Reframing Trauma in Contemporary Fiction Film 9781793651945, 9781793651952, 1793651949

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Ghosts and Ghouls
Victims and Villains
Lovers and Liars
Pariahs and Parasites
Clones and Clowns
Afterword
Filmography
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Reframing Trauma in Contemporary Fiction Film

Reframing Trauma in Contemporary Fiction Film Tarja Laine

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Laine, Tarja, author. Title: Reframing trauma in contemporary fiction film / Tarja Laine. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2023. | Includes filmography, bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “In this book, Tarja Laine provides insights into how traumatic cinema invites profound affective engagement with the pathology of memory that lies at the heart of trauma. The author reveals that traumatic cinema communicates the inability to process a traumatic event by means of its aesthetic specificity as a time-based medium”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023020202 (print) | LCCN 2023020203 (ebook) | ISBN 9781793651945 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781793651952 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Psychic trauma in motion pictures. | Memory in motion pictures. | Motion pictures—Aesthetics. | Motion pictures—History—21st century. | LCGFT: Film criticism. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.P7828 L35 2023  (print) | LCC PN1995.9.P7828  (ebook) | DDC 791.43/653—dc23/eng/20230605 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023020202 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023020203 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgments ix Chapter 1: Introduction



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Chapter 2: Ghosts and Ghouls: The Haunting Memory of Trauma



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Chapter 3: Victims and Villains: Traumatic Grief and the Roads of Payback 51 Chapter 4: Lovers and Liars: Performing Trauma



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Chapter 5: Pariahs and Parasites: The Dark Satire of Useless Passion 117 Chapter 6: Clones and Clowns: Traumatic Bodies in Dystopian Settings 153 Afterword

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Filmography

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Bibliography

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Index

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About the Author



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Figures

Figure 2.1. It Follows: The change of focus in the diner scene. Figure 2.2. It Follows: “It” emerges almost unnoticeably on the rear plane of the image. Figure 2.3. Thelma: The title character struggles to get out of the swimming pool through a sheet of ceramic tiles covering the water surface. Figure 2.4. Thelma: The traumatic image of the lifeless child under ice. Figure 3.1. The Skin I Live In: Identity crisis reflected in the mirror. Figure 3.2. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: A Frame within a frame. Figure 3.3. Incendies: Nawal within the burning ruins. Figure 3.4. Incendies: Face as landscape, landscape as face. Figure 4.1. Lust, Caution: Wong and Yee’s mirrored relation. Figure 4.2. Lust, Caution: Absence mirrored. Figure 4.3. The Handmaiden: Hideko being puppeteered by Kouzuki. Figure 4.4. The Handmaiden: Sook-hee and Hideko mirroring one another. Figure 5.1. The Lobster: The bleak setting of the singles’ hotel. Figure 5.2. The Lobster: Nature as the setting for authentic love. Figure 5.3. Parasite: Geun-sae greeting Mr. Park’s homecoming. Figure 5.4. Parasite: Immersed in sewage.

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Figures

Figure 6.1. Never Let Me Go: Kathy and Tommy’s exchange of looks reflected on the window. Figure 6.2. Never Let Me Go: Ruth “completes.” Figure 6.3. Joker: The Joker’s embrace. Figure 6.4. Joker: Camera separates, mirror unifies.

Acknowledgments

It is perhaps fitting that, given its theme and its topic, this book has not been an easy one to write, possibly due to the vicarious power of cinema to traumatize its spectator, as Ann Kaplan has suggested. And writing this book would have been an impossible task without the generous help from Charles France to whom I, as ever, owe a big debt of gratitude. I have found inspiration for the book from discussions with many students and colleagues over numerous years. In particular, the editorial board of the journal Film-Philosophy and their annual conference have been a crucial sounding board for my research. Thank you all—I have learned a great deal from considering your views. Sections of this book have been revised and expanded from previously published articles: an earlier version of The Skin I Live In appeared in Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media 7 (2014), and It Follows and Get Out were the subject of an article published in Film-Philosophy 23:3 (2019). I have discussed Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri in Crisis and Critique 7:2 (2020) and Incendies in Mind Reeling: Psychopathology on Film, edited by Homer B. Pettey (SUNY Press, 2020). An earlier version of Thelma was published in Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 12:3 (2022), and Lust, Caution and The Handmaiden were discussed in Asian Cinema 34:1 (2023). Many thanks to the editors and/or publishers of these articles, as well as to their anonymous referees. I am especially grateful to the anonymous peer reviewer for their careful and generous attention to the penultimate draft of this book. I would also like to thank the entire production team at Lexington Books, and especially Deja Ryland for all the help with the final stages in the publication of this book. Finally, my utmost gratitude goes to my editor Jessie Tepper for all her support and guidance throughout the writing process, as well as for welcoming the book to their series in the first place.

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Introduction

A woman only in underwear, tied up in a wheelchair in a nightly, abandoned and dilapidated car park, being approached by a shape-shifting, abject ghoul. A man floating helplessly in a billowing dark void, which symbolizes the black hole of his own psychic netherworld. A woman surfacing from a swimming pool to find a sheet of ceramic tiles covering the water surface, blocking her way out. An image showing the reflection of a man in a mirror, with his head “cut off” by its edges, an absent reminder of his forced mutilation. Three billboards being ravenously consumed by fire in the night, ignited to erase the memory of a heinous murder. A collapsed figure sitting next to a bus, going up in flames with the rest of its passengers, in the middle of a scorched, rocky landscape. A wildly spinning colored pinwheel on the handlebars of a rickshaw, taking its passenger toward the execution of her death sentence pronounced by her lover. A woman suspended in mid-air while fastened to a life-size wooden puppet as her sadomasochistic “sex partner,” illustrating her own situation as a puppet in the hands of a cruel puppeteer. A smart-dressed man escaping the woods on foot, escorting a smart-dressed woman who has been deliberately blinded. A family trying to rescue their modest belongings while immersed to their necks in filthy sewage water flooding their home. A surgeon lifting a vital organ out of the body of a young patient, who immediately flatlines. And a clown-for-hire pulling the corners of his mouth up into a “happy” grimace, while a makeup-stained tear runs down his cheek. These film scenes exemplify the notion of “traumatic images” which serve to haunt the spectator, matching the way in which the characters featured in them are haunted by their own painful memories of distressing events. These are images that, in Allen Meek’s definition, are “associated with a traumatic experience without directly showing anything physically or psychologically traumatic [. . .] participating in a structure analogous to that of traumatic memory” (Meek 2014, 32). Thus, when the main protagonist Jay in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014) is haunted by an atrocious presence that constantly seems to emerge either from the depths of the image or 1

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from outside its frame, the cinematic image itself would seem to duplicate the structure of trauma, in which individuals experience an invisible threat from the hidden layers of their psyche. Yet in addition to the film image as an “optical unconscious” (Walter Benjamin), the structure of trauma can be conveyed through film sound communicating “the unapproachable essence of the traumatic event, [being] more commensurate to the event that the visual image could ever be” (Morag 2008, 122)‌‌‌. Traumatic memories that remain hidden and inaccessible to the individual’s reflective, optical consciousness can nevertheless be “remembered” by the hearing ear. This is why Missy is able to hypnotize Chris in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) by the mesmerizing sound of a steadily stirred cup of tea. This taps into the trauma that he feels somatically, but is not accessible through semantic reflection. In this scene, the sound of the spoon scraping in the teacup is extremely pronounced, with an almost-hypnotizing effect for the spectator too. The sound of the stirring becomes layered with an internal sound of rain, which signifies Chris’ memory of the traumatic event, so that the whole soundscape of the scene positions us within his reminiscence, within his emotion, from the inside of his mind. Similarly, in Joachim Trier’s Thelma (2017), the soundscape in which nondiegetic, “industrial” sound effects are recurrently layered with diegetic caws of crows, plunges us acoustically in the protagonist’s psychological confusion from where her trauma originates and vice versa. However, unlike what the examples above might suggest, the experience of engagement with traumatic memory is not necessarily dependent on our narrative identification with a film character. As Jill Bennett argues, a fictional work is not necessarily about some explicit personal or collective trauma, but trauma can nevertheless be present “in a certain affective dynamic internal to the work” (Bennett 2005, 1). Davina Quinlivan talks about the “fabric of the image” and “its material properties and sensuous attributes” (Quinlivan 2015, 2) in which trauma can be embedded, beyond character psychology. We witness this sensual materiality literally in Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito, 2011), which frequently closes in on female hands cutting nude-toned fabric, thus evoking an association of self-mutilation, even before the spectator has found out what is the origin of the protagonist’s trauma. In psychiatry, self-mutilation is considered a coping mechanism for overwhelming traumatic affects and feelings of depersonalization, which reaffirms the sense of identity as skin is the most fundamental boundary of self (Himber 1994, Suyemoto and Macdonald 1995). At the same time, these symbolic self-mutilating practices in Almodóvar’s film function as a source of creativity, through which characters can abandon the harmful, outer reality forced upon them, and give expression to their traumatic inner self. Here it is the affective quality of the “second skin” that communicates traumatic imprisonment within one’s own body, as well as its cathartic shedding.

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Much of the scholarship on trauma deals with the notions of (post) memory (Marianne Hirsch), testimony, and witnessing of lived reality as an “unclaimed experience” (Cathy Caruth), which originated in the context of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies. This book is less concerned with the primary experience of historical events that generate trauma, but all the more with the characteristics and experience of traumatic memory within an aesthetic structure. Obviously, my approach could be considered problematic from the perspective of historical Trauma Studies, insofar as it may enervate the classical definition of trauma, rendering trauma a mere convenient conceptual tool of analysis. Indeed, according to Thomas Elsaesser, trauma “could become too handy a catch-all for resolving the aporias or lacunaes of previous theoretical configurations in the field of film and television studies” (Elsaesser 2001, 201). However, as Ann Kaplan points out, there are traumatic events that differ in kind and degree from the trauma suffered by genocide victims and camp survivors. To define these events as non-traumatic would not seem to be justified either (Kaplan 2005, 1). In this context, Dominick LaCapra distinguishes between historical trauma and structural trauma. Historical trauma is related to particular events which not everyone is a victim of, while structural trauma originates much more generally from one’s “desire for redemption and totality” (LaCapra 1999, 722) which we are all subject to. Not all trauma is traumatic in a violent, life-threatening sense, but it continuously weighs upon the general population in response to the experience of social suffering, for instance, due to one’s religion, ethnicity, gender, or class (Alexander 2012, 1), and it would seem that individuals do not necessarily have to undergo an extremely painful experience, before they can understand what trauma is. As Deborah ‌‌‌Bradley writes: Trauma touches all of us in some way or another, either through direct individual experiences, through communal experiences such as natural or manmade disasters, through war, through racism, sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, ableism, poverty, childhood abuse, or oppressions based on religion and language. Few people living in today’s world are completely insulated from these conditions or their traumatic effects. (Bradley 2020, 6)

My motivation for writing this book is born out of the observation that the structure of trauma is widely embedded in much of contemporary fiction film, and Reframing Trauma is an attempt to understand why this should be so. It is my conviction that even the films of which the intention is not to share the unshareable, lived, historical reality of traumatic events, are valuable objects of analysis in terms of trauma. In addition to enabling alternative modes of understanding the affective relationship between the film and the spectator, the concept of trauma can also alert us to philosophical insights

