” just like Leonard is trying to identify links between his isolated and externalized memories captured in his notes, photographs, and tattoos (Kania 2009c: 167). Throughout the film, and closely connected with the tactile epistemologies Leonard relies on, there is indeed an associative logic at work in Memento that cross-links the divergent timelines and turns our actual viewing trajectory into a constant zigzagging. For example, when Leonard sets himself up to link Teddy with the identity of “John G.” in the film’s final scene, he sets fire to the Polaroid of Jimmy Grants, as well as to the one that allegedly shows himself after killing the real John G. Later (in chronological terms) he tells Natalie “you have to burn them” when she tries to destroy the Polaroid of Dodd by tearing it apart, yet even then these photographs do not dissolve into ashes but remain as an amalgamated mass. The act

120

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

of burning the Polaroids further recalls the scene in which Leonard burns the keepsakes of his wife. Throwing piece after piece into the flames, he mumbles, “I’ve probably done this before. Burned truck loads of your stuff. I can’t remember to forget you.” This associative link between the Polaroids and his memories suggests that both are of a stubborn material persistence and cannot easily be extinguished. In a similar way the film’s inscriptive surfaces—Leonard’s tattooed skin, the Polaroids carrying both visible and material imprints of past, the film’s skin itself—are connected through associative links that we can make sense of without needing to bring them into a causal or linear order. Altogether, Memento’s highly structured narrative forms a tightly woven, complex web of meaning in which the facts and the feel of the film are inextricably intertwined. While Leonard himself supposedly relies upon, and tries to assure us of, a clear-cut differentiation between facts and objective information on the one hand, and subjective personal memories on the other, according to Sutton (2009) the crux of Memento is that “information and experience do not remain neatly bounded within independent memory systems, as personal memory and embodied memory interact in subtle ways.” Instead, they are “layered” and “interwoven” and “seeping across” different reference systems throughout the film (Sutton 2009: 68). Just like Leonard’s elusive past and his futile quest defy a purely rational and factbased solution to his situation, we cannot solve the film’s puzzle through disentangling and unraveling the plot by focusing on the facts alone, for the more objective evidence we try to gather, the more contradictions and ambiguities come to light, and the more we get entangled in the facts and memories of the film. And perhaps the point, then, is not to determine whether we engage with the film in a more cognitive or bodily way, which would after all contradict the way Memento itself subverts such a dualistic view (Sutton 2009: 83). Rather, through exploring the tacit and tactile ways of knowing and remembering, this analysis has shown how the body uniquely shapes our subjective experience of this film and contributes to the ways in which we can make sense of this complex story.

Corporeal estrangement and embodied experience in Fight Club Characterized by aesthetic innovation and narrative hybridity, Fight Club, like many other mind-game films, does not easily fit traditional labels and is hard to place within established genre categories (Ramey 2012: 47).19 Critic Amy Taubin describes it as “an action film that’s all about interiority” (1999: n.p.). But we can also call it the opposite: a mind-game film that is all about exteriority and embodied experience, a film that asks what it means to feel

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

121

alive and in touch with the world. The most immediately apparent aspects of corporeality in Fight Club are the graphic depictions of sex, violence, and masculinity. Yet Jack’s mental crisis is rooted in a tactile alienation from the world that reaches down to the bodily depths of his entire self, and the film is interspersed with a wide range of ambiguously affective moments and sensuously charged situations that go beyond what is represented on the narrative surface. Moreover, the two main male characters, Jack and his alter ego Tyler, are not only distinct from each other through their political views and lifestyles but through their contrasting bodily styles and ways of being-in-the-world. The differences between them manifest in the surfaces, textures, and materialities they get close to, the activities and actions they take part in, and the deeper anxieties that drive them or that they are free from. However, it would be a simplified view to say that Tyler personifies lacking aspects of Jack’s life: more than merely embodying an opposite way of life, he also allows Jack to inhabit the world in ways other than his own and exposes him to new environments and new experiences, often pushing him—and us—out of the comfort zone. Aside from the representation of bodies on-screen, Fight Club’s notoriety can also be attributed to its capacity to elicit bodily responses from its audiences. Perhaps the best token of the range of sensations of escalating intensity that Fincher’s film evokes are the ambivalent reviews of the film. At the time of its initial release Fight Club polarized opinions, attracting critical praise as well as “a sack-load of negative and sometimes hysterical critical comment” to almost equal measures (Ramey 2012: 45). On the one hand, much of the controversy was sparked by the graphic depiction of sex and violence, as well as by Tyler’s morally ambiguous philosophy. Roger Ebert’s much-cited account of Fight Club as a “cheerfully fascist big-star movie,” a “celebration of violence” and “macho porn” is exemplary for the way some critics perceived the film as a glorification of male brutality and misogynist behavior (1999: n.p.). Many of the more favorable reviews, on the other hand, often employed body-based metaphors in describing the film’s aesthetic. They mention, for example, the “blistering, hyper-kinetic style” (Smith 2009, quoted in Ramey 2012: 56); the “kinetic style, visceral approach” and the “marriage of adrenaline and intelligence” (Berardinelli 1999, quoted in Ramey 2012: 57); or call it a “sustained adrenaline rush of a movie” (Rooney 1999, quoted in Ramey 2012: 58). These figures of speech suggest that in order to apprehend Fight Club’s affective appeal—or its repelling effect—we need to look beneath the visible surface of represented bodies on-screen. Since Fight Club, unlike many other mind-game films, seems predicated for a discussion of embodied spectatorship because of its prominent emphasis on bodies and bodily activities, let me add a pre-emptive caveat. Although there have been extensive discussions of the film’s representation of gender and embodiment (many of these with a focus on a crisis of masculinity),

122

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

much of this debate is not pertinent in the context of mind-game films, and a discussion of the literature about Fight Club and the representation of embodiment is beyond the scope of this chapter. This is not at all to suggest that the themes surrounding gender, culture, and the body in this film are not important. More than anything, this diversity of potential body-related approaches to the film makes it clear how problematic it is to speak of the body in a generalizing way in the first place. As Mark Johnson reminds us, “My body is never merely a thing; it is a lived body” (2007: 275), and this lived body consists of multiple dimensions. He differentiates between five different levels of embodiment: biological, ecological, phenomenological, social, and cultural (2007: 275–78). While these are complexly interwoven in the “corporeal rootedness” of all experience (2007: 278), a theoretical inquiry can specify its focus. By focusing primarily on the phenomenological level of embodiment, or what Barker describes as the pre-personal aspects of perception and subjectivity of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy (Barker 2009b: 17–18), this chapter sets out to reveal how the film enables us to relate to Jack’s predicament beyond the social and cultural dimensions of our own lived experience. The line of inquiry I pursue will pay particular attention to the tactile, kinetic, and visceral qualities that characterize Jack’s life during the early stages of his insomnia, as well as to his altered way of being-in-the-world once Tyler becomes a full flesh-and-blood presence within the film.

Reality, imagination, and hallucination There is only a fine line between imagination and hallucination. While slipping into a state of temporary reverie is usually an act of one’s own volition and based on a clear understanding of what is real and what is not, experiencing hallucinations entails a loss of both of these elements. This distinction contributes to Fight Club’s complexity, for even before Tyler is revealed to be a materialization of Jack’s dissociative personality disorder there are numerous scenes that visualize his wishful fantasies, such as when he imagines exposing Marla as a liar in the support group meetings, or when he dreams of a mid-air collision while on a plane trip. However, these scenes are immediately marked as fantasies, for instance, through his voice-over, or through showing how Jack wakes up in a plane seat next to Tyler. Only much later do we realize that this very moment in the plane does not mark Jack’s return to reality but instead depicts a crucial ontological shift, since it is here where Jack has his first conversation with Tyler and subsequently loses control over the distinction between reality and hallucination (Laass 2008: 160). Yet aside from mistaking Tyler for a real person, there is another way in which reality is at stake for Jack. This second type of reality loss is an

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

123

existential crisis of which his insomnia is one early symptom, and which in turn is innately connected to the way in which he perceives his life-world: “With insomnia, nothing is real. Everything is faraway. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy,” Jack describes the alienating effects of his chronic sleeplessness that marks the beginning of his story. The words “I couldn’t sleep” still echoing in the background, the film expresses Jack’s state of mind as a perceptual estrangement from his surroundings, where things often are either too close or too far. An extreme close-up of a disposable Starbucks coffee cup illuminated by the characteristic flashing of a photocopier oddly sliding past is followed by a medium shot that shows Jack operating a copy machine, opening his eyes with a startle, and then staring vacantly further afield past the camera. With a sudden shift of distance and depth of field the film then cuts to a long shot of an open plan office in which a number of people stand at copy machines in near identical postures, each of them staring in another direction and holding a Styrofoam cup in their hands. Notably, Tyler’s first out of four infamous subliminal appearances before he becomes a full flesh-and-blood character also occurs in this scene, flickering by just as a copy clerk walks past. Yet even if we do not notice Tyler’s presence, this entire scene has a slightly surreal quality. With its subtle blurring of lines between Jack’s subjective imagination/hallucination and the film world’s intersubjective reality, it is exemplary for the way in which Fight Club is inflected by Jack’s perception through and through, even in shots without his imaginary alter ego. Merleau-Ponty writes, “Hallucinations are played out on a stage different from that of the perceived world and are in a way superimposed” (2002 [1945]: 395). This reads like an apt description of Tyler’s role in the film: he may not be real in the empirical sense of the word; nonetheless he becomes an integral add-on in Jack’s perception of the world and “has the value of reality” for him (2002 [1945]: 399). Merleau-Ponty further suggests that hallucinations are to be read as a sign that for the person who experiences them “the morbid world is artificial and . . . lacks something needed to become a reality” (2002 [1945]: 390). Considered from this angle, Tyler can be understood as both a symptom of Jack’s reality loss and simultaneously the solution for his alienation from the world. Or, to take up again Elsaesser’s notion of mind-game films as productive pathology, Tyler’s coming-into-being empowers Jack to “gain a different kind of relation to . . . [his] surroundings” (2009: 31)—surroundings that had led him to become fundamentally estranged from himself in the first place. Indeed, as Tyler himself later explains to Jack, TYLER: You were looking for a way to change your life. You could not do this on your own. All the ways you wish you could be: that’s me. I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I’m smart, I’m capable, and most importantly, I’m free in all the ways that you are not.

124

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

From a psychoanalytical perspective, Tyler, with his hyper-masculine appearance and the overt allusions to his sexuality, can be considered a fleshed-out version of Jack’s Id, his instinct-driven alter ego that has taken on a life of its own in the form of an idealized and externalized body image. However, while the term “body image” might imply that this is purely an optical phenomenon, Gail Weiss offers a more nuanced understanding of this concept, suggesting that there is a multiplicity of body images that are copresent in any individual (1999: 2). Taking up (albeit critically) Merleau-Ponty and Paul Schilder’s respective notions of body images as corporeal styles or postural schemas, Weiss’s understanding of body images includes perception, motility, and corporeal agency (1999: 7–12). Such a phenomenological understanding of body images captures the way in which Tyler and Jack are characterized through different tactile, kinetic, and visceral styles of being-in-the-world. Thus even though Jack’s realization that he and Tyler are the same person marks an important turning point in the film, understanding the productive function of Tyler’s persona and how it helps “cure” Jack’s profound alienation from his life-world requires us to accept him as a real character in the same way that Jack perceives him.

Tactile alienation We say that someone is out of touch with reality, has lost touch with their friends, or is no longer in touch with their feelings. These common figures of speech suggest the extent to which tactility—or the lack thereof—can shape the experience of feeling alienated from the world and others, and even from oneself. In Fight Club, the novel, the narrator explicitly links his chronic sleeplessness with his tangibly alienating surroundings when he says, “you can’t touch anything, and nothing can touch you” (Palahniuk 1997 [1996]: 21). In the film this line is missing from the voice-over in the corresponding scene. Yet it is through invoking our own sense of touch that the film engages us with the tactile dimension of Jack’s estrangement, here and throughout. Akin to the sense of tactile unease evoked by Fight Club’s opening sequence, this often occurs in a manner that feels too close for comfort. Juxtaposing emotional distance and physical proximity, the film brings us close to the surfaces and textures that characterize Jack’s lifeworld, both the ones before and after he moves in with Tyler. The tactile regime that defines Jack’s life before meeting Tyler can be described as clean, polished, and impersonal, a perfect match for his life as an interchangeable white-collar worker. His work environment, artificially lit and dominated by veneer in matt green and beige tones, evokes an atmosphere of a bureaucratic efficiency. It conveniently detracts from the more gruesome particulars of his occupation. Jack works as a recall coordinator for a car company, where his main task is to assess car crashes

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

125

via a mathematic formula in order to determine whether a faulty product should be recalled. Frequent work-related travel to crash sites means that he spends a lot of time in planes, airports, and hotels, transitory spaces that Marc Augé refers to as “non-places” due to their anonymous nature (2002 [1995]: 86). According to Marks, such non-places also “bring with them certain sensory organizations” and often an “an increasingly visual, specifically optical and symbolic world” (2000: 244). Indeed, a montage of strictly optical close-ups of bright and shiny convenience food packages, sample size shampoo bottles, and other pre-packaged lifestyle products that are associated with Jack’s business trips testifies to the superficiality of a life where things are defined through names printed onto surfaces, but lack any personal touch. And yet there are cracks on the surface of this formal and artificial world: juxtaposed with these optical images are haptic close-ups that we eventually identify as images of the charred texture of a burnedout car, including traces of the mortal remains of the passengers. Shown while Jack recounts how statistics and economic viability matter more than human existence in his line of work, his morbid fascination with these gritty textures foreshadows his latent awareness of the disconnect between his life and the essential “stuff” that truly matters. Indicative of his consumerist lifestyle, a similar sense of tactile detachment pervades Jack’s after-work life. Via voice-over he informs us that he lives in a condominium on the fifteenth floor of a “filing cabinet for widows and young professionals.” More than just metaphorically, this removes him off the ground and moreover keeps him separated from other people through the one-foot thick concrete walls that shield the inhabitants from unwanted noise and, by extension, from each other. Filling his apartment with mass-produced design furniture—what he refers to as the “Ikea-nestinginstinct”—is the only activity he finds fulfilling, identifying with it to such a degree that he wonders, “which dining set defines me as a person,” and later tells Tyler, “I was close to being complete” (the italics mark Jack’s emphasis) after the explosion has destroyed everything. Yet in an intricately layered spatial montage sequence the film distinctly calls upon our sense of touch to expose Jack’s style of being as shallow and trivial. It begins with a low-angle camera gliding past the polished and plasticky surfaces of his bathroom and toward Jack, who is browsing through a furniture catalogue while sitting on the toilet. The camera is drawn in particular to the illustration of an empty room on the catalogue’s back cover on which the suggestive caption “Use your imagination” is printed. Soon enough this illustration takes up the entire screen with a dissolve, a technique that Barker calls a gesture of cinematic caress that “moves us from shot to shot by allowing the surface of one image to press against the other as they merge slowly” (2009b: 60). Here, the dissolve merges the page and the screen, inviting our sense of touch to feel the glossy tactility of a catalogue page and its shiny promises, a smooth surface our own fingers

126

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

most likely would have enjoyed running along countless times. Suddenly, as if Jack’s or perhaps even the film’s imagination itself was brought to life, furniture items start appearing in the image of the empty room, accompanied by captions that are typically found in sales brochures. This image becomes even more baffling when the camera rotates to the right and Jack suddenly enters the frame and walks across the page in front of the captions while his voice-over continues to detail his furniture obsession. This obfuscation between the separate diegetic layers creates what Phil Powrie calls a “meta-diegetic and haptic moment, which takes us out of time and space into embodied feeling” (2008: 208). Looking at a moment of similar diegetic instability in François Ozon’s 5  ×  2 (2004), Powrie describes how the temporary arrest of diegetic coherence can disrupt narrative immersion and incite a mode of reflective engagement, yet one that is founded on embodiment rather than cognition (2008: 210). This idea can be applied to the catalogue-sequence in Fight Club. It is not only that everything in this image both looks and feels a little bit too perfect to be a real home, despite the homely atmosphere that the warm lamps and colorful patterns are meant to provide. Even though we see Jack walking among the furniture items, both the caption prints and the film’s refusal to move itself through the room defy the illusion of perspectival depth and obstruct our sense of spatial immersion. Mobilizing our sense of touch, the film evokes a felt difference between the diegetic layers, and between a two-dimensional catalogue page and a real, three-dimensional space, and as embodied viewers we understand that Jack’s neatly furnished condominium is not a lived-in home. In contrast to the slick surfaces and superficial lifestyle products that permeate Jack’s consumer life-world, the textures and surfaces that Tyler is associated with could hardly be more opposite. Defying his profession as a soap maker, Tyler is drawn to dirt and organic matters, in particular visceral

FIGURE 11 A haptic moment in Fight Club (1999).

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

127

fluids and bodily waste products, that are often associated with disgust and revulsion. He exhibits no fear of bringing his naked skin into direct contact with the most tainted, possibly even contaminated substances and surfaces that most of us would shy away from in disgust. In one notable instance he and Jack steal fat from a liposuction clinic to use it as a component for making soap, retrieving it out of a container labeled “infectious waste.” When one of the bags tears open, Tyler, in an attempt to retrieve some of the valuable ingredient, reaches out with his bare hands for the gooey stuff that is oozing out. Witnessing this scene from the safe optical distance of a long shot, seeing Tyler almost bathe himself in the viscous mass, is enough to incite a latent sense of disgust in us. Yet to make matters worse, a few seconds later, during the soap-making procedure, the film exposes us to an extreme close-up of a pot with a boiling, bubbly mass of fat, haptically daring us to come uncomfortably close ourselves. Tyler’s fondness for obnoxious textures and surfaces not only serves to underscore his transgressive personality and the opposition between him and Jack. Moving in with Tyler and being exposed to this unfamiliar and repulsive environment also has a productive function for Jack: it awakens his dormant senses. In contrast to Jack’s neatly furnished apartment, Tyler lives in a dilapidated and boarded up house in an out-of-the-way industrial area, tellingly referred to as “a toxic waste part of town.” Already the name “Paper Street” is evocative of a more concrete and tangible location. However, Tyler’s place of residence is not a conventionally inviting place. The minimal furnishings—blank mattresses, pieced together chairs and tables, and second-hand kitchenware—may be attributable to Tyler’s anticonsumerist lifestyle; but one would be hard pressed to find any ideological justification for the filthy and run-down state of the house. The walls are coated in multiple layers of dirt and the wallpaper is peeling off in pieces. Most surfaces are covered in some unidentifiable smudge, smut, or smear. Water stands knee-high in the basement and interferes precariously with the switchboard. There are numerous leaks and a smell of dampness hangs palpably in the air, making it the perfect breeding ground for all kinds of dangerous organisms. Yet despite pulling grimaces and making a number of scoffing remarks about Tyler’s “shithole,” Jack acquaints himself rather quickly with his new place of residence and explores it with an increasing sensual awareness. He comments, for example, on the “rusted nails to snag your elbows on,” olfactory qualities (“the fart smell of steam, the hamster cage smell of wood chips,” the “warm stale refrigerator”) and the way the house itself seems organically integrated with its environment (“Rain trickled down through the plaster and the light fixtures. Everything wooden swelled and shrank”). Jack’s perceptual curiosity is paralleled by the film’s own tactile interest in this new environment. Tyler’s house is surprisingly well-lit, a notable contrast to the film’s otherwise relatively dark atmosphere, and the camera

128

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

FIGURE 12 Sticky surfaces in Fight Club (1999).

explores it with a fondness for detail, traveling up and down staircases, traversing adjacent rooms, closely inspecting grimy walls or dwelling on filthy fabrics. Notably, Jack and Tyler spend ample time in the bathroom while drinking, talking, and performing activities that involve bare skin, such as teeth brushing, bathing, or washing. During these scenes, the camera lingers closely on details that belie the common association of bathrooms with cleanliness and bodily hygiene, showing us, for instance, rusty water spewing out of the tap of a stained sink. Brought up close to Tyler’s lifeworld, our skin understands the potential dangers of contagion lurking everywhere; and yet our gaze gets stuck on these sordid surfaces nonetheless. Mirroring Jack’s mixed reaction of repulsion and fascination, we understand that, even though Tyler’s house may not be the most pleasant place, it feels much more real and tangible in its dirty stickiness than the artificial and sterile surfaces of Jack’s apartment. More than just a plain shift of locales and lifestyles, then, the move is Jack’s first step toward finding a way out of the estrangement his consumerist lifestyle had fostered.

Kinetic styles of being It may seem a far stretch from Fight Club, with its complex narrative structure, to Tom Gunning’s (1989) notion of the cinema of attractions, where, in Barker’s words, “human bodies simply did things, performed acts from muscle-flexing to dancing to sneezing, for no other reason than for the sheer delight in seeing them done” (2009b: 133; emphasis in original). Nonetheless, Brad Pitt’s athletic body in the film has often been described as an attraction in its own right (Bauer 2012: 125; Stark 2012: 61; Taubin 1999: n.p.).20 Yet the attraction provided by Brad Pitt’s body is not alone that it lends Tyler his handsome appearance. It imbues the character with

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

129

a kinetic appeal that dynamizes the entire film and allows the differences between Jack and his alter ego to be expressed in muscular terms: Jack, played by Edward Norton, is characterized as skinny and limp, whereas Tyler is defined through a physique that is strong, well-muscled, and forceful. And even though Jack becomes a physically more active character once he starts the film’s titular fight clubs with Tyler, his looks become progressively weary, scrawny, and beaten, whereas Tyler’s appearance becomes increasingly strong and athletic. Especially toward the film’s end, during Jack and Tyler’s final struggle, Tyler’s flexing biceps are prominently on display, visually emphasized through the singlet he is wearing and the physical force he exerts onto Jack. These muscular differences between the two characters are not just evident through each character’s bodily appearance but first and foremost through distinct kinetic styles of inhabiting the world. Before Tyler’s arrival, Jack lets himself be taken over by an almost entirely passive and impassive way of being-in-the-world. Especially for a film whose title, combined with a highly energetic opening sequence and a breathtaking CGI plunge in the first scene, so clearly promises kinetic action, a surprising lack thereof characterizes the first half hour of runtime. Rarely ever do we see Jack moving around or doing something. Instead, we encounter him in various states of inertia and inactivity: sitting, standing, or lying around; slumping and slouching at his desk, in chairs, plane seats, or on his sofa. And even when he does engage in some kind of activity, he performs it rather sluggishly and with a blank expression on his face, such as when he limply endures being embraced by another person. Yet the film’s muscular gestures ensure we feel with our bodies what Jack never directly articulates: that his lethargy is more than a mere side effect of his insomnia and has some deeper existential implications. Frustrated by Jack’s idleness that defies its own inclination to move, the film nearly bursts with impatient anticipation for things to happen during these first thirty minutes. One of Fight Club’s specific camera movements, or what Barker would refer to as a cinematic “muscular gesture” (2009b: 78–81), is the controlling of speed within one shot, often gathering momentum and then slowing down again, similar to the way muscles produce movement through contraction and relaxation.21 Yet there is a palpable imbalance between flexing and never-quite-completely letting go, a cinematic build-up of a surplus of energy and adrenaline that creates not as much narrative suspense but muscular tension. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, in her book The Primacy of Movement, puts forth the notion that movement, selfhood, and agency are closely connected (2011: 118, 125). According to her, “A creature’s corporeal consciousness is first and foremost a consciousness attuned to the movement and rest of its body” (2011: 62). Furthermore, “movement is the generative source of our primal sense of aliveness and of our primal capacity for sense-making” (2011: 114), as it allows us to understand the world through the actions we can take in it. Consequently,

130

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

if “aliveness is . . . a concept grounded in movement as the concept ‘I can’” (2011: 116; emphasis in original), then Jack’s listlessness suggests that he is indeed closer to death than he is to life. In comparison with Jack it would read like an understatement to say that Tyler is bursting with energy: he embodies vitality itself. With his uninhibited style of being-in-the-world, Tyler inhabits the world of the film as if he owned it, permanently restless and perpetually on the move. We see him swaggering through streets and building interiors with confidence and determination, taking and discarding things and people as he sees fit, and enticing first Jack and then others to join him in a range of subversive pursuits, ranging from late night golf matches on Paper Street to practical jokes for Project Mayhem. Several scholars have highlighted the film’s tendency to show the two characters within one frame, an important technique to mislead us about Tyler’s ontological status (Laass 2008; Wilson 2006). But as a cinematic gesture it also reveals Jack and Tyler’s opposing kinetic styles. Providing a target for the intentionality of our vision even when he is only a blurred figure in the background, Tyler is always the (hyper-)active one, fidgeting around with his hands, jumping up and down, riding a bicycle around the house, or practicing some crazy karate moves. His sheer kinetic presence certainly makes it difficult to imagine him out of the frame (not to mention the overall film), as some scholars have suggested we might do during repeat viewings of the film (Wilson 2006: 91). But even during a first viewing Tyler is a liberating force, not just for Jack but for the entire film. For instance, walking next to Tyler suddenly Jack adapts a more energetic gait, indicative of the way his general sense of agency increases under the influence of his alter ego. In a similar vein, the film too becomes much more dynamic, noticeable, for example, in the way it imagines the steps that ignite the fire in Jack’s apartment, an energetically joyful kinetic moment that immediately precedes his move into Tyler’s house. Dashing toward the stovetop, spinning around the burners, backtracking across the floor, and plunging behind the fridge, the forceful and dynamic quality of the CGI camera marks a palpable contrast to the slow-moving shots that are associated with Jack’s movements until then, a difference that is further underscored by the noticeably quickening music. The film’s kinetic play with building up tension and delaying its release reaches its most intense moments during the film’s hallmark physical experience: the actual fight club gatherings themselves. We may not immediately understand the significance of Jack and Tyler’s first and comparably tame bout of fisticuffs, especially since the camera remains steady and at a cautious distance during this scene, nearly as unsure as Jack himself about Tyler’s prompt “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.” But by the time their underground “Fight Club” becomes an official movement the film revels in the exhilaration of the bare-knuckle boxing matches, and it invites our muscles and tendons to feel the same. Charged with impatience,

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

131

FIGURE 13 Kinetic styles in Fight Club (1999).

like a boxer ready to fight, the camera circles around Tyler while he recites the rules of “Fight Club,” and closely observes the other men as they engage in the preparatory tasks of taking off their shirts and belts. Once the actual fighting begins, the film’s attention is as much on the fights themselves as it is on their effect, equally raptured by the sight and sound of colliding bodies, the cheering shouts of the onlookers and the communal sense of joy and elation once two men end a fight by mutual consent. Similar to the way in which Jack’s new environment rouses his tactile sensitivity, the fighting sets free restrained emotions and affective constraints. Sara Ahmed describes how intensive collisions with another not only let us feel our own embodied existence but also transform the relationship to the world itself: “It is through such painful encounters between this body and other objects, including other bodies, that ‘surfaces’ are felt as ‘being there’ in the first place. To be more precise the impression of a surface is an effect of such intensification of feeling” (2004: 24; emphasis in original). This explains the productive function these fights have for Jack (as well as for the other men): they are such moments of intensification that bring him to his own being and to the surfaces of the world (2004: 27). Indeed, even though, on the whole, the fight scenes themselves do not take up too much screen time they sure make up for this in terms of intensity. With each session the crowd grows bigger; the punches become harder; the shouts become louder; the brawls become more violent; the faces become more enthralled. Each time the kinetic energy unleashed by the entangled mass of colliding bodies is thus amplified, and with every fight scene there is more blood, more violence, more injury. The most ferocious fight is also the last, when Jack smashes another man almost to a pulp. This last fight is accompanied by partially muted and partially amplified roars that no longer sound human and instead are reminiscent sounds of feral animals. Bringing to mind the visceral effect of sound in the opening sequence and Ihde’s assertion,

132

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

“I do not merely hear with my ears, I hear with my whole body” (1976: 45; emphasis in original), these uncanny sounds have a penetrating quality that generates an ambivalent effect, for if until here we may have unconditionally cheered along with the crowd, this is a moment of intensification for us, an almost painful collision between our embodied human existence and the film as a bodily other that brings us back to our own being and the surface of our world. And for a brief moment, no longer haptically absorbed by the shared the sense of combative joy and triumph, and instead confronted with the sight of a man’s face covered in blood, his features barely recognizable, we may suddenly find ourselves at an optical distance again, uncertain as to whether we should celebrate or condemn the ferocity of this fight.

Visceral unease Uninviting and obnoxious textures and bodily collisions have a liberating effect on Jack; yet there is an even deeper layer of his corporeal estrangement from the world that requires an appropriate solution. Lingering only at the margins of his awareness, and closely connected with the theme of death that permeates the entire film, a sense of visceral unease underlies his malaise. It emerges early on through Jack’s latent preoccupation with the body’s inner organs when he fakes various terminal illnesses to participate in support groups because these sessions provide him with relief for his insomnia. For no apparent reason he deliberately joins groups for internal bodily illnesses, casually disregarding posters for the “incest survivors group” or “Alcoholics Anonymous,” and instead circling newspaper ads for support groups that target people who have tuberculosis, brain and blood parasites, or various sorts of cancer. His fixation on the viscera resurfaces when he discovers a collection of essays written in the first person from the perspective of an organ in Tyler’s house and starts reading out loud sections such as, “I am Jack’s medulla oblongata. Without me Jack could not regulate his blood pressure, heart rate or breathing”; or “I am Jack’s colon” (to which Tyler cynically adds, “I get cancer. I kill Jack”). Soon thereafter he adopts a similar pattern of speech to express his (predominantly negative and suppressed) feelings in the same manner (“I am Jack’s raging bile duct”; “I am Jack’s smirking revenge”). A useful concept to shed light on Jack’s obsession with the body’s vital organs and the existential consequences of their potential breakdown is Drew Leder’s notion of “dys-appearance,” coined in his book The Absent Body (1990). According to Leder, all regions of the body, from the sensorimotor surface (the “excessive body”) down to the depth of the inner organs (the “recessive body”), can be temporarily absent from present action and conscious experience. In fact Leder observes that the inner or “recessive body” evades our control and awareness most of the time, an everyday “dis-appearance” [sic] that is an integral part of our corporeal functioning

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

133

(1990: 36). By contrast, it is particularly during times of pain, illness, or other states of bodily discomfort that the vital parts draw attention upon themselves. This way of the body making its presence felt is what Leder calls “dys-appearance” (1990: 36–69). He explains that in such moments, “the body appears as thematic focus, but precisely in a dys state—dys is from the Greek prefix ‘bad,’ ‘hard’ or ‘ill,’ and is found in English words such as ‘dysfunctional’” (1990: 84; emphasis in original). Significantly, even though Leder focuses on physical pain and illness, being a phenomenologist he highlights the complex connections between body, mind, and emotions: “Dys-appearance characterizes not only the limits of vital functioning but those of affectivity. I may become aware of a raging anger twisting my body or a lethargic depression leaving me limp. I feel these emotions holding sway within me as an alien presence that I cannot shake” (1990: 84). Jack’s experience can be read as an inverse variation of dys-appearance: his problem is neither an acute physical illness nor an overpowering emotional state but instead the complete absence of emotions and the inability to feel any joy in being alive in the first place. Bodily pain, a sensation prominently displayed in the film, reveals this very depth of his crisis and also provides a somewhat unorthodox cure for it. A key moment in this regard is the scene in which Tyler intentionally mixes lye and saliva to cause a chemical burn on Jack’s skin.22 Holding Jack’s hand in a tight grasp and additionally slapping his face to stop him from withdrawing from the pain into his “inner cave” via mediation, he repeatedly prompts him: “Stay with the pain! Don’t shut this out! This is your pain! This is your burning hand!” (The italics marks Tyler’s emphasis). Subsequently, he promises to neutralize the burn, but only after Jack acknowledges his own mortality. The experience of such intense physical pain here and in other pain-ridden moments in the film is thus not a signal of imminent death but instead is a way to bring him back to his emotions (Allen 2013: 164), for the experience of pain originates in one’s embodied existence, and thus intentionally subjecting Jack to averse, discomforting, and painful bodily experiences is Tyler’s way of bringing “corporeality back to the sufferer” (Leder 1990: 84), reminding Jack of what it feels like to be alive and in touch with the world. Drawing attention to this initial lack, his alter ego Tyler is a quasi-mentally outsourced manifestation of dys-appearance. Similar to the way Leder describes anxiety as “undoubtedly mine, but . . . also something from without, fighting my efforts at mastery” (1990: 85), Tyler—like a racing heart or sweaty hands— eludes Jack’s conscious control at large. Not just in this scene but until the film’s very end he is such “an alien presence” that Jack—almost—“cannot shake” (1990: 84). The crucial link between pain, emotions, and the inner organs raises the question to what extent the embodied viewer’s experience of Fight Club is shaped by corresponding visceral sensations. The film brings us as close as it can to Jack’s physical torment in the scene described earlier in this chapter, exposing us to close-ups of the bubbling, broiling burn on Jack’s hand. Like

134

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

the uncomfortable close-ups of the burned-out car or the boiling fat, these images serve to remind us of the biological body as organic matter. They are juxtaposed with split-second haptic images of a green forest bursting into flames, a green leaf covered with water droplets, and dictionary entries for the words “sear” and “flesh,” visualizations of Jack’s attempt to evade his suffering by way of meditation. While this diegetic layering creates a haptic moment similar to the one described in the Ikea-nesting-instinctsequence, its embodied effect is nonetheless limited: it may stir a sense of unease but it does not lead us to convulse and collapse with pain in the manner that Jack does. This is not only due to the fact that a film cannot inflict acute physical pain on its audience, or leave them with visible scars akin to the ones produced by the chemical burn on Jack’s hand.23 It also has to do with the radically subjective nature of pain itself. “Pain is marked by an interiority that another cannot share” (1990: 74), writes Leder with reference to Elaine Scarry’s seminal book The Body in Pain (1985). In this book, Scarry describes the unsharability of pain through language and the way its acute experience is inaccessible to anyone but those who immediately feel it (1985: 4–5). Even though a film is a medium that has channels other than language to its avail, and even though it can draw our attention to its own celluloid skin by revealing its scars, such as the “cigarette burns” (projection cues on a film strip) that Tyler points out, the subjective intensity of Jack’s pain is a threshold that it cannot overcome. However, Luis Rocha Antunes, who introduces the idea of “nociception” to cinematic spectatorship, suggests that viewers can “experience painful events without actual physical exposure to the noxious stimuli that cause those events,” and that “our perceptual experiences of pain in film may not necessarily result in the unpleasant perceptual contents of pain in real life” (2016: 94). Nociception is a term used in more recent studies of the sensory system to refer to the way pain arises through the stimulation of cells in a complex interaction of several areas of the nervous system. Because it operates across different sense modalities and is thus essentially multisensory and synesthetic, Antunes argues that films can appeal to our nociceptive stimuli through aesthetic devices such as editing, framing, or sound, which can elicit visceral and affective responses in a manner that goes beyond pure character empathy (2016: 72–93). This is the case in Fight Club, where throughout the film there are slight interferences of the film’s own visceral rhythms, disruptions of the continuous motion of twenty-four images a second through a projector that indeed make it a film that “screws around with your bio-rhythms” (Taubin 1999: n.p.). The most famous of what one might call cinematic extrasystoles are the subliminal shots of Tyler during the film’s first thirty minutes. Altogether four times his figure flickers through the frame like a sudden nervous twitch, barely visible unless one knows when to watch out for it, yet perceptible nonetheless, a latently felt cinematic dys-appearance, almost as unsettling as one’s heart skipping a

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

135

beat. Similar disruptions of the film’s regular flow of images, later on, are the cut-out frames in Jack’s flashbacks when he learns that he and Tyler are the same person, as well as the four-second frame of a penis that is displayed during the end credits. As a meta-moment, the latter echoes Tyler’s hobby of splicing pornography frames into family films, which in turn plays with the stereotypical fear that films might manipulate our subconscious with such subliminal shots, humorously illustrated when a shot of crying children and disturbed spectators is accompanied by Tyler’s comment, “Nobody knows they saw it, but they did.” Yet here, making such shots visible, these cinematic “dys-appearances” draw our attention not to the content but to the film’s visceral rhythm itself (just like the projection booth scene functions as a cinematic self-reflection of the film’s deep structures of embodiment), creating haptic or perhaps better visceral moments that bring us back to our own corporeality (Barker 2009b: 129). Perhaps the most impactful of these visceral moments is a jittering full frame of Tyler that—thanks to CGI—gets “stuck” in the projector for a few seconds and allows Tyler to address one of his so-called Durdenisms directly at us: “You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.” A variation of another of his slogans, “You’re the same decaying matter as everything else,” it invokes the film’s numerous references to bodily waste products, the haptic images of the burned matter of the car crash victims, and Marla’s description of herself as “infectious human waste.” In that way this cinematic moment of dys-appearance also has a productive function for us: it reminds us that on the one hand, as bodily beings we are indeed the same decaying matter as everything else, a material condition that we share with a film to a degree; yet on the other hand, as embodied individuals—and this is a crucial difference—we are always more than just biological bodily beings.24

FIGURE 14 Tyler’s first subliminal appearance—a visceral moment in Fight Club (1999).

136

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

The right kind of touch Having traced Jack’s predicament from the outer surface of his body down to his innermost fears, the previous sections have explored how Tyler is both symptom and cure for his tactile alienation from the world. Yet what brings Jack back not just to his senses but also his mind? While his realization that Tyler is his hallucinated alter ego is undeniably a gamechanging moment in the film, Nancy Bauer argues that the question of what is real and what is imagined is less important in Fight Club than the “more human, more passionate question about what it means to recognize another person’s existence” (2012: 126). She draws a direct parallel between Jack’s predicament in Fight Club and Descartes, who, like Jack, suffered from insomnia (albeit only for one night) while he was writing Meditations (2012: 117). According to her, “Fight Club relies on the trope of sleeplessness to map the topography of a certain state of Cartesian madness. It identifies this madness, figured as insomnia, as a state of being unable to feel or express one’s emotions. And this apathy is shown to produce a profound separation from other people” (2012: 123). In contrast to Descartes’s famous credo, “I think therefore I am,” then, an akin revelation that would suggest that Jack is cured of his madness would have to be: “I feel therefore I am,” and crucially, this emotional reconnection must include the capacity to feel for others too and not just his own embodied existence. The interpersonal dimension of Jack’s predicament is defined through tactility right from the film’s outset. Jack begins his story with two flashbacks, the first of them starting with a frontal close-up of his face pulled up closely to Bob’s (Meat Loaf) mutated male breasts, followed by several shots of sobbing and crying men hugging each during a support group meeting for testicular cancer sufferers. As mentioned previously, attending such support group meetings is a short-term remedy for Jack’s insomnia. However, it is not primarily the act of listening to stories of other people’s misery that helps him sleep again. Rather, the desired effect is brought about by the oneon-one sessions at the end of each meeting, where members are encouraged to hug each other in pairs. This ritual is simultaneously an acknowledgment of the impossibility to fully express one’s pain through words but also an attempt to share it with another nonetheless—not through language but through touch. The first time Jack takes part in this he starts crying, describing it as a way of finding freedom and letting go, and it is this ritual that he keeps coming back for. Yet there is a difference between physical and emotional touch, and even if being in close physical contact with another allows Jack to regain feeling for himself temporarily, he significantly falls short of feeling emotionally touched by any other person (Bauer 2012: 123–24; Skees 2012: 15; Wilson and Shpall 2012: 99). This disconnect between Jack and other people is expressed through the way the film itself often seems relationally at odds

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

137

with its main character. The camera often casts a distant and observant glance at him when he interacts with other people, its own physical distance to the main character mirroring the emotional gap between him and other people. At other times it initially pretends to take on Jack’s point of view, its attentive gaze directed at another person sharing their experiences—only to then pan across the room and reveal Jack faraway at the other end. Such moments of misalignment are further amplified through Jack’s voice-over, which tends to continue while another person is speaking, thus exposing his feigned interest in their stories. And even in moments when the film is more aligned with Jack, it still accentuates his lack of empathy with other people. For example, the non-diegetic music—according to Barker one way in which a film can express (and not just elicit) emotions (2009b: 147)— playing alongside Jack’s account of the positive effect that the support groups have on him may be in tune with his sense of joy and redemption with its uplifting harmonies; yet in doing so it equally contradicts the severity of other people’s true suffering in a manner that reflects Jack’s indifference toward them. Just like Jack and Tyler are characterized through unique tactile, kinetic, and visceral ways of being-in-the-world, the differences between the two characters also come to light through the manner in which they connect with other people. In contrast to Jack’s reserved and socially withdrawn personality, Tyler is portrayed as an extrovert par excellence: not shy to strike a conversation with a stranger, frank with his opinions, confident in any social situation, and quick to start a sexual relationship with Marla. Moreover, not only is Tyler unafraid of being physically close to other people; he also freely violates cutaneous boundaries, for instance, through contaminating restaurant food with his own bodily fluids, or spilling and smearing his blood onto the face of another man, with little concern about the spread of illness or infection—transgressive actions that perfectly embody his contagious personality, which enables him to spread the philosophy of fight club like an uncontrollable disease. Tyler’s tactile style of being—full of impact and intensity—extends to the way he connects with other people. If the embrace rituals at the end of the support group meetings were Jack’s feeble attempt to overcome his alienation from the world, then the fights are their experiential intensification through Tyler. With their emphasis on close physical contact between two (male) bodies, especially the one-on-one fights can be seen as “beefed up” versions of the hugging sessions (Wilson and Shpall 2012: 105). Like their much gentler counterpart, the violent frenzy of clutching and colliding bodies is about the non-verbal sharing of a mutual feeling via corporeal contact. Significantly though, unlike the support groups, “Fight Club” is located outside the spheres of psychology, spirituality, or any other abstract reference system and, apart from the infamous rules, goes without conscious reflection on one’s own and each other’s mutual experience. Instead, they

138

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

are a way to experience what Sheets-Johnstone calls “the sheer kinetic spontaneity” of the moment itself, the painful yet real sensation of being alive right here and now (2011: 234).25 In Jack’s own words, “You weren’t alive anywhere like you were there.” Tactility also crucially defines the way in which Jack and Tyler each engage with Marla, their shared love interest. While Jack admits to his feelings for her only very late in the film, a gentle form of tactility, sometimes reserved yet altogether affectionate, infuses many of their encounters. They first connect through touch in the support groups, when Jack wants to admonish her for visiting the same support groups that he goes to, and instead ends up with her sobbing at his shoulder during the hugging ritual. Much later, once she and Tyler have started a relationship, Marla calls Jack—not Tyler— over to check her breasts for lumps, and he reluctantly complies. “Are you sure you don’t feel anything?” she asks him, and Jack coldly replies: “No.” Even though we may initially not understand the full ambiguity of her question, not knowing that Jack and Tyler are the same person, it is hard to miss that Marla is not as much after a physical diagnosis but that she is using his touch to gauge his affection for her. The relationship between Tyler and Marla, by contrast, is characterized as a primarily sexual one. Yet despite Tyler’s crude, macho-style bragging about their sexual encounters, the most intimate moment between them, the extended sex scene of their first night, generates a haptic moment that affirms Marks’s point that the sexual content of erotic images is often merely the “icing on the cake” (2000: 185). The scene visualizes their ecstasy with flat and shaky slowmotion images that blur the contours of their naked bodies, not allowing for many physical details to be discerned—a far cry from the pornographic images that Tyler splices into other films. Its embodied effect is thus created not through sexual explicitness but through the inherent eroticism of haptic images themselves—for haptic images invite us to engage closely with the film itself, “close enough that figure and ground commingle,” to the effect that we briefly lose our “own sense of separateness from the image” (Marks 2000: 183). This moment of maximum intimacy, perhaps too close for comfort for some, calls to mind Bauer’s claim that the key question of Fight Club concerns finding the optimum distance to another person, which she sees fulfilled in the film’s final image, a long shot of Jack and Marla holding hands, neither too far nor too close from one another, against the backdrop of exploding skyscrapers (2012: 129). Yet the emphasis on their tactile connection throughout the film as well as in this final image suggests that finding this right emotional and physical distance also requires the ability to find the right kind of touch: one that is neither painful nor an impersonal gesture, and that requires modulating the intensity with which one touches and allows oneself to be touched by the other person or, for that matter, the film.

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

139

Productive pathologies revisited: Characters with mental conditions and embodied spectators As was the case with the previously discussed films The Sixth Sense and The Others, the complexity at work in Memento and Fight Club goes beyond the question of how to disentangle the plot or the different levels of reality. Even though both films tease us with dichotomies between truth/lie, fact/memory, reality/hallucination, objective/subjective, neither of them provides ultimate answers, clear distinctions, or unambiguous solutions. Moreover, these films are as thematically complex as they are narratively entangled, and they invite us to both think and feel in order to understand their stories. Memento addresses questions about revenge and the irreversibility of actions, about identity and memory, and about historical techniques and technologies that we use to store and retrieve knowledge. Fight Club interweaves sociopolitical themes, such as a cultural critique of late capitalism and a crisis of masculinity (an exploration of which was beyond the scope of this chapter) with psychological and epistemological concerns. Focusing specifically on the way in which the subjective experiences of mentally extreme characters such as Leonard and Jack infuse their narratives, I have argued that these two films are also stories about different ways of being-in-the-world: stories in which cognitive impairments such as amnesia and multiple personality disorder function as “productive pathologies” (Elsaesser 2009: 24–30) that call into action tactile and embodied forms of knowing and remembering (Memento), or corporeal modes of experiencing the world and reconnecting with others (Fight Club). More than just visually representing the actions and conflicts of their main characters, both films invite our own tactile knowledge and shared condition of embodiment to engage us closely with the characters’ conditions and their idiosyncratic relationships with the world. Combining a textural analysis with an embodied understanding of spectatorship has thus proven to be highly productive in considering how these films are neither just stories about clinical cures or dysfunctional states of mind nor merely cognitively demanding narratives. Perhaps even more so than Memento, Fight Club in fact only makes sense as a mind-game film if we take embodiment into account. Both films draw on conflicts between corporeal and cognitive ways of making sense of the world, and they shift these to the level of spectatorship as well: How do we know what we know? What does our experience feel like? These questions also pertain to repeat viewings of the films. Which facts do we remember? Do our own memories of Memento help us to gain a more coherent picture of Leonard’s quest in another viewing? Does the knowledge that Tyler is not real within the fictional world alter our engagement with his character and thus our entire experience of Fight Club? We may hope, for example, that accumulating a greater number of narrative details will

140

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

eventually bring us closer to the truth in Memento. However, we may find, in fact, that the more we get entangled in the film’s complex web of meanings and associations, the more our own memories of previous viewings begin to merge with the facts of the film. And perhaps we become increasingly less interested in what we know and remember about the facts of Leonard’s story. Instead we might turn our attention more deliberately toward how we know and remember the film and its central character, and thus become more aware of how our own tacit knowledge informs our experience of the film. Likewise in Fight Club, the knowledge that Tyler is not physically real (within the fictional world) may have less of an impact than our embodied experience of what feels real and authentic in the film. Despite our rational knowledge that he is only a figment of Jack’s imagination, we may find that resisting his kinetic presence and the film’s own corporeal appeal in order to maintain an analytic and reflective distance is not only a strenuous task, but would ultimately detract from the bodily experiences that Fight Club is about. While these readings of Memento and Fight Club have been very specific, deploying an extensive and deep mode of textural analysis to reveal the embodied layers of meaning in these films, there are some general implications to be drawn from the findings. A considerable number of mindgame films place an emphasis on mental processes, often but not exclusively on those that are disturbed and/or dysfunctional. Mental pathologies, ranging from schizophrenia, paranoia, and amnesia to personal traumata of the past, shape both narrative form and theme in films as diverse as The Machinist, Spider, Identity, Shutter Island, Enemy, A Beautiful Mind, Trance (2013), or π (1998), to name but a few. The extent to which the subjective experience of the main characters inflects and shapes the reality in these examples greatly varies: while some films feature an ontological twist moment that can take place early on (A Beautiful Mind) or toward a film’s end (Shutter Island, Identity), others express an increasingly strange perception throughout (The Machinist, Spider, Identity, π). Yet all of these films bestow a tension upon the difference between what is real and what feels real. Many of them feature hallucinated double-gangers and imaginary characters that, for those that perceive them, are materially anchored in the same world as they are themselves, and indistinguishable from flesh-andblood characters. Consequently, the question that arises is to what extent and in what way we engage with these films and their characters in both haptic and optical modes of spectatorship. Generally speaking, the way in which the mind becomes dysfunctional in mind-game films cannot be separated from the body: altered states of mind in these films invariably result in altered ways of being-in-the-world. Consider, for instance, Trevor Reznik (Christian Bale), the main protagonist in The Machinist, who like Jack in Fight Club suffers from insomnia and delusions. He is figured as emaciated and hollow-eyed (a role which put

SOLVING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

141

the actor Christian Bale in the spotlight for losing an extreme amount of weight) and gets told, “if you were any thinner, you wouldn’t exist”; whereas his imaginary antagonist Ivan, who he cannot get rid off despite several attempts to “murder” him, has a bulgy, stocky, and muscular appearance. Close-ups and extreme close-ups often draw our attention to tactile qualities of Christian Bale’s body, such as his pale skin and the shadows under his eyes, which simultaneously hide and reflect the trauma that he denies to remember; and yet the suppressed memory of having killed a child in a hitand-run accident stubbornly materializes in the exterior world, in the form of imagined characters, mysterious post-it notes with a hangman riddle, and haptic flashbacks of events that lead to accident, such as the firefighter in the car that he grabbed. Of course the imaginary characters, post-it notes, and flashbacks can in hindsight be considered as clues that help us solve the mystery of Reznik’s past. However, their unique tactile qualities and the way in which the film draws attention to them as superimposed onto the objective world give a unique feel and depth to his torment. Another film that turns haptic memories of the characters into tactile experiences is David Cronenberg’s Spider. In this film, the main character, Dennis “Spider” Cleg (Ralph Fiennes), can often be seen playing with, and being confused by, strands and webs of fabric that make little sense as an objective part of the fictional reality; yet as part of his subjective perception they create tactile connections between the altered reality of his present and the trauma of his past. Thus paying attention to the tangible qualities of imaginary alter egos and their different tactile, kinetic, or visceral styles, which often reflect and are responses to traumatic incidences, enables us to gain a closer feel for their stories, instead of removing ourselves from them through untangling subjective and objective versions of the fictional universe. As far as mind-game films as “productive pathologies” are concerned, a film that would be highly interesting to explore with a textural and embodied approach is Darren Aronofsky’s π. The film is about an arithmetic genius, Max Cohen (Sean Gullette), who suffers from paranoia and is obsessed with the number π as well as other mathematical patterns, which may or may not help him predict developments of the stock market. Permeated with patterns of all sorts—textures, shapes, sounds, numbers, shades—the film often uses haptic images to engage us with the protagonist’s way of being-in-the-world. Moreover, filmed in rough and grainy black-and-white sixteen millimeter, the film itself has a haptic quality that draws attention to the image as surface, reminding us that patterns are not just abstract information or rows of numbers but a form of tactile knowledge instead: they have tangible qualities and constitute the “stuff” that makes up the feel of Max’s world. At the same time, π contains a number of visceral moments, for instance, a scene in which Max uses a drill to self-operate on his brain, which engage us with the pathological rather than productive side of his condition. The graphic depiction of his actions in this scene is stomach-churning enough,

142

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

yet the intensity of the scene is generated through subtle eerie music and the sound of the drill, which both have a penetrating quality that anticipate the moment in which Max applies it to his skull. While many mind-game films feature characters with mental conditions, it is worth noting that some deal with mental activities as productive processes themselves, rather than as pathological states. For instance, Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey), the unreliable character-narrator of The Usual Suspects, is actively using his imagination to mislead Agent Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) as well as the audience about a series of heists, the gangsters that committed them, and the mysterious criminal mastermind Keyser Söze, who may or may not be one of those gangsters. Kint’s version of the story is accompanied by flashbacks that supposedly depict what has happened; and yet near the film’s end, seconds after Kint has left Kujan’s office, the FBI agent notices that information pinned to a board behind his desk and objects from his office, such as the bottom of a cup, bear impossible connections to Kint’s statements, thus triggering his realization that all these fragments of completely unrelated notes, names, and characters, have formed the fabric of a story largely made up by Kint. This is followed by one of the film’s most chilling moments, the final sequence in which Kint, who has been portrayed as a disabled person suffering from cerebral palsy throughout the film, suddenly stops limping and turns into an able-bodied man who jumps into a limousine—a clever method of using a kinetic style to enhance the illusion and to disguise his true identity as the real Keyser Söze. As a result of this revelation, we too have to re-evaluate the reality of these false flashbacks, in which facts and fiction intertwine. Yet just like Kint does not make up his story out of thin air and instead literally fabricates it by combining existing “stuff” with his imagination, a film like The Usual Suspects may present us with mental images that nonetheless have haptic qualities. This is a good moment to recall Marks’s suggestion that films such as The Usual Suspects that mislead their audiences often use haptic images in their opening sequence as epistemological entry-points that unsettle us and elicit doubts about our relationship to the image (2000: 177). Yet a film can integrate haptic imagery throughout a narrative, “without ceasing to narrate” (Trotter 2008: 141), and perhaps mind-game, as well as other complex films, with their often densely plotted stories, can also be considered as haptic narratives in their entirety: films that invite us to think about the stories they tell, and to haptically experience the way in which their main characters engage in altered ways of being in the world.

3 Getting Lost, Sensing the Way

Infinite worlds and impossible loops in Possible Worlds and Source Code “Each of us exists in an infinite number of possible worlds,” theorizes George Barber (Tom McCamus), a stockbroker and mathematical genius, during a flirtatious conversation with fellow broker Joyce (Tilda Swinton). George is the main protagonist of Robert Lepage’s film Possible Worlds (2000), an adaptation of John Mighton’s (1992) stage play by the same name. The philosophical theory1 he refers to indeed provides one conceivable explanation for the fact that this scene is already the second time we witness a seemingly first-time encounter between George and Joyce; yet that during their previous meeting she was a neurologist, had a slightly different appearance, and reacted adversely to George’s overt sexual allusions. Throughout the film the relationship between George and Joyce, or rather several versions of Joyce, is played out via such loosely connected moments of meeting each other, being together, or breaking up, instead of progressing along the turning points of a singular linear plot. George, unlike Joyce, appears to have some degree of awareness of these varying encounters. Yet, as the film goes on, he increasingly loses his assertiveness about his ability to “travel everywhere” and gets lost in the existential variations of his life. Things are further complicated by a parallel storyline surrounding two police detectives, Inspector Berkeley (Sean McCann) and his assistant Williams (Rick Miller), who investigate a macabre murder mystery whose victim had his brain stolen. This victim is the very same George Barber. At the end of the film a sneaking suspicion is confirmed: George’s peculiar state of being is in fact produced through an experiment by the eccentric if not evil scientist Dr. Kleber (Gabriel Gascon). Kleber has stolen George’s brain and keeps it in a vat to conduct experiments about human consciousness and imagination. This revelation calls into question the reality of George’s

144

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

existence and the infinite nature of his experiences. It suggests that each of the “possible worlds” he was traveling through has only existed within the interior realm of his brain—one rather “impossible” world, as we might rename it then. A similar scenario is the premise of the science-fiction mind-game film Source Code (2011). Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), an army pilot previously stationed in Afghanistan, wakes up to find himself on board of a commuter train bound for Chicago, where his traveling companion Christina (Michelle Monaghan) insists he is Sean Fentress, a school teacher. While Colter is still trying to understand his situation, the train explodes in a bomb attack and he is catapulted to a dark capsule where Captain Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) starts communicating with him via a computer screen interface. Colter then learns that he is part of a military experiment called “Source Code” (from here onwards non-capitalized, without quotation marks and in regular font to differentiate it from the film’s title), which enables him to experience the last eight minutes of someone else’s life in an alternate timeline. His mission is to identify the train bomber in order to prevent a further attack in downtown Chicago. Before he has much chance to object or ask further questions, he is transported back into the source code, time and again, where he has to relive Sean Fentress’s last eight minutes while trying to find the terrorist. With each iteration of the trip, Colter is able to learn from previous experiences and vary his actions. He also develops romantic feelings for Christina and learns more about his current situation: that the dark capsule is in fact another part of the source code technology; that in Goodwin’s reality, he has been nearly killed in Afghanistan; and that whatever is left of his mutilated body is kept in a comatose state on artificial life support. Eventually, Colter identifies the bomber, thus bringing the experiment to a successful end. Yet before his life support in Goodwin’s reality is switched off, he convinces her to send him back into the source code one more time, against the orders of her superior, Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright). This time, not only does he manage to save the lives of all passengers on the train but also to stay beyond the eight minutes. In the end he steps off the train with Christina, seemingly ready to continue his life in this alternative timeline that has become a reality, while in the initial timeline Goodwin has switched off his life support. Possible Worlds and Source Code significantly depart from the spatiotemporal unity and continuity that are characteristic of conventional narrative cinema. Buckland (2014b) describes this distinct feature of complex films as ontological plurality, which applies to those films that emphasize spatiotemporal layers, nested worlds, or space-time warps. These complex cinematic worlds are more than just backdrops for entangled narratives: they directly impact the viewer’s experience and shape the way in which they make sense of events that unfold within them. Bissonnette (2009) suggests that Possible Worlds, with its maze of

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

145

loosely connected moments and branching story lines that expand and unfold inside George’s disembodied brain, even goes beyond the notion of narrative and causal complexity. She argues that despite the limited number of narrative strands, the spatiotemporal complexity of Lepage’s film cannot be captured with Bordwell’s forking-path film model because it asks us to engage with philosophical ideas, ontological doubts, and conflicting spatial orders (2009: 394–95). Cameron and Richard Misek (2014) make a similar point about Source Code (as well as about Inception [2010]). Citing Bordwell’s suggestion that watching a film might be likened to a journey (1985: 37), they note that “the narrative structures of Source Code and Inception are too complex to be illustrated through the metaphor of a single through-line” (2014: 110). According to them, these films stand out through their “intrinsically architectural” nature. This is manifest in spatial metaphors, design processes, and complex vertical and horizontal connections between the different spatiotemporal levels within each film (2014: 110). As they further point out, the complex spacetimes of Source Code and Inception challenge our cognitive memory and processing capacities because the narrative events progress on different levels and at high speed (2014: 119). Bissonnette likewise hints at such demands in Possible Worlds, since we “must struggle to reconcile fictional fragments and apparent logical contradictions in order to create a unified . . . world” (2009: 396). Before I address the implications of the complex timelines and the films’ thematic focus on inner worlds in the context of embodied spectatorship, let me briefly point out a few differences between the two films. With a budget of $32 million, Source Code is a prime example of how, by 2010/2011, complex narratives were absorbed into mainstream filmmaking. Its number two domestic box office ranking on its opening weekend in the United States2 is a telltale sign of how nonlinear storytelling had become commercially viable, even though it did not replace traditional narratives. By contrast, Possible Worlds is a Canadian small-scale production released ten years earlier and did not gain the degree of widespread mainstream success that Source Code and some other mind-game films have reached. The films’ production contexts seem to correlate with a number of aesthetic characteristics: Source Code is fast-paced and action-oriented, whereas Possible Worlds is a slow film that could easily be categorized within an art cinema context, less concerned with the development of characters and the progress of narrative action and instead rich with philosophical dialogue that explores ideas in relation to George’s ambiguous state of being. The film’s aesthetic of artifice extends to the limited number of settings and locations. Each sequence of the highly structured narrative is confined to, and defined through, one singular space within the fictional world of the film. Source Code, though equally confined to a limited number of settings, is more concerned with the idea of time travel and some of its paradoxes

146

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

(even though Dr. Rutledge insists that the experiment is about “time reassignment” rather than time travel). Yet these are explored primarily through Colter’s actions within each iteration of the train trip, alongside some of the impossible connections between the disparate timelines. Considered as mind-game films, however, both films have in common that they articulate questions about perception and embodiment that are connected to the way in which their central characters are lost in temporally and spatially complex cinematic worlds. Philipp Schmerheim (2015) considers Source Code and a variety of other complex films as skepticism films, or cinematic thought experiments, because they raise doubts and questions about reality, knowledge, and personal identity. The protagonists in films as diverse as Inception, The Matrix (1999), Moon (2009), Open Your Eyes (1997), The Thirteenth Floor (1999), or The Truman Show (1998) are commonly immersed in virtual or otherwise artificially created worlds and become aware of this at different points during the course of narrative action. The multilayered diegetic structures in such skepticism films not only prompt both audience and protagonists to consider which ontological levels of a film’s world are real rather than simulated but also raise questions about the relationship between mind, body, and world, insofar as the characters often inhabit more than one world at the same time, either by proxy of a virtual avatar or as another version of themselves (2015: 229–34). Schmerheim broadly distinguishes between external skepticism films, in which protagonists find themselves in worlds that appear to be controlled by someone else (2015: 229–36), and self-knowledge skepticism films, in which the characters are for the most part the source of their own deception (2015: 279). Examples of the former include The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, or The Truman Show, whereas the latter include Open Your Eyes and its remake Vanilla Sky (2001) or Inception. Possible Worlds, with its emphasis on a multiverse of possible worlds and the motif of a brain in a vat, fits the category of the external world skepticism film. Source Code—a film also discussed by Schmerheim—is likewise a cinematic exploration of the idea of inhabiting a computer-simulated world; yet due to the fact that Colter is only able to exist in this world by taking control of another dead man’s body and assimilates his visual appearance, Schmerheim considers it primarily as a self-knowledge skepticism film (2015: 292). Moreover, he observes that as self-knowledge skepticism film, Source Code, unlike external skepticism films, moves away from the question of how one can know what is real, and instead asks which world subjectively feels the most real in the end (2015: 293). Yet regardless of their different nuances, what all these films share in common as cinematic (as opposed to purely hypothetical) thought experiments is not only that they depict some of actual experiential consequences of philosophical ideas (such as the brain-in-vat hypothesis) through the scenarios that characters find themselves in but also directly

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

147

involve their spectators in the complex and ambiguous relationships between multiple ontological layers and between the protagonists and their (virtual or disembodied) other selves (2015: 293). What makes Possible Worlds and Source Code particularly interesting in the context of mind-game films and embodiment is that they combine spatiotemporal complexity with a thematic focus on the brain, human consciousness, and the body. This is most explicit in Possible Worlds where, besides several graphic depictions of a brain in a vat, two of the main characters (one version of Joyce and Dr. Kleber) are neuroscientists who research cerebral processes. Moreover, many conversations evolve around related philosophical and scientific issues, such as the possibility to enhance one’s brain, the nature and purpose of imagination, or (more sci-fi than scientific) the fear that aliens might steal our brains. In Source Code, Colter has to reconcile his identity and past experiences with the fact that he is embodied as another person, Sean Fentress, in the alternative timeline of the train, while in the world of the military he merely exists as a body whose brain is wired to machines and stimulated by electronic impulses, and is eventually switched off. Such spatialization of inner or mental experience distinguishes Possible Worlds and Source Code (as well as similar mindgame films, such as Inception or Open Your Eyes) from films whose thematic exploration of consciousness is expressed as a series of abstract mental images, for instance, Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980), which is sometimes regarded as an early mind-game film.3 With their prominent emphasis on cerebral processes, both Source Code and Possible Worlds recall future-oriented theories of cinema that focus on the function and activities of the brain. Peter Weibel, for instance, contends that in the future the “cinematographic apparatus will deceive the brain, not the eye” (2003: 599). Patricia Pisters, who combines Deleuzian theory with digital aesthetics and neuroscience in her book The Neuro-Image, similarly argues that “films of the twenty-first century show us brain-worlds, braincities, architectures of the mind. We no longer look through characters’ eyes; we experience their minds” (2012: 306). Nonetheless, it is precisely this spatialization of the characters’ inner worlds that defies the idea that these films could be theorized solely via the notion of the brain, for, according to Merleau-Ponty, “the experience of spatiality is related to our implantation in the world” (2002 [1945]: 330), and thus in turn, any world, inner or outer, virtual or actual, presupposes a body—“our general medium for having a world” (2002 [1945]: 169)—to experience it. The intrinsic relation between spatiality and the body pertains to not only the characters but also the viewer’s experience of a narrative world. In contrast to other scholars’ emphasis on the cognitive challenges posed by mind-game films, Miklós Kiss (2013) suggests that the felt complexity of what he refers to as “riddle plots” is marked by the combination of narrative and bodily disorientation. Such riddle plots (an example he cites is

148

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

Lost Highway [1997]) can be distinguished from the complex plot and the puzzle film through the “spatial adventures” they invite their viewers into: Riddle films’ diegetic paradoxes, through destabilizing our visual, embodied, real-life experienced sense of the deictic center (of inertia), make the viewer’s narrative navigation, that is his/her cognitive plotmapping, practically impossible .  .  . the viewer faces great difficulties to uphold the narrative minimum of clear space-time relations ensuring causality and coherence, as riddle films deny our natural access, based on real-life skills of navigation and orientation, to their highly unnatural diegetic worlds and/or plot structures. (2013: 249; emphasis in original) While Kiss backs his ideas with an understanding of embodiment that is different to the one pursued in this book—he draws on neuroscientific research and theories of embodied cognition such as Torben Grodal’s (2009) PECMA flow model—he sheds light on the complex intertwinement of space, time, narrative causality, and coherence in the context of spectatorship as an immersive experience. The plot-mapping approach Kiss refers to in the citation above is based on the assumption that “viewers use their real-life skills of orientation during mapping of, and navigation in film-diegetic spaces. This specific interest in storyworld organization elucidates the film viewer’s ability to immerse into, then follow and understand the spatial settings and setups of fictional worlds’ constructed story spaces” (2013: 243).4 Possible Worlds and Source Code may arguably be less complex than Lost Highway, given that most of their narrative riddles get solved in the sense that there is narrative closure. Nonetheless their spatiotemporal complexity results in an equally disorientating experience that invites us to deploy our “embodiedcognitive skills of orientation and navigation” in order to understand the narrative (2013: 251). Moreover, both films also contain impossible links or riddles that are not easily reconcilable with a linear model of space and time. Kiss’s emphasis on navigation and orientation skills brings to mind a claim that Sobchack makes in her essay “Breadcrumbs in the Forest” (2004a), which explores the bodily experience of being acutely lost in concrete and worldly situations. Although cinema is not her main focus in this essay, she also cites a number of films with a complex “topo-logic” and suggests they have some significant experiential implications. In a passage that is worth quoting at length she draws attention to the way we have become accustomed to a spatially and temporally unified cinematic space: Since the cinema itself is made up of bits and pieces of discontinuous and discontiguous time and space, the goal of both the cinematic apparatus and the traditional narrative is to make these fragments cohere into a coordinated geography the viewer can navigate. Evoking literal disorientation reminds cinema and the spectator to varying degrees of

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

149

the cinema’s initial premises, which are incoherent. Thus, unless displaced into allegory or metaphor, long sequences of being lost in a narrative might well threaten to undo narrative. .  .  . “Getting lost” in narrative cinema . . . tends to be a rare occurrence, marked out against our—and the characters’—“familiar” orientation as “usual.” (2004a: 22, n. 17; emphasis in original) Although Sobchack herself excludes what she refers to as “sci-fi dramas of being lost in outer/inner space” in her own exploration of several “shapes” of being lost (2004a: 23), her observations are highly relevant to Possible Worlds and Source Code. They suggest that, as far as the viewing experience is concerned, the implications of these complex space-times reach further than feeling challenged about keeping track of narrative events. Neither film may entirely “undo” narrative. Yet their vertically nested hierarchies of “discontinuous and discontiguous” worlds indeed complicate our attempts to establish a unified sense of space and time in each film and, as I will argue in this chapter, they have a bodily disorienting effect. Furthermore, two of the three “shapes” of being lost that Sobchack describes in her essay—not knowing where one is and going round in circles—correspond with the ways in which George and Colter are metaphorically as well as metaphysically lost in the (im)possible inner worlds of their experience. In order to discuss how the experience of a film as a world can engender certain modes of bodily orientation, the first section of the chapter seeks to establish in more general terms three different ways in which meaning can arise from our bodily engagement with a cinematic space. The second part of the chapter looks at the world(s) of the film as whole, and how they contrast two different kinds of orientation and evoke the feeling of being lost. The third and final part of the chapter looks at the ways in which the films, rather than drifting into complete disintegration, provide a felt sense of coherence that defies a more rational mapping of their complex nested hierarchies of worlds.