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and ethical dilemmas conveyed in such not historically, but nevertheless trauma-oriented cinema. TRAUMA AS A FAILED EXPERIENCE From a clinical perspective, trauma is understood as a mental and physical disorder, which is triggered when an individual either experiences or witnesses a terrifying event. Ernst van Alphen (1999), Nouri Gana (2013), and others have described trauma as a “failed experience.” This occurs when the mind is unable to create a memorizable, reflective account of such an event, while that part of the brain which is responsible for the contextualization of emotions is rendered inactive. As a result, a collapse of experience ensues, manifesting itself in uncontrollable and distressing recurring memories, flashbacks, and nightmares of the traumatic event (Gana 2013, 81). As the traumatic event is not emotionally contextualized at the time of its happening, the event is grasped, in the words of Cathy Caruth, “only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it” (Caruth 1995, 4–5). Such repeated possession of trauma experienced by an individual is an important element in Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), where landscape functions as emotion metaphor for the traumatic event. Here, the exterior, physical landscape conveys the significance of the interior, affective landscape, reflecting the trauma of loss without resolution. It is the central position of the billboards that functions as a visible manifestation of the painful event that keeps the main character possessed in her traumatic grief (on emotion metaphors in cinema, see Bartsch 2010; on visual metaphors communicating mental distress in [animated] film, see Forceville and Paling 2021). Thus trauma is an overwhelming, extreme and catastrophic affective experience that resists being fully remembered and grasped, so that it becomes constitutive of the person’s sense of self (Herman 1992, 33). This emphasis on trauma as a failed experience or affective failure led in many theoretical accounts to a premise that trauma concerns the body and not the mind, and that the body is the site of traumatic (non) meaning: “[Instead] of being processed in symbolic/linguistic forms as most memories are, the traumatic event tends to be organized on a sensorimotor or iconic level—as horrific images, visceral sensations, or fight/flight reactions. ‘The body keeps the score,’ as expressed in the title of a famous paper [by Bessel van der Kolk]” (Bonomi 2004, 46). Van der Kolk had explained in this paper that trauma is an affective failure, because the effects of the painful experience are stored in somatic memory instead of semantic memory. Semantic memory is a dimension of memory that processes an emotional event by means of

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distortion. This locates the event chronologically and positionally in the past, and ensures that it is differentiated from current reality, the present. Somatic memory resides in the sensorimotor, bodily sensations that are related to the experienced emotional event. Since extremely painful emotional events resist processing by semantic memory, they are persistently stored as visceral sensations and visual images, such as nightmares and flashbacks, in the somatic memory (Van der Kolk 1994, 58). Such a visual image is to be found in Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies (2010). In this film the ruins signify events in the past that are mixed up with the present. The ruins function as a traumatic memory haunting the individual by means of “negative spatiality” (Trigg 2009, 95). The negative spatiality of the ruins disturbs the present while embodying a continuous past through the eternal return of the traumatic events. This prompts affective, visceral sensations in a restrained, traumatized body, laboring simultaneously at crises of identity, spirit, and agency. It also draws a parallel between the unknowability and unspeakability of trauma. Trauma is related to time and temporality insofar as it blocks the individual’s ability to distinguish affectively between the past and the present. So therefore trauma becomes an “arrested process,” as LaCapra puts it. Trauma locks the traumatized individuals into a compulsive repetition of the painful event as if they were possessed by the past. The temporality of trauma as an arrested process is connected to the Freudian concept of melancholia as unsuccessful mourning, which otherwise would have enabled one “to distinguish between past and present and to recognize something as happened to one (or one’s people) back then, that is related to, but not identical with, here and now” (LaCapra 1999, 713). Trauma thus disrupts our experience of time and temporality, as its structure is characterized by “belatedness” (Caruth 1996) or “afterwardsness” (Eaglestone 2013). This is why trauma is endured cyclically instead of in chronological order. In this context, Jenny Edkins talks about two notions of time. The first is linear time, the time of chronos that turns us into distant observers of our past, which then becomes self-reflectively representable. The second is trauma time, the time of aios that exists beyond the representable and “in which the past is dislocated into the present and the present is extended into the past [rendering] linear time inoperative” (Edkins 2013, 134). Traumatic experiences consist of out-of-joint feeling, of being cut off from the flow of time resulting from an act of dissociation by which people distance themselves from pain. Such feeling is strongly conveyed in the complex temporal structure of Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden (2016). This film visualizes the different layers of time by disrupting the present with remnants of the past not only through flashbacks, but also by its setting and props, which simultaneously testify of and expose past traumas. The Handmaiden contains numerous motifs that function as reminders of traumatic memories

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persisting without end. These need to be destroyed, so that they can be assimilated into narrative and transformed into representation. This question of whether or not trauma can be represented is a complex one, insofar as trauma simultaneously resists and demands representation (Gana 2013, 83). The reason for this is the dissociation of affect and representation that is experienced in trauma. This renders the traumatized individuals unable to heal, while continuously experiencing the very emotion they cannot express in the form of an introspective representation. According to Bonani, when an individual is struck by trauma, the unifying function between emotion and representation is broken: “The result is the falling to pieces of that which was previously linked and blended together” (Bonomi 2004‌‌‌, 48). Due to this representational void in experiencing trauma, some trauma scholars such as Daniel Sher define the phenomenon in terms of mood, or a “mood disorder.” According to him this is an underlying and longitudinal affective state which comes into being precisely because trauma resists representation (Sher 2005). Mood is a salient element in Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007), in which we apprehend the affectively relevant “mood-cues” (Sinnerbrink 2012) as charged with trauma. In this film it is especially the color design that creates a haunting mood of regret, conveying the characters’ trauma, for which here is no resolution available. Through this mood of regret, Lee’s film seeks to express the unrepresentable, the unspeakable pathos of trauma and the disintegration of the self, from which the characters suffer because of their traumatic loss. Mood as an aesthetic strategy to convey the sense of trauma illustrates Bennett’s insight that trauma-related works of art are “best understood as transactive rather than communicative.” That they affect us, but do not necessarily communicate the “secret” or the “truth” of traumatic experience (Bennett 2005, 7). As the “transaction of trauma” is realized by means of affective intensities, rather than by conventional forms of narrative, many trauma scholars focus on fragmented forms of anti-narrative and how these are similar to the traumatic experience itself. According to Caruth, “an experience that exceeds the possibility of narrative knowledge [. . .] will best be represented by a failure of narrative” (Caruth 1996, 50). Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub write that narratives that make us encounter strangeness are connected to trauma, since trauma has at its core a sense of oddness and peculiarity (Felman and Laub 1992, 7). One finds such examples of oddness and peculiarity in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster (2015), where the narrative is characterized by paradoxicalities, bearing the imprint of trauma. For trauma is paradoxical in its logic, insofar as it is a self-feeding loop in which the traumatic event returns to haunt the traumatized individual precisely because that very event “is itself constituted [. . .] by its lack of integration into consciousness” (Caruth 1995, 152). The Lobster is a film that does not invite emotional engagement with or sympathy

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for its characters, which might otherwise result in sentimental identification with their trauma. Instead, the film creates an affective distance which enables us to observe the narrative paradox by which the structure of trauma is made manifest. This paradox consists of an irresolvable conflict between determinism and indeterminism, which keeps the characters imprisoned in a deadlock of choiceless choices, thus establishing trauma as the affective core of the film. The narrative premise of the film contains a situation in which people use free will to deny themselves agency and the possibility of transformation. This situation is related to the paradox of trauma, as it entails their trauma increasing the more they resist remembering painful events, by repeatedly acting them out instead (Bradley 2020, 8). In the films mentioned above as examples of traumatic cinema, the sense of trauma is embodied. This embodiment does not only concern the traumatized protagonist, but it has ramifications as to how the spectator experiences the traumatic affect. As argued, this is less a matter of identification with the plight of a character, than to be more directly engaged with the cinematic aesthetics. Such engagement is not limited to the level of narrative understanding, but it is effected with our entire lived body, informed by all our senses. For instance, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019) uses an enthralling synaesthetic strategy of immersion to engage even the most elusive of our senses in the cinematic experience: the sense of smell. The film overwhelms us by an odor gamut that ranges from the uplifting scent of freshly cut greenery, through the tenacious smell of bodily secretions, to putrid stench of filthy sewage and vermin extermination fumes. In this film, it is “scent imagination” (Vivian Sobchack) that enables us to feel intimately the protagonists’ traumatic bodily entrapment within the negative effects of neoliberal capitalism. However, this emphasis on the body in the scholarship on trauma is only part of the story. Where both the affect and the memory of trauma reside in the individual’s somatic system, trauma, it is obviously also increasing the risk of severe mental disorder. According to John Read et al., while clinical research has focused on the link between trauma and non-psychotic conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, the relationship between trauma and psychotic disorders, such as anxiety and schizophrenia, have largely been ignored (Read et al. 2005, 331). Precisely this relationship is the central theme and narrative drive in Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019). Here we perceive from within the mental subjectivity of the main protagonist’s descending into madness, due to his traumatic past as a childhood abuse victim, which was left untreated. Positioned inside his head we witness his attempts to escape his trauma by creating alternative, imaginary situations, while his laughter disorder plunges him deeper into the self-feeding, traumatic loop. Finally, trauma is related to ethics, as there is the moral obligation to engage in witnessing traumatic experiences and to share them. According to

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Kaplan, such ethical witnessing takes place “when a text aims to move the viewer emotionally but without sensationalizing or overwhelming her with feeling that makes understanding impossible” (Kaplan 2005, 22–23). This does not only involve compassion, but also understanding of the structure of injustice which is at the root of many traumatic events. According to Robert Eaglestone, the analysis of trauma must involve examining the way in which traumatic events violate the ethical principles and virtues by which we live, in order to “assist in the rethinking of how we tell and think about ourselves” (Eaglestone 2013, 19). In Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go (2010), the narrative is driven by a conflict between moral denial and the reality of loss. This takes place against the ethical background of a dystopian society, built on denial of human subjectivity and political personhood. Thus the film becomes a traumatic event that palpably engages the spectators affectively, addressing their moral sensitivity. Structurally, the film contains an inevitable momentum toward traumatic loss, accompanied by false hope that ineffectively resists such loss. In Never Let Me Go, trauma is simultaneously held at bay and preserved in a way that invites ethical reflection on the status of nonhuman bodies in the context of posthumanism. THE CONCEPT OF TRAUMA IN FILM STUDIES There seems to be an ongoing interest in the notion of trauma within Film Studies, possibly in connection with the increase in affective as well as ethical approaches we have witnessed over the past few decades. An important stimulus for the current fascination with the trauma debate was a special issue of Film and Television Studies journal Screen, edited by Susannah Radstone, which was published in 2001. In this issue, Radstone raised the possibility that trauma might have become a “popular cultural script” (Radstone 2001, 189) and a symptom of another academic deadlock. By which was meant the need to revise theories of film spectatorship in order to rethink the relationship between memory, temporality, and subjectivity. One scholar contributing to this issue exploring the intersections of trauma and cinema was Ann Kaplan. In her later monograph Trauma Culture (2005) she focused on trauma as a “disturbing remains” of history, which has an impact on both the individual and entire cultures or nations, as her argument moved between the formation of the traumatized subject and collective trauma. An important part of her discourse is the need to share traumatic impact through what she calls the “aesthetics of trauma.” In this notion the inner experience can be embodied and re-enacted in cinema, due to the “visuality common to traumatic symptoms (flashbacks, hallucinations, dreams) and the ways in which visual media like cinema become the mechanisms through which