Setting the scene, settling into a world: Bodily orientation in (cinematic) space Whenever we watch a film for the first time, an unknown world opens before us: not only do we have to get accustomed to narrative details such as characters or events but we also have to orientate ourselves within a hitherto unfamiliar space. For Stanley Cavell, this seemingly magical coming-intobeing of a world, “the film’s capacity to carry the world’s presence” (Cavell 1979 [1971]: 131) and its invitation “to view it unseen” (1979 [1971]: 40), is one of cinema’s defining elements. According to him, watching a film means to view a world that is present to us but from which we are

150

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

physically absent, a reality that comes to life for the duration of the film but in which we cannot actively participate (1979 [1971]: 167–68). However, Cavell’s emphasis on a primarily ocular mode of access to this cinematic world detracts from the fact that the experiential dimension of a film world, or a film as world, is just as much informed by perceptual and bodily modes of engagement with this space. “Film worlds are felt as much as they are perceived and known,” writes Daniel Yacavone (2014: 161), whose book Film Worlds provides a fresh approach to cinema as an aesthetic and immersive experience. Combining philosophical theory, in particular the works of Nelson Goodman, Mikel Dufrenne, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, with cognitive as well as embodied approaches to cinematic spectatorship, he points out the limitations of reducing cinematic worlds to the representation of diegetic story spaces5 that are primarily defined through narrative setting and content. A good case in point, he argues, is the fact that we can feel immersed in, or absorbed by, a non-narrative film, and thus “if film worlds are more than story-worlds, then it is also likely that not all strongly immersive feeling and affect is a function of engaging in particular ways with represented situations and the fortunes and misfortunes of dramatic characters” (2014: 168). He advocates for a more holistic approach to film worlds instead, one that understands them as nuanced and multifaceted phenomena that comprise of “sensory-affective,” “cognitive-diegetic,” and “formal-artistic” modes of address and experience (2014: 170). All of these contribute to what Yacavone describes as global “cineaesthetic world-feeling”: a somewhat elusive category that is difficult to single out in analytical terms, “not only copresent but typically in complex interaction with many perceptual and symbolic elements that are capable of bearing aesthetic properties and qualities” (2014: 200), an affective immersive experience that is perhaps best summed up by the popular notion that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.6 Yacavone’s understanding of a film as an experiential and aesthetic object may not be entirely compatible with Sobchack’s understanding of the film experience as the “expressed perception of an anonymous, yet present, ‘other’” (1992: 9); nonetheless his emphasis on the subjective, affective, and immersive experience of a film’s world is an important shift away from the illusive nature of a film’s fictional world or the question of how spectators might mentally construct space in cinema. Moreover, his suggestion that cinematic immersion is “the experiential sum of the perceptual, imaginative, affective acts of a viewer ‘entering’ into a film, with the range of (potential) consequences for both mind and body that ensue” (2014: 186) provides a suitable starting point for this chapter: it corresponds to the idea that understanding where a character is headed in narrative terms—why they are going somewhere or how they got where they are—is just as important as knowing where they and we are in the more direct, spatial sense of the word.

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

151

Negotiating the spatial transition from unfamiliarity to familiarity at the beginning of a film involves first and foremost a bodily mode of orientation. Most opening passages correspond to this need, not only setting the scene but also aiding us in settling into a particular space and place. Specific cinematic gestures enable us to gain our spatiotemporal bearings (but can also prevent us from doing so) and give us a first feel for a film’s world. Perhaps, then, it is misleading to say that “a world opens before us” as I have written before: conventional establishing shots in narrative cinema make it easy to forget that our engagement with the world of a film is not an unmediated and direct spatial experience. This is fortified by a tendency to accommodate a visual mode of orientation in a habitual progression from far to near: many films start with sweeping panoramic views and long shots of a city or a landscape, before closing in on a particular place, building, character, or event through medium and close-up shots. Conversely, when a film subverts or withholds such conventional establishing shot patterns it can invoke senses other than vision. Such was the case with the previously discussed films Memento and Fight Club, where haptic images attune us to tactile ways of knowing the world. As I set out to explore in the following, spatially complex films such as Possible Worlds and Source Code not only draw our attention to the unique qualities of their cinematic worlds but also to the ways in which this world, or any cinematic world for that matter, is mediated through the film’s embodied vision.

Architecture and immersion: The opening passage of Possible Worlds The opening passage in Possible Worlds, set in George’s loft, establishes different modes of spatial orientation and immersion in relation to the architectural nature of the space it is set in. The film’s title sequence, a mostly out-of-focus shot of rolling and crashing waves with an extremely narrow depth of field, already denies us optical orientation and invokes haptic visuality instead. After this, the film’s first image is a red-tinted close-up of a glass panel covered in foam being swept off from the other side. Next, a frontal medium distance shot shows a man standing on a ladder leaning against the outside of a large window. Then, a geometrically arranged long shot gives view to the entire inside of a spacious room. Hidden in darkness, this room does not yet reveal much, other than the silhouette of the cleaner standing high on the ladder on the outside of a huge window front. Suddenly he drops his bucket, presumably upon the discovery of something inside the room, and subsequently hurries away. The progression of shots from near to far, from a haptic close-up to a perspectival image, can be grasped as a gradual shift from haptic to optical orientation. It reverses the traditional pattern of establishing shots commonly found in narrative

152

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

cinema and introduces some of the film’s visual motifs that recur throughout the film, such as the space of the loft itself, the subversion between inside and outside space, and the notion of containment (Bissonnette 2009: 401). Yet this transition also yields an immediate spatial effect. Barker describes how a film’s editing can keep us either out of its space or position us inside it (2009b: 70). The first three shots of Possible Worlds, however, leave us uncertain about our spatial relation to this film’s world. Straddling the boundary between inside and outside, the film delays the spatial absorption we often experience in cinema and reminds us that spectatorial immersion is neither immediate nor always a given. The 4:3 aspect ratio of Possible Worlds contributes to this spatial ambiguity, making us hesitate for a moment as to whether or not we should immerse ourselves into the world of this film. This format is relatively uncommon in contemporary cinema and draws attention not just to the loft but to the frame itself. According to Sobchack, “The frame provides the synoptic center of the film’s experience of the world it sees; it functions for the film as the field of our bodies does for us” (1992: 34; emphasis in original). Any expressive emphasis on the film’s own perception of a given space, such as through an unusual aspect ratio, leads to an effect that Sobchack calls “echo-focus”: a felt difference between the film’s vision and our own (1992: 178). In Possible Worlds, the near-square aspect ratio of the film’s framed “viewing-view” gives the room the impression of a cube that we ourselves would not perceive in that way. In doing so, it works as a gesture of perception and expression that simultaneously mirrors and accentuates design features of the loft, drawing our attention to this engrossing and unique architectural space itself, rather than to the action that takes place in it. With its different levels and geometrical patterns that expand both vertically and horizontally into potential infinity, the architectural layout of the loft visually anticipates the topological organization of the fictional world of Possible Worlds as whole. However, its experiential significance goes much beyond the metaphorical function of its geometric design. Its most prominent elements are the high ceilings and separate floor areas with ground and mezzanine level, as well as the window at the back that runs almost from top to ceiling. The room’s horizontal dimension is underscored by the lines of the wooden floorboards, while tall octagonal beams give further prominence to its vertical dimension. The emphasis on geometry continues in the details of the interior design, where most furniture pieces are characterized through clean lines, geometric patterns, and smooth, clear surfaces. Any decorative items and objects of daily use, such as pictures, books, or coffee cups, are neatly arranged, thus fitting the atmosphere of order and array. The ceiling-high window at the back is made of frosted glass that obstructs a clear view beyond the interior of the building and casts our attention onto its surface itself. It is subdivided by square lines that

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

153

structurally turn it into a grid, and each individual windowpane has a circle engraved in its surface. Our engagement with cinematic architectural spaces is not a cognitive and visual experience alone but always involves the body and the entire sensorium. According to Lucy Fife Donaldson, “Films are filled with experiences of spaces, they have tangible properties which evoke responses to surface, shape, fabric, color and depth” (2014: 81). Echoing this sentiment, the architect and theorist Juhani Pallasmaa, who has extensively explored the relationship between architecture and the senses in his book The Eyes of the Skin (2005) and in his other works, in particular in the essay “Space, Place, and Atmosphere” (2014), stresses that “architectural space is lived space rather than physical space, and lived space always transcends geometry and measurability” (2005: 64). Pallasmaa describes our experience of architecture as essentially “multi-sensory; qualities of space, matter and scale are measured equally by the eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue, skeleton and muscle . . . architecture involves several realms of sensory experience which interact and fuse into each other” (2005: 41). He further argues that spatial immersion is a bodily transgressive experience, since, “as we enter a space, the space enters us, and the experience is essentially an exchange and fusion of the object and the subject” (2014: 20). Significantly, Pallasmaa expands this notion of the multisensory perception of space to imaginative spatial encounters, such as dreams or the spaces of literary fiction. In fact he considers such spatial transgressions as integral for our capacity to have an aesthetic and immersive experience of fictional worlds: “Literature and cinema would be devoid of their power and enchantment without our capacity to enter a remembered or imagined space. The spaces and places enticed by a work of art are real in the full sense of the experience” (2005: 68; emphasis in original). For him, feeling immersed in a fictional world is thus not a question of illusion and deception but rather the opposite, for “the power of architecture lies in its ability to strengthen the experience of the real . . . an experience of ‘thick’ space and time” (2005: 29). In this sense, architectural spaces within a film not only contribute, but also potentially intensify and deepen our sensory response, to a film. Yet bodily immersion into a fictional space is not always a given or straightforward experience. Consider how in Possible Worlds the first three shots and the aspect ratio delay our spatial entry into the space of the film. This effect is fortified by the architectural features of the loft, whose perspectival layout is distinctly emphasized through the gradual succession of shots from near to far along a straight axis, as well as through the geometric lines and patterns that characterize its design. According to Pallasmaa, “Perspectival space leaves us outside as observers, whereas multiperspectival and atmospheric space . . . encloses and enfolds us in its embrace” (2014: 38). His distinction between the perspectival “architecture of the eye” on the one hand and “haptic and atmospheric architectures”

154

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

FIGURE 15A AND B Immersion and atmosphere in Possible Worlds (2000).

on the other references Western traditions of representation that privilege vision and the geometric depiction of spaces, both of which had a significant influence on architectural design (2014: 35). Bearing resemblance to Marks’s theory of optical and haptic images and corresponding modes of perceptual engagement (2000: 162–63, 170–76), Pallasmaa distinguishes between a consciously directed look, which takes in visual details with precision and attentive focus, and “peripheral vision,” which is a multisensory and “unfocused gaze” that invokes inclusion, immersion, and proximity (2014: 38–39). Like haptic and optical visuality, these are not mutually exclusive

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

155

modes of engagement though. When Pallasmaa writes that “the character of space calls upon our entire embodied and existential sense, and it is perceived in a diffuse and peripheral manner, rather than through precise and conscious observation” (2014: 19), he implicitly suggests that all spaces can evoke such a multisensory engagement. This explains how, initially, the “frontal, fixated, focused vision” of Possible Worlds keeps us out of what seemed like “a stage set for eye” (2005: 30–31) and yet how we can find ourselves immersed in, and “enclosed” by this cinematic space nonetheless. One way in which we can feel more generally absorbed by a space in a haptic and sensuous way, Pallasmaa suggests, is through the experience of ambience or atmosphere (he does not draw a clear distinction between the terms). He points out how this is an experience that often eludes a primarily optical and functional understanding of space: “The serious Western tradition is entirely based on seeing architecture as a material object through focused vision, whereas ambience is a kind immaterial ‘halo’ that the material reality seems to extrude” (2014: 22–24). Ambient attributes, such as sounds, colors, light, materials, fabrics, textures, or shapes, contribute to our experience of a space, cinematic or otherwise, in a multisensory and synesthetic way. Such qualities are neither part of a geometrical layout nor do they serve a solely decorative purpose, and together they can generate “overpowering atmospheres [that] have a haptic, almost material presence, as if we were surrounded and embraced by a specific substance” (2014: 34). Any immediate sensory response evoked by the bleeding red, impressionist sky in the first three images of Possible Worlds, for instance, can be usefully theorized via Pallasmaa’s notion of atmosphere. He points out how such ambient qualities are often hard to grasp on a conceptual level, as they distinctly engage the body and the senses before we make sense of the space in a more conscious and reflective manner (2014: 21). Atmosphere is not a fixed and immutable quality of a given space though, and its changes often become intelligible to us in a multisensory manner. At the beginning of Possible Worlds, a dissolve induces a change of color and brightness. It suggests a lapse of time, and indeed the dark still of the night is soon replaced with dim daylight and sounds of lively activities. Before, the room had seemed like a silent hollow, disturbed only by the squeaky noise of the cleaner’s sponge. Now, it hums with the indistinct murmur of human voices and the repeated sound of a reloading camera flash. The main discernible diegetic light source is the window, which allows only a limited amount of light to enter through its frosted glass. The filtered light suffuses the entire space with a milky haze and lends it an atmospheric thickness. With the transition to daylight the entire room also becomes imbued with a diffuse, cool glow. In an ambient fusion of space and inhabitants, this glow seems to emanate from both the subtly shaded blue and gray walls and policemen moving around in their uniforms. Two strange items, however, stand out and disrupt the harmonious atmosphere of soft light, pastel

156

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

colors, and geometric patterns: the yellow tape and the crime scene markers, alongside the amorphous shape of vivid red blood seeping from underneath of the blue couch. Perhaps even more so than the sight of the lifeless body on the couch, these “peripheral stimuli” (Pallasmaa 2005: 65) alert our perceptual attention before any narrative context is known, warning us that we should not feel too settled and safe in the space of the film. The opening passage of Possible Worlds ends as unsettling as it began: with an upside-down close-up of George, the murder victim. His closed eyes and the eerily waxen texture of his pale lifeless skin, illuminated by the cold blue flash of the camera in the second-next shot, are uncanny in themselves. Yet the unusual upturned perspective amplifies the disquiet of these shots in a distinctly cinematic way. Notably, this sense of unease does not even get alleviated when the following shot suggests that the upsidedown perspective corresponds to the vantage point of the photographer standing behind George. In fact the uncanny proximity to George’s face and the spatial incongruence between the frontal, static close-up and the photographer’s lived bodily position, another “echo-focus” in Sobchack’s terms (1992: 178), exacerbate this effect. Adriano D’Aloia suggests that an “upside-down image establishes a conflicting relationship between the body and the eye,” and between our visual and proprioceptive sensual registers (2012: 157). Inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of an experiment with retinal inversion, in which a subject wore glasses that correct the physiological inversion of the retina and perceptually adjusted to the resulting 180° rotation of the visual field within a week, D’Aloia suggests that we go through brief dis- and re-embodying phases when faced with such upside-down images (2012: 56). Though here, perhaps it might be more productive to speak of de- and re-stabilizing phases to account for the way in which this upside-down image makes us aware of our own sense of balance and upward position in relation to the space of the film. Giving us a first taste of the bodily disorientation that Possible Worlds evokes throughout, it anticipates how George is spatially at odds with his surroundings, and moreover how our own experience of the film’s world will require bodily and perceptual reorientation more than once.

Bodily orientation in cinematic space: Entering the world of Source Code In contrast to Possible Worlds, the opening passage of Source Code follows more conventional patterns of introducing us to the world of the film from far to near; and yet the pretense that such an optical beginning would allow us a straightforward gentle entry into the world of the film is subtly undermined. The film’s beginning is inseparable from the opening sequence, which is diegetically integrated with superimposed credit titles and segues

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

157

into the first scene, in which Colter wakes up inside the train. Initially, the film introduces us to its world from afar and above. Its first image is an aerial shot of the skyline of Chicago, with the camera slowly approaching the city from across the lake. Subsequently, evoking a drone’s searching gaze for its target, it graciously glides past skyscrapers and travels right between them, allowing us to survey the grid of the city with its intersecting roads, parks, waterways, and walkways straight from above and in broad daylight. These shots of Chicago’s cityscape are intercut with shots of a train that is rolling along on railway tracks, cutting through meadows and crossing bridges, seemingly unstoppable on its linear path toward its destination. Yet despite the birds-eye perspective it is difficult to gain a unified sense of spatial orientation: we are neither far enough to view the entire city nor are we close enough to focus on any potentially relevant narrative details in this labyrinth of meandering pathways. Moreover, the camera performs sudden changes of height and screen direction that become increasingly nauseating. For example, with a single cut it drops from a fly-by shot of a thirty-story building to a wide shot taken from near ground level during which it starts swooping toward the moving train, before swiftly cutting back to another aerial shot. The camera’s seemingly erratic behavior continues in its lack of a clear direction, which sometimes sees it moving along with the flow of traffic on a motorway or the train, and at other times against it. Furthermore, apart from the repeated shots of the train, the camera does not appear to focus on anything special. Nonetheless, the manner in which it scans the city from above and circles around buildings evokes a sense of embodied agency, imitating perhaps what we don’t know about at this stage: the transfer of Colter’s disembodied consciousness into the source code—not sure yet of its aim but bound to find it. Though unbeknownst to him and us at this stage, to a certain extent Colter’s situation, physically present in the military lab and simultaneously entering the virtual world of the source code, reflects the spatial experience of watching a film. Drawing on Alexander Sesonske’s article “Cinema Space” (1973), Barker suggests that “the phenomenon of feeling, if not being, physically in two places at once is a hallmark of the cinematic experience” (2009b: 84). She describes this as a matter of being “doubly situated”: as viewers we are sitting “here,” for example, in the actual space of a theater seat, while also feeling a bodily commitment to the “there” of the space of the film (2009b: 84–85; emphasis in original). Of course, the crucial difference between our actual space and the one we encounter on a screen is that, unlike Colter’s experience of the source code, we cannot actually enter into or physically intervene in the world of the film. But this is not the point. Barker writes that “the filmgoer ‘reckons with the possible’ every time she sits in a movie theater and invests herself in a film,” regardless of whether or not we can execute those possible actions (2009b: 85). This idea is based on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of motor intentionality, according

158

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

to which the unity of consciousness, body, and world means that we always perceive our environment as a potential for movements and actions that we can undertake, a pre-reflective “anticipation of, or arrival at, the objective [that] is ensured itself by the body as a motor power” (Merleau-Ponty 2002 [1945]: 127). With regard to spectatorship this explains how “we are able to enter a situation even though we’re at physical remove from it,” and thus how in both spaces—actual and cinematic—our body grounds or “anchors” our experience (Barker 2009b: 85). Accordingly, the feeling of being immersed into the space of a film is facilitated by our bodily relationship to the physical world in which we live, and the way in which we, as embodied beings, have learned to apprehend, act, and move around in the latter. The first scene of Source Code is a good example of how cinematic space becomes immediately comprehensible by way of embodied relations, rather than through intellectual operations based on abstract spatial dimensions. Once the credits have finished, the camera homes in on the moving train once more; yet it is abruptly cut off mid-motion by a sudden fade to a white screen, a moment which signals the end of the opening sequence and ushers in the film’s first scene set inside the train. Its first shot is a close-up of Colter, who is leaning against the window of the moving train with his eyes closed, his fluttering eyelids, moving lips, and the non-diegetic sounds of helicopters and distant commands suggesting that he is in the middle of a dream. Seconds later he wakes up with a startle and then turns his head first to the left and then to the right, darting confused glances at his surroundings. Next, the film cuts to two behind the shoulder shots that emulate the direction of Colter’s glance, looking outside of the window and at world swooshing past in a backward direction, and then directing its attention back at the interior of the train to look at Christina sitting opposite in front of Colter. Subsequently, while Christina tries to engage him in a conversation, a series of shot and reverse shots shows his confused reactions to the sounds and other people surrounding him: hearing the sound of a fellow passenger opening a soft drink can, he rotates around to look at what is behind him; reacting to another passenger spilling coffee while walking past, he tilts his head downward, and a close-up at ground level shows a few drops of coffee on his shoes; he looks up again and another shot, back at eye level, shows a passenger across the aisle casting a glance at his watch. A few seconds later, the camera follows Colter’s upward glance as he tilts his head to gain a view of the upper seating area of the two-level carriage. Only occasionally, the camera parts with Colter’s point of view, following, for example, the movements of another passenger who gets up from his seat behind Colter’s back, or shifting his position to observe Colter and Christina opposite each other from the medium distance of a two-shot. Finding himself in an in-medias-res-type situation, Colter’s evident state of spatial disorientation—Where am I? What kind of space is this? What is behind and in front of me? Who are these people around me? What actions

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

159

FIGURE 16 Embodied orientation in Source Code (2011).

are possible for me? Where can I go from here?—mirrors that of the audience, who equally find themselves plunged into an unknown space in which they yet have to find their bearings. Yet of course unlike Colter, we cannot turn around in this space at will and freely explore it: we must instead rely on the film’s expressive and perceptive agency to mediate our process of spatial orientation. So far Source Code remains fairly convention in this regard: perhaps with the exception of the hyper-amplified sounds to which Colter reacts, at least in terms of cinematography and editing there is nothing out of the ordinary about the scene. The framing and editing techniques that help to establish the cinematic space are entirely consistent with the continuity system. The aspects I want to draw attention to, however, are first how the vocabulary such as the one I used to describe the scene in the previous paragraph demonstrates how our spatial orientation derives from embodied positions and relations in space, and second how the film’s embodied agency facilitates the way in which cinematic space becomes comprehensible for us. Spatial experience is always situated, and thus orientation necessarily occurs from an embodied point of view. Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) points out how linguistic markers such as inside/outside, far/near, above/below, behind/ in front, left/right, upward/downward do not describe the qualities of a given space in absolute terms; rather, they are relative terms that designate spatial positions, directions, and relationships between situated subjects and their surrounding space (1977: 34–50). According to Tuan, “Every person is at the center of his world, and circumambient space is differentiated in accordance with the schema of his body. As he moves and turns, so do the regions front-back and right-left around him” (1977: 41). Of course we cannot “move and turn” through the cinematic space ourselves and would

160

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

even lose sight of it in its fullness if we shifted our spatial “front-back” orientation. But to recall Barker’s notion of being in two places at once: because of our own embodied spatiality we “reckon with the possible” each time we are immersed into a film (2009b: 85). That is, we do not as much mentally imagine how we might be walking up or down steps, turning left or right around corners, or moving from the front to the back of a room. Rather, we feel bodily invested into the cinematic space in its entirety as a space of bodily possibilities, and the film’s spatial perception and expression, the way it comports itself through the cinematic space it inhabits, crucially contributes to our bodily investment into the fictional world on-screen. Similar to the way Colter, whose disembodied consciousness, as we later learn, inhabits the source code by proxy of another man’s body (what Buckland [2014c] refers to as avatar in his essay on the video game logic in Source Code), the film’s embodied agency enables our spatial apprehension of the cinematic space and invites us to consider the possible actions and movements within it. As mentioned previously, the relationship between a film and us is mediated by way of bodily gestures such as specific movements, editing patterns, or its aspect ratio (Barker 2009b: 78–82). Such gestures also negotiate our relationship with a film’s fictional world. They can be an “invitation” to share its space and come along for a ride in it, or, as was the case in Possible Worlds, an attempt to delay our entry or even keep us outside of it (2009b: 90–91). In Source Code, the film’s opening aerial shots, taken from an embodied point of view that is unavailable to us flightless human beings, at first offer us a place as passengers rather than active inhabitants of the film’s world. Yet once the camera starts moving at ground level within the space of the train, it invites us to leave behind our initial position as observers and immerse ourselves more fully into the on-screen world. Once the train stops at a station and Colter gets up, the camera follows him along the aisle, alternating between unsteady handheld shots that emulate his stumbling gait when he navigates his way across the spilled contents of someone’s bag; upward tilted shots glancing at the upper deck; and backward tracking shots that anticipate the direction of his movement to the exit platform. Just like the film accompanies the character (whose bodily grounding within this space is audibly amplified through the sound of his footsteps), we are invited to follow the cinematic body as it traverses the train. Once Colter has arrived at the exit platform, it briefly jumps to the outside before it returns to Colter standing on the steps and peers over his shoulders as he leans forward to look at the world beyond the carrier wagon he found himself on. Considered as a cinematic gesture, the editing here thus takes us from one side to the other, or from the inside to the outside and back again. After the train leaves the station, Colter’s initially only spatial confusion is soon replaced by the more shocking discovery that his mirror reflection shows the face of another man, Sean Fentress. Yet his ensuing panic and

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

161

Christina’s frantic efforts to calm him down are abruptly brought to a halt when a massive explosion rips through the train’s carriages and derails it. A brief montage shows a green afterimage of the explosion, an image of a sculpture whose significance will only be revealed at the film’s end, and a rapid zoom-out of Colter’s eye. Then, we are suddenly confronted with an upside-down close-up of Colter, who is now surrounded by pitch-blackness, while a computerized female voice starts giving instructions to him. Similar to Possible Worlds, the upside-down image here is an unsettling device that destabilizes our and the character’s spatial grounding, the feeling of being firmly anchored and bodily secured in this on-screen world. Moreover, the explosion is a moment of disruption that not only leaves us confused about the story that has been unfolding thus far but also, once again, interferes with our sense of spatial immersion. Just like Colter is ejected from the train and finds himself in the strange, dark, and claustrophobic capsule, we are catapulted out of the space of the train, just as it had started to become familiar to us. Without a clear spatial passage that would allow us or Colter to understand the transition from one space to the next, we have to adjust our body and senses to a new spatial environment just like he has reorientate himself in yet another unfamiliar and unexpected space.

Spatiotemporal (dis)orientation in complex cinematic worlds The previous section has established how the opening passages of Possible Worlds and Source Code function as spatial entry-points that facilitate our immersion into the fictional world of each film. Once we have settled into a cinematic space we are in two places at once: simultaneously outside and inside the on-screen world. Within both places, our body serves as a point of reference for our spatial orientation and enables us to absorb the specific feel of a space. Just like architectural spaces within a film world can evoke different kinds of bodily responses, a cinematic world in its entirety can have qualities that shape the way in which we perceive a film world and feel immersed in it, from its spatiotemporal layout to its overall atmosphere, or what Yacavone calls the global “cineaesthetic world-feeling” (2014). The next question, therefore, is to what extent the body and the senses continue to inform our experience of these films. As mentioned earlier, with their intricate arrangement of simulated, real, and (im)possible worlds that overlap, coexist, and contradict each other at times, the complexity of Possible Worlds and Source Code goes beyond the notion of entangled narrative events. Cameron and Misek (2014), writing about the mind-game films Inception and Source Code (which they consider as variations of the modular narrative), explore the ways in

162

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

which the spatiotemporal design of these films is uniquely different from the spatiotemporal unity and continuity commonly found in narrative cinema. Their observations provide a useful basis from which to map out and compare the complex topographies of Possible Worlds and Source Code in the following section. Subsequently, I will turn my attention to the ways in which both films articulate different modes of orientation, and how they moreover evoke a feeling of being lost by playing with our own sense of space.

Spatiotemporal complexity One common feature of Source Code and Possible Worlds, alongside Inception, is their “intrinsically architectural” nature, which is evident in the way these films foreground architectural processes of creating and experiencing spaces (Cameron and Misek 2014: 110). The creation aspect is perhaps most evident in Inception, with the character of Ariadne (Ellen Page) being an architect hired by Cobb’s crew to design dream spaces. Yet as a simulated form of reality, Source Code’s titular source code too is a designed space, just like the multiple worlds in Possible Worlds are suggested to be interior spaces created by George’s disembodied brain. Another shared element of the architectural nature of the three films are meticulously designed interiors and the experiential possibilities of spaces. Cameron and Misek highlight how in Inception each “layer” in the complex spatial maze of dream spaces is visually marked with its own architectural design, while in Source Code the locations are limited to the train, the station, the capsule, and the military lab (2014: 111). Even though some of the latter are common spaces that may not stand out through intricate architectural features per se, each of them becomes a recognizable sphere of experiences that is linked to their layout. Likewise in Possible Worlds, each sequence, or what Cameron (2008) might refer to as a narrative module, is confined to, and defined by, one particular location within the film. With the exception of some outdoor landscapes toward the end of the film, most of these locations are interior spaces with a distinct architectural style, such as the loft, the cafeteria, the police headquarters, or the pharmaceutical company in which Kleber’s laboratory is based. The spaces in these films are further distinctly marked by spatial metaphors that relate to the films’ themes. In Inception, for example, there is a visual prominence of multiple “levels” and “layers” that are nested within each other in a vertically arranged hierarchy of reality levels (Cameron and Misek 2014: 110). In Source Code, a graphic emphasis on “lines” or “tracks” corresponds with the rail-bound linear movement of the train, the horizontal directions in which Colter can move, act, and orientate himself within it, and not least the timeline itself (2014: 111). Similarly, lines and layers

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

163

characterize many spaces in Possible Worlds. While geometrical designs, clear lines, and symmetrical patterns feature prominently in George’s loft, in the cafeteria, the bar, or the conference room, other spaces, for instance Kleber’s laboratory, feature an entangled maze of pipes and wires that mark a visual contrast to these. If we link these designs to the film’s theme of being lost, then “maze” and “grid” work as apt metaphors for Possible Worlds. One could further add “box,” since spaces within spaces and images of containment are also reoccurring elements of the film (Bissonnette 2009: 397, 401), notably a visual element which can also be found in Source Code. A topographical layout that is organized around vertically nested layers and horizontal trajectories is a further similarity between Inception, Source Code, and Possible Worlds, an arrangement of worlds that can be compared to the aesthetics of a video game (see also Buckland 2014c). Cameron and Misek describe how in Inception each “level” or “layer” within the vertical hierarchy of dream levels adheres to its own linearity, horizontality, and temporality (2014: 111, 114–15). This is very similar in Source Code, where Colter is sent from the “top-level” world of the military lab, in which he only exists as a head-cum-torso kept alive via a machine, down to the simulated space of the capsule, and from there deeper down into the source code, the train itself (2014: 111, 117). Though he is initially unaware of this vertical hierarchy, he soon learns that direct communication appears possible only between the military lab and the capsule, to which he must return for further instructions, before re-entering the train, which is the only sphere that allows him to move horizontally. Likewise in Possible Worlds, the relationship between interiority and exteriority, between the inner world(s) of George’s mind and the outer world of the detectives is characterized as a vertical spatial hierarchy. In the top-level world, George is nothing more than a brain in Kleber’s vat and Berkeley and Williams investigate his murder. Contained within this upper layer are the different possible worlds that exist in the inner sphere of George’s consciousness, where George keeps meeting Joyce and lives through various stages of their relationship. To a degree George’s experience resembles that of Colter in Source Code; yet while the latter assumes the visual appearance of another and relives the same situation within the singular space of the train, George maintains his bodily identity and passes through different spaces, experiencing each of them no more than two or three times. While his inner worlds expand into potential infinity and have no clear temporal relations, the upper layer of Berkeley and William’s world expands horizontally and in a temporally linear fashion. Although in all three films the different horizontal levels are mostly separate from each other, there are some spatial and temporal overlaps. In Inception, for instance, relational effects between the different layers tend to complicate the actions and experiences of the characters, who are often simultaneously engaged in creating, altering, and reacting to their

164

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

immediate and perpetually shifting surroundings, and have to move quickly within each layer as well as between them (2014: 114–15). In Possible Worlds and Source Code the different ontological spheres of each film’s world interfere with each other in less obvious ways. And yet here, too, subtle overlaps simultaneously not only create a sense of vertical cohesion but also complicate the relationships between the layers. For example, in Source Code Colter attempts to call Rutledge and later writes a text message to Goodwin from the space of the train. Not only does this create a Möbius strip–like riddle that increases the complexity of the film by suggesting that the past may be looped and altered (2014: 117); it also defies the notion that it is impossible to communicate directly between the top level and the bottom level of the film’s ontological hierarchy. Likewise in Possible Worlds, there is a dreamlike sequence in which George enters a beach house that he had previously seen represented as a work of art in Joyce’s apartment. Once in it, he wanders through a case-like room, and subsequently finds himself outside a lighthouse on a rocky island talking to Kleber—a spatial progression that is neither clearly vertical not horizontal. The ontological hierarchy between these spaces is further complicated when George and Joyce later travel to the very same beach house and Joyce comments on words that George mumbled in his sleep, and that partially match a previous dialogue between him and Kleber. While the emphasis on architectural spaces through which the characters move repeatedly leads to a spatialization of time, temporality inseparably adds to the topological complexity of Possible Worlds and Source Code (as well as Inception). In Source Code, deadlines are the dominant mode of narrative time. Like in Inception, temporal markers in Source Code emphasize time pressure for the characters, who can also often be seen looking at watches or setting a timer, or ask about the time (2014: 115). Yet while the pressure to identify the bomber before any further attacks are committed applies to each of the characters on the separate spatial levels— Colter on the one hand, and Goodwin and Rutledge on the other—Colter moves back and forth between the capsule, which is temporally aligned with the linear temporality of the military lab, and the train, in which he is confined to an eight-minute loop of recurring past. In Possible Worlds, similar to Inception, time passes differently in each layer (2014: 111). Yet unlike in Nolan’s film as well as Source Code, temporal markers point to elisions and gaps between the alternating scenes within each world and thus make it difficult to get a clear sense of the temporal duration within each narrative strand. For instance, Berkeley and Williams make comments such as “see you tomorrow” or “you have been sitting here all day,” which gives their investigation a sense of continuous and linear progress. In George’s world, by contrast, temporality is less clearly defined and complicated through the repetition of experiences, such as the altogether four different first-time encounters with Joyce, as well as through allusions to temporal

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

165

continuity between some of these meetings nonetheless. Their conversations often refer to indeterminate time periods that tend to bridge increasingly longer periods of time, with comments ranging from “I saw you earlier” and “it was fun last night” to “I haven’t seen you here in a while” and “it’s been going on for too long” through to “I have been late at the lab all week” or “I’ve been seeing someone for three weeks.” Altogether, in both Possible Worlds and Source Code the dominant element is the characters’ spatial progression through the different spaces, rather than the temporal order of the events themselves, and accordingly, spatial orientation is the key way to further explore their worlds.

Two modes of (dis)orientation Locational awareness, the manner in which we perceive our embodied position in a given space, and our navigational ability to find routes from starting point to destination are complex processes in which several sensemaking systems interact. According to Brian Massumi (2002), two reference systems underlie our spatial orientation in general: “cognitive mapping,” which relies on visual cues and landmarks, and the “proprioceptive selfreferential system—the referencing of movement to its own variations,” which relies on proprioceptive orientation and habit, along with the direct, immediate, and immersive experience of space (2002: 180; emphasis in original). Both modes of orientation are important and usually cooperate; yet in some instances they can be at odds with each other, which results in the experience of feeling lost. Massumi further suggests that cognitive mapping, though indispensable, comes after, and in fact relies on, the proprioceptive system and thus on our active movement through a given space: Cognitive mapping is secondarily applied to the experience of space, or the space of experience. This makes it an overcoding—a certain way in which experience folds back on itself. It is very uncommon, a limit-case rarely attained, that we carry within our heads a full and accurate map of our environment. We wouldn’t have to carry maps on paper if we had them in our brains. No matter how consciously overcoding we like to be, our mappings are riddled with proprioceptive holes threatening at any moment to capsize the cognitive model (like the empty quarters filled with sea monsters on medieval maps). (2002: 181; emphasis in original) Put differently, Massumi argues that we learn how to navigate certain routes by means of actual bodily journeys through a given three-dimensional space and the turns we take in it, rather than through the study of abstract maps and visual landmarks, and that we can travel a familiar route from A to B without having to, or even being able to, cognitively recall every detail

166

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

and visual landmark along the way. This is particularly relevant in Possible Worlds and Source Code, where these two different modes of navigation correspond with spatial engagement and orientation techniques that are evident in the distinct manner in which different characters enter, inhabit, and orientate themselves in a given space. In Possible Worlds, orientation in the world of the detectives is simple, at least initially. Berkeley and Williams act and investigate in a world that is largely familiar to them and are thus able to rely on their proprioceptive orientation. For example, in two different sequences Williams and Berkeley walk up a set of stairs to their headquarters, turn right, traverse a large hall full of desks and people along a straight line, and then turn right again at the end to walk up to another level where their office is located. Repeated camera movements emphasize their and the film’s habitual familiarity with this space: each time the camera patiently waits at first, picks up their pace as soon as they have arrived on top of the first staircase, and then tracks them through the hall in almost exactly the same manner. Yet even when Berkeley or Williams encounter a space that is novel to them during their investigation, neither of them takes much time to look around upon entering. Instead, the detectives stride toward a suspect or any other goal without hesitation. In contrast to Berkeley and Williams’s habitual and determined trajectories, George generally pauses before entering a space and moves around at a much slower pace. For example, in each scene in which he meets Joyce in the cafeteria, he initially steps through an opening between two wood panels, only to stop and look around. Once he continues his path through the room packed with people having lunch, he does so in a deliberately slow manner, scanning the cafeteria with a searching and detached gaze. Finally, his attention is drawn to Joyce (and only secondarily to the empty seat at her table) and he asks to join her. Even in sequences that begin with George already seated at a table or otherwise situated in a given space, he almost always appears slightly out of place and strangely disengaged from his surroundings. When we see him sitting in a bar, for example, he is looking down at a table, rather than making eye contact with other people or showing a general interest in the world in which he currently is. Such comportment makes him seems less a savvy traveler who enjoys his existence in an infinite number of worlds, and instead speaks of a profound sense of displacement and disorientation. George’s repeated need to halt, search for visual cues, and find his spatiotemporal bearings can be explained with the fact that every scene represents a new possible world that he has not been in before, even though there are some recurring landmarks that he recognizes in each of them. Joyce in particular is such a visual landmark: she is the one he keeps looking out or waiting for, and her presence gives his worlds the continuity they otherwise lack. Yet despite his attempts to cognitively map and keep track of his encounters with her, his world accrues a number of what Massumi

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

167

calls “proprioceptive holes” (2002: 181). For even though within each sequence itself George maintains a sense of spatial coherence, he lacks the physical body that would keep up with his spatial trajectories from world to world. For us, each of these trajectories that the editing skips may appear like the conventional elision of dead time between scenes. Yet for him, these experiential interstices mark proprioceptive gaps that are indeed “threatening at any moment to capsize the cognitive model” (Massumi 2002: 181) and undermine his sense of where and who he is. Similar differences in modes of orientation can be observed in Source Code. Goodwin, Rutledge, and the other military staff remain largely stationary in front of screens and other equipment in their lab, and only have access to the virtual source code world through Colter; whereas he is the one sent on a mission to explore the space of the train firsthand. Thus while their orientation of the space of source code is created through cognitive mapping, which is based on Colter’s reports, Colter himself is bodily immersed in it. Through this he gains both a cognitive and proprioceptive awareness of the train, which not only increases with each trip but also turns out to be his advantage. Herein lies thus a significant difference between Possible Worlds and Source Code: while George’s theoretically infinite number of possible worlds vary from each other, the two primary spheres that Colter acts and moves in are limited to two spaces, the capsule and the train. In particular on the train, on the one hand, Colter relies on visual and, quite notably, other perceptual landmarks that allow him to create a cognitive-perceptual map of the compartment that is both spatial and temporal. For instance, Christina in the opposite seat, the location of the other passengers, or the exit doors all become visual landmarks that are in the same position each time he enters the source code. Since he is experiencing the same eight minutes over and over again, other perceptual cues, such as the sound of a soda can being opened, coffee being spilled, or the ringing of Christina’s mobile phone, too become spatiotemporal landmarks that allow him to anticipate events that occur at the same time in a particular location. Yet, on the other hand, each time Colter wakes up in the train, he also actively increases his proprioceptive familiarity with this space. Moving through it, he explores new areas within the train, such as the lavatory, the conductor’s staff room, or the upper level, and even ventures outside when the train stops at Glenbrook station. His ability to bodily inhabit the space of the train and later the train station allows him to move quicker each time and moreover frees his cognitive resources from the need to focus on orientating himself; it is ultimately this cooperation of the two orientation systems that allows him to find the bomber within the restricted time frame of the eight-minute loop. Nonetheless, like George, Colter too accrues proprioceptive gaps that have a disorientating effect on him. Whenever he gets ejected from the train into the capsule and back into the train again, this is a journey he cannot make bodily sense of, and

168

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

even though he becomes familiar with both spaces, Goodwin often has to help him via a cognitive recall pattern to regain an awareness of where he is (or where he thinks he is), almost as if trying to remedy Colter’s proprioceptive holes with a conscious effort to cognitively overcode his locational disorientation. Locational awareness and bodily orientation are reciprocal processes that also depend on the qualities of a space, its layout and relation to other spaces. Massumi recounts one particular instance where the interior of a building made him feel lost. Unable to keep track of the building’s numerous twists and turns along hallways with no view of the outside world, he found it difficult to reconcile his proprioceptive sense of orientation with a cognitive understanding of where he was (2002: 178–79). This helps explain how in Possible Worlds, even within the world of the detectives, a clear sense of orientation is sometimes more difficult than it initially seems, and if we were to draw a map of their world it would be full of proprioceptive holes as well. Berkeley and Williams almost entirely operate within the interior of buildings that are either windowless or have windows with frosted glass or pulled down blinds; in fact the only exterior shot of their world is a brief view of the facade of the pharmaceutical company. Echoing Massumi’s account, many of these buildings consist of endless corridors and upper and lower levels that make it easier to lose one’s way than not. For example, when Berkeley first visits Kleber’s laboratory, he encounters numerous twists and turns such as the ones Massumi has described, and a lab assistant leads him deeper and deeper into the building. The mess of pipes and tubes covering the walls add to the impression of a maze, as do several signs with arrows that never match the direction taken by Berkeley. Likewise in Source Code, the military lab is a confined interior space without windows, compartmentalized into several smaller rooms, and even though we see Goodwin and Rutledge move around in it occasionally, it is hard to gain a spatial awareness of it due to the camera’s lack of exploration of this space. Furthermore, throughout most of the film the only exterior shots are the aerial shots of Chicago, whereas the geographical location of the military lab is in Nevada, a fact that is not very clear throughout most of the film due to the lack of exterior establishing shots; only toward the end a brief shot of a road sign reveals this geographical detail. A similar inability to gain locational awareness of the capsule in relation to its surrounding space affects Colter whenever he is forced to return to it. Unlike the train, the capsule is extremely dark and confined, and initially he even finds himself strapped into some kind of safety belt harness, which restricts his movement and thus his proprioceptive ability to make sense of this space. Yet even once he frees himself from the harness, he is neither able to look nor move to the outside, a radical interiority that encapsulates the way in which Colter feels entrapped as well as lost.

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

169

Bodily displacement and being lost Placing emphasis on complex topological layouts and modes of orientation, Possible Worlds and Source Code are films about the experience of being lost, as well as about finding one’s way. As such they correspond with distinct spatial and temporal forms or “shapes” of being lost, as Sobchack describes them in her essay “Breadcrumbs in the Forest” (2004a). That is not to say that she regards space and time as separate entities when we lose our way. Rather, depending on the circumstances, each of these dimensions gains a specific prominence and thus gives a specific type of being lost its experiential shape. In Possible Worlds, George’s experience is predominantly a case of “not knowing where you are.” His disembodiment is figured as an existential displacement from the outer world; and the world(s) of his inner experience are fractured, discontinuous, and unstable. As these multiple worlds successively cease to make sense to him, he increasingly loses his orientation within them. Contrary to his initial assertion that he is a traveler between multiple worlds, later in the film he says he can “feel [his] properties melting” as a consequence of his loss of self and place. In Source Code, Colter’s experience is characterized by “going round in circles.” Similar to George, he is subjected to a rupture of the unity of body, mind, and world, whereby he simultaneously exists as a body-cum-brain hooked to a machine in one world, temporarily experiencing his simulated embodied self in a capsule, and inhabiting the last eight minutes of someone else’s life inside the source code over and over again. The train is the only sphere in which he is able to move, act, and interact independently; and yet here he is confined to the Möbius strip–like spatiotemporal loop in which only minor variations occur. Unlike George’s, Colter’s experiences are portrayed as continuous and ongoing and he can build upon past knowledge, and unlike for George, the two main spheres of his conscious experience—the train and the capsule— remain identical for him. Yet alternating between the three impossible realities of his existence, he becomes lost in a perpetual present from which there seems no way out. “The alarmingly physical sense we feel when we realize we are lost is a bodily registering of the disjunction between the visual and the proprioceptive,” writes Massumi more generally of the experience of being lost (2002: 182). As I set out to demonstrate in this section, Possible Worlds and Source Code play with our proprioceptive sense of place and direction in distinctly cinematic ways in an attempt to make us feel lost. Although our experience of cinematic space is not direct but instead mediated by a film’s spatial orientation and embodied movement in relation to this space, the difference between cognitive and proprioceptive modes of orientation nonetheless bears on what one might accordingly call the cinematic space of experience. To recall Barker’s notion of “being

170

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

in two places” at once: even if we cannot physically move through the world of a film ourselves, our bodies are spatially invested in the space of the film, and the film’s muscular gestures engage us proprioceptively (2009b: 85). Films like Possible Worlds and Source Code, with their complex vertical and horizontal ontological layers, undermine our attempts to visually track routes or establish a unified sense of geography of a film’s world that we could navigate, and whose cognitive maps we could form in our heads. Thus even though to a lesser degree and in a less existentially threatening way, the complex spatiotemporal layouts of such films can make us feel lost.

Not knowing where we are in Possible Worlds “Not knowing where you are,” the shape of being lost that dominates in Possible Worlds, is described by Sobchack as a distinctly spatial shape of disorientation, albeit as one with a temporal component as well: Not knowing where you are is not about the loss of a future destination or the return to a previous one; rather, spatially it is about the loss of present grounding and temporally about being lost in the present. .  .  . The shape of “not knowing where you are” is elastic, shifting, telescopic, spatially and temporally elongated: one is orientationally imperiled not so much on the horizontal plane as on the vertical. .  .  . The primary temporal dimension of this form of being lost is the present—but a present into which past and future have collapsed and that is stretched endlessly. (2004a: 25; emphasis in original) Sobchack’s account of “not knowing where you are” explains why, even though George initially boasted about his ability to travel between an infinite number of worlds and sleep with billions of women, he turns into such a forlorn figure as the film goes on, for he is indeed subjected to a situation where he is repeatedly uprooted, unable to settle in any of these multiplied “possible worlds” long enough to sufficiently get the feel for the space and become familiar with it. The resulting loss of being firmly and bodily grounded within one singular space is not only spatially disorientating but also leads to “the dissolution of the very spatial and temporal grounding necessary to placing and securing one’s self-identity” (Sobchack 2004a: 26). Furthermore, the constant need to re-situate and re-orientate himself increasingly turns into a stressful and tiring experience that George has to endure, rather than a series of pleasant adventures. The theoretical infinity of worlds thus turns experientially into a “vertiginous and all-consuming present” (2004a: 26) in which memories and contingencies, past and future Joyces, become indistinguishable so that, ultimately, all his attempts

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

171

at leading a coherent existence and building a stable relationship with her can only remain futile. George’s displacement from the one world in which he only exists as a brain in a vat and his ambiguous existence in the numerous inner worlds is linked to the feeling of bodily instability and the loss of balance. The most pronounced expression of this is a moment when George, already confused after he has mixed up one version of Joyce with another, suddenly takes notice of a piece of art that depicts a row of three houses in a linear geometric perspective. He slowly walks to this artwork as if under a spell. Following him along, the film moves closer too, and much to our bewilderment, what had seemed like a flat image plane suddenly appears more and more threedimensional, with the houses in the image now seemingly protruding. Angles and corners, foreground and background, become increasingly indistinct and permute, as the camera slowly approaches the row of houses while turning to the right during the process. Similar to the hollow-mask illusion in which the concave, hollow, and pushed inward depiction of a face gives the impression of an ordinary convex, pushed outward shape, the fluid inversion of spatial depth produces a nauseating effect. Its impact is similar to the Stendhal Syndrome, the sensation of being overpowered by an overabundance of art. Often experienced by tourists in destinations like Florence or Venice, the Stendhal Syndrome can “destabilize both the grounded space on which they stand and their temporal moorings in the present” (Sobchack 2004a: 25). As an intensified variation of “not knowing where you are,” this moment signals a latent degree of awareness that George has of the extent to which he is truly lost. Leaning against the wall to gather his spatiotemporal bearings again, he explains to Joyce: “There are moments when my consciousness shifts. I can feel my properties melting.” As signaled by these lines, George’s disembodied “fluctuating dream-state” (as Dr. Kleber calls it) is linked with the loss of embodied stability in his inner “possible worlds,” a sensation that manifests itself most clearly during those moments in which George transitions from one world into another. Invisible editing techniques that mask the transitions between the different spheres emulate George’s shape of being lost, bringing our cognitive and visual understanding of where we are—or where we think we are—into conflict with our proprioceptive orientation. During almost every spatial shift, graphic match cuts, often in the form of close-ups, temporarily delay our cognitive understanding of where we are in the world of the film. One example of this is a scene that ends with a close-up of George and Joyce walking through a crowded bar. A cut to another close-up amid a crowd of people signals the start of the following scene; yet suddenly we see Inspector Berkeley fighting his way through a congregation of animal rights activists to get to Kleber’s laboratory. On the one hand, this seamless blending of spheres adds a sense of coherence to the film’s otherwise disjointed and discontinuous worlds. Yet, on the other hand, it creates spatial disorientation,

172

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

producing an effect akin to a jet lag. Only with delay do we realize that we are no longer where we thought we are, and our bodies need to spatially readjust. While transitions such as these aim at leaving us uncertain of where we are, others play more immediately with our proprioceptive sense. One of the most perplexing transitions that upturns our sense of uprightness begins inside the darkroom of the police headquarters, with an overhead shot of a development tank in which a number of photographs are floating around. The scene already takes a strange turn when the camera starts gliding along the surface and other buoyant items—a pencil case, a glass, a pencil, a thermos—come into the frame. But it becomes even stranger when the unexpected upside-down reflection of a figure emerges. Once the water stops rippling, this figure becomes recognizable as the upside-down reflection of George’s face on the still surface, a variation of an “upsidedown image” (D’Aloia 2012). After a barely noticeable pause, the camera resumes its movement with an upward pan that is hard to recognize as such, and suddenly George’s face is reflected on the surface of a highly polished black tabletop, behind which he is sitting; and only now do we come to realize that we have moved worlds again. The transition between the development tank and the table is not only confusing because it joins two separate spheres in one seemingly continuous movement. With only a figure but no ground, it is impossible to feel the moment when the film performs the 90° tilt from the overhead perspective of the tank-turned-table upward onto George’s face. The film’s editing also frequently thwarts spatial distinctions between above and below, near and far, left or right, here or there. For example, during another, similarly confusing transition, one scene ends with a zoom into a soup bowl from above, followed by a shot of a huge and heavy lid with a similarly round shape seen from below in the next scene. This is entirely unmotivated in diegetic terms: we never get a view of what might be inside that ominous vessel. Similar to the startling effect of the upside-down image, this unexpected reversal of spatial positions during the transition between spheres subverts our sense of above and below. Another striking moment of deliberate spatial confusion that even combines several of such spatial inversion techniques is a dreamlike sequence, in which George enters the beach house and ends up meeting Kleber first inside a staircase and then outside a lighthouse. Without visible cuts it moves from George entering the cottage from the left to an adjacent room with George re-entering the frame from the opposite right. A tiny window in the background briefly shows a view onto a lighthouse on an island. After stepping through two more doors, George and Kleber suddenly stand outside of that same lighthouse. Here and there, far and near, left and right all at once get subverted in this transition between impossibly connected spaces. In that way the film continuously works to unsettle our sense of stability, position, and direction and overrides any cognitive attempts at mapping these spaces.

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

173

In addition to destabilizing our sense of position and direction during the transitions between the film’s separate spheres and spaces, editing as a crucial technique of spatial disorientation is also used within individual scenes. For example, the second time we encounter George he is being interviewed by a range of people inside a conference room. George and the interviewer sit opposite one another at a long table, flanked by a row of four other people sitting on each side (notably, one of them is Kleber). Most of the shots are close-ups of George and the interviewers’ faces. Yet intermittently a number of long shots reveal the great spatial distance between them. Barker comments on the jarring effect of such unmotivated cuts and reframings (2009b: 70), noting that such a “fragmented and incoherent view . . . leaves us unable to make any bodily ‘sense’ of the space” (2009b: 171 n. 1). The effect here is amplified by the sound: George and the interviewer both speak with low voices that could not possibly travel the actual distance between them; nor does the volume ever change between long shots and close-ups. Such a lack of correspondence between voice and spatial position occurs throughout Possible Worlds and creates synesthetic conflicts that increase our sense of spatial disorientation in this film. The disjunctive editing and sound in Possible Worlds play on the grounding function of the body within a given space, be it cinematic or otherwise. It is not only that, despite the narrative solution the film offers in the world of the detectives, it is difficult to create a coherent and linear narrative out of George’s experiences. We have to re-orientate ourselves constantly and repeatedly within the different layers of space-time in Possible Worlds, and rather than making this operation easy for us, the film complicates it instead. We may quickly regain our bodily sense of upward and downward, here or there, near or distant, left or right after each of these individual moments described above, as well as after many similar ones that occur throughout the film. But similar to the cumulative effect that Cameron and Misek describe in Inception, where horizontality and verticality become interchangeable and the constant shifting of the center of gravity leads to the characters loss of gravity (for instance, in Inception’s “zero-gravity” hotel) (2014: 116), bit by bit, cut by cut, the film takes hold of our own sense of stability, position, and direction. As a result of this permanent uprooting and destabilizing, being exposed to all those moments of orientational delay, and without the familiar and safe topography of one singular unified world, we can feel lost in a film like Possible Worlds. Kate Rennebohm (2008), writing about the even more radically fractured Inland Empire, suggests that the affective experience of watching Lynch’s film might even lead to a temporal loss of one’s sense of identity. This seems to be going too far, since, according to Barker, “we lose the sense of our separateness from the film, but we don’t lose our sense of ourselves” in the tactility of the film experience (2009b: 36). Yet there are certainly moments within Possible Worlds where we lose track of where we

174

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

are in the film, finding ourselves in situation similar to that of George, whose spatial disorientation converges with the loss of feeling bodily anchored. At the same time, however, the transitions in Possible Worlds are moments of shock or disruption shift of our own embodied awareness back to our being “here,” in our seats, rather than to being “there,” in the cinematic space, thus leading to a “conflict between received ideas and lived experience” (Barker 2009b: 90). They remind us that, unlike George, we are not truly lost, and encourage us to consider how we might find our way out.

Lost in the loop of Source Code While Source Code is, strictly speaking, not a time travel film, it fits the category of the complex time travel film in which a “traumatized protagonist . . . gains the power to go back in time to alter injustices but in doing so negates his own existence” (Panek 2006: 79). Complex time travel films, for example, Primer (2004), Looper (2012), Time Crimes (2007), Triangle (2009), The Butterfly Effect (2004), or Donnie Darko (2001), often explore “the relationship between time and the subjects that encounter it” and often make the paradoxes of the idea of time travel felt by focusing on the experiential conflicts that result from spatiotemporal disorientation, disjunction, and multiplication (Isaacs 2014: 199). A common trope in these films is that a character discovers, observes, and directly encounters another (past or future) version of their own embodied self (or even selves) (Isaacs 2014: 212). Films such as Primer, Time Crimes, or Triangle can therefore be challenging, for we have to keep track of the character(s)’ positions in space and time. By allowing Colter to inhabit another man’s body—an avatar— through the source code technology, Source Code thus conveniently avoids this central paradox of time travel tales and makes in some ways a less complex viewing experience. It is also noteworthy that Colter is portrayed as an action and goal-oriented character who, aside from brief moments of confusion when he encounters his reflection in a window and later in a mirror during his first mission into the train, does not experience any side effects that one would expect to arise from such a rupture between one’s body and mind and the world. Nonetheless, what makes Source Code interesting in the context of this study is that, like Possible Worlds, displacement is expressed in spatiotemporal terms, whereby time is spatialized through the film’s settings, the hierarchy of multiple spatial layers, the different flow of time in each layer, and the character’s movement through these spaces-times (Cameron and Misek 2014: 111–12). In that way, then, Source Code too is a time travel film in which the disembodied protagonist’s journey leads to various states of being disoriented and lost in a complex configuration of spatiotemporal layers in which the forces of subjective and objective time collide.

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

175

Just like the disjointed and fractured topology of Possible Worlds, the nonlinear and discontinuous space-time in Source Code creates a sense of bodily disorientation. Although Source Code does not attempt to continually confuse us about our spatial whereabouts in the space of the film, its play with repetition and variation creates an indeterminate temporality that results in another shape of being lost: a “round shape of being lost,” an experience of “going round in circles.” This shape of being lost is “oriented toward the past since one finds oneself continually revisiting and relocating there” and deals with the “anxiety about being spatially and temporally ‘arrested’ and stuck in place in a present become the past, about the future’s foreclosure, about the literal prohibition of forward movement” (Sobchack 2004a: 23). Indeed this account of being lost quite aptly encapsulates the experience of Source Code and the scenario that Colter finds himself in. Taking us into and out of each of its three main spaces with predictable regularity, the film operates on a perpetual loop course between the train, the capsule, and the military lab, and Colter is constantly forced to relive the same eight minutes over and over again. Unlike George, Colter quickly learns where he is (although the full truth about his true existence in the military lab is still somewhat withheld until later in the film); and unlike George, who often seems to be drifting aimlessly through his multiverse of possible worlds, Colter is focused and goal oriented, able to learn from his past experiences and make modifications to his path of actions each time. Yet despite his determination, within the logic of source code in neither sphere there appears to be a possible future for him: in one world he is disembodied and on artificial life support, and in the other world trapped in a recurring present moment, which is in reality, a recreated memory of somebody else’s last minutes in life. Source Code not only challenges the notion that the past is a path which we cannot retrace but in doing so also plays on the intrinsic unity between time, space, and the lived body. As a prerequisite for this claim consider how we often conceive of time in a spatialized manner: we talk of the past as something that we have put behind us, and of the future as a horizon of possibilities that lies ahead or in front of us, containing events that we look forward to. These spatial markers of temporal relations are subjective and relative, rather than absolute and scientifically mappable; they are neither north nor south, but are points of orientation that are experienced from the perspective of the lived body. Thus time, as it is perceived and understood from the perspective of the lived body, is anchored somewhat paradoxically in the constant flux of the present and from there extends backward into the past and forward into the future. However, the difference to a strictly spatial understanding of “behind” is of course that we can backtrack a route we have taken in space, whereas according to our common understanding of time as linear and irreversible we cannot “backtrack” in time.

176

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

Source Code utilizes this spatialized grasp of time to give visual expression to Colter’s tale of being lost in a perpetual present. In particular within the sphere of the train, the past-turned-present is figured as a field of tension in which the opposing forces of forward and backward push and pull in either direction. Notably, each time Colter wakes up inside the train he is seated facing away from the direction of travel, his repeated insertion into a moment that has already happened replicated in his backward glance at the world rushing by outside the window. Such placement inside a moving vehicle, which some people acutely dislike, is disorientating not only because we cannot see where we are traveling to in spatial terms but because it produces a contradiction to our embodied and spatialized understanding of time: the future suddenly lies behind our backs and we are faced with the past as it slips away from his and our visual grasp. The shot/reverse shot editing during Colter’s conversations with Christina creates additional confusion in this regard, as the stream of scenery seen through the window in the background constantly changes direction when the camera cuts between over the shoulder shots from Colter’s perspective to hers, facing forward. Colter’s spatial movements further contribute to this field of opposing forces when he walks, stumbles, or rushes either forward or backward through the aisle, along with or against the direction of travel of the high-speed train. Emulating if not amplifying Colter’s experience for us, Source Code deploys a range of camera movements that engage us as embodied spectators in this drama of being pushed and pulled between forward and backward forces in space and time. The same forward traveling shot marks the beginning of nearly every sequence in which Colter re-enters the source code, sweeping across a lake and toward the approaching train like

FIGURE 17 The present as a field of opposing forces in Source Code (2011).

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

177

a missile honing in on its target—the palpable danger of imminent collision between two fast moving bodies racing toward each other in space impelling us to hold our breath. At other times the camera engages us more subtly, first moving toward Colter, only to pull back again seconds later. A good example is the moment in which Colter steps outside of the train during his second experience of the source code. Situated on the outside, the camera slowly moves forward alongside the carriage, toward the stream of people, among them Colter, exiting and entering the train. Continuing the take, it slowly circles around him as he takes in his surroundings, tentatively yet amazed at the same time. Then, when a speaker voice announces the train’s imminent departure, a cut takes the camera further away from the train, and the camera, rather than following Colter back on board of the train, starts pulling backward while the doors slowly close and Colter walks backward up the steps before the train starts moving. This tension between conflicting forces in motion extends to the different spheres and the spatiotemporal relations between them. Even more so than Colter’s transfers into the train, his passages back into the capsule are dynamized through movements into opposing directions. These moments of extraction, which are preceded by Colter’s death within the source code, are much more violent in nature than the entries. They consist of stream-ofconsciousness-type montages, showing afterimages of Colter’s experience on the train, the explosion, Christina, and their reflection in a statue whose significance we only understand at the film’s end. Unlike with the clearly differentiable movement of the camera and the train in the entry moments, it is impossible to tell whether these images are pulling away from, or pushing against the screen, and often it feels like they are doing both at the same time. In addition to playing with our spatialized embodied grasp of temporality within the part of the source code that consists of the train, Source Code creates a palpable tension between the different experiential spheres of the film as whole. A useful model to account for this embodied effect is Yacavone’s model of nested time. It consists of three experiential parameters: first the actual, measurable time of on-screen duration; second the represented, objective time of the fictional action; and third the lived, experiential, expressed or felt time of the film (Yacavone 2014: 201–14).7 While the first two are common distinctions in the analysis of narrative cinema, it is the latter, somewhat intangible category that can vary from viewer to viewer and that creates an “affective link” between spectator and film, a link which cannot be reduced to character engagement but instead is felt and closely related to the “expressed world-feeling of a cinematic world” that, as mentioned earlier, characterizes the film experience as whole (2014: 206). In particular in films in which there is a discrepancy between actual time, represented time, and expressed time, this link can produce a noticeable effect (2014: 204). This is the case in Source Code, where each

178

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

of the experiential spheres—the military lab, the capsule, the train—follows its own temporal course, so that it is even hard to speak of one single represented time of the film. Each of them affects us in a way that defies their supposed position in the hierarchically nested structure of spheres, resulting in a “world-feeling” that originates in a conflict between felt and represented spatiotemporal realities. In terms of the actual screen time, it is hard to get a feel for the film’s on-screen duration. With a runtime of ninety-three minutes, Source Code, though still within conventional limits, is on the shorter side of contemporary feature films. Nonetheless, audiences may well be surprised at this fact, as the different types of represented times within the film make it hard to gauge the progress of events in temporal terms. In Goodwin and Rutledge’s sphere the represented time is one continuous and linear flow of actions and events, which consists predominantly of them monitoring Colter’s vital signs and his progress and re-entry into the source code. The moments that Colter spends in the capsule are of undetermined duration, yet presumably they last between a few seconds and a few minutes, and are aligned with the objective passing of time in the military lab. Often crosscut with shots set in military lab, they mostly depict how Colter communicates with Goodwin and Rutledge via a screen-and-camera interface. The moments that he spends inside the source code, on and off the train, are temporally the most clearly defined: in terms of represented time, each trip starts at the same point of time in the past, lasts eight minutes maximum and ends with either the explosion or Colter’s “death” inside the source code through other means. Apart from his final insertion into the train, which is crosscut with events taking place in the military lab, these sequences are kept strictly separate from the hierarchically higher reality level, allowing us to become fully immersed in this virtual space along with Colter. Panek observes about The Butterfly Effect that one of the central problems for the time-traveling protagonist is that “although time is moving back and forth for everyone else in the story, it is constantly moving forward for the protagonist” (2006: 82). The opposite is the case in Source Code: here, as a result of the divergent flow of time in each sphere, they drift apart, and as they do so, continuity and synchronicity between them become increasingly volatile and insignificant. That is to say, because in the sphere of the military lab time continues its linear forward stream, it increases the temporal distance to the eight minutes that take place in the train. The alternation between the different spheres and the conflicting temporalities create a cinematic rhythm that is intrinsically linked to Source Code’s lived or expressed time and our affective experience of it. It diverts us from the objective and measurable passing of time to the effect that its expressed time creates a feeling of being immersed if not stuck in a permanently present moment. In the most general sense, “rhythm is the perceived or felt order and pattern of a succession of discrete sense

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

179

impressions, most often characterized by repetition and separated by intervals of varying length” (Yacavone 2014: 206). Numerous cinematic means of expression, for instance, shot length, editing, graphic elements, patterns of dialogue, or music, can all contribute a film’s specific rhythm, which in turn can be seen as an effect of its multiple temporal temporalities (Yacavone 2014: 209). In order to understand how in Source Code the film’s cinematic rhythm elicits a temporal “round shape of being lost,” it is helpful to call to mind again Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on the unity of body, mind, and world, and his fundamental assumption of consciousness as embodied. Since “time implies space and space lived time” (Yacavone 2014: 212), the embodied experience of time is also inherently connected to movement: the inner movement of the body’s vital organs, for example, the constant beating of the heart or the workings of lungs, but also the exterior movement of the body within  the world, that is, the way in which our embodied intentionality allows us to experience the world as a possibility of movements and actions, almost allowing us tiny glimpses into the future, a sensation we may remember too well from accidents in which we fell to the ground and foresaw the impact a fraction of a second before we actually felt it. Consider also how a given time period tends to feel longer the more actions we engage in; whereas the less we do, the shorter it feels. This link between time, action, and embodiment explains how the time Colter spends inside the source code experientially expands even though the circular shape of time in this sphere dictates that each of his trips only lasts eight represented minutes (and in terms of actual duration is even shorter), and even though these eight minutes are only a virtual experience of the same supposedly inalterable moment in the past. Paradoxically, the train and its spatial extension, the station, is the sphere in which more actions occur, and in which there is a sense of progress, since Colter is able to learn from his past experiences each time. By contrast, in the sphere of the military lab, not to mention the capsule in which Colter is both literally and figuratively entrapped, there is a sense of stagnation. Goodwin and Rutledge do not engage in much action beyond pushing buttons, typing commands, and communicating with Colter whenever he is back in the capsule. Thus due to Colter’s actions the spatial sphere of the train has an experiential richness that is missing on the level of the military, which remains a space of abstract rather than concrete embodied possibilities. Intensifying our sensory and embodied awareness of the film’s lived or subjective time at the expense of both its objective or represented temporality and our own sense of the actual duration of the film itself, Source Code’s cinematic rhythm, an effect of the film’s divergent temporalities, creates a feeling of being lost in more than one way. Yacavone notes that “the familiar sense of losing track of objective time” is essential to feel immersed in, or absorbed by a work of art, be it a book, a song, a daydream, or a film (2014: 207). Thus, on the one hand, Source Code’s “lived time and affective rhythm

180

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

help to provide for immersive engagement on part of the film viewer” (2014: 207), an immersive engagement whose magnetic pull is the strongest whenever we find ourselves in the source code alongside Colter. Yet on the other hand, even though there is a cumulative sense of progression in this sphere, this is of little value if it only ever occurs within the same eight minutes, over and over again. Sobchack writes that the round shape of being lost “produces a context in which purposive activity and forward momentum are sensed as futile and, in response, become increasingly desperate and frenetic in quality” (2004a: 24). This quote neatly sums up Colter’s dilemma and explains how the film’s expressed or subjective time puts us into a conflicted state of being stuck in a perpetual present as well: we learn along with Colter that, aside from identifying the attacker, his actions within the source code are in vain, as they have no tangible consequences within this sphere. For example, regardless of whether Christina dies or survives the explosion, whenever Colter finds himself onboard the train again she is sitting opposite. Thus our objective knowledge of the film’s different hierarchical levels tells us that the world of the military, with its linear flow if time, is the only sphere in which a future is possible; yet at the same time, experientially aligned with Colter and his embodied actions onboard of the train, this virtual space with its circular temporality feels like a much more feasible reality with a future potential nonetheless. I will return to the dual meaning of being lost in a cinematic world in the conclusion of this chapter. But before that let me address one further aspect of the complex spatiotemporal worlds of Possible Worlds and Source Code: the ways in which both films also allow us to find our way out.