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a culture can unconsciously address its traumatic hauntings” (Kaplan 2005, 69). Through the aesthetics of trauma, cinema would be able to translate the remains of disturbing personal and political events for the spectator. And it would also develop understanding among people by transferring “difference into something other than trauma” (Kaplan 2005, 23), such as healing. A more recent work is Davina Quinlivan’s Filming the Body in Crisis (2015), in which she uses the concept of trauma as a tool to investigate acts of healing, hopefulness, and reconciliation in cinema. She argues that trauma holds the potential to orient the spectator toward catharsis, based on a sense of renewal of the self. To negotiate trauma is thus understood as a restorative dimension of cinema spectatorship: “[Film] encourages the mediation of trauma beyond its representational qualities, and constitutes a kind of ‘healing body’ through the very texture of its material attributes and multisensory images” (Quinlivan 2015, 3). The transformative potential of trauma in cinema is also central in Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla’s Aesthetics, Ethics, and Trauma in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (2017). In his view the notion of “trace” (Jacques Derrida) points to unsymbolizable traumatic events that are simultaneously present and absent. He argues that in Almodóvar’s aesthetic practice we encounter (past) traces of (political) trauma that are actualized in somatic memory, but from which we can recuperate, “and so overcome the toxic effects inscribed in the body’s memory, without submitting to a reductive teleology of resolution or cure” (Gutiérrez-Albilla 2017, 4). In Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma (2019), Amit Pinchevski approaches the relation between trauma and media from a more general perspective as a question of mediation rather than of representation of aesthetics. Rather than analyzing how trauma is embodied in cinema or media, Pinchevski shifts the focus to trauma that is made manifest through mediation, through non-symbolic channels and forms provided by technological media. This would correspond to the way in which traumatic memories appear in the mind. According to Pinchevski, mediation is the key concept in this context insofar as trauma is a form of “failed mediation.” Trauma is “what happens when the medium between interior [mind] and exterior [world] does not hold. If mediation is taken to be the mental processes whose task is to mediate between the outer and the inner, then trauma is the result of failed mediation” (Pinchevski 2019, 4–5). This means that trauma is more than just representational content; it is the media technological operation itself that explicates the traumatic intersection between inside and outside, shareability and unshareability, personal and collective. For Pinchevski, by bearing “witness to the human failure to bear witness” (4), media renders the traumatic manifest by means of mediatized transmissions. While for Pinchevski trauma is a question of failed mediation, Thomas Elsaesser defines it as a “failed tragedy.” This finds its expression especially

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in the genre of melodrama, which is characterized by the most extreme narrative contrasts pitched into discordance between external action and inner conflict, while there are no ways of arriving at resolution (Elsaesser 2016, 37). Melodrama opens itself to trauma since the emotional urgency it contains has to do with the protagonists’ failure to function in a way that could shape events. Instead these events act upon them in the tragic universe they are confronted with. This notion of “failed tragedy” would be an apt concept to apply to most of the films discussed in Reframing Trauma regardless of their genre, but this is especially valid for my analysis of Never Let Me Go and Joker, discussed in chapter six. Similarly to Elsaesser, Kaplan recognizes an association between melodrama and trauma. For her this is located in the private sphere of the family, where painful memories are hidden while structured by patriarchal power relations in the public (Kaplan 2001, 202). But melodrama would not only be embodying trauma through its formal aspects, but also by means of belatedness, as this likewise is the temporal structure of trauma. Linda Williams has defined the characteristics of melodrama in these terms, for example, when she writes that in melodramatic fantasies there is the search for absolute love that is both futile and “always tinged with the melancholy of loss. Origins are already lost, the encounters always take place too late, on death beds or over coffins” (Williams 1991, 11). These and similar approaches have inspired me in my exploration of the structure of trauma in contemporary fiction film, and how these structures engage the spectator affectively. My methodology involves first and foremost close analysis of the aesthetic organization of the case films. This develops into interpretation of the affective insight that results from such analysis. It is only afterward that I move into a discussion of the larger film-philosophical themes, which shed light on the relationship between such diverse aspects as trauma, memory, loss, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class, among other things. Instead of “applying” a specifically convenient theoretical framework to a given film, the concepts that are central in my discussion have emerged organically from my own experience of the film as an inspirational object for theoretical reflection. Admittedly, the conceptual approach presented in Reframing Trauma is far from “coherent” and is most appropriately described as eclectic. Apart from trauma theory, it embraces multiple other approaches, including psychoanalysis, critical theory, phenomenology, affect theory, social science, gender theory, and existentialism. While from a more orthodox perspective my approach might be considered indecisive and problematic, it is nevertheless my conviction that the complexity of trauma cannot not be explained within one paradigm only, and that in this case my “eclecticism” might lead to a more enriched understanding of “traumatic cinema.” What this book hopes to contribute to the already existing scholarship on trauma within Film Studies is not a “new” theory of what trauma “is,”

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but insight into the different ways in which cinema can get us emotionally involved with the pathology of memory which lies at the heart of trauma. The aim of the book is thus twofold: on the one hand it has to do with the ability of cinema to shape itself according to the details of traumatic structures, on the other hand it is concerned with how these traumatic structures are affectively felt and experienced by the spectator. Throughout the book I shall demonstrate how trauma can function as an aesthetic emotion in cinema, conveyed and expressed beyond engagement with a character. I categorize as “aesthetic emotions” the formal and stylistic structures in the work of art which determine its “global or organizing affect, its general disposition or orientation towards its audience and the world,” as Sianne Ngai defines this (Ngai 2005, 28). Such aesthetic emotions do not have a distinct origin in either the spectators’ experience, or in the representation of feelings within the cinematic world, but they emerge in their conjunction. As Ngai puts it, aesthetic emotion “is never entirely reducible to a reader’s emotional response to a text or reducible to the text’s internal representations of feelings. [Rather, it] is the dialectic of objective and subjective feeling that our aesthetic encounters inevitably produce” (Ngai 2005, 29–30). Similarly, Jenefer Robinson discusses aesthetic emotions in terms of formal qualities of artworks which are expressive of emotion in a way that enable the audience to attune to the expressed emotion appropriately, while adding that an appropriate attunement is not necessarily a mirroring one (Robinson 2007, 389). Throughout this book I shall demonstrate that our “emotional attunement” to traumatic cinema is not merely based on identification with the film character expressing emotion, but on feelingly responding to the film itself, as it embodies emotion in its stylistic and formal techniques. These include, for example, tension between onscreen and offscreen space, flashback structures, settings in inhospitable landscapes and prison-like interiors, and bleak color palettes, among other things. Related to the idea of emotional responsiveness to the film itself is my postulation that it is a relatively straightforward matter for the spectator to engage with traumatic structures, since we are all vulnerable to trauma. However, the degree of our vulnerability may vary due to the effect of personal temperament, psychological disposition, and emotional (im)maturity, among other things (Young 2007, 34). Insofar as we all carry traumatic structures within ourselves, we are able to resonate with the aesthetics of trauma organically from within, even when, for example, we are not specifically suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. According to Miriam Taylor and Vienna Duff, “we are all traumatized to a greater or lesser extent [. . .] low-level trauma buzzes around us constantly [and] our reality [is] a chronic state of emergency” (Taylor and Duff 2018, 18). Lenore Terr et al. talk about “distant traumatic effects” which occur when people are indirectly exposed

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to traumatic events through a medium, such as television (Terr et al. 1999, 1536). For Allan Young, traumatic images affect us because their visual quality is related to the “inner logic” of trauma, which is “intrinsic to notions such as flashback, flashbulb memory, indelibility, and death imprint” (Young 2007, 33). The concept of trauma is not only understood as the vulnerability of an individual to pervasive traumatic effects through media, but also to injurious events of everyday life and discriminatory social structures. These “have the power to violate the boundaries of the self and to shatter core conceptions about one’s place in the world” (Brunner 2007, 99). This ubiquity of trauma means that not only do we recognize the inner logic of trauma in a mental wound, but also in the traumatizing structure of its external cause. As such the material force of social exclusion is felt as a traumatic wound organically from the inside. For instance, in Never Let Me Go, the aesthetics of confinement expressing the clones’ existence in the marginal fringes of society, give way to a cinematic experience in which the spectators too are caught in the trauma of the clones’ situation, which defines their future lack of identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways. Furthermore, this means that trauma does not concern individual psychology only, but that it can penetrate social life, damaging “the tissues of community [. . .] in much the same way as the tissues of mind and body” (Erikson 1994, 228). According to José Brunner, trauma differs from other mental disorders insofar as it is caused by social and moral disorder situated in external reality. Therefore, it refers “not only to the mind’s invisible inner life, [but it also points] outward, involving real events in the logic of their causality” (Brunner 2007, 99). According to Jeffrey Alexander, trauma is widely experienced and/or intuitively understood by many, not because it is a phenomenon that exists naturally, but because it is socially constructed. This form of trauma develops gradually and therefore it does not have the quality of “suddenness” customarily associated with traumatic events. Furthermore, it is not even an event that creates this collective trauma, but it emerges by means of “a socially mediated attribution” through which the members of a collectivity can “symbolically participate in the experience of the originating trauma” (Alexander 2012, 13, 19). In order to demonstrate how social and political institutions mediate collective traumas, Brunner identifies three dichotomies between discourses. These are: (1) suspicion and compassion, (2) silence and solidarity, and (3) victimhood and healing (Brunner 2007, 99). Another dichotomy one might add here is between care and indifference, which structures the cinematic world of both Never Let Me Go and Joker, and which is exactly what renders these two films social dystopias. For instance, in Joker, we witness Arthur Fleck as subjected to medical and political indifference, which he experiences as a repetition of the event which had traumatized him in the first

Introduction

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place. He lives in a torn social fabric where care has become nonexistent, thus reinforcing the disorder of which he is already suffering. Thus, there is a symbiotic relationship between individual and collective trauma, in which the socially mediated attribution of trauma becomes a self-feeding loop. This torn social fabric is found in the narrative theme of the rift between rich and poor, between politicians and citizens, between powerful and powerless. But this rift in the collective tissue is also visible in the aesthetic structure of Joker which is expressive of pain, decay, and dilapidation throughout. However, Joker also features what Alexander defines as a carrier group of trauma in the form of the clown-masked rioters, representing the denigrated and marginalized groups in a fragmented and polarized social order (Alexander 2012, 16). Although inspired by Arthur as the Joker, these rioters rather than Arthur himself execute performative actions to project trauma claims on behalf of the members of the emerging collectivity against the elite. As Austin Sarat, Nadav Davidovic, and Michal Alberstein argue, trauma can “reveal something about our construction of reality, and transferring [. . .] personal experiences [of trauma] to collective understanding can help us to develop new perspectives on contemporary phenomena” (Sarat, Davidovic, and Alberstein 2007, 6). Similarly, Reframing Trauma hopes to show that cinema can reveal something about what trauma is or what trauma does. Potentially this will enable gaining a new perspective on the multiple ways films both express emotion and are expressive of emotion, even when that emotion is “inexpressible.” Throughout the book I propose that traumatic cinema invites remarkably profound affective engagement on the part of the spectator, thereby offering more general insights into cinematic experience (see also Kaplan 2001). What my close reading of the films aims to demonstrate is that there are multifarious ways in which the spectator can relate to trauma affectively. In doing so spectators act as embodied subjects through their reflective consciousness, but in both ways it leaves traces. As Kaplan argues, cinema may even “vicariously” traumatize the spectator (Kaplan 2005, 22), which is why traumatic cinema can be an important source of ethical knowledge both within and beyond the cinematic world. TRAUMA AND ORGANIZATION OF THIS BOOK Reframing Trauma has been intentionally written so that the chapters function independently, and can be read in any order even though the given order deliberatively moves from haunting memory through pathological grief to deadlocks of identity. The discussed films have been grouped together based on the “type” of trauma expressed in them, often through shared aesthetic features such as flashbacks conveying traumatic guilt, and frozen time,