Feeling coherence: Atmosphere, immersion, and perceptual maps Several outcomes are possible when one is lost: to find the way out; to be found by someone else; or to stay lost for good. Not all of these presuppose the recognition that one is lost in the first place; nor do they necessarily imply the lost person’s wish to change the situation—staying lost can be a deliberate choice or a way of being-in-the-world for some.8 As far as Possible Worlds and Source Code are concerned, the main characters in both films ultimately do realize that they are lost in a multiverse of worlds (George) or trapped between being kept in an apparatus in one world and traveling in an eight-minute loop on a train that never reaches its destination in another (Colter). The desire to find a way out is more clearly articulated in Source Code. Once Colter finds out the truth about his parallel existence in the world of the military lab and the source code, he actively works out an escape plan and explicitly discusses with Goodwin his belief that it is possible for him to

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

181

move deeper into the source code and remain onboard the train beyond the eight minutes. Compared to him, George seems like a passive drifter who cares little about where he goes next. Instead, he expresses relief when he senses that there is an end to his journeys in the film’s final scene, which is preceded by Detective Williams finally finding the murder victim’s brain in the upper level or actual world. Nonetheless, George too becomes “un-lost” in a moment in which he almost triumphantly remarks, “I think I know where I am now” while being interrogated by Dr. Kleber near the film’s end, an implicit acknowledgment of his shape of being lost as an instance of “not knowing where he is.” Both Colter’s plan of action and George’s existential realization raise the question of what prevents these characters—alongside us—from becoming lost entirely in the complex mazes of their impossible worlds, and what instead enables them to find their way again. The previous section has explored how Possible Worlds and Source Code evoke a sense of disorientation and being lost. The following, last section of this chapter addresses the way in which both films also express a sense of coherence and unity, rather than complete narrative and spatiotemporal fragmentation, and guide us in finding our way out. Links between space and progression and embodied ways of perceiving a space and its ambient qualities allow us to make sense of experiences and events that do not neatly fit into a linear and causal order. In Possible Worlds, the film’s atmosphere creates a felt sense of change and cohesion and also makes us perceptive to a subtle epistemological shift that George undergoes as a character. In Source Code, by contrast, the film’s atmosphere initially contributes to the feeling of being stuck in the present; yet at the end we come to realize, alongside Colter, that a hidden perceptual map has led his way all along.

Atmosphere and unity in Possible Worlds Aside from the distinction between the two separate ontological spheres, there are also two different types of spaces in Possible Worlds. On the one hand, there are the mostly interior architectural spaces. These include the loft, the cafeteria, the bar, the boardroom in which George has a job interview, Kleber’s laboratory, and the police department, as well as the beach house. On the other hand, there are exterior, natural spaces, such as the rocky island where George meets Kleber, the surrounding landscape of the beach house, and lastly the beach where George assaults Joyce, and where the film’s final scene takes place. While such qualitative spatial differences thus occur in both spheres, they are particularly important for George’s experience because they imbue the film with a sense of progression that George’s infinite and arbitrary traversal through possible worlds otherwise lacks. Initially, the architectural spaces dominate in his sphere, beginning with the first scene in the cafeteria. The natural spaces, by contrast, become more frequent

182

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

toward the later stages, culminating in the film’s final scene in which George and Joyce sit at a beach, presumably their last encounter in the possible worlds sphere, while in the actual world his life support is switched off at the same time. While this spatial progression from inside to outside can be read metaphorically as a move out of containment and toward freedom, it is important to note that this progression is nonetheless decoupled from linearity and causality. George shifts back and forth between the interior and exterior spaces several times, and aside from a conversation between George and Joyce in which they plan a holiday there is no motivation for these trips in narrative terms. Patrick Heelan, in his book Space Perception and the Philosophy of Science (1983), draws a distinction between Euclidean (or Cartesian) and hyperbolic visual space (a concept also referenced by Sobchack in her “Breadcrumbs in the Forest” essay [2004a]). More specifically, Heelan emphasizes that these are, in fact, two distinct ways of perceiving space, rather than spatial qualities in themselves. In broad terms, Euclidean visual space relates to Euclidean geometry, physical laws, and abstract measurements. Hyperbolic visual space, by contrast, is characterized by “near and distant zones” and “size-distances” that do not necessarily abide by physical laws, as well as by “horizontal planes” and curved shapes, rather than straight lines that converge into potential infinity (Heelan 1983: 27–32). Significantly, Heelan locates these two traditions of perceiving and representing visual space within the larger context of Cartesian philosophy and related science traditions. Taking a phenomenological stance, he challenges the notion that objective and empirically verified claims based on such scientific traditions are the only method to provide truthful knowledge about the world. For him, the difference between a “third-person mode of inquiry” and a “firstperson mode of inquiry,” or a Euclidean and a hyperbolic visual strategy, is simply that they are different—rather than contradictory—“hermeneutic choices” to make sense of the world (1983: 142–43). While Euclidean visual space has become a culturally dominant norm of representing space and knowledge, hyperbolic visual space nonetheless comes closer to our unaided visual perception of space, as it corresponds to the lived viewpoint of the observer (1983: 12–13), and is therefore more person-related and significant to an embodied subject (1983: 259). Possible Worlds makes these shapes and structures visible for us, engaging us with them as a way of making sense of George’s progression from the architectural interiors to the natural outdoor spaces. The architectural interiors, including the loft, the cafeteria, the bar, and even the police headquarters in the world of the detectives, all fit within the Euclidean system. Designed according to the geometric principles of the Renaissance, straight vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines structure the relations between size, distance, and depth in these spaces. Their geometric perspectives are, as mentioned previously, additionally emphasized by the

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

183

film’s 4:3 aspect ratio. The exterior spaces, by contrast, are characterized by hyperbolic shapes and structures, and in fact their representation matches Heelan’s definition of hyperbolic spaces almost one-to-one. Several scenes in which George and Joyce travel to the beach house are exemplary in this regard. The first of these starts with a panoramic long shot of their car driving along a meandering ocean road—the film’s only traditional establishing shot—which indeed gives visible expression to “the dynamic flow of shapes when driving on a highway . . . the shape of the open sea and the sky” (1983: 28). In another scene we see George and Joyce from behind, “looking at an extended horizontal plane below eye level” as they are gazing at “the sea seen from the top of a cliff” (1983: 31). Situated extremely close behind the two characters, the camera additionally makes visible the “near zone . . . directly in front of the viewer,” while the sea and the sky in the “distant zone . . . appear to be finite” and “shallow in depth” (1983: 28–29). Perhaps the most striking example of hyperbolic visual space in Possible Worlds is when George and Joyce stroll across a grassy hillside and the film, positioned at a much lower position downhill, shows them as small figures against a background of large looming clouds. In this image it is not as much the “extended horizontal plane above eye level, such as a cover of clouds” that “takes on the appearance of an arched but flattened vault resting on the horizon” (1983: 31), but rather the hilly horizon itself with its distinct curvilinear shape.9 George’s progression from the Euclidean, architectural interior spaces to the hyperbolic, outdoor landscapes in Possible Worlds signals an epistemological shift of how he makes sense of his experiences. Neither George’s appearance nor his personality changes noticeably throughout

FIGURE 18 Hyperbolic space in Possible Worlds (2000).

184

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

the film, and he maintains the same stoic manner and slightly withdrawn facial expression (Bisonnette 2009: 397). Nonetheless, an important transformation he goes through is from analytic and scientific thinking to sense perception and subjective, embodied experience, from quantitative accounts of his parallel existence in several worlds, where he has “billions of lovers,” to the qualities of these experiences and what makes them meaningful instead. Consider how at the film’s beginning conversations often evolve around abstract topics such as possible worlds theory, or George’s intellectual abilities, such as his outstanding arithmetic skills that enable him to juggle dizzying sums and numbers in his head. Yet very subtly he turns away from abstract and scientific theories and toward concrete qualities of experience, for example, when he simply asks Joyce how she likes the dessert, or when Joyce later tells him, “I love the way you touch me,” while the film emphasizes their mutual intimacy through close-up shots of their skin.10 This increased sensory awareness occurs in the context of both pleasant and disturbing and disruptive experiences, the latter evident, for example, in a scene where George wakes up and the grinding noise of the coffeemaker temporarily stalls his entire functioning. George’s epistemological shift is paralleled by perceptive and expressive changes in the film’s atmosphere, a subtle reminder that for us too the qualities of a cinematic space contribute to the way we make sense of a film. Consider the second cafeteria scene, which is the first time we see George re-entering a space that is already familiar to us. Initially it might seem like a near identical repetition of the previous one: George enters through the panel doors on the left with exactly the same movements; a flash of lightning again occurs in the very moment he steps into the cafeteria; the camera slowly tracks his steps sideways across the room just as it did before; George asks to sit down with Joyce at exactly the same spot and even opens a conversation with exactly the same question. However, now there is a brief flicker of recognition in Joyce’s expression, rather than ignorance, and the conversation is more amiable and ends with Joyce giving George her card, instead of storming off infuriated like she did before when his overt sexual remarks offended her. Yet aside from these more obvious differences, the entire scene also has a very different feel from the beginning. The previous scene was underexposed, and the entire space, including the people in it, was suffused with a cold and muted blue hue. Now, a subtle change in tone and saturation gives George’s second entry into the cafeteria a livelier impression from the beginning. Though subdued and diffused lighting is still a prominent ambient quality, warmer colors and stronger contrasts give everything a more defined look. The yellow of Joyce’s shirt collar underneath the lab coat becomes noticeable as such, and both George and Joyce’s complexions have lost their waxen pale shade in favor of a slightly rosier glow. There is also a change in the room’s “auditory texture” (Ihde 1976: 59). Like in the earlier scene, the jumble of voices in the crowded

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

185

room fills the space with a homogenous mumble. Yet singular words and sentences are now more discernible than before, as are the lyrics of the background music. Altogether these ambient changes are subtle variations in kind, rather than quantifiable ones, and if “real” was a property to be measured in gradients, the variance here could be described as “still surreal, but less so than before.” Atmospheres are a complex interfusion of both permanent and changeable elements, including light, materials, shapes, textures, colors, sounds, weather, and moreover the people inhabiting a particular space at a given time (Pallasmaa 2014: 20–21). This is no different with cinematic atmospheres, which can absorb the characters’ vibes as they interact with a space, and reflect them through a film’s specific means of expression such as cinematography, mise-en-scène, or sound. Donaldson, for example, describes how in Vertigo (1985) “spaces are coloured by how the characters experience them” (2014: 90). The same could be said for Possible Worlds, only here the spaces are colored by the differing degrees of intimacy, intensity, and emotional resonance between George and Joyce. Each of the film’s spaces and places undergoes changes in hue, brightness, and saturation such as the ones described above. Yet neither of these changes can be attributed to the weather or the daytime alone. A good example are the scenes that are set in the loft. In one of them, deep, saturated blue tones next to muted yellow cushions are the dominant colors, the overall atmosphere exuding a coolish, sober vibe that anticipates that later in this scene Joyce will inform George that she is not interested in a romantic relationship with him. In another scene set in the loft, pastel shades of yellow and green and an overall increase in brightness evoke the ambience of a sunny morning in spring, matching the relaxed and intimate atmosphere of George and Joyce having breakfast in bed and making holiday plans. By contrast, yet another scene that is filled with tension rather than intimacy sees the loft darkened down, brimming with the muffled talk and laughter of party guests. Open flames and fire produce harsh contrasts rather than warmth, and the only color that stands out is the jade green of Joyce’s dress, its near aggressive tone a premonition of her imminent break-up with George. Such ambient transmutations are the film’s way of absorbing and reflecting the constant flux of the characters’ feelings for each other, calling to mind that an often used alternative expression for atmosphere is the term “mood.” Robert Sinnerbrink, exploring the elusive category of mood in cinema and its close connection with a film’s world from a phenomenological perspective, argues that moods function as emotional maps to a cinematic world: they are “expressive of .  .  . what aspects of such a world might be emotionally significant” and “provide a ‘baseline’ form of attunement that enables certain items within that world to show up as interesting” (2012: 154). For him, “the evocation of mood is a holistic phenomenon that reveals different aspects of a cinematic world rather than

186

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

a piecemeal process triggered by the apprehension of isolated ‘mood-cues’” that cognitivist scholars such as Greg M. Smith, Carl Plantinga, and Noël Carroll have focused on in their respective writings on narrative cinema and emotional engagement (2012: 157). And while there is no specific sense organ for moods and emotions, if we think again of the skin of the film as a perceptive and expressive membrane, then we can liken Possible Worlds to a cinematic chameleon that adjusts its skin in emotional resonance with its surroundings. In addition to reflecting the emotional variations of George’s relationship with Joyce, the constantly morphing atmosphere of the film imbues its world with a sense of unity and cohesion that the nonlinear narrative of George’s travels otherwise lacks. Pallasmaa writes that “atmosphere is the overarching perceptual, sensory and emotive impression of space, setting or social situation. It provides the unifying coherence and character for a room, space, place, and landscape. It is ‘the common denominator,’ ‘the colouring’ or ‘the feel’ of the experiential situation” (2014: 20–21). This understanding of atmosphere can be extended to a film, where we often take for granted a carefully constructed and consistent mise-en-scène or worldfeel, and only became aware of it when something is amiss or does not quite fit. Atmosphere can indeed establish a “unifying coherence” that holds together the disparate and impossible ontological layers in a narratively and spatially fractured film such as Possible Worlds, a sentiment also shared by Yacavone, who writes that a film’s overall world-feeling can “provide a kind of expressive glue . . . that somehow reconciles contrasting or incongruous spaces, times and events on an affective plane” (2014: 197). Just like Joyce provides George with some sense of continuity during his discontinuous nomadic drift that defies the external and emotional changes of her character, the atmosphere of Possible Worlds allows us to experience the world of the film as a unified whole, rather than as an incoherent journey through a fragmented assortment of places and spaces. Several ambient hinges link George’s interior world(s) with the exterior world of the detectives. For instance, even though the disorderly and chaotic atmosphere of the police headquarters noticeably contrasts with the neatly arranged and ordered interior design of the loft, both spaces also share atmospheric qualities such as similar gray and blue tones or a diffuse and hazy light. Other overlaps are more subtle, such as the vivid red of George’s blood spilling over the floor and the yellow crime scene tape and evidence markers from the film’s first scene, which seem to seep through the entire film: when Williams interviews a suspect on location, the background is interspersed with thin yellow railings; yellow and red marks are on a wall planner in the detective’s office, as well as in the background of hallways and lab spaces in the pharmaceutical company where Kleber works; speckles of red and yellow moreover leak into George’s world, evident, for example, in Joyce’s yellow shirt underneath her lab coat or the cushions

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

187

in the apartment. Spots of red can be found in the flashing signal of a vat containing a rat brain in Kleber’s lab, the red light on a coffeemaker that Georges stares at with confusion, or the mysterious flashing light signal that George and Joyce ponder about in the last scene. In their world, this red light suddenly stops; in the exterior world, the life-support system of the vat is switched off, its inexplicable simultaneous occurrence in both spheres suggesting that the outward signal of George’s brain paradoxically bounces back into his interior realm. There are also a number of more complex atmospheric hinges that question the ontological relationship between the two spheres itself. Though with increasing tendency toward the end of the film, this occurs as early as during the transition between the first and the second scene. The first scene ends with the camera flash that illuminates George’s dead face. This flash carries over into the next scene, where bad weather lightning briefly illuminates the cafeteria as George enters. On the one hand, such leaks reiterate that the boundaries between George’s world and the world of the detectives are porous and permeable rather than strictly separate (Bissonnette 2009: 403). Yet, on the other hand, they undermine the ontological hierarchy of one actual and several subordinate possible worlds. These and numerous other ambient leaks and hinges, perceptual overlaps, and atmospheric changes might easily bypass our conscious visual recollection of the individual scenes. Yet this does not mean they go entirely unnoticed. Pallasmaa writes that “overpowering atmospheres have a haptic, almost material presence, as if we were surrounded and embraced by a specific substance” (2014: 34). He further describes atmosphere or ambience not only as cognitively elusive but also as an essentially synesthetic

FIGURE 19 Atmospheric leaks and hinges in Possible Worlds (2000).

188

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

phenomenon, “an invisible fragrance or smell that fuses and heightens the sensory experience” (2014: 24). As such it provokes a mode of “peripheral vision [that] encloses and enfolds us in its embrace” (2014: 38). This kind of vision is “non-focused” and multisensory, rather than directed and precise (2014: 38–39). Thus even though many of the ambient changes of the film’s spaces do not become a part of our cognitive map of the film, our tactile sensibility allows us to register the different feel of them in a manner that eludes our conscious grasp. In that way the film’s atmosphere fuses together the disjointed and discontinuous spheres, a shape-shifting yet cohesive substance that allows us to feel a sense of unity and prevents us from getting lost completely in this complex maze of possible worlds. Notably, toward the film’s end George abandons his belief in possible worlds and instead declares, “I have been dreaming. There is only one world.” This “one world” may have been entirely imagined, either by George, by Kleber, or even by the film itself; a possibility that the film neither confirms nor denies, instead leaving it up to the audience to draw their own conclusions about the ontological complexity of Possible Worlds. Of course, looking at the meta-level of spectatorship, a common notion of many philosophical and literary concepts of possible worlds is that, regardless of however many ontological spheres a fictional world may contain, as such it is always “only” a possible rather than an actual world.11 And yet, Possible Worlds not only explicitly addresses and cinematically expresses this theory but also undermines this very dualism when it makes us aware that ultimately we cannot determine which of the film’s spheres is more or less real than the others. And perhaps an overt focus on the distinction between one real/ actual and several imagined/possible worlds misses an important point. The phenomenologist Harald Stadler suggests that film experience is not defined through opposition between the viewer’s experience of the real world and a superimposed fictional non-reality, but rather that it engages us with a reality that has a higher fictional component in a continuum of realities (1990: 45–46). Thus even though we can downplay a cinematic experience by saying, “it’s only a film,” one of the pleasures of being immersed in a film’s world lies in considering what this world is like and what kinds of experiences it affords.

Sameness, variation, and moments that matter in Source Code Given the extremely limited number of spaces in Source Code, it is perhaps not surprising that qualitative differences between them are much less pronounced than it is the case in Possible Worlds. Like its main protagonist, Source Code is caught in a spatiotemporal loop that for the most part alternates between the military lab, the capsule, the train and

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

189

its spatial extension, Glenbrook station, a stop before Chicago at which Colter disembarks several times. At first sight these spaces have much more qualities in common than not. For one, interior spaces dominate, and as mentioned prior, the lab and the capsule are even windowless and thus lack any visible spatial reference points to the surrounding outside world. The lab as well as the train are furthermore compartmentalized by internal walls and decks, doors and windows, spaces within spaces that can sometimes be accessed by the characters and at other times not, and in particular the capsule—dark, small and without any functional openings—evokes an air of claustrophobia. The only exception to these interior settings is Glenbrook station. Yet unlike the exterior spaces in Possible Worlds, this is a perspectival rather than hyperbolic space, created and perceived in the same structured Euclidean style as the interior spaces, with a notable emphasis on horizontal and vertical lines and geometrical designs. What is more, its geographical boundaries—the tracks, the parking lot and the building itself—seem to form invisible spatial barriers that Colter is unable to transgress. His first effort to get off of the train at Glenbrook while tailing a suspect initially leads him straight into the interior of the station and then downstairs into the men’s bathroom. Outside of the building he is either killed by an approaching train when he accidentally falls onto the tracks, or shot by Derek Frost, the bomber, in the parking lot. Thus more so than Possible Worlds, the spaces of Source Code are dominated by atmospheres of confinement, the numerous doors, throughways, and windows almost taunting us to visually explore them for possible exits that Colter might take, while reinforcing a strong feeling of entrapment at the same time. Source Code, even though it makes it explicit that the events in the main timeline only take place during a very limited number of hours during one single day, creates a feeling of temporal indistinctness through its enclosed spaces and the ambient monotony of the train. The entire film’s atmosphere is marked by sameness rather than variation. Both the military lab and the train are dominated by gray, blue, and occasional red tones, with smaller sections of black and white on the train and greater areas of darkness in the artificially lit military lab. In particular the colors on the train—the gray and white wall panels, the dark red seat covers, the blue and gray tones of Colter and Christina’s clothing—all have a slightly subdued and muted quality, creating the ambience of a faded and less lively version of the past. The train is evenly lit, with natural light coming through the windows and complementing the artificial light sources inside the carriage; and yet even though the exterior shots immediately prior to entering the train take us across a landscape with blue sky and golden-lit foliage, once Colter wakes up onboard of the train the exterior light is that of a milky wintry sky, where everything is slightly hazy and devoid of color. Most of us would have a clear sense of what time of the day it is, based on the angle, direction, and quality of outside light coming through windows, intuitively aware of the

190

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

specific shadows and varying areas of brightness that move through our lived environments on sunny or overcast days. Yet onboard of the train the atmosphere never undergoes any changes, thus amplifying the feeling of going round in circles. For Colter this feeling is further intensified in the near-total darkness of the capsule, in which it is impossible to gain a sense of the time of day or night. Thus unlike in Possible Worlds, where the ambient hinges between the film’s dispersed and disparate spaces create a welcome cohesive effect, the perpetual sameness of Source Code’s homogenous atmosphere achieves almost the opposite: with its limited color palette and even yet dimmed lighting, the atmosphere onboard of the train envelops those that are within it like the transparent yet impenetrable wall of a snow globe. Yet as mentioned previously, one way in which these spaces differ is the extent to which they facilitate Colter’s ability to act, explore possible actions and exits, and thus ultimately find a way out. Colter exists simultaneously in three spheres, and in each of them his range of movements and activities is determined by, and correlates with his immediate spatial surroundings. In the film’s representation of the real world, the sphere of the military lab, he is the most confined: here, he exists in an incapacitated and comatose state as a torso-cum-brain inside an incubator-like apparatus in which his basic vital signs are sustained and monitored through various wires attached to his body. Inside the capsule, which is eventually revealed to be a manifestation of Colter’s mind, and whose design bears a subtle semblance to the apparatus in which his body is kept, his primary actions consist of communicating with Goodwin and Colter via a screen interface. Nonetheless, regardless of its virtual status, in this space he is (or imagines himself to be) a fully embodied and conscious self. Moreover, while he is initially strapped into a harness, he eventually breaks free from it, explores the narrow confines of the dark capsule with his hands and feet, and in one instance even attempts to break out through what looks like a trap door, albeit to no avail. But by far the widest range of actions and movements Colter is able to perform takes place onboard the train. Although he has no direct control over the moment when he enters this sphere, he has full control over his movements and actions once within this space, and is even able to explore its adjacent areas, such as Glenbrook station, expanding his boundaries like an explorer mapping unfamiliar terrain. This terrain, much like the other parts of the film’s world, is almost exclusively an overwhelmingly Euclidean space. From the city grid of Chicago to the rectangular wall-to-ceiling tiles of the Glenbrook station bathroom; from the internally subdivided military lab to the compartmentalized train with its seating rows, internal doors, lower and upper level; from the train’s inner linear gangway to the straight railway tracks it moves on—with its emphasis on geometrical shapes, straight lines, and perspectival structures, the overall atmosphere of Source Code is that of a neatly structured and

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

191

scientifically ordered world. This is befitting, given that Colter is sent into a space that by its very nature is a mathematical space, a simulation based on computer codes and algorithms combined with the afterimage of someone else’s memory. At several moments the algorithmic nature of this space even becomes immediately visible, such as when he finds out about his own death in Afghanistan two months prior and Christina suddenly disintegrates into small pixels, not unlike the experience of watching a damaged digital video file. Similar moments occur during a number of transitions between the capsule and the train, when the entire screen briefly turns into a pixilated, digitally fractured surface. Even though glitches such as these reinforce rather than question the Euclidean nature of this space, similar to the glitches in The Matrix or The Truman Show they not only function as a “narrative tool that . . . leads to the truth about the characters’ world” (Schmerheim 2015: 236) but also rupture the film world’s visual and spatial unity—a crack in the surface of a perfectly designed and created virtual reality. There are, however, exceptions to this ordered Euclidean universe. The most notable of them occurs during a scene near the film’s end. After Colter has managed to prevent the explosion and remain on board of the train beyond the eight minutes, he disembarks with Christina in Chicago and stops to admire Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” sculpture, a gigantic kidneyshaped artwork with a reflective steel surface. The curved shape of the sculpture is a stark contrast to the straight lines that have visually dominated the film’s spaces thus far. Moreover, the sculpture’s elliptical shape distorts the image of the world it reflects, including that of the observer. The last image of Colter and Christina is a traveling shot that shows them in front of this sculpture. Starting as a low-angle long shot, initially it leaves the cityscape visible in the background, framing the sculpture’s elliptical mirror. Yet then the camera moves toward and between the two characters and gradually rises, until the distinctly hyperbolic mirror image, with softly bent skyscrapers and a curved floor pattern, fills the entire frame, to the effect that the camera appears to dive into the space opened up by the reflection—a seamless mirror image of a world that can no longer be distinguished from the world it reflects. This simultaneous depiction of the same space in both the Euclidean and hyperbolic mode is significant, for it suggests that there may be another layer of reality hidden underneath that has been there all along. The distorted reflections have been featured throughout the film during the transitional warp sequences, yet it is only now that we come to recognize them as impossible glimpses into the future, rather than as abstract mental images created by Colter’s consciousness to process the trips between the train and the capsule. These fast, surreal-looking sequences (perhaps a visual nod to the star gate sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968]) oscillate between flowing shapes and curvilinear images of Colter’s eye, Christina, the explosion, reflections of the sculpture merging into each other

192

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

FIGURE 20 A hyperbolic moment in Source Code (2011).

on the one hand, and images in which the entire screen is fractured by white lines in a geometrical pattern on the other hand, akin to a shattered virtual surface. Like the ambient hinges in Possible Worlds, they create a felt sense of unity and coherence that tends to slip out of reach when we reflect on it for too long or that, as Massumi might say, is “threatening at any moment to capsize the cognitive model” (2002: 181). With their stream-of-consciousness style and amalgamation of past, present, and future, the transitional warps bear visual testimony to Barker’s claim that “the surface reality ascertained by vision is only one layer; the big picture is more complex, and its perception and depiction are necessarily synaesthetic” (2008: 251). According to Barker, moments of cinematic spectacle such as the warp sequences draw on multiple sense modalities at once and can express and enact synesthetic perception itself (rather than just represent or reproduce it as a metaphorical effect).12 Moreover, Barker suggests that certain film moments, for example, the Club Silencio scene in Mulholland Drive, “in which sensual spectacle and the mingling of sense modalities allow a jarring glimpse of another ‘map’ operating beneath the more apparent, visual, cognitive linear one,” can work like a biogram and evoke cinematic synesthesia (2008: 245). The notion of the biogram is taken from Massumi, who describes it as a form of perception that is unique to clinical synesthetes and that serves as a form of orientation device. Not a map in the cartographic sense of the word, it is a “lived diagram” that links past, present, and future experience. It takes up the space between perceiver and the world and often has a “feeling of thickness or depth” to it (Massumi 2002: 186–87). This idea can be usefully applied to the way in which Colter’s experiences from

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

193

his past, present, and future impossibly converge during the transitional warp sequences. From a strictly linear, visual, and Euclidean perspective, they create a complex temporal loop in which time folds back on itself, defying the clear order of Source Code’s different spheres and the linear progression of time within them. Yet from a synesthetic and hyperbolic perspective, they provide a perceptual map of the film’s world that invites us to sense and feel Colter’s escape route, a synesthetic mode of experience that is unhinged from singular and linear narrative pathways and the Euclidean hierarchy of worlds. As moments of cinematic synesthesia, the transitional warp sequences not only express and evoke a “mingling of individual senses modalities” (Barker 2008: 238) but also engage us perceptually with cinema’s unique ability to fuse different modes of experiencing time. According to Sobchack (2004d), a film can simultaneously express both the objective and the subjective perception of time. In an objective or realist mode, we perceive time as irreversible, linear, measurable, and directed toward the future. In a subjective mode, by contrast, time can be experienced as nonlinear and multidirectional (e.g., when we remember the past or fantasize about the future), and its duration can be perceived as fast or slow. Sobchack writes that these modes of perceiving the flow of time “exist simultaneously in a demonstrable state of discontinuity” in our concrete experience, “actively and constantly synthesized as coherent in a specific lived-body experience,” despite the fact that they might contradict each other in terms of direction or duration (2004d: 150–51; emphasis in original). A film, with its constant and fixed, forward stream of moving images, along with its ability to expand or contract time through editing as well as other techniques—Sobchack lists “flashbacks, flash-forwards, freeze-framing, pixilation, reverse motion, slow motion, and fast motion” (2004d: 151)—is able to express both objective and subjective temporality at the same time. It thus not only comes close to our lived experience of time but also explicitly emphasizes the heterogeneity of temporal experience (2004d: 150–51). This is relevant in Source Code, for similar to George’s epistemological shift from science to the senses, Colter undergoes a transformation from operating in a deadline-driven environment that is dominated by an objective mode of time, to paying attention to moments that matter, a subjective mode of time in which he prioritizes his own lived experience. The objective mode of time, in which time is emphasized as measurable in minutes and seconds and moving forward in a constant flow, is evident in Source Code from the beginning, when passengers can be seen glancing at their watches and ask if the train will make up the delay. Once Colter knows about the source code mission, close-ups show him setting the countdown timer of his wristwatch to eight minutes several times, and he explicitly gets briefed by Rutledge and Goodwin not to waste time with personal concerns, such as thinking about how to save Christina and the other passengers of the train, or connecting

194

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

with his father. Yet while Colter continues to make progress with the official mission during each iteration of the source code, his experience of the eight minutes is increasingly inflected by a subjective mode of time. He experiences flashbacks of his time in Afghanistan and, once he realizes there is no future for himself outside of the source code, attempts to extend the present through actions that are personally valuable to him, such as calling his father, or flirting with Christina. The most pronounced moment of this subjective mode of time takes place during Colter’s final trip into the source code. Unsure whether he will succeed to remain in the source code, shortly before the eight minutes are up Colter first challenges a fellow passenger who is a comedian to make everyone laugh and then kisses Christina, thus following her advice that, if one has only seconds to live, one needs to “make those seconds count.” While Goodwin switches off Colter’s life support in the military lab, in the train all movement slows down until time comes to a standstill. Only the camera comes alive during this moment, slowly tracking backward through the train compartment and along the passengers’ happy faces frozen in time, creating a haptic moment that transforms the virtual source code reality into a thick and tangible space. With its unique spatialized freeze frame during which the camera is the only animate presence in the world of the film, this arresting moment—almost an instance of cinematic mindfulness—reminds us that for us too a film creates subjective moments that matter and that we remember subjectively, regardless of, or perhaps even more so than the causal and linear progression of narrative events.

Cognitive riddles, immersive pleasures Unlike some more radically ambiguous mind-game films, Possible Worlds and Source Code offer relatively straightforward solutions and narrative closure to the issues they raise. Yet this does not mean they are less complex in thematic or cinematic ways. On the one hand, both films deliver explanations for the characters’ experiences: in Possible Worlds, the ending makes it clear that George is the murder victim of Dr. Kleber, a mad scientist who stole his brain to conduct experiments on human consciousness. Since his brain, which Kleber has kept in a vat, cannot be re-inserted into his body, the only option for George’s grieving widow is to switch off her husband’s brain’s life support. In Source Code, the titular source code technology is explained to Colter early on, and the end of the film confirms that the fully embodied person that he used to be no longer exists; similar to George he is little more than a disembodied brain hooked to a machine used for experiments. The final conflict here revolves around the question of whether Goodwin will keep her promise to switch off his life support (she will), along with the question of whether Colter will succeed to save everyone’s

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

195

life onboard the ill-fated train and remain inside the source code beyond the eight minutes (he will). Yet, on the other hand, both films also leave us with a number of unresolved riddles and logical inconsistencies. For instance, one of the unexplained mysteries of Possible Worlds is the death of the caretaker who “froze to death at room temperature” and earlier in the film insists to have seen the lights of a UFO before the night of George’s murder. When Berkeley and Williams examine the body of the caretaker in the pathology lab, a brief upward shot from the perspective of the dead man shows a circle of five bright lights that evoke his earlier account of the UFO, and his fear that aliens might steal our brains is echoed by the lurid front page of a magazine that Kleber gives to Berkeley. While these associative ambient overlaps may not question the boundary between the film’s disparate spheres, they create an impossible perceptual loop between what the caretaker saw on the night of George’s death, what his dead body (whose eyes are wide open in the scene) might “see” in the pathology lab, and what has happened to George, thus subverting the causal and linear consistency of the world of the detectives in a subtle manner. In Source Code, likewise, Colter sends a text to Goodwin to notify her of his success and instructs her to tell the man kept for experiments with the source code technology, Captain Colter Stevens, that “everything will be alright.” In this world, a mildly frustrated Rutledge still waits for an opportunity to test the source code technology and a television in the background broadcasts reports about the prevented bomb attack. While this ending allows Source Code to avoid some of the paradoxes of time travel films, such as that the past cannot be altered, it leads to other logical problems. For example, if in this world the train has not exploded, then what has happened to the real Sean Fentress, the history teacher whose body serves as Colter’s avatar? How will Colter, trained as an army pilot, suddenly adapt to a new life as a history teacher without anyone noticing? What is the relationship between this Colter, who came from another parallel world and assumed Sean Fentress’s identity, to the Colter who in this world is still being kept inside the military lab? Despite the film’s clear-cut ending, in hindsight these inconsistencies make it easy to pick the film’s ending apart, or alternatively interpret it as the dying Colter’s wishful thinking, rather than a real possibility. Thinking about such unsolved riddles or impossible loop structures is undoubtedly one of the pleasures that films like Source Code and Possible Worlds provide; however, they are not the only ways in which these and similar mind-game films are a meaningful and rewarding experience for their viewers. Unlike George and Colter, we as viewers are enworlded and embodied beings, rather than disembodied brains. And in fact, as Mark Johnson in observes, “the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis is laughable . . . because it leaves out the critical role of meaning, reference, and truth” (2007: 276). This does not suggest, of course, that the brain’s role is insignificant for such

196

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

questions. However, Johnson emphasizes that “meaning does not reside in our brain, nor does it reside in a disembodied mind. Meaning requires a functioning brain, in a living body that engages with its environments” (2007: 152). Both Possible World and Source Code testify to these claims, for even though their main characters are such brains in a vat who get teleported temporarily into another (inner or virtual) world, their experiences are neither purely defined as cognitive states nor cerebral-biological processes. Instead, in these films the rupture between body, mind, and world is figured as an embodied situation of being lost in complex spatiotemporal environments, and embodied perception and orientation strategies helps us make sense of these stories and find a way out. There are a number of mind-game films that give expression to the experience of being lost in a complex spatiotemporal world that consists of several layers and at times incompatible inner and outer realities, and in many of them the experience of finding oneself in a spatially disorienting situation is a prominent trope. The opening of Open Your Eyes (as well as that of its Hollywood remake Vanilla Sky) is a particularly memorable instance. The film opens with a black screen and a female voice says “abre los ojos” (open your eyes), followed by an out-of-focus image of what turn out to be bedsheets—another good example of how haptic images at the beginning of a film can evoke a sense of epistemological uncertainty, where the act of opening one’s eyes and looking at the world does not necessarily lead to a clearer understanding of the full picture. The film then follows the protagonist, César (Eduardo Noriega), finish his morning routine and subsequently get into his car. As soon as he starts driving through city streets, on a route that seems obviously familiar to him, it becomes clear that something is wrong: despite it being the time of the morning rush hour, the streets are completely deserted; not a single person or other car is to be seen. The sudden inexplicable strangeness of familiar spaces induces a sense of panic, and César gets out of the car and starts running. This moment is even more impressive in the film’s Hollywood remake, Vanilla Sky, which sees him sprinting across a void Times Square, a visual landmark that is familiar even to those that have never been to New York and is usually teeming with people. Seconds later the film suggests that everything has been a bad dream, repeating the opening scene but then showing the morning journey through busy city streets in which everything seems to be business as usual. And yet even though from then onward the cinematic world of Open Your Eyes (as well as that of Vanilla Sky) initially looks right it does not always feel right, and soon visual and embodied experiences are at odds with each other, until it turns out that most of what we have seen may have a been a lucid dream state that turned into a nightmare from which César yet has to wake up. Interestingly, in both films, as well as in other spatiotemporal complex films such as The Matrix or The Thirteenth Floor, color tonalities function as subtle “ontological markers” that invite us to get a feel for what might count

GETTING LOST, SENSING THE WAY

197

as reality within the film’s world (Schmerheim 2015: 252–53, 277). Similar to the atmosphere in Possible Worlds such color markers not only imbue these films with a felt sense of coherence but also function as affective maps that in some cases support a film’s narrative solution, whereas in other cases they increase its ambiguity and encourage us to consider alternatives. The challenge to make proprioceptively sense of a space that visually does not make sense and vice versa is often connected with an emphasis on bodily balance and stability and the sensation of losing one’s sense of gravity. In Stay, the dying protagonist’s final moments expand into an inner world, and as his vitality is getting weaker, the more unstable this world becomes (a connection we only understand at the end of the film). Jump-cuts, sudden perspective shifts, jarring cuts between spaces, and canted geometrical patterns destabilize our own experience of this world with increasing tendency. Similarly in Inception, the moment when Ariadne (Ellen Page) first enters a shared dream space with Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and begins rendering her surroundings in real time, the suddenly upward tilting streets and building facades turn into an animated M. C. Escher painting in which it is easy to lose one’s sense of above or below, left or right, up or down. In a later sequence, the tilting and shifting walls and floors in the zero-gravity hotel sequence lead us to feel as unanchored as Cobb and his crew in this volatile dream space, in which the characters move back up from one level to another by falling, or what they refer to as a “kick.” Notably, this kick is often triggered by perceptual experiences such as hearing a song or being immersed into water. The multilayered dreamscapes of Inception point to another risk in these films: not finding one’s way out again. At one point in the film Cobb gets stuck in “Limbo,” the deepest and most dangerous level in the maze of dreamscapes. Here it is easy to forget that one is in a dream, and the only way to differentiate this space from reality is to have an individual tactile totem, such as Cobb’s spinning top. Thus even though Inception provides us as viewers with a relatively clear and navigable hierarchy of dream levels, its ambiguous ending, in which it is not clear whether Cobb has been reunited with his children in reality or in a dream, leaves us with a lingering doubt. An even more radical cinematic experience of being lost in a complex maze of conflicting spaces is David Lynch’s Inland Empire, which may well leave some viewers substantially disturbed (Rennebohm 2008). The film’s main character, actress Nikki Grace (Laura Dern), inexplicably disappears from and transgresses through a variety of stories and spaces, some of which are in the past, while others are exposed as a film within a film, and yet others seem to have little to do with her at all. These spaces are linked through associations rather than through a clear hierarchy of spatiotemporal relationships between real and unreal, past and present worlds, and some of them are haunted by ghosts that appear to be her own shadowy doubleganger. Perhaps this explains why a degree of closure in those mind-game

198

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

films that express spatiotemporal shapes of being lost is rather comforting, for it allows us to find a way out of their disorienting and confusing worlds, whereas in a film like Inland Empire we risk of leaving a part of us behind in the film. Possible Worlds and Source Code suggest that the experience of being in two places at once is untenable on a permanent basis: only temporarily can we commit ourselves to two worlds at the same time, and at some point we need to exit one of them if we do not want to stay lost. Given that the experience of being in two places at once, according to Barker (2009b) one of the hallmark sensations of watching a film, is so central in Possible Worlds, Source Code, and similar films, they can also be considered as meta-films about the aesthetic experience of being immersed in a cinematic world. Indeed both films that were discussed in this chapter feature transitional vessels that facilitate the journey from one fictional sphere to another. In Source Code, this is the capsule in which Colter communicates with Goodwin and Rutledge, and from which he departs to enter the source code. In Possible Worlds, it is suggested that Kleber manages to crossover into George’s world by using a flotation tank (he uses the old term “sensory deprivation chamber”). Invented by John Lilly (1977) in the 1950s to explore human consciousness and the effects of isolating the body from all external stimuli, some people have reported altered states of consciousness, increased perceptual awareness, and a heightened sense of creativity after having spent some time in a suspended bodily state inside such a flotation tank. Annette Michelson (1969) has put forward the idea of cinema as a similarly mindaltering device in an influential essay on 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which she argues that Kubrick’s film turns a theater into a vessel and takes its viewers as passengers on a journey of discovery that explores the relations between space, movement, consciousness, and the body. According to her, we get stimulated by the combination of what we see and feel when watching the film’s depiction of space and weightlessness, along with the suspension of gravity and the distortion of the logic of physical actions and movements (1969: 60). Considered from this perspective, films like Possible Worlds and Source Code are therefore not, as Bissonnette suggests, a case of perceptual manipulation, whereby we learn that we should not trust our senses (2009: 403). Quite the contrary: feeling synesthetically and peripherally enveloped by the ambient spatial qualities of fictional worlds can strengthen the feeling of being immersed in fictional worlds (Pallasmaa 2014), and thus films like Possible Worlds and Source Code remind us that sensory perception and embodiment are integral elements of cinema as an immersive and aesthetic experience.

Conclusion: Play It Again Games with the Mind or with the Body and the Senses?

According to Merleau-Ponty,“The movies are not thought, they are perceived” (1964 [1948]: 58). This assumption has also been the underlying premise of this book, which set out from the belief that cinematic spectatorship is always an embodied activity, informed by the body and the senses as much as by the mental faculty. Since cognitive and reflective modes of experience have already been widely explored in relation to mind-game films, the specific questions I addressed were the following: How does embodiment shape our experience of mind-game films? How do the body and the senses uniquely contribute to the way we can make sense of these films that do not always make sense in a familiar way? By asking these questions, I challenged the dominant view that these complex, confusing, or unreliable narratives films primarily address our cognitive skills. What I hope to have shown throughout this book is that mind-game films are indeed more than just narrative puzzles whose main appeal lies in putting the pieces into the correct causal and linear order, or in reordering subjective and objective versions of a film’s fictional world, or in re-establishing one truthful and reliable solution to a film’s story. Instead, they play games with our body and our senses as much as they do with our minds. In this concluding chapter I will briefly recapitulate the unique benefits of and insights gained through a phenomenological and textural study of mind-game films, first by synthesizing the main findings of the preceding analyses and subsequently by revisiting the films I discussed via an embodied approach to repeat viewings, a practice that has often been associated with mind-game films due to their complex and challenging nature. Exploring mind-game films from the perspective of embodied spectatorship has not only reinforced Sobchack’s claim that cinematic spectatorship is grounded in embodied perception, and therefore like

200

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

all films, mind-game films make sense to us because we are “cinesthetic subjects” (2004e: 84). The mind-game films discussed in this book offer aesthetic experiences that draw their specific appeal from bringing into conflict different epistemological and perceptual registers of our bodies. We perceive films like The Sixth Sense, The Others, Memento, Fight Club, Possible Worlds, or Source Code as startling, confusing, or disorienting, not only because of their surprising twist endings, nonlinear narrative structures, or spatiotemporal complexity, but because they solicit tensions between different modes of perception, knowledge, and experience, and between reflective and embodied ways of being in the world. In The Sixth Sense and The Others such a conflict directly concerns the activity of seeing, and thus engages us with what Sobchack considers as cinema’s “primary means of signification” (1992: 4). Both films play on our carnal knowledge of what it means to be an embodied seeing subject, and subverting a distanced and disembodied mode of vision, while simultaneously reminding us of other modes of perceptual engagement in the cinematic experience such as hearing and touch. Similar conflicts between reflective and embodied modes of experience manifest in other mind-game films. In Memento, for instance, a tension exists between narrative facts and tactile epistemologies, between “knowing that” and “knowing how.” In Fight Club, there is an experiential conflict between the rational knowledge that Tyler does not exist and the intensity of the tactile, kinetic, and visceral styles of being with which he is associated. Likewise, the feeling of being lost in Possible Worlds and Source Code is not merely the effect of demands on our cognitive orientation skills when we encounter the ontological ambivalence of actual and factual spheres within the film. Instead, these films involve the spatiality of our bodies in the immersive experience of their complex spatiotemporal arrangement of worlds. To account for the perceptual and bodily modes of knowledge and experience invoked by mind-game films, adopting a textural (instead of a more traditional textual) mode of analysis has been a productive approach to trace the corporeal and perceptual structures and processes through which meaning can take shape independently of the narrative structures of these complex films. The textural analysis of Possible Worlds and Source Code has shown that coherence need not depend on narrative causality and can also be something we intuit through a film’s atmosphere. In other instances, understanding why and how something feels real (subjectively, invisibly, materially, painfully) outweighs knowing what is real in the empirical sense of the word. Thus rather than asking only questions about objective facts, narrative truths, or the order of events—what has happened—it is equally important to consider how we are perceptually responsive to the feel of a film and its world, and how we, as embodied “cinesthetic subjects,” understand the stories of mind-game films as concrete and tangible experiences—how they make sense (Sobchack 2004e: 67). The films that

CONCLUSION: PLAY IT AGAIN

201

I have analyzed throughout this book engage us with felt, material qualities that we know on the basis of our own tactile and embodied being: light that touches us; textures our skin understands as the feel of a film’s world; sounds that unsettle us; rhythms that resonate with our own bodily pulses; movements that make us feel nauseous, dizzy, tense, or inert; kinetic gestures our muscles sense as slow, steady, or abrupt; atmospheres that enwrap us and that we mutually absorb. In many of the moments that I singled out for a detailed textural analysis, the film’s perceptive and expressive agency also came to the fore. The twist sequences in The Sixth Sense and The Others, for example, not only call our attention to the embodied nature of our own vision but to what Sobchack (1992) calls the film’s body. These are the films’ “thinking” or “haptic” moments that invite us to sense and feel, rather than just see and reflect on, the kinds of stories they tell. One overarching finding of applying a textural and embodied framework to mind-game films is that tactile modes of engagement often bring us closer to the characters than thinking about what might be the singular or truthful solution to a story, or “narrative puzzle.” While this applies to all of the films that I explored in this book, perhaps the most pronounced examples were Memento and Fight Club. In these films, the mental dysfunction of the main protagonists functions as a “productive pathology” in Elsaesser’s (2009, 2018) terms. As such it is accompanied by a liberation of other skills and knowledge and different ways of (re)engaging with the world (2009: 24– 30). While other studies have often highlighted how in each of these films, the narrative form corresponds to the dysfunctional side of the characters’ condition, such as Leonard’s anterograde amnesia, or Tyler as Jack’s hallucination, deploying a textural and tactile approach has revealed how these films also engage us with the “productive” side of these pathologies. In Memento, haptic images connect us with Leonard’s way of being in the world, such as his reliance on tacit knowledge and tactile epistemologies. Similarly in Fight Club, the film engages the embodied structures of our own tactile being, from haptic surfaces and kinesthetic thrills down to the viscera, and thereby lets us grasp the full depth of Jack’s estrangement from the world and his need for Tyler to remind him—and us—of the felt sense of being alive. We feel for these pathological characters because the films invite us to feel what their (life-)worlds feels like. Following on from that, one important aspect that a combination of textural, phenomenological, and thematic analysis has uncovered is the epistemological capacity of the body and the senses through which events and experiences can become tangible in a way that eludes cognition or prior intellectual reflection. Looking back at some of the films that were discussed, touch in particular has gained currency as an important sense to know, understand, and remember things about the world. In Memento, tactile epistemologies and tacit forms of knowledge enable Leonard to

202

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

maintain tangible links to the past he cannot not consciously recall and bring him on a par with the other characters. Likewise in The Sixth Sense and The Others, touch (followed by hearing) surpasses vision as a means of knowing and enables contact with invisible beings that materially inhabit the same world. Such emphasis on embodied and tactile epistemologies raises some interesting points with regard to the possibility that mind-game films may be linked with certain aspects of contemporary culture, such as new media and the internet. For instance, Steven Johnson (2005), who writes about the productive potential of complex forms of popular culture in general, suggests that contemporary films, video games, and television shows reflect different and potentially more sophisticated ways of dealing with information. While substantiated claims in this area exceed the scope of this book, one general implication that can be drawn from the preceding analyses is that any such correspondences would not only concern new ways of organizing and processing complex data, but also our embodied relationship with the materiality and the artifacts of new media culture itself. The latter, after all, is part of our life-world, rather than an abstract flow of information, and as such it is shaped and informed by experiences that are perceptual and embodied. Elsaesser and Hagener pursue such a line of argument when they write that “the turn to ‘haptical vision’ is mainly due to the tactility, proximity and sense of texture intuitively associated with the digital image” (2010: 186). In this context, one can further point to the now-ubiquitous touch screens and other haptic interfaces as a possible point of connection with the important role of touch in these films. Expanding the scope of such interconnections between mind-game films and their wider contemporary context, Elsaesser (2009, 2018) suggests that mind-game films may even reflect larger historical, technological, and epistemological transitions. Although he does not look at mind-game films from an embodied spectatorship angle, he theorizes that “these pathologies of the self are a way of making the body and the senses ready for the new surveillance society” (2009: 31) and “the sensory overload of contemporary life” (2009: 32). He develops this argument further in his later essay, where he argues that mind-game films, with their often insolvable ambiguities, teach us to live with contradictions and “educate and engage spectators at the level of their subjectivities as well as their senses and bodies, and thus renew—however tentatively and temporarily—the broken bond with the world” (2018: 34), an idea that certainly resonates with the main findings of this book. At the same time, however, the prevalence of mental themes in mind-game films might also point to the influence of other current cultural discourses, such as the increasing importance of neuroscience, which according to Pisters (2012) has contributed to the emergence of the “neuro-image” in contemporary cinema. Both are valid possibilities and do not exclude each other; yet either way, the body and the senses, textures and tactile experiences, cannot be

CONCLUSION: PLAY IT AGAIN

203

ignored in future studies of mind-game and other complex films and their wider cultural context. If we look back at how exploring mind-game films via textural analysis has revealed new layers of meaning and facets of their pre-reflective intelligibility, the tension between intellectual, rational, and reflective apprehension on the one hand and perceptual and bodily engagement on the other can be used to describe the aesthetic experience of this distinct group of films altogether. However, juxtaposing the cognitive and the corporeal types of knowledge and highlighting the tension between the reflective and the experiential dimension of mind-game films is not to be misread as a suggestion to establish a dualism in cinematic spectatorship. In fact, it has become clear that mind-game films often dismantle such either/or positions by reminding us that mental and bodily processes are intertwined, and the films privilege neither of them as an ultimate mode of access to the world. Following a suggestion by Dylan Trigg (2012), we can instead describe a shifting of focus performed by the films, or what Trigg describes as a matter of emphasis, rather than reinstating a “tacit dualism” between body and mind: “By emphasizing the cognitive or the corporeal dimension, we need not posit metaphysical dualism to the mind-body interaction. Emphasizing how I rationally appropriate or perform an experience does nothing to detract from the anchoring role of my body. My body is there all along, consistently rendering my actions possible” (2012: 103). Mindgame films, by subverting traditional modes of sense-making, remind us of this “anchoring role” of our bodies, which also renders possible our understanding of cinema. For instance, in The Sixth Sense and The Others, the central crisis that Malcolm and Grace and her children, respectively, find themselves in can be seen in analogy to the ambivalent experience of a phantom limb, where it is precisely their phantom bodies’ insistence on continuing to exist as an embodied being that characterizes their dilemma. Yet unlike the ghosts, we do not have a corrupted link between body, mind, and world, and are thus fully perceptive of the ways in which these films address us as embodied viewing subjects, with a particularly affective force during the twist sequence. A similar issue is at the heart of Possible Worlds and Source Code, where the main protagonists feel increasingly lost due to the proprioceptive gaps that impede their orientation, which in turn can be linked to their disembodied state in another layer of their reality. In these cases the films have literally drawn our own attention to the “anchoring role” of our bodies through thwarting our sense of stability, direction, and position in relation to our engagement with cinematic space and time. At the same time, the perceptual overlaps between the outer and inner world(s) in fact not only subvert a dualistic body-mind conception but point to the irreducible ensemble of body, mind, and world. This book too can be seen as such a shifting of focus that Trigg suggests. In practice, any retroactive understanding of what happened in a film is

204

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

inseparably intertwined with how we experience it during the act of viewing itself. Yet different theoretical approaches to spectatorship can emphasize different processes of how we can make sense of a film. Indisputably, viewers do make sense of mind-games by applying analytical and cognitive modes of interpretation, as other studies have suggested. There is no doubt that many viewers would indeed marvel at Shyamalan’s intricate framing maneuvers in The Sixth Sense, or interpret Jack as the unreliable narrator of Fight Club and hypothesize how some of the other characters would have perceived Jack’s behavior from an objective point of view. Likewise, some viewers may find great gratification from drawing intricate plot maps of the causal connections and linear order of events in Memento, or from mapping out the different layers and levels in Possible Worlds and Source Code. However, one major implication of the studies in this book is that, inversely, such reflective interpretations are just one possible way to apprehend mind-game films. None of the films that I discussed prescribes a singular mode of engagement. All of them, however, draw on, and call on us to be attentive to the rich perceptual means we have to our avail in making sense of a film. In that way a textural and tactile analysis of mind-game films is complementary (and not contradictory) to cognitive approaches and illuminates other aspects of their complexity that so far have been neglected. With reference to memory, Trigg further asks: “If we can emphasize our cognitive or embodied responses to the world, such that one dimension is heightened at the expense of the other, then what of memory? Can we, for instance, remember a place in two quite dissimilar even opposing fashions?” (2012: 103). This is a rhetorical question for Trigg, who goes on to describe how we can indeed bodily remember an experience that we are not cognitively aware of (2012: 103–07). We can repurpose the question for spectatorship: how can we remember a film in such different ways? Albeit in passing, throughout this book I have gestured toward the way many mind-game films inspire a second viewing, perhaps even a third one or more. Given that such repeat viewings often lead to an altered viewing experience, this invites a brief further exploration of how the body and the senses uniquely shape our experience of a film that we have already seen. Barbara Klinger (2006) suggests that mind-game films (she refers to them as puzzle films) are particularly prone to multiple viewings for two reasons. The first is that they are rich in intrinsic aesthetic properties themselves: a film “must be perceived as artful, complex, culturally important, or emblematic in regard to generation or genre” and “offer new insights or, at the least, something previously unnoticed” to encourage repeat viewings (2006: 159). Secondly, they cater for at least two different types of viewers: those that derive pleasure from returning to an already familiar experience and those who enjoy discovering new details every time they watch a film (2006: 142). In more general terms, Klinger suggests that repeat viewings

CONCLUSION: PLAY IT AGAIN

205

can be framed in terms of discovery and decoding, whereby “uncovering something new in each encounter transforms any film into a multilayered, inexhaustibly interesting entity, meaning that no text is immune from the process of discovery that lies at the heart of the aesthetic enterprise” (2006: 159). Klinger’s emphasis on repeat viewing as a process of discovery recalls Bordwell’s notion that after watching a mind-game film, “viewers lock into puzzle-film mode and . . . re-scan the movie for clues and narrational gambits” (2006: 86). However, repeat viewings can be more than the accumulation of more details to complete the narrative puzzle or the search for “well-hidden Easter eggs” to see how we were misled (Ferenz 2009: 267). The “process of discovery” that Klinger mentions is not necessarily a purely intellectual undertaking, a distanced and analytical mode of viewing, during which we primarily revise hypotheses about the characters and cause-andeffect chains. While it is easy to see why complex films such as Memento and The Sixth Sense are associated with multiple viewings, let me begin with a few basic observations about the phenomenon. To watch a film for the first time means being open to new experiences and encounters with an unknown diegetic world as well as with the strangers that inhabit it. We may have expectations based on trailers, reviews, or friends’ recommendations; yet our unfamiliarity with the characters and lack of knowledge about the turn of events and their eventual outcome is what holds our attention and maintains our suspense. Returning to see an already familiar film a subsequent time, however, we find these premises radically altered and the result is a fundamentally different experience: the diegetic world that was once unchartered territory has now become familiar terrain, and in many cases we no longer need to ask questions about the characters and their goals or the outcome of their actions. Some external variables, such as screen size or viewing environment or even our mood, may be subject to change; home-based viewing technologies lead to a different degree of control and immersion when engaging with “domesticated versions of films that [we] can pause, rewind, fast-forward” (Klinger 2006: 136–39); yet the film itself is an inalterable combination of prerecorded sounds and images, characters and events, over which we can exert little influence. Generally speaking, then, what is at stake during multiple viewings is the interplay between memory and narrative comprehension, recall and repetition. Yet memory is not a mere accumulation of facts, and our emotional memory can contribute to subsequent viewings in a way that overwrites our previous knowledge of narrative events. Noël Carroll describes this phenomenon as “the paradox of suspense,” the seemingly illogical phenomenon that, even though “uncertainty seems to be a necessary condition for suspense,” viewers can still feel anxious, nervous, or otherwise emotionally affected by a film whose ending they already know (1996: 71). The solution to this conundrum, according to Carroll, is that we can

206

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

suspend our factual knowledge of a film’s narrative outcome in favor of the feeling of being fully invested in a film’s diegetic world once more, just like the temporary suspension of disbelief allows us to feel immersed in any work of fiction in the first place. Karen Renner takes Carroll’s suggestions even further to argue that “repeat viewings of a film may actually intensify rather than diminish one’s emotional reaction” (2006: 108). According to her, this is a largely subconscious process triggered by “mood cues” and “recurring emotion markers”: When a film relies on recurring emotion markers to create a certain mood .  .  . the markers themselves, even those unattended to by the viewer, may trigger emotional memories. As the film progresses, viewers recognise these repeated emotion markers by calling upon representational memories. The activation of these representational memories simultaneously invokes emotional memories of the sadness experienced during the previous scenes in which these markers were featured. (2006: 113) Renner’s argument is partially based on her own experience of feeling increasingly saddened by Leonard’s story during subsequent viewings of Memento, but also draws on the work of Greg M. Smith and on neuroscientific research by Damasio, LeDoux, and Hogen. While she thus pursues a different theoretical approach to embodiment than the one I have used in this book, her observations support the idea that repeat viewings are about more than the refinement of factual knowledge about a film’s story and plot. Repeat viewings can also be complicated by the fact that our factual memory of a film—what we remember—may not be as perfect and infallible as we would like to think. This is a point made by George Toles (2009), who addresses repeat viewings in the context of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. According to him, “The experience of watching repeatedly a familiar movie can tell us much more about how experience that is always ‘the same’ can acquire telling, invigorating new contours” (2009: 124). Drawing an analogy to the theme of fated repetition and the mutability and malleability of memories in Gondry’s film, Toles points out how our remembered factual knowledge of a film is subject to unnoticed changes and subtle alterations, rather than a stable set of readily accessible facts to which we simply add more knowledge of the same sort. In fact we might be surprised by how little we actually remember from a previous viewing: Returning to the film scene to see what we have left out, we may come to the startling realization that we haven’t attended to it with any care. Now that we are intent on being exact, images separate themselves from the general flow, and strike us so forcefully that it seems we are only now beginning to behold what is in them. (2009: 124)

CONCLUSION: PLAY IT AGAIN

207

In Toles’s understanding repeat viewings thus can take on a reciprocal dynamic of their own. No matter how familiar we are with a particular film, any analytical motivation behind watching it a second time can give way to its affective and expressive power once more. This does not mean that the film distracts our attention from the task we set out for, but that it evokes a different kind of attention as a mode of response. Such images that “separate themselves from the general flow” are, for instance, the haptic openings in Memento or Fight Club, or other haptic images and moments in any film. Thus encouraged to adopt a mode of haptic visuality during a consecutive viewing, we can engage more closely with a film than we did before, perhaps let ourselves be touched more intimately by it, rather than being continually removed from it through the increased optical distance of a more analytical mode of viewing. Marks writes that haptic images “can give the impression of seeing for the first time, gradually discovering what is in the image rather than coming to the image already knowing what it is” (2000: 178). Considered from this angle, repeat viewings as a “process of discovery” are not a matter of “decoding” and filling in the narrative gaps (or optical mastery, as Marks might say), but about taking notice of a film’s expressive agency, about shifting between optical and haptical modes of viewing, and thus about staying open to other ways of looking at and engaging with it. Echoing Toles’s observations, John Mullarkey succinctly captures the experience of returning to a film and finding it less familiar than we expected when he rhetorically asks, “Have our eyes changed or has the movie offered up new riches?” (2009: 170). Of course our eyes have not changed, strictly speaking and potential changes in eyesight aside; but we can re-watch a film with an altered perceptual acuity, and this is one way in which repeat viewings allow us to discover such “new riches” of knowledge and understanding that we did not notice before. A useful way to account for this effect is Sobchack’s distinction between two different types of vision: operative and deliberate. Operative vision is the default mode, “lived antepredicatively as corporeal perception in its cultural familiarity with the world,” and takes in the visible world as granted (1992: 92). Deliberate vision, by contrast, is more active and reflective and understands “the visible deliberately as an act of judgement, of conscious and intentional choice” (1992: 93). In other words, through employing a deliberate mode of vision we become increasingly aware of the way in which embodied perception structures our relation to the world, less focused on what we see, but rather on how we see the world. We can transfer these two modes of vision to other modes of sensory perception as well, and this is a good way to account more generally for the way in which different senses can get activated during another viewing. While films cannot cause us to see, hear, or feel differently, they can heighten the experience of individual senses to a more or less long-lasting

208

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

effect. For example, at the end of Chapter 1, I suggested that we might rewatch The Others or The Sixth Sense with a heightened or more deliberate mode of hearing and touch, which in turn inspires a shift in the way we think about the epistemological functions of these senses and their status in the sensorium. Marks writes that “the cinematic encounter takes place not only between my body and the film’s body, between my sensorium and the film’s sensorium. We bring our own personal and cultural organisation of the senses to cinema, and cinema brings a particular organisation of the senses to us . . . Spectatorship is thus an act of sensory translation of cultural knowledge” (2000: 153). While her argument, though grounded in the close analysis of individual films, concerns sensual hierarchies on a bigger global and cultural scale, it is possible to argue that our perceptual attention can also shift during repeat viewings of a particular film. Films like The Sixth Sense and The Others remind us that our sensorium is not a fixed hierarchy and encourage perceptual reconfigurations during subsequent viewings. For example, while during a first viewing of The Sixth Sense it certainly helps that the film makes the ghosts visible for us at some point so that we believe in their existence, during consecutive viewings we no longer need to see them in order to feel their presence—the film has taught us to rely on other senses instead. And thus rather than “re-scanning” the films for clues, we might be watching it with a deliberate mode of vision, hearing, or tactility, paying attention to the film’s way of knowing and sensing the world. As we become more aware of the sensual hierarchies that inform our experience of a film, during subsequent viewings we can feel inspired to sense and think differently about the world it depicts. Another possibility of rethinking repeat viewings through the perceptive body is to consider the act of repetition itself. Consider again the significant role that habit played for Leonard in Memento. To recall, habit, or “learning through repetition” was an important technique for him to bypass his cognitive memory deficit and utilize the tactile memory of his body so to develop new skills for his mnemonic system. Emulating Leonard’s way of being in the world, the film too plays on the act of repetition, performing certain sets of kinetic gestures again and again. Even though our own bodies are not directly involved in much action while watching a film, a film engages our muscular structures of embodiment nonetheless. This makes it possible to suggest that our bodies can remember a film’s behavioral patterns in a way of which we are not cognitively aware. Let me offer my own experience of watching Memento repeatedly while I was writing this book as an example. One thing that suddenly struck me when watching the film for the nth time—I stopped counting after about the fifth—was how incredibly familiar I had become with the reverse structure of the plot. Even though I did not remember all the minutiae of narrative details and causal connections, I did no longer struggle to follow the reverse sequences and Leonard’s quest. But it was not my detailed factual knowledge of the story and the plot (in

CONCLUSION: PLAY IT AGAIN

209

fact I still find it difficult to give an account of the events in their exact causal and linear order) that had allowed me to reach what Dreyfus would call the “proficient stage” of watching Memento (2002: 370–71). Instead, I had learned through repeatedly engaging with the film’s gestures and kinetic patterns of behavior such as camera movements or patterns of framing. I further noticed how this had a productive side effect, as my now habitual reliance on the alternating pattern of sequences freed my cognitive resources and enabled me to pay more attention to other elements of the film, such as the ambiguous subliminal shots, the subtle links between the interwoven storylines, or the way tacit knowledge is used in the film: not as narrative detail in itself, but as a way of knowing, which in turn made me consider how my own tacit knowledge also informed and shaped my understanding of the characters. Perhaps few films simultaneously require and reward repeat viewings to the extent that Memento calls for, with its uniquely challenging plot structure. Nonetheless, the way habit and muscular memory function in this film can be transferred to a more general understanding of the role of the body in repeat viewings. Certainly, it takes more than one or two repeats for an action to truly become a habit. Yet even if we do not watch a film excessively over and over again, our familiarity with it increases in a manner that goes beyond the mere cognitive recollection and successive accumulation of narrative facts. John Mullarkey writes that “the ‘film,’ seen again and again, in certain situations, is like a meal repeatedly presented when a bell tolls” (2009: 170). His words evoke the image of a Pavlovian dog whose conditioning makes it respond each time it is presented with a particular stimulus. Yet just like Leonard is able to adjust his behavioral patterns according to different contexts without having to think about it, a form of bodily intelligence rather than a fixed set of tasks and commands, we do not react blindly to cinematic stimuli such as foreboding music or specific types of camera movement. The narrative context, our familiarity with a genre, our immediate viewing environment, our mood, and not least our previous encounters with a particular film all form the context upon which our response depends. Even though our level of physical activity may be somewhat reduced, our muscular investment in a film enables our bodies to learn. Thus through media repetition, narrative comprehension skills and cinematic knowledge get inscribed into the body. Considered from the perspective of embodied learning, repeat viewings themselves can thus become a “productive pathology” like the ones discussed in Chapter 2, rather than a “nonproductive, frivolous activity that simply provides more of the same,” or a pathology that potentially “hints at an eccentric overinvestment in or obsession with the media” (Klinger 2006: 159). Suggesting such a transformative potential is not to say that a film causes each of us to see differently. However, Barker argues that the relationship between viewer and film can be described as an act of

210

MAKING SENSE OF MIND-GAME FILMS

full-bodied mutual inspiration whereby “the film takes in our forms of beingin-the-world, and at the same time fills us up and animates us with sensations and attitudes” (2009b: 147). Watching mind-game films repeatedly, I suggest, can inspire us to be open to different ways of knowing, seeing, and sensing, and these can carry over to other experiences beyond the films themselves. To borrow a quote from Fight Club: “After Fight Club, we all started seeing things differently.” Such effects may be most noticeable after watching films that explicitly thematize perception. Yet many films have the power to temporarily alter our sensorium. Who has not occasionally caught themselves being slightly more attentive to creaking floorboards after watching a horror film? Repeat viewings can intensify such experiences, as with each viewing, narrative facts turn into bodily know-how and new perceptual habits are stored in the memory of the body. In that way repeat viewings are perceptual re-encounters that draw on the memory of the body and the senses as much as on the viewer’s factual memory. In other words, repeat viewings draw their appeal from the interplay of different kinds of memories that sometimes compete with, and at other times complement each other, and the question is not just what we pay attention to but also how we pay attention to a film and its way of sensing and knowing the world. “We do not ‘lose ourselves’ in the film,” according to Barker (2009b: 19), but we can temporarily get lost within a film and the complexity of its world or its stories. This was the central idea of Chapter 3, which explored how being lost can be perceived both as a threat and as an aesthetic and immersive pleasure in Possible Worlds and Source Code. To these various effects and implications of being lost we can add a further differentiation by Rebecca Solnit: Lost really has two separate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. (2006 [2005]: 22) Solnit’s understanding of “lost” as an experience of shifts between familiarity and unfamiliarity aptly captures what watching a mind-game film can feel like as well as the accompanying confusion that may arise. Perhaps, then, we can describe mind-game films, which oscillate between traditional and narrative forms, in more general terms as the result of shifts between familiarity and unfamiliarity. Narrative elements that we are familiar with— transparency, continuity, linearity, causality, unity, closure—are “falling away” in these films, to varying degrees. In some mind-game films this might

CONCLUSION: PLAY IT AGAIN

211

lead to an experience that feels so unfamiliar that we can indeed get lost for a while. Thus, on the one hand, mind-game films are indeed “stories that make the familiar strange again. .  .  . Getting lost like that seems like the beginning of finding your way or finding another way” (Solnit 2006 [2005]: 13). In their strangeness they remind us that we can “find our way” through skills and strategies that we are already familiar with—our own tacit skills, the knowledge of the body and the senses—by applying them in a “strange” context. Yet on the other hand, through repeatedly engaging with mind-game films—either by watching the same film over and over again, or by watching a range of mind-game films—these borders between the familiar and the unfamiliar can shift once again: films that once stood out as a novelty now no longer seem strange, and we deal with their complexity with increasingly familiar strategies. But either way, through allowing ourselves to get lost in these films they can expand and enrich our world.