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expressing traumatic grief. Rather than developing a single argument through the different chapters, there is a connecting theme between them, which can be found in the methodology. This attempts to allow for philosophical reflection to emerge from experiential openness to the aesthetics of specific films. My guiding principle is that, rather than on the dynamics of character identification, our emotional response is based on resonance with the affective structures of cinema, which are textural, kinetic, and visceral in nature, as Jennifer Barker has suggested (Barker 2009). Our sense of experience is anchored in affective structures, and trauma emerges when these structures are shattered, which is an experience that can also take place in cinema, as the following chapters hope to demonstrate. Reframing Trauma is made up of five chapters, all of which analyze trauma as embodied in the aesthetic organization of the films under discussion. Each film deals with a traumatic crisis of sorts—personal or collective, specific or ambiguous—in a way that in my view engages the spectator directly with the structure of trauma. Throughout the book the notion of cinematic mood takes an important place in my analysis of the aesthetics of trauma. Mood is what originates from a film’s aesthetic salience, the way in which the formal and stylistic elements of the film flow together to form a cohesive whole, addressing and engaging the spectator in different ways within its cinematic world. In Sianne Ngai’s definition, mood is the “feeling tone” or the “affective value” in an artwork, “its global or organizing affect, its general disposition or orientation towards its audience and the world” (Ngai 2005, 28). For Robert Sinnerbrink, cinematic mood is the “stimmung” by which the fictional world “is expressed or disclosed via a shared affective attunement orienting the spectator within that world” (Sinnerbrink 2012, 148). In my close readings too, mood is a relevant aesthetic strategy. It engages the spectators with a fictional world consisting of affective relations that embody trauma, which they feel in and through the cinematic experience. Reframing Trauma aims at gaining insight into how trauma helps us to understand our primal fears and desires. Such as what is important for our sense of self, and for the basic way in which we relate to others, also on an ethical level. Even though this book does not explicitly deal with genre, most films grouped together in each chapter share generic similarities nevertheless. In chapter two entitled “Ghosts and Ghouls: The Haunting Memory of Trauma,” I discuss the affective orientation of three horror films: It Follows, Get Out, and Thelma. All three films embody the arrested process of trauma, which is congruous with the persistent and intrusive, haunting quality of traumatic memory. There is the returning presence of “It” in It Follows, in the form of ever-changing appearances. But the cinematography also expresses “It” as the haunting presence of traumatic horror lurking beyond the edge of the frame. Similarly, in Get Out the signs of hidden menace are often

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offscreen, emerging from outside the frame sometimes abruptly, sometimes gradually, but always with the ghastly sensation of persistent dread. And in Thelma the unspeakable threat finds expression in supernatural events and the intense, epileptic seizures the title character suffers from. In all three films horror emerges from traumatic structure, in which past trauma haunts the protagonists in the form of hallucinations, flashbacks, nightmares, and other visual repetitions. But all films also manifest the creation of cinematic mood through an overarching aesthetic strategy that enables us to feel the effects of trauma beyond character engagement. Chapter three on “Victims and Villains: Traumatic Grief and the Roads of Payback” analyses three thrillers—The Skin I Live In, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and Incendies—as examples of films conveying traumatic pain brought about by the loss of a loved one, and even the loss of self. The films are therefore best characterized as grief-stricken in their affective orientation, or even pathological insofar as their grief involves an irrational attempt to “restore” a lost person. In all three films the paradoxes of traumatic grief are embedded in their aesthetic organization, providing them with an affective quality that directly involves the spectator. In all three films the traumatized protagonists labor under the illusion that revenge would somehow restore their trauma caused by forced mutilation/depersonalization (The Skin I Live In), the violent death of one’s daughter (Three Billboards), or the disappearance of one’s son in the throes of war (Incendies). They all involve the type of wish for revenge which Martha Nussbaum calls the road of payback, consisting of an (irrational) belief that the wrongdoer’s suffering would bring back the (dead) victim of injury (Nussbaum 2016, 5). As expected, the road of payback turns out a failed strategy to cope with the traumatic event, since it does not remove or constructively address the protagonists’ trauma. Yet in Incendies a closure of sorts is nevertheless achieved, as this film also contains a search for acknowledgment insisting on truth, but even this does not completely wipe away the trauma. Chapter four, entitled “Lovers and Liars: Performing Trauma,” presents an analysis of Lust, Caution and The Handmaiden as melodramas with emphasis on exaggerated emotion foregrounded in trauma. This exposes hierarchy between ethnicities, genders, and social groups. As the thematic core in both films, this trauma is rooted in colonial history and it draws our attention to the politically charged predicament of suspended agency. However, my reading puts less emphasis on the representation of national trauma than on matters of affective intensity, as experienced and understood organically from the cinematic experience. In this chapter I argue that Lust, Caution gives aesthetic expression to “love’s paradoxes” (Niklas Luhmann). It draws our attention to performance as a failed attempt to distinguish between the embodied self that experiences emotion, and the impersonated self that performs emotion.

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This failure becomes a source of trauma. In The Handmaiden trauma is borne out by abject masculinity as a constraint of female sexual desire. Here masquerade functions as an aesthetic-affective strategy for escape from trauma and for reclaiming self-determined agency. While Lust, Caution lacks such prospect, I hope to show that the ending of The Handmaiden suggests the possibility of overcoming trauma through a relationship with an “addressable other” (Dori Laub), who can annihilate the traumatic story. Chapter five, “Pariahs and Parasites: The Dark Satire of Useless Passion,” discusses The Lobster and Parasite as based on the impossible conflict between our desire to be fully self-sufficient and our basic fear of freedom. In both films, dark satire is a coping mechanism for life, which Jean-Paul Sartre defined as a “useless passion,” the origin of our fundamental trauma. In both films the production of space (Henri Lefebvre) plays an important role in the main characters negotiating their identity deadlock. In The Lobster escape into bad faith renders authentic self-determination an ever-eluding project. In Parasite the self-creative activity of aiming for change is hindered by neoliberalist capitalism overpowering the social space of the underprivileged. This is the source of class-based trauma. In both films the poignant social satire invites reflection on social conditions, in which individuals only lose themselves more irrecoverably, the harder they attempt to escape. Finally, chapter six on “Clones and Clowns: Traumatic Bodies in Dystopian Settings” explores the interplay between trauma and social exclusion in Never Let Me Go and Joker as examples of dystopian cinema. It argues that it is through cinematic aesthetics that the spectator is directly engaged with the inner conflict of both films’ protagonists and their identity crisis. The first part of the chapter provides a reading of Never Let Me Go, which is inspired by the Foucauldian concept of biopower as a determining factor for the protagonists’ trauma. This is also reflected in the aesthetic organization of the film, as it follows the clones in their desperate search for the significance of their identity. The second part of this chapter analyses the relationship between childhood trauma and adult mental disorder in Joker. It demonstrates that psychic disturbances such as anxiety, psychic dissociation and schizophrenia are tied to the aesthetic organization of the film. Thus it sheds light on the link between trauma and mental disorder beyond the use of mere plot devices. In the end I argue that failed tragedy in the sense discussed by Elsaesser is the most characteristic feature in both Never Let Me Go and Joker, because they do not allow their protagonists any other kind of fate than enduring, abject emptiness, an inevitable cul-de-sac of identity. The central argument in this book highlights the significance of trauma as an aesthetic structure. How this audio-visualizes failed experiences by means of such phenomena as out-of-joint temporalities, haunting cinematic moods,

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and collision between internal and external realities. Reframing Trauma hopes to show that these cinematic structures are closely experienced on the level of embodied subjectivity—or as “cinesthetic subjects” to use Vivian Sobchack’s (2004) term—instead of witnessed from an aesthetic distance. As Caroline Bainbridge has argued, trauma can be a useful concept in understanding the structure of cinematic experience, insofar as it demands “an embodied emotional response from the spectator, who struggles to cope with the impact of the trauma at the level of representation” (Bainbridge 2004, 393). In this spirit the analysis presented in this book hopes to highlight the affective dynamics between film and spectator, as it originates from a cinematic exchange based on the structure of trauma. Even though such cinematic exchange cannot provide “understanding” of trauma in any traditional sense of the word, it may enable the spectators to relate to the structure of trauma in a way that is not always comfortable. Laura Brown writes: “when we admit to the immanence of trauma in our lives, when we see it as something more likely to happen than not, we lose our cloak of invulnerability” (Brown 1995, 108). It is this immanence of trauma which might explain our ongoing fascination with trauma. But it also indicates why we are able to resonate with traumatic structure embodied in an aesthetic experience, even when we ourselves have not been victims of (historical) trauma.

Chapter 2

Ghosts and Ghouls The Haunting Memory of Trauma

IT FOLLOWS; GET OUT; THELMA In his Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film, Adam Lowenstein argues that by registering national trauma by means of allegory, horror films reflectively challenge and confront spectators with collective anxieties in the aftermath of social conflicts (Lowenstein 2005). Similarly, Linnie Blake employs the concept of trauma to interpret disturbing conventions of horror cinema as allegories for historical and national wounds by which they can be worked through (Blake 2008). The three films discussed in this chapter—David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, and Joachim Trier’s Thelma—are likewise all open to an interpretation which emphasizes their nature as allegories of national trauma. From that perspective they are concerned with such themes as urban decay and racial relations in contemporary America, and the emergence of reactionary politics in present-day Europe. But instead of reading the films as allegorical commentaries on social problems lurking beneath a surface, this chapter strikes another note. It argues that, by their aesthetic qualities, the three films are rendered traumatic in their affective orientation, both toward the cinematic world and toward the spectator. As Robert Eaglestone argues, trauma is not merely a “wound” in the psyche of an individual, but also a “discipline of thought” which can be recognized in fictional works that deal with trauma (Eaglestone 2013, 15). Cinema, too, can affectively embody the arrested process of trauma, a strategy we recognize in It Follows, Get Out, and Thelma, and which corresponds with persistent and intrusive traumatic feelings. Even though it may not be a very obvious choice to draw a comparison between these three films, there are many striking similarities in their aesthetic strategies. In all three films the main protagonist is present in almost every scene, making them strongly character-driven, and 19