NOTES

Introduction 1 It is also worth noting that while Bordwell implies that the term “puzzle film” is widely known beyond academic jargon, there is a lack of supporting evidence for this. Neither film reviews nor dedicated internet forums or web pages appear to make extensive use of the term. Box Office Mojo categorizes films like Inception, The Sixth Sense, and Memento as “mind-benders,” while the dedicated webpage Class Real currently lists 204 so-called “mind-fuck” films, defined by “surreal atmospheres, identity surprises, reality surprises, existentialism, postmodernism and time travel” (www.classreal.com; last accessed November 12, 2018). 2 See also Elsaesser’s comment in his earlier article on the mind-game film, in which he points out that “a picture puzzle contains enigmatic details or special twists, which is to say that something is revealed that was always there” (2009: 40, n. 1). 3 For a more comprehensive overview of different terms and concepts, see Simons (2014). 4 In his follow-up article on mind-game films, Elsaesser (2018) updates his initial list of six common motifs and describes altogether twelve typical scenarios as well as the narratives forces that shape the complexity of these films. 5 It should be noted that the list of films in Figure 1 is neither a comprehensive list of all films that can count as mind-game films nor are films listed here necessarily films that every scholar would include. 6 As far as canonization is concerned, the most prominently covered films in Buckland’s latest anthology Hollywood Puzzle are Inception and Source Code, both of which get discussed in more than one chapter. Inception even has an entire section of the book dedicated to it as “the archetypal Hollywood puzzle film” (2014c: 55). 7 It should be noted that Thon does not aim to distinguish “mind-bender films” from other complex films; instead, his discussion centers on narrative complexity as a recent phenomenon that is marked by complex stories, nonlinear plots, unreliable narration, and a self-reflective, metaleptic play with narrative levels. 8 Box Office Mojo: “1999”.

214

NOTES

9 “Mindbender,” Box Office Mojo. 10 For example, Jeff Gordinier almost exclusively refers to mind-game films and other complex narratives in his article “1999. The Year that Changed Movies.” Besides commenting on the success of novel narrative forms, he highlights how major studios and A-list Hollywood stars have become involved in such films. See Gordinier (1999). 11 Between 1990 and 2018, only ten films that are generally considered as part of this trend toward narrative complexity—Pulp Fiction, The Truman Show, The Sixth Sense, The Matrix, Vanilla Sky, A Beautiful Mind, Inception, and Shutter Island, Flightplan, The Village—rank among the top twenty domestic grosses in the respective year of their release, with Inception being the most commercially successful mind-game film up to date (“Mindbender,” Box Office Mojo). 12 For a discussion of the notion of the narrator in relation to film, see Burgoyne (1990). Burgoyne argues that a narrator is an essential communicative element in a fiction film that serves to authorize truth and communicate authenticity as integral elements of the spectatorial contract (1990: 6). Accordingly, narrative scenarios in a film where an impersonal narrator simultaneously creates and “lies” about the fictional film world undermine this authenticating, infallible, objective, and truthful level itself. While for Burgoyne this is only a theoretical problem, the timing of his discussion is interesting in this respect. Published in 1990, it coincides with the time period which is generally considered to be the beginning of the mind-game film cycle. 13 Klecker omits them from her “corpus of mind-tricking narratives” without much explanation (2013: 145–46). Berg explicitly excludes them from his discussion of contemporary complex films because he deems films like Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive as “fascinating examples of avantgarde filmmaking, firmly within the Dadaist tradition.” According to him, “That they are feature length, made in the U.S., and that the last two were released and exhibited through mainstream outlets say more about the success of Lynch as auteur and the loyalty of his cult following than about their content. But their poetics underscores Lynch’s primary interest in imagery and his appreciation of formal elements purely and simply as formal elements” (2006: 12). Many other scholars, by contrast, include Lynch’s films into their lists of puzzle or mind-game films (Bordwell 2006; Buckland 2009c; Elsaesser 2009), and some have already been addressed in this context (see, for instance, Buckland’s analysis of Lost Highway [2009a]). 14 For analyses of Mulholland Drive, see Barker (2008) and del Rio (2008). For material on Lost Highway, see Donaldson (2014) and Jane Stadler (2008). For a discussion of Inland Empire, see Rennebohm (2008). 15 Interestingly, Sobchack was not the only person to combine film and phenomenology during the early 1990s. Allan Casebier’s Film and Phenomenology (1991) was published one year earlier than The Address of the Eye, yet has largely been ignored. In contrast to Sobchack, Casebier draws

NOTES

215

on Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, which perhaps explains why it did not gain as much resonance as Sobchack’s work in the recent discourses of cinema and embodiment. 16 For more on the comparison of Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty in the context of cinema and embodiment, see also del Rio (2005).

Chapter 1 1 Sobchack discusses psychoanalytical concepts in more detail in The Address of the Eye (1992: 100–28). For a discussion of the concept of identification in relation to phenomenology and psychoanalysis, see also Ince (2011). 2 For more on inattentional blindness and embodiment, see Noë and Thompson (2002). For an effective demonstration of the concept, see also www.awarenesstest.co.uk, a video campaign to increase awareness for cyclists on London roads. One especially baffling video is “Whodunnit,” a brief murder investigation during which almost the entire background, props, and even some actors get exchanged, most likely without attracting your attention. 3 As far as the representation of animated corpses is concerned, one might immediately think of zombie films. For a more humorous and poignant exploration of what an animated corpse might look like, see also the film Swiss Army Man (2016) by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. 4 Let me clarify that when I speak of “normal” or “standard” vision these terms do not refer to a vision that is natural, but rather to a normative concept that coheres with a culturally dominant understanding of what counts as “normal” vision. Just like with everything that counts as “normal” it is often a matter of degree and variation rather than absolutes. If anything, the understanding of “normal” vision in this book is based on the phenomenological understanding of vision as embodied. 5 Anna’s holding on to such material keepsakes bears a striking similarity to the way Leonard in Memento tries to retrieve memories of his wife via some of her possessions, such as a book, a brush, or a bra, and later burns those items in an attempt to teach himself to forget her and move on. See Chapter 2 in this book for more details. 6 Some readers might notice that Yella’s plot bears some significant semblance to Herk Harvey’s film Carnival of Souls (1962), which itself is based on Ambrose Pierce’s short story “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” In an interview with the German newspaper die tageszeitung, director Christian Petzold states that although he does not consider Harvey’s film as a direct inspiration for Yella, watching Carnival of Souls repeatedly when he was a teenager undeniably had an influence on him. I am mentioning this because it is an interesting example of how mind-game films marginally existed long before their sudden spike

216

NOTES

in popularity from the 1990s onward. While the spectacularly unsuccessful Carnival of Souls led to a career change of the first-time director Harvey at the time, the film was rereleased on DVD in 1996 and has attained somewhat of a cult status (http://www.taz.de/1/archiv/?id=archivseite&dig=2007/02/15/ a0326; last accessed May 13, 2018).

Chapter 2 1 Leonard’s condition is often described as the loss of short-term memory. Yet Andrew Kania points out that if Leonard’s short-term memory was dysfunctional, he would be unable to even follow a conversation for fifteen minutes. It is thus Leonard’s long-term memory that is affected by his amnesia (2009a: 3). 2 For reasons of style and ease of understanding, I follow the convention to refer to the originally nameless narrator of the book as Jack, which is the name he goes by in the script of the film. 3 To preempt semantic hairsplitting and for the purpose of the argument I use mind-related terms such “mental,” “cognitive,” “rational,” “analytical,” or “intellectual” synonymously at large in this chapter, since both the mind and the brain are traditionally associated with cognitive skills and knowledge. This semantic slippage is not meant to suggest that I deem the brain only capable of rational and intellectual through-operations, nor that I consider the brain and mind as synonymous. After all, Mark Johnson reminds us that we must never equate brain with mind. The brain is not the mind. The brain is one key part of the entire pattern of embodied organism-environment interaction that is the proper locus of mind and meaning. . . . The proper locus of the mind is a complex, multilevel, continually interactive process that involves all of the following: a brain, operating in and for a living, purposive body, in continual engagement with complex environments that are not just physical but social and cultural as well. (2007: 175) Yet in order to uncover hitherto embodied layers of meaning in these films and contrast them with the cognitivist approaches that have been applied so far, it is useful to rely on and exaggerate such binary distinctions sometimes. 4 A poignant example of this “radical difference between the transcendental, posited moment of the photograph and the existential momentum of the cinema, between the scene to be contemplated and the scene as it is lived” is, according to Sobchack, the moment in Chris Marker’s film La Jetée when the female protagonist unexpectedly blinks (2004d: 145). 5 In another place, however, she observes in relation to Blade Runner (1982): “Suspension of belief in ‘realism’ is not the same as disbelief in the real. It is, however, a rejection of the transparency of such belief in ‘realism’ and a recognition that our access to the real is always mediated and epistemologically partial” (2004d: 144, n. 20). And yet, Tiago DeLuca’s (2014)

NOTES

217

in-depth exploration of films by Carlos Reygadas, Tsai Min-liang, and Gus van Sant via Bazin’s treatment of the long-take demonstrates that realism is still a powerful concept in cinema. 6 Allan Cameron also comments on the conspicuous absence of digital technology in Memento: “There are no mobile phones, digital cameras, CD players or the like, despite the fact that the film was made in 2000.” For him this fortifies the film’s “mood of temporal dislocation” (2008: 100). 7 Since the entire scene consists of CGI, strictly speaking this is not physical camera movement but a digital effect. Yet such CGI effects are experienced as a functional equivalent (Barker 2009b: 115). 8 For more on digital effects, optical and kinetic movement, and embodied spectatorship, see also Barker (2009a). 9 I refer to this piece as title track here because its actual title is misleading. On the official score it is listed as track no. 10 and is called “Stealing Fat,” even though it does not get repeated in the sequence in which Jack and Tyler actually steal the fat (Fight Club. Original Motion Picture Score. Composed, arranged, and produced by the Dust Brothers [1999]. Restless Records.CD). 10 Such an experience is also the main theme of a famous German song by Herbert Grönemeyer, titled “Sie mag Musik nur wenn sie laut ist” (“She only likes music when it’s loud”). The song is about a deaf girl who does not know what the world sounds like. However, she takes great pleasure in feeling the music through the reverberation of the floorboards and feeling it tickle in her stomach, and she stays blissfully unaware of the neighbor’s loud knocking. While the lyrics explain her condition to us and we can hear them, the song also encourages us to share the embodied experience of feeling the music itself, enabling a connection with the deaf girl that is not dependent on the linguistic signifiers of the song lyrics. 11 While Knight and McKnight deliver an extensive discussion of Memento as a neo-noir (2009), Laass sheds light on the links between contemporary complex films with unreliable narration, including Memento, and other films that fall under the noir/neo-noir label (2008: 201–09). 12 Burt (Mark Boone Junior), the motel receptionist, articulates Leonard’s condition in a way that aptly characterizes our difficulty as well. He says, “That must suck. It’s all backward. Maybe you’ve got an idea what you want to do next, but you can’t remember what you just did. I’m exactly the opposite.” The challenge we face in following the plot while (re)constructing the story—especially in the reverse color timeline—is thus that we learn what Leonard does “next” in the plot before we see what he “just did” in the story. 13 Sutton too makes a reference to Dreyfus’s theory of skill acquisition in the context of Leonard’s reliance on habit and routine. Yet he does so only in passing and, more crucially, interprets this theory as a form of automatic embodied response, “independent of attention, awareness, control, deliberation” (2009: 70). As becomes evident in the main text, this stands in direct opposition to my reading of Dreyfus.

218

NOTES

14 Polanyi’s claim is something that Merleau-Ponty certainly would agree with. In many ways Polanyi and Merleau-Ponty’s ideas are strikingly similar. Both draw on Gestalt theory and insist on the primacy of the body, and both defend the value of subjective knowledge against a positivist model of knowledge and science that is based on objectivity and empiricism. 15 Once more this points to the impossibility of clearly allocating different kinds of knowledge to either body or mind. 16 A good example of tacit knowledge in spectatorship is the opinion we form of an actor’s qualities: we say “bad acting” even if we know nothing about acting skills and methods, and could not specify any objective criteria upon which our judgment is based. 17 This slippage has less to do with an error of reasoning in Marks’s argument, but must be seen in the context of her book The Skin of the Film, which is explicitly devoted to what she terms “intercultural cinema”: non-commercial, experimental, often short and non-theatrically exhibited film and video works by diasporan filmmakers that “attempt to represent the experience of living between two or more cultural regimes of knowledge, or living as a minority in the still majority white, Euro-American West” (2000: 1). 18 For another, albeit slightly different discussion of “haptic narrative,” see also Trotter (2008). Similarly referring to Marks, Trotter asks whether “are there ways in which narrative cinema might incorporate haptic imagery, without ceasing to narrate” (2008: 141). Additionally drawing on the concept of mimesis and Kracauer’s notion of naturalism, he explores how in Ratcatcher (1999), there are moments of “mess-making” that “invite a haptic look” and “yet are integrated into narrative” (2008: 144). 19 According to Ramey, in terms of settings, iconography, and other conventional genre markers Fight Club matches at once “ghost story, fantasy, gore fest, medical drama, action movie, star vehicle, crime film, comedy, psycho-drama, satire, romance . . . fable” (2012: 49). He further notes that even Fox, the film’s production company, and IMDB had troubles in categorizing the film (2012: 66). 20 See also Ramey, who comments on Brad Pitt’s status as “Hollywood’s poster boy of the 1990s” who was repeatedly voted as ‘sexiest man alive’ by People Magazine in 1995 and 2000. He argues that “[Pitt’s] choice to play Tyler was not only a brave one in terms of his career trajectory but also a dignified choice” (2012: 37). 21 It should be noted that such swirling camera movements are also signature gestures of David Fincher himself, deployed, for instance, in Panic Room (2002). For a brief discussion of Fight Club and David Fincher in the context of auteur theory, see Ramey (2012: 67–71). 22 A similar reading of the function of pain in this particular moment is provided by Allen (2013), who locates it within his general argument about gaining and losing control. He considers the burning with lye as an initiation ritual that ultimately serves to distinguish “those that are dying (and are deemed emotionally dead) [and] disavow their pain” from “those that are alive (and

NOTES

219

truly live) [and] experience their pain,” whereby the sensitive scar tissue serves as a kind of branding for this distinction (2013: 164). 23 It is interesting to note in this context that Films that Scar is the title of Mark Browning’s (2010) book about David Fincher and his films. But Browning’s use of the phrase is strictly metaphorical. 24 See also Sobchack’s (2004c) essay in which she describes the difference between being embodied and having a biological body. This essay might also be a good starting point for a discussion of the representation of embodiment and the cultural critique in the film. 25 In this sense, the first two and identical rules of Fight Club—“You are not allowed to talk about Fight Club”—read less like a warning to keep the secret and instead are the only instruction the members need: it is all about the physical experience. For this reason, “if this is your first night at Fight Club, you have to fight!”

Chapter 3 1 The idea of “Possible Worlds,” initially devised by Leibniz, is a philosophical theory that became popular during the 1960s in the context of modal logic. Far from being a homogenous theory, philosophers that have discussed the concept are Saul Kripke, David Lewis, and Robert Stalnaker, among others. For a good overview, see Menzel (2017). 2 http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=sourcecode.htm. Last accessed November 12, 2018. 3 This is not to suggest that we would make sense of such films only with our brains either, but simply to say there is a different experience in terms of spectatorship. Notably, there is also an interesting parallel between Altered States and Possible Worlds: both films feature a sensory deprivation tank. For discussions of altered states in cinema, see Fisher (2008) and Powell (2007). 4 Plot-mapping and diagramming have attracted some more attention in the discussion of mind-game films. See Panek (2014). 5 It should be noted that the concept of diegetic world/diegese itself is subject of debate. See, for instance, Fuxjäger (2007). Hence my preference for the term “film world.” 6 In an earlier essay, he speaks of a “shared-world feeling” (2008: 98), an idea that, like his later work, is inspired by Mikel Dufrenne’s (1973) theory of aesthetic experience. This shared-world feeling designates, for instance, the way in which the expressed world of a film is held together by a general mood, or by an affective atmosphere that imbues it with a felt unity (2008: 93–96). 7 As Yacavone himself acknowledges elsewhere, the distinction between actual and represented time parallels Bordwell’s distinction between plot and story time; yet it is this third dimension of expressed and lived time that lacks a counterpart in the former’s narratological model (2008: 97).

220

NOTES

8 For instance, the father in Debra Granik’s film Leave No Trace (2018). 9 This has to do with a difference between the film’s capacity to perceive hyperbolic visual space and the way Heelan describes our own. Unlike for us, in the film’s perception of the world shapes in the distant do not appear “slightly concave” but straight (1983: 29), at least when seen with a standard lens. Consider, by contrast, how a film shot entirely with a fish-eye lens would be able to see the world curved and hyperbolic in a way we never could. It is interesting to note, in this context, that Heelan sees evidence for hyperbolic visual perception in the (non-perspectival) paintings of Cézanne, van Gogh, and Turner. He contrasts some of van Gogh’s paintings with photographs taken from the hypothetical viewpoint of the painter, pointing out how van Gogh’s pictorial space would be considered “incorrect” and “distorted” from a scientific perspective (1983: 114–28). However, Heelan also points to ways in which the mechanical eye of the camera can perceive hyperbolic shapes, for example, with a telephoto lens that flattens and compresses space (1983: 29). 10 Notably, Joyce reciprocates George’s increased perceptual awareness. In a later scene she asks “what’s that smell?” when George is making coffee. In another scene, in her incarnation as a stockbroker, she tells George she is thinking about quitting her job because “I’ve never felt comfortable selling things you cannot see or touch.” 11 There is a huge literature on the topic of possible worlds theory and its application to fictional worlds, the discussion of which exceeds the scope of this chapter. See, for example, Ryan (2001), Dolezel (1998), Buckland (1999, 2001), Sellors (2000), and Perlmutter (2002). For other applications in the context of complex narratives and mind-game films, see Laass (2008: 82–87), Orth (2006), and Uhl (2013). 12 For more on the difference between synesthesia as a metaphorical effect and a cinematic “way of being,” see also Barker (2009a). The reason why I rely on the 2008 article is that its focus on excess and spectacle is more immediately relevant to the way atmospheres work in Possible Worlds.

REFERENCES

“1999.” Box Office Mojo. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=1999. Last accessed November 12, 2018. Ahmed, Sara (2004), The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Allen, Steven (2013), Cinema, Pain and Pleasure: Consent and the Controlled Body. Houndmills, Basingstoke; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Antunes, Luis Rocha (2016), The Multisensory Film Experience: A Cognitive Model of Experiential Film Aesthetics. Bristol: Intellect Books. Arnheim, Rudolf (1957), Film as Art. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Augé, Marc (2006), Non-Places. Translated by John Howe. Second English Language Edition. London; New York, NY: Verso. “Awareness Test: Test Your Awareness Online” (2014). http://www.awarenesstest. co.uk/. Last accessed December 24, 2014. Barker, Jennifer M. (2008), “Out of Sync, Out of Sight: Synaesthesia and Film Spectacle.” Paragraph 31 (2): 236–51. Barker, Jennifer M. (2009a), “Neither Here nor There: Synaesthesia and the Cosmic Zoom.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 7 (3): 311–24. Barker, Jennifer M. (2009b), The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Barratt, Daniel (2009), “‘Twist Blindness’: The Role of Primacy, Priming, Schemas, and Reconstructive Memory in a First-Time Viewing of The Sixth Sense.” In Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Warren Buckland, 62–86. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Barthes, Roland (1981), Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York, NY: Hill and Wang. Bauer, Nancy (2012), “The First Rule of Fight Club: On Plato, Descartes and Fight Club.” In Fight Club, edited by Thomas E. Wartenberg, 112–31. Philosophers on Film. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Bazin, André (2005), “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” In What Is Cinema?, 9–16. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Benjamin, Walter (1969), “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 217–52. New York, NY: Schocken Books. Berg, Charles Ramìrez (2006), “A Taxonomy of Alternative Plots in Recent Films: Classifying the ‘Tarantino Effect’.” Film Criticism 31 (1/2): 5–61. Berger, John (1972), Ways of Seeing. London: BBC; Harmondsworth: Penguin.

222

REFERENCES

Beugnet, Martine (2007), Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Bissonnette, Sylvie (2009), “Cyborg Brain in Robert Lepage’s Possible Worlds.” Screen 50 (4): 392–410. Bolton, Lucy (2014), “Solving Suicide: Facing the Complexity of The Hours.” In Hollywood Puzzle Films, edited by Warren Buckland, 265–78. AFI Film Readers. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Bordwell, David (1985), Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Bordwell, David (2002), “Film Futures.” SubStance 31.1 (97): 88–104. Bordwell, David (2006), The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Branigan, Edward (1992), Narrative Comprehension and Film. New York, NY: Routledge. Branigan, Edward (2002), “Nearly True: Forking Plots, Forking Interpretations: A Response to David Bordwell’s ‘Film Futures.’” SubStance 31.1 (97): 105–14. Briefel, Aviva (2009), “What Some Ghosts Don’t Know: Spectral Incognizance and the Horror Film.” Narrative 17 (1): 95–110. Browning, Mark (2010), David Fincher: Films That Scar. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Brusberg-Kiermeier, Stefani (2006), “Kampf der Fakten und Gefühle: Erzählen und Erinnern in Memento, Paycheck, und Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” In Camera Doesn’t Lie: Spielarten Erzählerischer Unzuverlässigkeit Im Film, edited by Jörg Helbig, 123–47. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Buckland, Warren (1999), “Between Science Fact and Science Fiction: Spielberg’s Digital Dinosaurs, Possible Worlds, and the New Aesthetic Realism.” Screen 40 (2): 177–92. Buckland, Warren (2001), “A Reply to Sellors’ ‘Mindless’ Approach to Possible Worlds.” Screen 42 (2): 222–26. Buckland, Warren, ed. (2009a), “Introduction: Puzzle Plots.” In Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, 1–12. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Buckland, Warren, ed. (2009b), “Making Sense of Lost Highway.” In Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, 42–61. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Buckland, Warren, ed. (2009c), Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Buckland, Warren, ed. (2014a), Hollywood Puzzle Films. AFI Film Readers. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Buckland, Warren, ed. (2014b), “Introduction: Ambiguity, Ontological Pluralism, and Cognitive Dissonance in the Hollywood Puzzle Film.” In Hollywood Puzzle Films, 1–14. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Buckland, Warren, ed. (2014c), “Source Code’s Video Game Logic.” In Hollywood Puzzle Films, 185–97. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Burgoyne, Robert (1990), “The Cinematic Narrator: The Logic and Pragmatics of Impersonal Narration.” Journal of Film and Video 42 (1): 3–16.

REFERENCES

223

Burnett, Adam (2004), “‘Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut’: The Strange Afterlife of an Indie Cult Film.” Indiewire, July 22. http://www.indiewire.com/article/ donnie_darko_the_directors_cut_the_strange_afterlife_of_an_indie_cult_film. Last accessed November 12, 2018. Cameron, Allan (2008), Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema. Houndmills, Basingstoke; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Cameron, Allan, and Richard Misek (2014), “Modular Spacetime in the ‘Intelligent’ Blockbuster: Inception and Source Code.” In Hollywood Puzzle Films, edited by Warren Buckland, 109–24. AFI Film Readers. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Campora, Matthew (2009), “Art Cinema and New Hollywood: Multiform Narrative and Sonic Metalepsis in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Research Article.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 7 (2): 119–31. Campora, Matthew (2014), Subjective Realist Cinema: From Expressionism to Inception. New York, NY; Oxford: Berghahn Books. Carroll, Lewis (1971), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. London: Oxford University Press. Carroll, Noël (1996), “The Paradox of Suspense.” In Suspense: Conceptualizations, Theoretical Analyses, and Empirical Explorations, edited by Peter Vorder, Hans J. Wulff, and Mike Friederichsen, 71–91. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Carroll, Noël (2009), “Memento and the Phenomenology of Comprehending Motion Picture Narration.” In Memento, edited by Andrew Kania. Philosophers on Film. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Casebier, Allan (1991), Film and Phenomenology: Towards a Realist Theory of Cinematic Representation. Cambridge, NY: University of Cambridge Press. Cavell, Stanley (1979 [1971]), The World Viewed. Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Enlarged Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chamarette, Jenny (2012), Phenomenology and the Future of Film: Rethinking Subjectivity beyond French Cinema. Houndmills, Basingstoke; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Chion, Michel (1999), The Voice in Cinema. Translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. “Class Real: The Mindfuck Movie List.” Class Real. http://classreal.com/. Last accessed November 12, 2018. Connor, Steven (2000), “Sounding Out Film.” http://www.stevenconnor.com/ soundingout.html. Last accessed November 12, 2018. D’Aloia, Adriano (2012), “Upside-Down Cinema: (Dis)Simulation of the Body in the Film Experience.” Cinema: Journal of Philosophy of the Moving Image 3: 155–82. Daly, Kristen (2010), “Cinema 3.0: The Interactive Image.” Cinema Journal 50 (1): 81–98. Doležel, Lubomír (1998), Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Donaldson, Lucy Fife (2014), Texture in Film. New York, NY; Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Donaldson, Lucy Fife (2015), “Moments of Texture: Introduction.” Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism 6: 27.

224

REFERENCES

Dreyfus, Hubert L. (2002), “Intelligence without Representation – MerleauPonty’s Critique of Mental Representation: The Relevance of Phenomenology to Scientific Explanation.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (4): 367–83. Dufrenne, Mikel (1973), The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Dunleavy, Trisha (2018), Complex Serial Drama and Multiplatform Television. New York, NY: Routledge. Dust Brothers (1999) [CD], Fight Club: Original Motion Picture Score. Restless Records. Ebert, Roger (1999), “Fight Club.” RogerEbert.com. http://www.rogerebert.com/ reviews/fight-club-1999. Last accessed November 12, 2018. Eckel, Julia, Bernd Leiendecker, Daniela Olek, and Christine Piepiorka, eds. (2013), (Dis)Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes, Bielefeld: Transcript. Eig, Jonathan (2003), “A Beautiful Mind(fuck): Hollywood’s Structures of Identity.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 46. http://www.ejumpcut.org/ archive/jc46.2003/eig.mindfilms/. Last accessed November 12, 2018. Elsaesser, Thomas (2009), “The Mind-Game Film.” In Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Warren Buckland, 13–41. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Elsaesser, Thomas (2018), “Contingency, Causality, Complexity: Distributed Agency in the Mind-game Film.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 16 (1): 1–39. Elsaesser, Thomas, and Malte Hagener (2010), Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Ferenz, Volker (2009), “Mementos of Contemporary American Cinema: Identifying and Responding to the Unreliable Narrator in the Movie Theater.” In Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies, edited by Warren Buckland, 257–85. New York, NY: Routledge. Fisher, Kevin (2008), “Intimate Elsewheres: Altered States of Consciousness in Post WWII American Cinema.” Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. Fuxjäger, Anton (2007), “Diegese, Diegesis, Diegetisch: Versuch Einer Begriffsentwirrung.” Montage/av 16 (2): 17–37. Garwood, Ian (2013), The Sense of Film Narration. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ghislotti, Stefano (2009), “Narrative Comprehension Made Difficult: Film Form and Mnemonic Devices in Memento.” In Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Warren Buckland, 87–106. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Gordinier, Jeff (1999), “1999: The Year That Changed Movies.” Entertainment Weekly, November 26. http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,271806,00.html. Last accessed November 12, 2018. Grau, Christopher, ed. (2009), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Grodal, Torben Kragh (2009), Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

REFERENCES

225

Gunning, Tom (1989), “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In) credulous Spectator.” In Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing, edited by Linda Williams, 114–33. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hanich, Julian (2010), Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers: The Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Hansen, Miriam (1993), “‘With Skin and Hair:’ Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Marseille 1940.” Critical Inquiry 19 (3 [Spring]): 437–69. Heelan, Patrick A. (1983), Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Helbig, Jörg, ed. (2006), Camera Doesn’t Lie: Spielarten Erzählerischer Unzuverlässigkeit Im Film. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Ihde, Don (1976), Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Ince, Kate (2011), “Bringing Bodies Back In: For a Phenomenological and Psychoanalytic Film Criticism of Embodied Cultural Identity.” Film-Philosophy 15 (1): 1–12. Isaacs, Bruce (2014), “The Image of Time in Post-classical Hollywood: Donnie Darko and Southland Tales.” In Hollywood Puzzle Films, edited by Warren Buckland, 198–213. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Jamieson, Lee (2007), “The Lost Prophet of Cinema: The Film Theory of Antonin Artaud.” Senses of Cinema 44: n.p. Jay, Martin (1993), Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in TwentiethCentury French Thought. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Johnson, Mark (2007), The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Johnson, Steven (2005), Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. New York, NY: Riverhead Books. Jütte, Robert (2004), A History of the Senses. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kania, Andrew, ed. (2009a), “Introduction.” In Memento, 1–12. Philosophers on Film. London: Routledge. Kania, Andrew, ed. (2009b), Memento. Philosophers on Film. London: Routledge. Kania, Andrew, ed. (2009c), “What is Memento? Ontology and Interpretation in Mainstream Film.” In Memento, 167–88. Philosophers on Film. London: Routledge. Kinder, Marsha (2002), “Hot Spots, Avatars, and Narrative Fields Forever: Buñuel’s Legacy for New Digital Media and Interactive Database Narrative.” Film Quarterly 55 (4): 2–15. Kiss, Miklós (2013), “Navigation in Complex Films: Real-Life Embodied Experiences Underlying Narrative Categorisation.” In (Dis)Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes, edited by Julia Eckel, Bernd Leiendecker, Daniela Olek, and Christine Piepiorka, 237–56. Bielefeld: Transcript. Kiss, Miklós, and Steven Willemsen (2016), Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Klecker, Cornelia (2013), “Mind-Tricking Narratives: Between Classical and ArtCinema Narration.” Poetics Today 34 (1–2): 119–46.