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encouraging us to develop concern for the protagonists in accordance with the emotional salience of the course of events (Carroll 1999). All three films might be considered trendsetters within the horror genre as strongly affective films, in which the protagonists suffer from trauma resulting from a (violent, sudden) loss of a family member, a memory which they have effectively repressed from reflective consciousness. But more importantly, all three films manifest the creation of cinematic mood and immersive aesthetic strategies that enable us to feel the effects of trauma beyond character engagement. The argument starts with an analysis of It Follows, and the sense of anxious anticipation in the film. This is not only signaled by the returning presence of “It” in the form of ever-changing appearances, but also by its cinematography expressing the haunting presence of traumatic horror lurking beyond the edge of the frame. Similarly, in Get Out the signs of hidden menace are often offscreen, emerging from outside the frame sometimes abruptly, sometimes gradually, but always with a ghastly sensation of persistent dread. The recurring nightmares that haunt Chris in Get Out, contribute to the overarching mood of the film, which is congruent with persistent and intrusive traumatic feelings. And in Thelma the unspeakable threat finds its expression in supernatural events and the intense epileptic seizures which the title character suffers from. Thus, the haunting presence in It Follows, the hidden menace in Get Out, and the supernatural events in Thelma all function as symptoms of psychogenic amnesia resulting from the repression of traumatic memory from semantic consciousness, which nevertheless remains retained on the level of the body and the somatic experience. In all three films horror emerges through a traumatic structure, in which the past trauma haunts the protagonists in the forms of hallucinations, flashbacks, nightmares, and other visual repetitions. Furthermore, in all three films it is parenthood that functions as the source of trauma borne out by the children’s emotional disorder, which seems to have reached a point of being traumatic in its intensity. For instance, in a crucial scene in It Follows, “It” takes the form of the deceased father of the protagonist Jay, suggesting that her feelings related to his death somehow paralyze her engagement with life, even though the scene of loss is not explicitly addressed in the film. In fact, the story with Jay’s father is notably absent in It Follows, indicating that such painful absence occurs when traumatic loss cannot be adequately worked through, but instead is repressed and banished from reflective awareness (LaCapra 1999, 698). In Get Out, Missy is able to hypnotize Chris and toss him into the Sunken Place by intensifying his remorseful feelings about his mother’s death, which he is reluctant to acknowledge. And in Thelma we are invited to believe that the trauma of the title character has to do with guilt. The emergence of Thelma’s supernatural abilities coincides with the arrival of her newborn brother, which makes the

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mother reject Thelma, directing all her affection to the new sibling. This leads to six-year-old Thelma causing the death of her little brother, which in turn leads to a suicide attempt by her mother, leaving her paraplegic. As a result, Thelma has seemingly developed total amnesia of her trauma, making it impossible for her to recall the events until many years later. All three films thus embody trauma as a denial of relief from dread, the ever-haunting presence of repressed, painful memory, which we both recognize in the characters’ experience, and feel in our own bodies through the effective creation of ever-present threat. Many trauma theorists argue that painful memory must be actively remembered for healing to occur, and such incitement to remember seems to motivate the narrative development of all the films under discussion. Yet the closing images of both It Follows and Get Out would seem to suggest an absence of such possibility. It Follows ends with a haunting camera movement slowly closing in on Jay, and the last shot in Get Out is a close-up of Chris’ devastated face, shielded by a car window, as if he had lost all sense of human relatedness. Of all three films in this chapter, it is only the ending of Thelma which implies a process of healing of sorts, perhaps because her traumatic memory is possibly false or implanted. In this ending, the sense of hidden threat is lifted, at least hinting at the possibility of a renewed, life-affirming future for the title character. It Follows David Robert Mitchell’s second feature film It Follows revolves around Jay, a young woman who is left with a haunting sense of traumatizing horror after a seemingly innocent sexual encounter. The consequence of this encounter is that she is followed by a zombie-like monster, which takes various appearances that only she can see, and that will kill her unless she has consenting sex with someone else, in order to pass the fatal curse on to this person. The film could therefore be seen as a blatant allegory of sexually transmitted disease except that the actual “cure” is to have more (unprotected) sex. Set in Detroit, the film has also been regularly considered an allegory for innercity decay and the unstoppable dissemination of urban deterioration into suburban neatness, as epitomized in the numerous phantom-like scenes with dilapidated streets and abandoned houses. The mise-en-scène is undefinably retro yet strangely contemporary at the same time: the color scheme as well as the decorative patterns are from the 1970s. Yet, there is also a device that looks like a powder box but is actually an e-reader or a “shell phone,” as Mitchell himself defines this prop (Dowd 2015). The opening scene with the hazy suburban mood is reminiscent of the Orange Grove Avenue sequences in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), an association which is strengthened by the sinister score by Disasterpiece. The conscious use of Carpenter’s horror

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elements, such as the mood of being constantly observed and surrounded by something sinister that made Halloween a slasher classic, renders It Follows uncannily familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. To place the film outside of time, or within arrested time, is also suggestive of the acute sensation of being cut off from any temporal flow, which characterizes the experience of trauma (Riley 2012). In a Guardian review, Peter Bradshaw (2015) indeed describes It Follows as a film that “taps into primal anxieties so effectively you can’t help but be traumatized.” In the following analysis, I argue that such traumatic persistence is one of the most important aesthetic principles in the formal and stylistic organization of the film. The film’s cinematography, for instance, signals a haunting presence of traumatic horror tormenting the victim through circular pans, following shots, and slow dolly-in camera movements. The film contains many extreme long shots that isolate the protagonist in wide-open surroundings, and that render her vulnerable to threat that seems to approach from every direction. On the other hand, the interior shots are characterized by darkness and suffocation, with the resulting effect of enclosing horror. The lurking presence of invisible threat in the film is realized through sudden change of focus to a distant figure in the background, or through allowing the monster to emerge from outside the edge of the frame. There is this relentless presence of a jaunty soundscape, which directly induces a sense of anxious anticipation in the spectator with its pulsating, throbbing rhythm. And finally, water is a recurrent motif in the film—the pool in which Jay floats, the water in the swimming pool into which “It” dissolves in a shot reminiscent of The Shining (1980) by Stanley Kubrick. It functions as a substance that particularly lends itself to the representation of nightmares, hallucinations, depression and trauma, an unusual place of concealment and refuge, and element that can wash away sin, or from which sin emerges. Water is strategically used as a substance capable of [. . .] “hosting” a crucial event, e.g., loss, trauma, separation, or death. (D’Aloia 2012, 93)

Situated in a dimly lit suburban setting, the film opens with an extreme long shot with large depth of field that centers everything within the frame from the spectator’s perspective. The camera pans slowly in a circular movement to follow a horrified girl running in circles, while a pulsating, throbbing rhythm starts off on the sound track. After a short temporal ellipsis, the next frame is a nightly long shot on a deserted beach, with the girl as a tiny figure in the center of the image. This is followed by a POV shot of the beach surrounded by forest and lit only by the headlights of the car in which the girl escaped from some invisible threat. The opening sequence ends with a shot of the girl’s grotesquely mutilated corpse lying on the beach in blue morning light.

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The organization of framing, lighting, and sound in this opening sequence establishes a disclosing affective mood, which functions to determine the characteristic features of the entire film, as Robert Sinnerbrink (2012, 161) has defined this aesthetic strategy. Similarly, Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener (2010) write that openings often cover the whole film in a nutshell, offering “watching instructions” that give the spectator a sense of what the inner dynamics of the film will be by setting “the tone and atmosphere that prepares for the film to come” (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010, 42). The tone and atmosphere that is set in this opening is best characterized as haunting, anxious anticipation of a threat that seems to come from all directions at once, and of which there is no escape. In his Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers, Julian Hanich discusses such threatening scenes in terms of dread that “lasts until it gives way to shock or horror or disappears otherwise” (Hanich 2010, 156). By contrast, the horror effect of It Follows seems based on privileging dread to shock, insofar as the sense of dread does not ease off, even when the protagonist, aware of the horror, takes action, either by escaping or by fighting against the threat. The sense of lingering dread is consistent with trauma theory, which commonly acknowledges that extreme affective experiences resist cognitive processing, so that they become stored in somatic, sensorimotor sensations, and are persistently repeated in the form of flashbacks and nightmares. Furthermore, like Cathy Caruth (1996) has emphasized, the nature of trauma is lingering: it is not located in the original violent event in an individual’s past, but in the present where it continues to haunt the individual. Likewise, Teresa Brennan argues that in trauma the individual incorporates the very structure of the violent event in some malformation, which renders the trauma lingering (Brennan 2004). Therefore, trauma is not merely an event from the past, insofar as it is felt as an impending catastrophe always about to happen. An example of this is in the scene where the film’s protagonist Jay is introduced floating in a circular swimming pool, gazing at the surrounding treetops. Here the tight framing and the form of the pool, accompanied by non-diegetic ambient music, carry the dread that was established in the opening sequence over into this seemingly innocent setting. There is a sense of enclosing virtual threat that has not yet materialized. In the diner scene the arrangement of space has several layers with only the foreground featuring Jay and Hugh/Jeff in focus at first. But as we witness their conversation, the foreground is markedly thrown out of focus, and our attention is briefly drawn to a dark approaching figure in the nightly rear plane, after which the focus racks back onto Jay again (figure 2.1). In the scene in which the threat already has become acute, Jay is shown tied to a wheelchair in the ruins of an abandoned, multi-story car park with vast depth of field. The lighting creates prominent highlights and shadows, guiding our attention deeper into the

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Figure 2.1.  It Follows: The change of focus in the diner scene.

depths from which the threat emerges—in the form of Hugh/Jeff’s mother, naked, as we will find out later. The arrangement of space in all three scenes suggests tormented anticipation of an unidentified thread unavoidably closing in, with similarity to the affective experience of trauma. For trauma is an affective state with a temporal dimension, simultaneously waiting and refusing to be cognitively processed and narrated, with the traumatized individual always inhabiting time “out of joint” (Boreth 2008; Adams et al. 2009). The affect of anxious anticipation in cinema regularly comes with the sense of urgency that it is about time that a protagonist became aware of the dread and took action, as Ed Tan has argued (Tan 1996). By contrast, It Follows maintains a sense of urgency throughout with no relief by action, so that the dread lingers and does not disappear. Jay’s failure to function confronted by the threat—that she will be relentlessly pursued by a shape-shifting ghoul that will follow her with zombie-like stamina—is evident, even when she is not yet consciously aware of it, due to the omnipresent sense of tormenting anticipation in the film. The moment when Jay finally apprehends that the curse is real, takes place during the scene in a classroom, in which she is brought into the frame through a circular pane shot, and is shown listening to her teacher reading aloud a passage from T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J.

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Alfred Prufrock. While the teacher recites the line “And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat” (Eliot 1917/1963, 16), Jay glances outside, and the following extreme long shot draws our attention to a distant figure in the rear plane of the image onto which the camera zooms in, while a jarring score starts off on the sound track. Through a POV/reaction shot structure of Jay and the monster, the scene builds an emotional impact that is both alarming and relentless, changing the mood of the film from haunting to menacing as the threat becomes palpable in the form of an abject figure, an insane-looking old woman with a limp, wearing a hospital gown. Other forms that the monster takes include a disheveled (violated?), topless cheerleader urinating all over herself, a demonic neighbor boy, and finally Jay’s deceased father. These are uncanny, abject figures: uncanny, because they are simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, and abject because they represent, in Julia Kristeva’s terms, the place where meaning collapses, where innocence and affection become corrupted. Furthermore, the figures embody trauma insofar as they confront their victim with death, with “the border of [one’s] condition as a living being” (Kristeva 1982, 3). Onscreen/Offscreen The classroom scene is a turning point that not only changes the mood of the film, but also its aesthetic strategy, which so far emphasized the rear plane of the image. Now the offscreen space and the edge of the image become more important in the elicitation of dread. Veerle Bovens has analyzed the notion of edge in cinema as a peripheral strategy that can evoke a “creeping sensation” or mood that may signify things that one would rather exclude from the center (Bovens 2018, 28). This comes down to affirming that privileging edge as a source of threat has more important functions than merely creating cheap cinematic shocks. Furthermore, edge or periphery is linked to trauma insofar as a traumatic event involves dissociation, which locates the trauma at the periphery of consciousness, of memory (Spiegel 2006‌‌‌‌‌‌). The emphasis on the edge of frame and the offscreen space in It Follows could be interpreted in traumatic terms. Trauma is simultaneously present and absent, visible and invisible: present in the somatic dimension of the self where it resists narrativization (offscreen), and absent in the semantic dimension where it could be narrated and worked through (onscreen). Furthermore, the lurking presence of (in)visible threat can allegorically represent some traumatic event that Jay herself has gone through. Even though the film does not articulate this explicitly, I offer as my interpretation that “It” represents the traumatic absence of Jay’s father, an absence which, as Caruth suggests of traumatic events, is not wholly experienced in the present (Caruth 1995, 4). Hence the

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aesthetic emphasis on the edges of frames: the edge represents the traumatic event which, while not fully assimilated in the (overt) semantic memory, is nevertheless constantly present in the (covert) somatic memory. This lurking, absent threat is constantly on the verge of breaking out of the offscreen onto the onscreen space with deadly consequences. First there is the offscreen sound of a window shattering in the scene in which the monster breaks into Jay’s house. As she wanders around the darkened rooms, we are mostly confined to her POV, which situates the threat firmly outside the edge of the frame, until she enters the room where the monster slowly approaches her. A screeching sound on the sound track accompanies the sudden appearance of the monster. In the beach house scene, the monster materializes without a musical/aural warning, appearing as Jay’s friend Yara, and entering the frame as an almost unnoticeable figure. It is only when the real Yara is shown entering the scene from outside the frame and from a different angle that the jarring music starts off on the sound track, indicating imminent danger (figure 2.2). This establishes every offscreen space, or every space beyond center within the frame, as a space where the threat potentially emerges in the film.

Figure 2.2.  It Follows: “It” emerges almost unnoticeably on the rear plane of the image.

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The hospital scene is a case in point, in which a POV from Jay’s perspective consists of several frames within a frame, thus several offscreen spaces in one shot, the sound of distanced footsteps originating from any offscreen space whatever (to emulate Deleuze). Again, the offscreen space functions as the place where the traumatic dissociated experience lingers, always threatening to emerge into the here-and-now. This is why the image of the naked monster in an angry, violent posture on the rooftop of Jay’s house is so disturbing, as it is shown visibly within the frame from Jay’s point of view, while the car in which she is hits the road. The monster emerges from the periphery of the frame as Jay’s field of vision grows larger, epitomizing that aspect of trauma that is unknowable, unspeakable, and unrepresentable, but nevertheless relentless. The relentless reappearance of the monster epitomizes the functioning of trauma through cycles of incomprehensible repetition. This comes to a halt when the traumatic event is translated from repetition into an “articulatory practice” that enables one to recall in the present that something happened in the past, while simultaneously opening to the future (LaCapra 2001, 21–22). It seems no coincidence, then, that the strategy to destroy the monster is developed into luring it from the edge into the center of the scene in an abandoned swimming pool. This is a space simultaneously open and confined, with a liquid center (the pool itself), surrounded by solid edges (the coping). In the swimming pool scene, the handheld camera pays attention to the meticulous way in which Jay’s friends place diverse electronic devices onto the edge of the pool, in the middle of which she is floating. Water thus functions again as a substance that can dissolve trauma, on the one hand, and from where trauma can re-emerge, on the other. And when the monster finally falls into the pool, it gets killed, dissolving into a red liquid that stains the water, spreading from the center toward the edges, until the color fills the frame entirely. The symbolism in this image could mean that the trauma dissolves, but the monster does not disappear entirely. Instead, “It” lingers on as an unpleasant scene to which one belatedly returns over and over again long after its conclusion. The film ends with a following shot of Jay and her boyfriend Paul, with an approaching distant figure in the rear plane of the frame. Even though the scene is silent, its effect is disturbing, suggesting the eternal return of trauma even when the threat has been eliminated. The effect is reinforced by an abrupt cut to black and the hasty appearance of the film’s title, accompanied by an emphatic beat of the closing music. This is an ending that renders the horror effect enduring, lingering on after the film has finished, suggesting perhaps that dissolution of trauma does not necessarily mean that a break with the past can ever be fully completed. At least not before one is able to recognize one’s hidden, painful memory seeking acknowledgment.

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Get Out Jordan Peele’s directorial debut Get Out is often seen as a social commentary on hidden racism beneath a refined surface. The film revolves around Chris, a talented African American photographer, who, through his white girlfriend Rose, gets entangled in a sinister conspiracy at a secluded Armitage family estate. In the privacy of the estate, Rose’s mother Missy hypnotizes their Black guests with the mesmerizing power of a steadily stirred cup of tea. Following this Rose’s father Dean, a brilliant neurosurgeon, performs a transplantation which allows a white person to inhabit a Black body for its supposedly superior physical abilities. But in addition to reading the film as an allegory for white liberal racism and the way in which contemporary America deals with race, I argue that the film is also about trauma, characterized by the sense of entrapment, paralysis, and incomprehensibility of experience that is captured in the idea that the body can be invaded and inhabited by another, alien being. For trauma can feel as if one’s body were inhabited, intruded upon by disturbing, uncontrollable, relentless thoughts, as if one were out of control of one’s embodied mind. As many trauma theorists argue, the body is the site of trauma, which registers the “physical imprint” of the traumatic event, rendering its memory constantly present although not continuously experienced (Bennett 2005, 25). Similarly to It Follows, the opening scene in Get Out functions to establish an affective mood for the whole film, which is menacing, although not without comic undertones. The film opens with an extreme long shot of a nightly suburban setting with the chirping noise of crickets on the sound track, and the camera tracking backward, as we hear the voice of the character Andre offscreen, talking into his mobile phone. While Andre enters the frame, the camera continues its backward movement until he pauses, at which point the camera takes half a circle around him and starts trailing the character hauntingly from behind. Then we see a car entering the frame from a distance. The camera rotates 180 degrees again as the car pulls over and makes a U-turn, stopping alongside Andre while we hear thirties music playing on the car stereo. Andre turns around while the camera follows him, moving alongside him so that we see the car with an open door on the driver’s side, but not the very driver. That is, until the masked driver emerges abruptly from outside the frame and attacks Andre. The thirties music gets louder, suppressing the noises of the attack, until the opening credits start, and the non-diegetic music takes over, with its eerie Swahili vocals and bluegrass undercurrent. Like in It Follows, the circularity of the camera movement, the importance of the offscreen space, and the leafy, suburban mise-en-scène reminiscent of Halloween function to establish not only a haunting tone and atmosphere, but also what Elsaesser calls the narrative enigma in the film (Elsaesser

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2012, 118). In Get Out, this narrative enigma is not merely the question of who Andre’s abductor is, or what his motives might be, but something more intangible at first sight. The enigma is the unspeakable in trauma that struggles in its desire to be articulated, as Miriam Haughton describes this (Haughton 2018, 1), which is simultaneously expressed and suppressed through affective-aesthetic cinematic strategies. Like in It Follows, the opening of Get Out establishes a mood of anxious anticipation and emotional urgency that is present throughout the film, and stems from a traumatic failure to function and to influence the course of events—literally, as Chris’s ability to function will be effectively blocked by practices of hypnotism. This is why Get Out is a horror film during which the audience should be screaming “get out of the house,” as Peele explains in the feature commentary on the film. This emotional urgency is indicated by signs of hidden menace throughout the film. There is a bad omen, when a deer that coming of nowhere gets hit by Chris and Rose’s car, which is followed by the offscreen groaning of the wounded animal. There is the ghastly presence of Walter, the groundkeeper, who first enters the frame from offscreen by means of a slow dolly out, and later at night appears at high speed from the surrounding woods, accompanied by a jarring string score. There is the Armitages’ housekeeper Georgina staring into the offscreen space while serving Chris iced tea, spilling the drink all over, and later appearing on the other side of a corridor in the darkened house, with an empathetic clang sound. In the “Bingo/auction scene,” it is a photograph of Chris that is brought from offscreen into to the onscreen space by means of a dolly out, suggesting that the virtual threat he has constantly been under, is about to be effectuated. Entrapped in Trauma As argued, offscreen space is significant in the creation of traumatic mood, functioning as the shadowed area of unspeakability, the origin of menace that cannot be represented, but which exists in the marginalized terrain of repressed memory. In Get Out though, that menace becomes palpable shortly after the auction scene. This is aesthetically realized by means of point-ofview cutting accompanied by Michael Abels’ suspenseful score, mingled with the atonal plucking of a banjo by Rose’s brother Jeremy. We witness Chris and Rose returning to the Armitage house, and being welcomed by silent greetings that range from openly contemptuous (Jeremy and Missy) to triumphant (Georgina, Walter, and Dean). Once inside the house, Chris finds photographs of Rose with several Black men (including Walter) and one woman (Georgina). The scene with Chris flipping through the photos is not merely a narrative clue that sheds light on the course of events, but also a moment that

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epitomizes trauma, a moment where the past manifests itself in the present in the form of hidden memories. In this scene, the door to the cabinet containing the bright red show box in which the photographs are kept, remains open, as if inviting Chris to discover them, while on the sound track a sinister type of music starts off. The photographs have the aura of haunted past, with ghosts of persons in the past demanding to be found and resurfacing in the present as it were, analogously to the functioning of traumatic memory. Then, when Chris attempts to escape the house, he is besieged by the family on all sides, while Dean bursts into a strange monologue: In life, what is your purpose Chris? Fire. It’s a reflection of our own mortality. We’re born, we breath, and we die. Even the sun will die someday. But we are divine. We are the gods trapped in cocoons. (Dean in Get Out)

In a later scene in the operating room, the music and the wide-angle image composition that centralizes Dean in the setting, suggest that he indeed sees himself as a god-like figure with the power to grant eternal youth to the members of his cult—entitled “Behold the Coagula.” This macabre situation in Get Out involves a very complicated reflection on the (Black) body as the vessel for a strange (white) consciousness. As Richard Brody from The New Yorker described it, the Armitages are creating “inwardly whitened black people” (Brody 2017). This is implicit in Jeremy’s openly contemptuous remarks about Chris’s “frame and genetic makeup,” and followed by his vision on jiu-jitsu as not being based on strength, but on strategy, thereby implying intellectual (white) superiority to embodied (Black) experience. The “inward whiteness” also manifests itself in Walter’s odd hostility toward Chris, as well as in his style of being in the world, his body language, his wardrobe, his way of talking. These are different from the cultural expectations one might associate with an African American male in his thirties. The way in which in the garden party scene white guests recite various fetishizing stereotypes about Black men’s physicality in a remarkably straightforward manner, suggests that these physical characteristics are not the embodied property of a person, but a form of corporeity that can be inhabited like one might inhabit a house. This is why there is this strange situation with Logan King, a Black guest in his twenties at the Armitages’ garden party, who seems jarringly “white” and elderly with his straw hat, committing the faux pas of meeting Chris’s fist bump with an old-fashioned handshake. “It’s like all of them missed the movement,” comments Chris at some point to his friend Rod on the telephone. Like Walter, Georgina acts hostilely submissive, gliding through the house in a robot-like fashion when not on standby behind the kitchen door. Midway through the film she appears abruptly in Chris’s room, apologizing