226

REFERENCES

Klinger, Barbara (2006), Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Knight, Deborah, and George McKnight (2009), “Reconfiguring the Past: Memento and Neo-Noir.” In Memento, edited by Andrew Kania, 147–66. Philosophers on Film. London; New York, NY: Routledge. Kozloff, Sarah (1988), Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film. Reprint. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kracauer, Siegfried (1961), Nature of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. London: D. Dobson. Laass, Eva (2008), Broken Taboos, Subjective Truths: Forms and Functions of Unreliable Narration in Contemporary American Cinema- A Contribution to Film Narratology. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Laine, Tarja, and Wanda Strauven (2009), “The Synaesthetic Turn: Introduction.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 7 (3): 249–55. Lavik, Erlend (2006), “Narrative Structure in The Sixth Sense: A New Twist in ‘Twist Movies’?” The Velvet Light Trap 58 (Fall): 55–64. Leder, Drew (1990), The Absent Body. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Leiendecker, Bernd (2013), “Leaving the Narrative Maze: The Plot Twist as Device of Re-Orientation.” In (Dis)Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes, edited by Julia Eckel, Bernd Leiendecker, Daniela Olek, and Christine Piepiorka, 257–74. Bielefeld: Transcript. Lilly, John C. (1977), The Deep Self: Profound Relaxation and the Tank Isolation Technique. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. De Luca, Tiago (2014), Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Beauty. New York, NY: I. B. Tauris. Manovich, Lev (2001), The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marks, Laura U. (2000), The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Marks, Laura U. (2008), “Thinking Multisensory Culture.” Paragraph 31 (2): 123–37. Martin-Jones, David (2006), Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity: Narrative Time in National Contexts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Massumi, Brian (2002), Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. PostContemporary Interventions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mayne, Judith (1993), Cinema and Spectatorship. London; New York, NY: Routledge. Menzel, Christopher (2017), “Possible Worlds.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Winter 2017 Edition. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/ entries/possible-worlds. Last accessed May 21, 2018. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1964), “Eye and Mind.” In The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, edited by James M. Edie, translated by Carleton Dallery, 159–90. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1964 [1948]), “The Film and the New Psychology.” In Sense and Non-Sense, translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus, and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, 48–59. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1968), The Visible and the Invisible. Followed by Working Notes. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

REFERENCES

227

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2002 [1945]), Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London; New York, NY: Routledge. Michelson, Annette (1969), “Bodies in Space: Film as ‘Carnal Knowledge.’” Artforum 7 (6): 54–63. Mighton, John (1992), Possible Worlds and A Short History of Night. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. “Mindbender.” Box Office Mojo. http://boxofficemojo.com/genres/ chart/?id=mindbender.htm. Last accessed November 12, 2018. Mittell, Jason (2006), “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television.” The Velvet Light Trap 58 (Fall): 29–40. Mittell, Jason (2014), “Serial Orientations. Paratexts and Contemporary Complex Television.” In (Dis)Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes, edited by Julia Eckel, Bernd Leiendecker, Daniela Olek, and Christine Piepiorka, 165–81. Bielefeld: Transcript. Mittell, Jason (2015), Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York, NY: New York University Press. Mottram, James (2002), The Making of Memento. New York, NY: Faber and Faber. Mullarkey, John (2009), Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of Reality. Paperback Edition. Houndmills, Basingstoke; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Noë, Alva, and Evan Thompson (2002), “On the Brain-basis of Visual Consciousness: A Sensori-motor Account.” In Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception, edited by Alva Noë, and Evan Thompson, 567–98. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Noë, Alva, and Evan Thompson, eds. (2002), Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Orth, Dominik (2006), “Der Unbewusste Tod. Unzuverlaessiges Erzählen in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense Und Alejandro Ameñabar The Others.” In Camera Doesn’t Lie: Spielarten Erzählerischer Unzuverlässigkeit Im Film, edited by Jörg Helbig, 283–307. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Palahniuk, Chuck (2006 [1996]), Fight Club. With a New Afterword. London: Vintage Books. Pallasmaa, Juhani (2005), The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Chichester: Wiley Academy. Pallasmaa, Juhani (2014), “Space, Place, and Atmosphere: Peripheral Perception in Existential Experience.” In Architectural Atmospheres on the Experience and Politics of Architecture, edited by Christian Borch, 18–41. Berlin; Boston, MA: De Gruyter. Panek, Elliot (2006), “The Poet and the Detective: Defining the Psychological Puzzle Film.” Film Criticism 31 (1/2): 62–88. Panek, Elliot (2014), “‘Show, Don’t Tell:’ Considering the Utility of Diagrams as a Tool for Understanding Complex Narratives.” In Hollywood Puzzle Films, edited by Warren Buckland, 72–88. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Perlmutter, Ruth (2002), “Multiple Strands and Possible Worlds.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 11 (2): 44–61. Peucker, Brigitte (2007), The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

228

REFERENCES

Piepiorka, Christine (2013), “You’re Supposed to Be Confused! (Dis)Orienting Narrative Mazes in Televisual Complex Narrations.” In (Dis)Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes, edited by Julia Eckel, Bernd Leiendecker, Daniela Olek, and Christine Piepiorka, 183–204. Bielefeld: Transcript. Pisters, Patricia (2012), The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Plantinga, Carl R. (2009), Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Plantinga, Carl R., and Greg M. Smith (1999), Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Polanyi, Michael (1967), The Tacit Dimension. London: Routledge & Kegan. Powell, Anna (2007), Deleuze, Altered States and Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Powrie, Phil (2008), “The Haptic Moment: Sparring with Paolo Conte in Ozon’s 5x2.” Paragraph 31 (2): 206–22. Prince, Stephen (1996), “True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory.” Film Quarterly 49 (3): 27–37. “Pulp Fiction.” Box Office Mojo. http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=pulpfiction. htm. Last accessed November 12, 2018. Ramey, Mark (2012), Studying Fight Club. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur Publishing. Rennebohm, Kate (2008), “Look at Me and Tell Me If You’ve Known Me Before: Exploring Affect After Inland Empire.” Synoptique 11 (March): n.p. Renner, Karen (2006), “Repeat Viewings Revisited: Emotions, Memory, and Memento.” Film Studies 8 (Summer): 106–15. Ricoeur, Paul (1984), Time and Narrative. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul (1991), A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination. Edited by Mario J. Valdés. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Del Rio, Elena (2005), “Alchemies of Thought in Godard’s Cinema: Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty.” SubStance 34.3 (108): 62–78. Del Rio, Elena (2008), Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Del Rio, Elena (2010), “Film.” In Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics, edited by Hans Rainer Sepp, and Lester E. Embree. Dordrecht; Heidelberg; London; New York, NY: Springer. Ross, Miriam (2015), 3D Cinema. Optical Illusions and Tactile Experiences. New York, NY; Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rutherford, Anne (2003), “Cinema and Embodied Affect.” Senses of Cinema 25, http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/feature-articles/embodied_affect/. Ryan, Marie-Laure (2001), Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Scarry, Elaine (1985), The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Schilder, Paul (1950), The Image and Appearance of the Human Body: Studies in the Constructive Energies of the Psyche. New York, NY: International University Press. Schmerheim, Philipp (2015), Skepticism Films: Knowing and Doubting the World in Contemporary Cinema. New York, NY; London: Bloomsbury Academic.

REFERENCES

229

Sellors, C. Paul (2000), “The Impossibility of Science Fiction: Against Buckland’s Possible Worlds.” Screen 41 (2): 203–16. Sesonske, Alexander (1973), “Cinema Space.” In Explorations in Phenomenology, edited by David Carr, and Edward S. Casey, 399–409. Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy 4. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Shaviro, Steven (1993), The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine (2011), The Primacy of Movement. Exp., 2nd Edition. Advances in Consciousness Research 82. Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V. Simons, Daniel J., and Christopher F. Chabris (1999), “Gorillas in Our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events.” Perception 28 (9): 1059–74. Simons, Jan (2008), “Complex Narratives.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 6 (2): 111–26. Simons, Jan (2014), “Complex Narratives.” In Hollywood Puzzle Films, edited by Warren Buckland, 17–34. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Sinnerbrink, Robert (2012), “Stimmung: Exploring the Aesthetics of Mood.” Screen 53 (2): 148–63. Skees, Murray (2012), “Have I Been Understood? – Dionysus vs. Ikea-Boy.” In Fight Club, edited by Thomas E. Wartenberg, 12–34. Philosophers on Film. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Smith, Greg M. (2003), Film Structure and the Emotion System. Cambridge, NY: University of Cambridge Press. Smith, Murray (1995), Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sobchack, Vivian (1990), “The Active Eye: A Phenomenology of Cinematic Vision.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 12 (3): 21–36. Sobchack, Vivian (1992), The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sobchack, Vivian (2000), “Meta-Morphing, ‘At the Still Point of the Turning World’ and Meta-Stasis.” In Meta Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change, edited by Vivian Sobchack, 131–58. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press. Sobchack, Vivian (2004a), “Breadcrumbs in the Forest: Three Meditations on Being Lost in Space.” In Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, 13–35. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sobchack, Vivian (2004b), “Introduction.” In Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, 1–9. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sobchack, Vivian (2004c), “Is Any Body Home? Embodied Imagination and Visible Evictions.” In Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, 179–204. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sobchack, Vivian (2004d), “The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic and Electronic Presence.” In Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, 135–62. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

230

REFERENCES

Sobchack, Vivian (2004e), “What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh.” In Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, 53–84. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sobchack, Vivian (2005), “When the Ear Dreams: Dolby Digital and the Imagination of Sound.” Film Quarterly 58 (4): 2–15. Solnit, Rebecca (2006 [2005]), A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Reprint. Edinburgh: Canongate. Stadler, Harald A. (1990), “Film as Experience: Phenomenological Concepts in Cinema and Television Studies.” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 12 (3): 37–50. Stadler, Jane (2008), Pulling Focus: Intersubjective Experience, Narrative Film, and Ethics. New York, NY: Continuum. Stark, Cynthia (2012), “There’s Something about Marla: Fight Club and the Engendering of Self-respect.” In Fight Club, edited by Thomas E. Wartenberg, 51–77. Philosophers on Film. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Steinke, Anthrin (2006), “‘It’s Called the Change-Over: The Movie Goes On and Nobody in the Audience Has Any Idea’: Filmische Irrwege Und Unwahrheiten in David Fincher’s Fight Club.” In Camera Doesn’t Lie: Spielarten Erzählerischer Unzuverlässigkeit Im Film, edited by Jörg Helbig, 149–66. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Stewart, Garrett (2007), Framed Time: Towards a Postfilmic Cinema. Chicago, IL: University of Press. Stewart, Garrett (2014), “Fourth Dimensions, Seventh Senses: The Work of Mind-gaming in the Age of Electronic Reproduction.” In Hollywood Puzzle Films, edited by Warren Buckland, 165–84. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Straus, Erwin Walter (1970), “The Phantom Limb.” In Aisthesis and Aesthetics, edited by Erwin Walter Straus, and Richard Marion Griffith, 130–49. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Sutton, John (2009), “The Feel of the World: Exograms, Habits, and the Confusion of Types of Memory.” In Memento, edited by Andrew Kania, 65–86. Philosophers on Film. London: Routledge. Taubin, Amy (1999), “So Good It Hurts.” Sight and Sound. http://old.bfi.org.uk/ sightandsound/feature/193. Last accessed November 12, 2018. Thanouli, Eleftheria (2009), Post-Classical Cinema: An International Poetics of Film Narration. London: Wallflower Press. Thon, Jan-Noël (2009), “Mind-Bender. Zur Popularisierung Komplexer Narrativer Strukturen Im Amerikanischen Kino Der 1990er Jahre.” In Post-CocaColanization: Zurück Zur Vielfalt?, edited by Sophia Komor, and Rebecca Rohleder, 175–92. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Toles, George (2009), “Trying to Remember Clementine.” In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, edited by Christopher Grau, 111–57. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Trigg, Dylan (2012), The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Trotter, David (2008), “Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher. Towards a Theory of Haptic Narrative.” Paragraph 31 (2): 138–58.

REFERENCES

231

Tuan, Yi-Fu (1977), Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press. Uhl, Nele (2013), “Amazing Maze. On the Concept of Diegese, Possible Worlds, and the Aesthetics of Illness.” In (Dis)Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes, edited by Julia Eckel, Bernd Leiendecker, Christine Piepiorka, and Daniela Olek, 205–20. Bielefeld: Transcript. Vasseleu, Cathryn (1998), Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. London; New York, NY: Routledge. Wahlberg, Malin (2008), Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press. Walton, Saige (2016), Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Wartenberg, Thomas E., ed. (2011), Fight Club. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Weibel, Peter (2003), “The Intelligent Image: Neurocinema or Quantum Cinema?” In Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, edited by Jeffrey Shaw, and Peter Weibel, 594–601. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Weiss, Gail (1999), Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. London; New York, NY: Routledge. Weiss, Gail (2008), Refiguring the Ordinary. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. White, Stephen L. (2009), “Michel Gondry and the Phenomenology of Visual Perception.” In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, edited by Christopher Grau, 94–110. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Wilson, George (2006), “Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (1): 81–95. Wilson, George M., and Sam Shpall (2012), “Unraveling the Twists of Fight Club.” In Fight Club, edited by Thomas E. Wartenberg, 78–111. Philosophers on Film. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Yacavone, Daniel (2008), “Towards a Theory of Film Worlds.” Film-Philosophy 12 (2): 83–108. Yacavone, Daniel (2014), Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Young, Kay (2002), “That Fabric of Times’: A Response to David Bordwell’s ‘Film Futures’.” SubStance 31.1 (97): 115–18. Zerweck, Bruno (2001), “Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction.” Style 35 (1): 151–78.

FILMS

12 Monkeys. Terry Gilliam. 1995. USA. 21 Grams. Alejandro González Iñárritu. 2003. USA. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick. 1968. UK. USA. 5 × 2. François Ozon. 2004. France. A Beautiful Mind. Ron Howard. 2002. USA. Adaptation. Spike Jonze. 2003. USA. Altered States. Ken Russell. 1980. USA. Amélie. Jean-Pierre Jeunet. 2002. France. Germany. American Psycho. Mary Harron. 2002. USA. Amores Perros. Alejandro González Iñárritu. 2000. Mexico. Being John Malkovich. Spike Jonze. 1999. USA. Blade Runner. Ridley Scott. 1982. USA. Hong Kong. UK. The Butterfly Effect. Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber. 2004. USA. Canada. Carnival of Souls. Herk Hervey. 1962. USA. Donnie Darko. Richard Kelly. 2002. USA. Enemy. Denis Villeneuve. 2013. Canada. Spain. The English Patient. Antony Minghella. 1996. USA. UK. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Michel Gondry. 2004. USA. Fight Club. David Fincher. 1999. USA. Germany. Flightplan. Robert Schwentke. 2005. Germany. USA. Following. Christopher Nolan. 1999. UK. The Forgotten. Joseph Ruben. 2004. USA. The Game. David Fincher. 1997. USA. The Hours. Stephen Daldry. 2003. USA. UK. Identity. James Mangold. 2003. USA. Inception. Christopher Nolan. 2010. USA. UK. Inland Empire. David Lynch. 2007. France. Poland. USA. The Jacket. John Maybury. 2005. USA. Germany. Jacob’s Ladder. Adrian Lyne. 1990. USA. La Jetée. Chris Marker. 1962. France. Looper. Rian Johnson. 2012. USA. Lost Highway. David Lynch. 1997. France. USA. The Machinist. Brad Anderson. 2004. Spain. USA. The Matrix. Andy and Lana Wachowski. 1999. USA. Australia. Memento. Christopher Nolan. 2000. USA. Moon. Duncan Jones. 2009. UK. Mulholland Drive. David Lynch. 2001. France. USA.

FILMS

Open Your Eyes. Alejandro Amenábar. 1997. Spain. The Others. Alejandro Amenábar. 2001. USA. Spain. France. Italy. Panic Room. David Fincher. 2002. USA. Paycheck. John Woo. 2003. USA. Canada. ∏ (Pi). Darren Aronofsky. 1998. USA. The Piano. Jane Campion. 1993. New Zealand. Australia. France. Possible Worlds. Robert Lepage. 2001. Canada. Primer. Shane Carruth. 2005. USA. Pulp Fiction. Quentin Tarantino. 1994. USA. Ratcatcher. Lynne Ramsay. 1999. UK. Repo Man. Alex Cox. 1984. USA. Requiem for a Dream. Darren Aronofsky 2000. USA. Run Lola Run. Tom Tykwer. 1999. Germany. Secret Window. David Koepp. 2004. USA. Shutter Island. Martin Scorsese. 2010. USA. The Silence of the Lambs. Jonathan Demme. 1991. USA The Sixth Sense. M. Night Shyamalan. 1999. USA. Sliding Doors. Peter Howitt. 1998. UK. USA. Source Code. Duncan Jones. 2011. USA. Canada. Spider. David Cronenberg. 2002. Canada. UK. Stay. Marc Forster. 2005. USA. Swiss Army Man. 2016. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. USA. Time Crimes. Nacho Vigalondo. 2007. Spain. Trance. Danny Boyle. 2013. UK. USA. France. Triangle. Christopher Smith. 2009. UK. Australia. The Truman Show. Peter Weir. 1998. USA. The Thirteenth Floor. Josef Rusnak. 1999. USA. Unbreakable. M. Night Shyamalan. 2000. The Usual Suspects. Bryan Singer. 1995. USA. Germany. Vanilla Sky. Cameron Crowe. 2001. USA. Spain. Vertigo. Alfred Hitchcock. 1958. USA. The Village. M. Night Shyamalan. 2004. USA. Waking Life. Richard Linklater. 2002. USA Yella. Christian Petzold. 2008. Germany.

233

TELEVISION

Breaking Bad. AMC. 2008–13. Dark. Netflix. 2017–. Game of Thrones. HBO. 2011–. Lost. ABC. 2004–10. Madmen. AMC. 2007–15. Mr. Robot. USA Network. 2015–. True Detective. HBO. 2014–. Twin Peaks. ABC. 1990–91. Twin Peaks: The Return. Showtime. 2017. The Wire. HBO. 2002–08.

INDEX

acousmêtre 63, 64, 81 affect and spectatorship 23, 25, 28, 134, 150, 177, 205 affectivity in Fight Club 96, 131, 133, 138 Ahmed, Sara 131 aliveness 129, 130 ambience 155, 181, 184–90, 192, 195, 198 Amores Perros 22 analog film/photography 92, 93, 96, 115 Antunes, Luis Rocha 134 apparatus theory 25 architecture 72, 151, 153, 155 in The Others 72 in Possible Worlds 151–3, 155, 152, 181, 182 and the senses 153c5 Artaud, Antonin 24 aspect ratio 152, 153, 160, 183 atmosphere as cohesive substance 181, 186, 188, 190 in Fight Club 100, 124, 126, 127 in The Others 36, 72, 73 and perception of architecture 153, 155, 196, 197, 201 in Possible Worlds 152, 155, 181, 184–8 in Source Code 189, 190, 197 audience 80. See also spectatorship aural texture 97 balance 156, 171, 197 Barker, Jennifer M. 52, 209 being in two places at once 157, 158, 160, 170, 174, 198

cinematic tactility 27, 34, 67, 68 editing 125, 135, 152, 173 musculature and kinesthetic empathy 68, 98, 99, 110, 128, 129 music and emotions 137 skin and touch 67, 77, 97, 117, 125 synesthesia 192, 193 textural analysis 22, 23, 27 visceral connection between viewer and film 100, 135 Barratt, Daniel 40–2, 55, 61, 81 Barthes, Roland 95 Bauer, Nancy 136, 138 Bazin, André 24, 95 A Beautiful Mind 8, 9, 18, 140 being-in-the-world 54, 58, 59 Benjamin, Walter 24 Berg, Charles Ramirez 9–11, 16, 19 Beugnet, Martine 23 birds-eye perspective 157 blindness 47, 52, 77 bodily style 141 body body–mind–world relationship 1, 4, 13, 15, 58, 59, 146, 179, 196, 203 and death 54–6, 79, 80, 95 habitual 27, 108–10, 208–10 image 56, 124 as inscriptive surface 116, 117 lived body 25, 29, 30, 46, 58, 59, 122, 175 as narrative horizon 29 and spatiality 156, 158–61, 167 and temporality 94, 95, 100, 175, 179

236

INDEX

body language in Memento 108, 111–14 Bordwell, David 5, 16, 17, 29, 145, 205 brain and cinema 147 in mind-game films 3, 87, 96, 102, 141, 146, 147, 196 Briefel, Aviva 53 Buckland, Warren 2, 7–10, 19, 34, 144, 160 The Butterfly Effect 174, 178 Cameron, Allan on Memento 103, 117, 119 modular narratives 5, 15, 16, 19, 20 on Source Code and Inception (with Richard Misek) 145, 161–3, 173, 174 Campora, Matthew 85, 86 Carnival of Souls 38 Carroll, Lewis 89 Cavell, Stanley 51, 149, 150 celluloid. See analog film/photography CGI 96, 97, 99, 102, 129, 130, 135 chiaroscuro 70, 71 chiasm 48, 49 cineaesthetic world-feeling 150, 161 cinema of attractions 128 cinematic gesture 111, 130, 151, 160 cinematic ride 96–100 cinesthetic subject 26, 49, 66, 69, 77, 80 close-ups in Fight Club 99, 123, 127, 136 in Memento 90, 92, 106, 114 in opening shots 99, 151, 158 closure 13, 88, 148, 194, 197, 210 cognitive mapping 165, 167, 170 cognitive puzzlement 2, 4, 5, 19 cognitive schemata 14, 17, 19, 41, 42 cohesion devices 17, 164, 186 material signifiers as 107 collision between bodies 131, 132 color 155, 185, 189, 190, 196, 197 complexity. See also narrative complexity cinematic 10, 30, 31, 44, 60, 78 spatiotemporal 145, 162, 164, 188

Connor, Steven 102 corporeal style 124 D’Aloia, Adriano 156, 172 darkness 71, 72, 76, 190 death. See also aliveness and embodiment 13, 39, 53–7, 79 and photography 93, 95 as a theme in mind-game films 4, 13, 31, 38, 39, 79 deception and skepticism films 146 and spectatorship 2, 13, 18, 42, 86 Deleuze, Gilles 24–7, 102, 147 Descartes 71, 136 disgust 97, 127 disorientation 148, 158, 166, 167, 170, 171, 173–6 dissolve 125, 155 Donaldson, Lucy Fife 22, 23, 153, 185 Dreyfus, Hubert M. 104, 109, 110, 209 dualism 53, 56, 62, 71, 188, 203 DVD 12, 19 dys-appearance 132–5 Elsaesser, Thomas on mind-game films 1, 3, 7, 9 body and senses in 15, 34 common motifs of 8, 12, 14, 39 cultural context of 202 as productive pathologies 87, 88, 103, 108, 110, 123, 201 “the rules of the game” 5, 8 embodied knowledge (see tactility/tactile, epistemologies) memory 111, 120 spectatorship 26–8, 102 vision 21, 25, 31, 39, 47, 71, 75 emotion and embodiment 131, 133, 136 perception of 137, 186 emotional empathy 28, 136–8, 185, 186 epistemological twist film. See twist

INDEX

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 5, 10, 14, 86, 206 Euclidean space 182, 183, 189–91, 193 Ferenz, Volker 86, 205 film phenomenology 3, 26 film’s body 30, 44, 52 and cinematic space 159, 160 differences to viewer’s body 46, 78, 94, 95, 98, 99 kinesthetic empathy with 68, 98, 99 muscular gestures and 129, 170 film’s embodied act of seeing 44, 75, 82 film world, film as world 123, 150, 161, 191 flotation tank 198 focalization 38, 87 focal shift 43, 99 forking-path film 2, 16, 17, 29, 41, 145 Garwood, Ian 22, 23 Ghislotti, Stefano 84, 87, 107 ghosts and (in)visibility/seeing 35, 45, 48–53, 60, 61, 76, 81 and materiality/immateriality 50, 54, 57, 74–7, 81 and mirror reflections 56, 57 sensing the presence of 66, 69, 70, 78 and sound 64, 81 habit 103, 104, 107–11, 165, 208–10 hallucinations 39, 57, 122, 123 handwriting in Memento 108, 115, 116 haptic epistemologies (see tactility/tactile, epistemologies) memories 118, 141 moment 21, 126, 134, 135, 138, 194 narrative 119, 142 openings 69, 187

237

recognition 99 sound 97, 100, 101 visuality 67, 91, 92, 151, 207 haptic images as erotic 138 in Fight Club 89, 96, 99, 134, 135, 138 in Memento 89, 91, 93, 104, 106, 117, 118, 201 hearing 63, 64, 79–81 as haptic 97, 101, 102 Heelan, Patrick 182, 183 horror films, bodily responses to 66, 210 hyperbolic space 182, 183, 189, 191–3 Ihde, Don 101, 102, 131, 184 “Ikea sequence” in Fight Club 125 immersion and architecture 154, 155 and cinematic ride 96, 98, 102 in cinematic space 150–3, 158, 160, 179, 188, 198 disruption of 92, 126, 161 inattentional blindness 55, 56 Inception 12, 14, 32, 79, 86, 145–7, 161–4, 173, 197 Inland Empire 173, 197, 198 intentionality 25, 56, 69, 75, 130, 179 invisibility. See visibility/invisibility invisible editing 171 “invisible gorilla” experiment. See inattentional blindness Jay, Martin 62, 63, 70, 72, 73, 76 Johnson, Mark 27, 55, 100, 122, 185, 186 Johnson, Steven 6, 14, 202 jump-cuts 79, 197 Jütte, Robert 70, 80 kinesthetic empathy 68, 69, 98, 99, 110 kinesthetic memory. See muscular, memory Kiss, Miklós 5, 7, 9, 14, 18, 28, 147, 148 Klecker, Cornelia 6, 7, 9, 13, 14

238

INDEX

Klinger, Barbara 204, 205, 209 Kracauer, Siegfried 24 Laass, Eva 86, 87, 122, 130 Leder, Drew 132–4 Leiendecker, Bernd 38, 79, 85 light 92, 101 and atmosphere 51, 73, 155, 185–7, 189 and knowledge 71–3 in The Others 71, 77 texture of 76, 77, 97, 100 and touch 77, 78 Lilly, John 198 lived-body 39, 46, 58, 79, 95, 193 long-take 41, 62, 68 Lynch, David 6, 21, 38, 173, 197 The Machinist 140 Manovich, Lev 2, 19 Marks, Laura U. culture and perception 26, 27, 92, 125, 208 haptic images, haptic visuality 89, 91–3, 138, 207 haptic narrative 119 haptic sound, haptic hearing 97, 101 optic images, optical visuality 91, 92 The Skin of the Film 24–7, 30 touch and knowledge 67, 79, 80, 89, 104 touch and memory 67, 95, 118 Massumi, Brian 165–9, 192 materiality film as a material presence 25, 30, 44–7, 69, 75, 77, 95 of ghosts 50, 51, 54, 75–8, 81 and mental images 14, 140 and the seen world 51, 52, 70, 74, 75, 77, 82 traces 67, 96, 115 Mayne, Judith 61 memory 204 in Memento 83, 103–5, 107–11, 115, 118, 120 and spectatorship 17, 42, 110, 111, 205, 206, 209, 210 mental images 86, 88, 142, 147, 191

mental pathologies in mind-game films 8, 12, 13, 32, 86, 88, 140 as productive 87, 103, 123, 139, 141, 201 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice body as a means of being-in-theworld 43, 54, 58 chiasm 48, 49 film 1, 199 flesh 76 habit 27, 108–10 hallucinations 123 phantom limb 58 spatiality 147, 158 Michelson, Annette 198 mind-game film 5, 8 brain in 3, 87, 96, 102, 141, 146, 147, 196 as cognitive challenge 14, 17, 18 common motifs 8 mind-bender 7, 11, 14 mind-fuck 7 mind-tricking 7, 13 other terms for 1 phenomenological themes in 4, 13, 14 vs. puzzle film 7–9 (see also Elsaesser, Thomas on mind-game films; narrative complexity; puzzle film; twist; unreliable narration) typical examples of 4, 9–13 modular narrative 5, 16, 20, 161 mood 185, 186, 205, 206, 209 mood-cues 186 motor intentionality 157, 158 Mullarkey, John 207, 209 muscular empathy 98 gesture 129, 170 memory 110, 209 muscular 68, 129, 130 music 100–2, 130, 137, 142 bodily impact of loud 100, 101 narrative complexity 2, 4–9 in contemporary culture 16, 19 innovation vs. tradition 16, 17

INDEX

and spectatorship 5, 16, 17, 139, 148, 204 in television 6 network narratives 5 nociception 134 non-linear storytelling mainstream success of 11, 145 in mind-game films 9, 11 and new media culture 19 and spectatorship 17, 21, 87, 175, 186 in TV 6 non-places 125 ocularcentrism 61–3, 70 ontological twist film. See twist opening sequences 89, 142 Open Your Eyes 146, 147, 196 orientation in cinematic space 148, 151, 159–61 proprioceptive 98, 165–8, 171 visual 74, 97, 106, 151, 157 pain and cinematic spectatorship 134 in Fight Club 131–3, 136, 138 ghosts’ experience of 54, 57, 58 Palahniuk, Chuck 124 Pallasmaa, Juhani architecture and the senses 153–6 atmosphere and ambience 155, 156, 185–7, 198 Panek, Elliot 7, 12–14, 174, 178 phantom body 54, 58–60, 66, 72, 78–80, 203 phantom limb 33, 57–9, 203 phenomenology 79 relevance for mind-game films 2, 4, 14, 21, 23, 33 and theories of embodied spectatorship 3, 23–8 philosophy, intersections with film studies 2 photography 90, 115 indexical nature of 95, 96, 116 in Memento 90–6, 108, 115, 116, 118 in The Sixth Sense 63

239

photosensitivity in The Others 36, 72, 73 Pisters, Patricia 102, 147, 202 Plato 73 plot-mapping 148 point-of-view shots 45, 47, 68, 137, 158 Polanyi, Michael 104, 111, 112, 114 Polaroid. See photography polytheistic definition 10 post-classical narration 2, 12, 16, 86 Powrie, Phil 21, 126 productive pathologies. See mental pathologies proprioception conflicts with other senses 98, 156, 169, 171, 172, 197 as a mode of orientation 165–7 spectatorship 45, 70, 98, 170 Pulp Fiction 11 pulse 100, 101 puzzle film 7, 8, 205. See also mindgame film, other terms for Hollywood blockbuster 32 impossible puzzle film 2, 5, 9, 18, 28, 29 psychological puzzle film 7, 13 spectatorship 2, 5, 14, 19, 148, 205 Rennebohm, Kate 173, 197 repeat viewing 81, 130, 139, 199, 204–10 reverse motion cinematography 94, 95 rhythm experience of time 178–80 music 100, 101 and viscera 68, 100, 101, 134, 135 rupture between body, mind, world 59, 169, 174, 196 moments of 44, 46, 78, 191, 196 Rutherford, Anne 28 Scarry, Elaine 134 Schmerheim, Philipp 146, 191, 197 seer-figures 52

240

INDEX

sense hierarchies 26, 78, 208 sensorium 49, 59, 80, 153, 208, 210 sensory deprivation chamber. See flotation tank Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine 129, 138 shot/reverse shot 41, 46, 61, 64, 176 sight. See vision Sinnerbrink, Robert 185 skepticism film 1, 2, 146 skin as boundary 102, 117 and disgust 97, 127, 128, 137 of the film 117, 120, 134, 186 as haptic interface 67, 116, 117, 120 and intimacy 184 of the spectator 24, 66, 106 touched by light 72, 77 Sobchack, Vivian camera movement 69 cinema and temporality 94, 95, 170, 175, 193 cinema as technology of perception and expression 31, 52, 80, 90, 95, 96 “echo-focus” 152, 156 the film experience 25, 26, 30, 44, 49, 52 film’s embodied vision 21, 44, 46, 52, 74, 75 focal shift 43 frame 152 operative/deliberate vision 207 phenomenological description 29 photography 95, 96, 116 reverse motion cinematography 94 shapes of being lost 149, 169, 170, 175, 180 spectatorship as multisensory 26, 30, 49, 59, 80, 99 viewed-view/viewing-view 25, 26, 44, 82, 152 Solnit, Rebecca 210, 211 sound haptic 97 in The Others 36, 40, 48 recording technologies in The Sixth Sense 64 as sonic 101–3, 132

space Euclidean 182, 183, 189–91, 193 film’s mediation of 74, 148–52, 156, 158–61, 173 geometrical representation of 70, 72, 152, 182, 189 hyperbolic 182, 183, 189, 191–3 immersion in cinematic space 153, 155, 158 movement through 45, 68, 126, 160, 165–7 offscreen 40, 45 spatialization of inner experience 147 spatiotemporal complexity 14, 144, 145, 162, 169, 196–8 spectatorship cognitive approaches to 17, 18, 27, 28 embodied theories of 1, 3, 22–8, 31 and narrative complexity 8, 14, 17–22, 41, 86 Spider 140, 141 Stadler, Harald 188 Stay 13, 38, 79, 197 Stendhal Syndrome 171 subjective realism 85–7 subliminal shots 119, 123, 134, 135, 209 Sutton, John 103, 105, 107, 111, 114, 116, 117, 120 “synaesthetic turn” 24 synesthesia 26, 59, 80, 192, 193 tacit knowledge 111–14, 140, 209 tactility/tactile alienation 121, 124, 125, 136 epistemologies 64, 67, 104–7, 115, 116 memory 44, 75, 111, 117, 118, 208 qualities of surfaces 75, 97, 124, 125, 127, 152 relationship between viewer and film 22, 26, 27, 67–9, 100, 173 signifiers 44, 66, 81, 107, 197 style of being 124, 137 unease 97, 99, 100, 127

INDEX

241

“Tarantino effect” 11 Taubin, Amy 120, 128, 134 temporality/time 5, 164, 175 and embodiment 95, 101, 175, 177–80 nested model of 177, 178 non-linear 4, 5, 20, 163, 175 subjective/objective 179, 180, 193 textural analysis 22–4, 27, 33, 78, 102, 139, 140, 199–201, 203 Thanouli, Eleftheria 12, 16, 85, 86 Thon, Jan-Noël 7, 31, 11, 13 time travel films 14, 146, 174, 195 Toles, George 206, 207 touch and knowledge. See tactility/ tactile, epistemologies tracking shots 69, 111, 160, 194 Trigg, Dylan 203, 204 Tuan, Yi-Fu 159 twist blindness 41, 55, 61 in complex films 5, 37, 38, 85, 89 epistemological/ontological 5, 8, 37, 38, 80, 85, 140 spectators’ responses 5 2001: A Space Odyssey 191, 198

Vanilla Sky 146, 196 Vasseleu, Cathryn 76, 77 VHS 63, 67 viscera cinematic 100, 101, 134, 135, 201 in Fight Club 126, 132, 133 and music 100, 101 visibility/invisibility as a relationship 46, 52, 53, 61, 62, 95 of a seeing subject 46, 48, 50, 56, 57, 76 vision Cartesian 54, 70, 71 deliberate/operative 207 embodied 21, 25, 46, 47, 49, 59, 75 foveal 41 peripheral 154, 155, 188 reciprocity of 48, 49 synesthetic and synoptic 26, 59 and truth 50, 61–3, 70, 71, 73 unreliable 37, 51, 60, 62, 63, 76 voice-over narration 18, 85, 86, 118, 122, 137

unreliable narration 6, 17, 18, 86, 142, 204 upside-down image 156, 161, 172 The Usual Suspects 5, 12, 14, 37, 86, 89, 142

Yacavone, Daniel 186 Yella 13, 38, 79

Weiss, Gail 29, 124 Willemsen, Steven 5, 7, 9, 14, 18, 28 Wilson, George 37, 38, 87, 130 150, 161, 177, 179,

Zerweck, Bruno 18, 86