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for unplugging his phone. Filmed close-up from a slightly low angle, the camera position accentuates her forced facial expressions. As a reaction to Chris’s remark about “getting nervous with too many white people around,” the close-up gets tighter, and Georgina’s facial expression changes from radiant to confused: her breath starts to tremble and she gasps as if going through some inner struggle. Davina Quinlivan has argued that breath in cinema operates within an invisible mode of perception, which can draw our attention to the “unseen presence of the human body in film” (Quinlivan 2012, 3–4). That unseen presence in Get Out is the persistent, mnemonic residue of the sense of self that resides in the somatic memory even when the reflective consciousness is trapped in the Sunken Place. And it manifests itself as a suppressed trauma in symptomatic gestures that are simultaneously blocked and expressed. In Dominick LaCapra’s terms, the scene with Georgina’s struggle could be interpreted as a traumatic dissociation of affect and representation, a moment when one dissociatively feels what one cannot express, and disorientedly represents what one cannot feel at the same time (LaCapra 2001, 42). This means that, even though at first glance the film seems to convey a very Cartesian statement in which the mind has an ontological priority over the body, Get Out is not about the body as a vessel, or a “cocoon” after all. By contrast, it is the body that is the locus of agency in the film, which results in visible emotional conflict or dissociation when Georgina (nervously) laughs and cries at the same time, until she regains control and returns to her “Stepford wife” behavior. Soon after the scene with Georgina, Chris triggers an aggressive reaction in Logan by the flash of his camera. Accompanied by underwater sound effects that convey the feeling of rupture under the calm surface, Logan freaks out, stumbles toward Chris, screaming at him to get out. Like in the scene with Georgina, Logan’s reaction gives expression to the embodied memory of the self that the body once was (Andre). Finally, Chris is able to escape only because his body takes over: the traumatic memory of his mother’s death triggers an unconscious reaction that makes him scratch the armrest of the chair he is tied to. This is a moment of “the traumatized subject using the resources of the body to re-embed itself in place” (Kabir 2013, 73). With the stuffing of the armrest Chris protects his ears from the hypnotizing sound of the clinking spoon, an act that enables him to (temporarily) disable the traumatic dissociation that Missy took advantage of in order to hypnotize him in the first place. The hypnosis scene is undoubtedly the most important one when it comes to understanding the complexity by which the film deals with trauma. Furthermore, it illustrates the structure of traumatic experience, in which the traumatic event is not integrated in the semantic memory, but it subsists in the repeated possession of the somatic memory within one’s lived, experienced body. It is indeed significant that Missy uses Chris’ embodied traumatic

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memory to get inside his head. Missy waits for Chris in a darkened room and, abruptly switching on the lights, confronts him about his smoking. Face-toface with Chris, at an almost exact 180-degree angle, Missy then starts asking probing questions about his mother’s death, scraping her teacup with a spoon. The sound of pattering rain from the past commences and mingles with the clinking of the spoon in the present, while the film cuts to a distorted flashback of Chris watching television the night of his mother’s accident. Chris starts crying, while the camera moves closer. The shots from the past and the present intertwine as Chris, unable to move his body, falls deeper into the state of hypnosis, until Missy commands him to sink into the floor. In the next shots, the young Chris in the past slides through his bed accompanied by a hollow sound, while the adult Chris floats in a dark vacuum—the Sunken Place—gazing up at an ever-shrinking televisual view of the outside world. The Sunken Place has a function similar to the offscreen space. Both refer to the shadowed space of arrested time that possesses the traumatized self and the repressed memory locked in the past, faced with a future without a sense of continuity or change (LaCapra 1999, 713). Furthermore, it is significant that in the process of hypnotizing him, Missy intensifies Chris’s feelings of guilt about his mother’s death through the mimetic situation of the evening of this traumatic event. In trauma theory, mimesis refers to a kind of hypnotic imitation that, in the words of Ruth Leys, precludes the kind of specular distance necessary for cognitive knowledge of what has happened. [This] explains the tendency of traumatized people to compulsively repeat their violent experiences in nightmares [. . .] by comparing the traumatic repetition to hypnotic imitation. Trauma is therefore interpreted as an experience of hypnotic imitation [. . .] that disables the victim’s perceptual and cognitive apparatus to such an extent that the experience never becomes part of the ordinary memory system. (Leys 2007, 8)

The visual metaphor for the traumatic repetition of Chris’s guilt feelings is the deer that Rose and Chris hit on their way to the Armitage estate. A haunting scene follows, in which the camera tails Chris closely as he enters the forest to check on the dying animal. The scene ends with a close-up of Chris’s transfixed face that functions as a Deleuzian affection image, registering the traumatic memory of his mother. Before the hypnosis scene, Chris’s imagination keeps him from sleeping: we see an “inner image” of Chris re-entering the forest in a nightly setting with the loud offscreen moaning of the deer, conveying the profundity of his trauma, the depth of his hidden memory. Finally, in the room where Chris is hypnotized there is a taxidermized deer head mounted above the television, situated as if gazing directly at Chris, triumphantly, accusingly, with the television set as an additional reminder of

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Chris’s traumatic memory. Obviously, the deer—the buck—represents the idea of Black men being prized as fetishized “trophies,” and it is significant that toward the end of the film Chris kills Dean by puncturing him with the deer’s antlers in a violent, abrupt attack, symbolizing resistance. But just as importantly, the deer is the symbol of Chris’s trauma, the emotional pain that he has denied, and that has led to his failure to integrate his mother’s death into semantic memory. In addition, the association of the deer with the mother opens up avenues for interpreting Chris’s personal trauma of the loss of his mother much more generally as collective pain in the African American community. However, the film does not resolve the issue of how successfully Chris finally overcomes his trauma. The final shot of Chris in the film shows him through a car window, night reflected on the screen, accompanied by the Swahili/bluegrass score from the opening credits on the sound track, which cyclically locates the ending in the same place the story began. Like the ending of It Follows, the scene is without a sense of relief and embodies a mood of resignation instead, suggesting that Chris has not sufficiently achieved a break with the past to be able to anticipate a future free from dominance of his traumatic childhood experience. Another symbol of Chris’s trauma is Georgina, who is eerily calm on the surface, but seems fundamentally in distress, as if constantly fighting Rose’s grandmother who possesses and controls her mind-body. First there is the sound of a spoon clinking against a glass that sends Georgina in a trance-like state, from which she is only woken up by Missy’s snappy reaction. There are the tears that run down her cheeks in the scene with Chris before she proceeds to a creepy repetition of the word “no.” It is to this image that Chris’s mind returns when undergoing phase two of the transplantation procedure, and after he has run her over when trying to escape. It triggers his decision to save her, as if attempting to make amends for himself, for his traumatic guilt. Furthermore, this is a moment that is not a compulsive repetition of the past, but an event that Chris can attend consciously in the present, anticipating the future as he does. But it turns out that Georgina remains a “possessed monster” to use the terminology of Barbara Creed (1993). She discussed Regan’s body in The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) in these terms, arguing that her abject state has its roots in “a reconciliation with the maternal body” (Creed 1993, 41). I think that Georgina is an interesting variation of the monstrous-feminine, a possessed mother that does not seem to fit into Creed’s categories, insofar as she simultaneously embodies an affectionate, loyal bond with a dead parent—LaCapra’s “fidelity to trauma”—and a monstrous mother that represents danger. Finally, the Armitage house itself can be seen in terms of trauma insofar as it represents those “culturally sanctioned forms of physical, emotional, and psychological violence and abuse [that are] privately ritualized and

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normalized, while publicly denied and dismissed” (Haughton 2018, 27). The menace that the Armitage house represents is already established in the telling first shot of Chris and Rose arriving. Here its front door is centered in the image as a passageway to a situation from which there is no escape. Both the distance (extreme long shot) and the length of the shot—approximately 45 seconds—emphasize the importance of the house for the narration, as if the house itself were a character. The following long shot is similarly framed, with the front door in the center of the image, and the house’s interior dominating over the human figures. The camera keeps its distance while tracking in a direct horizontal line “through” the house as Chris and the Armitages move from the entry into the living room. It is only after thirty seconds that the Armitages are finally brought into a medium long shot, and the editing becomes conventional for a conversation situation. I offer as my interpretation that, like the Sunken Place, the Armitage house too, and especially its basement, is a shadowed space characterized by “post-traumatic structures of contradiction, disrupted linearity, compulsive repetition, problematic confusion with Self and Other, ethical murkiness, and a general milieu of potential vulnerability and disorientation” (Haughton 2018, 3). The Armitage House is yet another metaphor for trauma housed in the collective and the individual body, inhabited from within. A strange mood hangs over the estate and its residents, starting from the house tour that Dean emphatically insists taking Chris on. It begins with Missy’s office, moving through hallways with family photos on the walls, past the basement door that is “sealed up” due to “some black mold down there” toward the kitchen with Georgina in a studied pose, at which point Dean says: “My mother loved her kitchen so we keep a piece of her in here.” The dim candle light in the dining room scene contributes significantly to the change of mood in the film from strange to downright menacing, and the scene also features a “black buck” sculpture that is prominently brought into view at the precise moment when Jeremy attempts to headlock Chris. The nightly house seems a haunted place, with the camera following Chris as he walks through its corridors, closing in on him when Georgina suddenly appears on the other side of the hallway like a ghost, accompanied by a high-pitch sound. In the hypnosis scene Missy’s command to “sink into the floor” entraps Chris in the Armitage house both psychologically and physically, a feeling that is powerfully captured in the Sunken Place imagery. Obviously, the Sunken Place represents a symbolic entrapment in the social system that suppresses the agency of Black people. But it also epitomizes how profoundly trauma is buried in the somatic memory of the traumatized people, so that they feel indeed as if entrapped within their own bodies. This is why it is necessary that the Armitage House be consumed by fire in the end of the film as a cathartic event of some sort,

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although without the notion of hope with which Quinlivan has associated this phenomenon (Quinlivan 2015). Thelma Joachim Trier’s 2017 feature film Thelma is a psychological thriller in which we follow the title character coming to terms with her queer sexuality. At the same time, she is struggling for independence from her overprotective, religious parents, a process linked to intense epileptic seizures and supernatural events. Like in It Follows, Thelma has a swimming pool as the setting for a crucial scene at the midpoint of the film. In this scene we witness Thelma in a natatorium, diving into a deserted pool, while the lights start switching off spontaneously, accompanied by loud electric buzzing. She starts trembling uncontrollably and sinks deep into the dark water, in an image reminiscent of Chris floating in the Sunken Place. She then attempts to struggle out of the pool, only to find that a sheet of ceramic tiles has appeared to cover the surface, like ice floating on water (figure 2.3). A literally breathtaking underwater scene follows, with Thelma swept up in the swirling of water caused by her own struggling. In this scene Thelma’s body is engulfed by its own movement, in a loop that entraps the title character in her own emotional vortex, until finally she is able to surface, gasping for air. Like in It Follows (swimming pool) and in Get Out (rain), Thelma features water as a recurrent motif and a substance capable of accommodating trauma as a central theme. The immersive nature of the swimming pool scene is epitomic of the traumatic tendency which lies at the heart of all three films discussed in this chapter. And like in Get Out, in Thelma the title character’s trauma is linked to childhood events, which here led to six-year-old Thelma causing the death of her baby brother, and the subsequent suicide attempt by

Figure 2.3.  Thelma: The title character struggles to get out of the swimming pool through a sheet of ceramic tiles covering the water surface.

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her mother. However, the inconsistencies in the film’s narrative logic and the ambiguous way in which it presents us story information, opens up the possibility that the traumatic incidents from Thelma’s childhood never actually took place. Anne Gjelsvik makes a similar argument when she writes that, as the film is remarkably open to multiple interpretations, whether Thelma in fact exhibits supernatural powers or not remains an open question (Gjelsvik 2019, 83). Yet the question remains: Why look for the narrative logic in a supernatural horror film, a genre extensively imprinted by imagination and the fantastic? From a generic point of view, one might equally argue that Thelma’s subjective experience of spatial and temporal disorientation bypasses the narratological norms of coherence and clarity. For instance, within the conventions of supernatural horror the “inexplicable” disappearance and reappearance of Thelma’s love interest Anja may be literally accounted for by Thelma’s struggles with her awakening sexuality. However, the intensity of emotion Thelma feels when Anja disappears compared to the noticeable lack of emotion when confronted by the death of her brother, would seem to complicate such a straightforward reading. While my interpretation of Thelma is obviously not the only possible one, I hope to show that this inconsistency of emotion toward narrative events renders the film accurately explicable as a symbolic expression of the title character’s trauma. Mind Games The way in which the film intermingles fantasy sequences with authentic cinematic events means that Thelma lends itself to be categorized as a mind-game film, in which both the character and the spectator are subject to being played games with, in Thomas Elsaesser’s definition (Elsaesser 2009). In contrast to Get Out, in which Chris’ trauma is real but inappropriate, I argue that in Thelma the title character’s affect is unreal but appropriate. This is because her trauma is induced by her parents in an attempt to control her sexuality, which is considered deviant in the context of the rigid religious community Thelma’s family is part of. While it would also be accurate to argue that Thelma’s parents have somehow caused her to forget the traumatic events of her past, the loose ends in the narrative suggest that her childhood memory is induced instead of an authentic recollection. This renders Thelma a mind-game film par excellence in which “a character is persuaded by [her family] that she is deluded about the existence or disappearance, usually of a child—a self-delusion brought upon by trauma, excessive grief, or other emotional disturbance” (Elsaesser 2009, 18). In the context of mind-game cinema it could be argued that Thelma’s traumatic memory is a fabricated recollection altogether, not a forgotten one. It is designed to confirm Thelma’s sexual “deviancy,” after which this can be

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tamed through rigid religious practices. For instance, toward the end of the film first her father heavily sedates Thelma and then convinces her that the mutual affection between her and her classmate Anja is nothing but a delusion or the consequence of Thelma’s supernatural willpower, which can only be subdued through communion with God. This is accompanied by shots of a distraught Thelma praying on her knees, perched with her forehead against the wall, watched closely by her parents. The scene contains an interesting paradox. Thelma’s depriving Anja of her individual freedom to choose justifies in turn curbing Thelma’s agency and self-determination by the traumatizing force of religious control, disguised as individual salvation. Michel Foucault calls this form of religious control “pastoral power,” which relies on the Christian tradition of “knowing the insides of people’s minds [. . .] exploring their souls [and] making them reveal their innermost secrets” as a strategy for the Church to produce “the truth of the individual himself [sic]” (Foucault 1982, 214–15). Pastoral power thus operates not only through the technique of collective subjugation, but also through strategies of individual subjectivation (Vermeulen 2014, 146). This can lead to religious trauma, shattering individuals’ spiritual sense of self and their set of ethical values (Panchuk 2018, 514). As further support for the argument that Thelma’s trauma is induced and not real, I offer the following observations. First, both Thelma and the spectator learn about her baby brother’s death from a flashback, in which Thelma while sleeping sends the infant psychokinetically into a frozen lake. The image of the lifeless child under the ice, shot in a bird’s-eye view with the camera zooming in, is traumatic in itself, as Claire Thomson also suggests, when she writes: “an as-yet-warm body frozen behind the screen beyond the screen [. . .] an impossible sight” (Thomson 2019). The image of the child is traumatic, because it is located on the threshold of life and death, forever frozen in this liminal state, cut off from the flow of time (figure 2.4). The image

Figure 2.4.  Thelma: The traumatic image of the lifeless child under ice.

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also evokes an association of parallelism with the earlier scene of Thelma being enclosed under water in the swimming pool, suggesting the hidden, repressed, and locked-away nature of Thelma’s guilty memory of her brother. However, the way in which this scene is narratively framed, complicates this interpretation. The flashback follows a present-day scene in which Thelma’s parents drug her by means of a sedative-laced cup of tea—another interesting similarity to Get Out—in order to tell her “something very painful” as she passes out. The flashback sequence could be interpreted as a forceful demand to recognize repressed traumatic guilt, which Thelma would suffer from without even consciously realizing it. However, after the flashback it is as if the film abandons this narrative trajectory altogether. Never do we witness Thelma either accepting or refusing to acknowledge the effects of her alleged earlier traumatic childhood actions shaped by sibling jealousy. Of course, one could say that Thelma does not take responsibility for her past wrongdoing that ended her brother’s life, because she blames her actions on the fact that she was a selfish child, feeling rejected by her mother. Yet from the point of view of narrative coherence, this interpretation seems less plausible than the one in which the traumatic memory is induced by Thelma’s parents in the first place, thereby taking advantage of her vulnerability. Furthermore, throughout the whole film our emotional alignment stays with Thelma—who is present in almost every scene—even after we have learned about the death of her brother and her mother’s suicide attempt. Thus, it is narrative incongruity and misguided emotion that alerts the spectators to the possibility that the fratricide never took place, and that Thelma’s traumatic guilt originates from her parents’ controlling strategies. A number of recurring elements, such as the symbolic presence of crows emerging from an extradiegetic space, and the panoptic framing of the image, embody both the negative influence of Thelma’s parents and her repressed sexuality. As a consequence of the film’s affective-aesthetic organization, the spectators too are invited to feel the effects of Thelma’s induced trauma, paralleled by her systematic exposure to toxic parental control. In the remainder of this chapter, I analyze the film as symbolic enactment of the function of trauma. In my reading, the scenes that we witness do not necessarily depict actual cinematic events. These events do not make sense within the “grids of conventional narrative logic” (Buckland 2014, 185), nor do they correspond with the emotional trajectory that Thelma follows. This is why I argue that these events more accurately epitomize the “logic” of trauma symbolically. This is borne out by the idea of bad parenting having thrown Thelma in an identity crisis so severe, that she develops a mental disorder known as “psychogenic non-epileptic seizures.” This bad parenting manifests itself in the form of Foucauldian biopower on the father’s side, and as a Kristevan monstrous-feminine attitude on the side of the mother. This is the major

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ambiguity which the film sets for its title character as a task to be resolved first and foremost by means of symbolic encounters, which in the end make the narrative and emotional inconsistencies in Thelma insignificant. By focalizing the narrative through Thelma’s mental subjectivity of religious and supernatural imagery, the film is rendered symbolically meaningful, instead of narratively reliable. “Daughter, Can’t You See I’m Burning?” Given the centrality of conflicting parent-offspring relationships in the film, it comes as no surprise that Thelma is full of Freudian themes. This renders the film a variation on “atonement with the father,” an Oedipal stage described in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). In this work he explores the theory that mythological narratives share the same structure of monomyth, with the hero’s journey as the main motif. In such narratives, the archetypical father is often an authoritative figure whom the hero must overcome or reconcile with, which echoes the Freudian idea of Oedipal conflict. In Freud’s thinking, the father is the (symbolic) intruder in an infant’s life of serenity and (imaginary) union with the mother. Therefore, the atonement with the father is a necessary stage to resolve this deep-rooted infantile conflict, so that later on the child can live a productive emotional life as an adult. This is why, toward the end of the film, we witness Thelma’s father taking a boat to the lake in which Thelma’s brother allegedly drowned, where his body suddenly bursts into flames which he cannot extinguish, not even by throwing himself overboard. The scene is preceded by a close-up of a sleeping Thelma which fades into black, while an ominous ambient noise starts off on the sound track, functioning as a nondiegetic sound bridge to the shot showing the father preparing his boat. As he is heading toward the open lake, the film crosscuts to images of Thelma trembling in her sleep. Then a flight of shrieking crows appears above the boat, and from the father’s point of view we see a figure in a white nightgown standing on the shore, who promptly disappears. The father then glances at his hands, which start shaking uncontrollably, after which flaming stigmata appear in his palms before his whole body catches fire. The scene ends with a close-up of Thelma waking up from her sleep with a sharp gasp. Similar to the scene with Thelma’s little brother appearing under the ice, the way in which the scene is framed suggests that it plunges deeply into Thelma’s mental subjectivity, evoking a strong association with symbolic patricide. A reference to one of Freud’s famous dream interpretations is hard to avoid. In this interpretation Freud describes a father who has a traumatic dream featuring his recently deceased child, standing by his bed and asking: “Father, can’t you see I’m burning?” The father wakes up and finds out that

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one of the candles surrounding the bed of his dead son has fallen and has started to burn the child’s body (Freud 2010). According to Freud, while the dream conveys the traumatic reality of the burning of the child, it nevertheless contains the fulfilment of the grieving father’s wish that the child is still alive. (Freud 2010, 509). By a similar but opposite logic, Thelma’s dream-vision of her father burning also contains fulfillment of a wish, which transforms the living father into a (symbolically) dead one. In his analysis of the film Søren Birkvad makes a similar claim when he writes that “the final sequence of the film appears to be a case of metaphorical self-healing [by which Thelma] liberates herself from the antagonistic forces of religious patriarchy” (Birkvad 2019, 208). Rather than a murderous act of self-defense by which Thelma eliminates the threat to her own life, the shot of the burning father could be seen as a symbolic image of a cathartic event, signifying that her traumatic emotions and thoughts are now purified by fire. Davina Quinlivan writes that in cinema trauma can be “embedded in the very fabric of the image,” enabling a “cathartic possibility predicated on a particular sense of renewal and selfhood” (Quinlivan 2015, 2). In Thelma, the image in which the father is immersed in water yet still in flames, embodies the sense of trauma through its material attributes. The cathartic dimension stems from the synthesis of water and fire, which eliminates the father’s toxic presence from the title character’s life. Parental Biopower and Religious Subjection In addition to Thelma lending itself well to Freudian interpretation, the father-daughter conflict can also be understood in the spirit of Foucauldian biopower, which is institutionalized, regulatory power used to control individual bodies and bodily actions. In the words of Foucault, biopower is “a technology of power centered on life” aimed at achieving “the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” (Foucault 1990, DE ‌‌‌‌‌ 140; 144). For Foucault, religion too can act as a powerful agent of biopower insofar as it inspires lived, embodied belief through various theologies. Even though for Foucault it operates as an institutionalized, rather than individualized, disciplinary power, this concept of biopower is nevertheless relevant in Thelma insofar as is vital in the existence of the title character. In this sense, the functioning of biopower is a major issue in Trier’s film, resulting in the traumatic appropriation of Thelma’s body, while both her epileptic seizures and her telekinetic powers can be seen as the bodily articulation of resistance to this biopower. Throughout the film there is a striking juxtaposition between Thelma’s controlled, reformed, orderly body, and her unruly, disobedient, and disorderly body struggling against the panoptic fatherly gaze which she has internalized. It seems no coincidence that halfway through the film, when

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researching the psychogenic non-epileptic seizures she has been diagnosed with, Thelma stumbles upon the famous photographs of the “hysterics” of Salpêtrière hospital, produced under the directorship of neurologist JeanMartin Charcot. In his Foucault-inspired study of the medical discourse and technology of mental health care, Georges Didi-Huberman has examined the way in which Salpêtrière hospital aimed at supplying “spectacular evidence” with pictures of women in expressive poses in support of Charcot’s faulty concept of hysteria. Didi-Huberman demonstrates that Charcot’s method of visualizing hysteria enabled the “invention” of this non-existing disorder, regardless of the fact that female patients were not simulating the symptoms of their “sexual dysfunctioning.” By staging hysteria as a visual spectacle, photography invented evidence about the female body and sexuality (DidiHuberman 2003). Similarly, in Thelma the title character’s epileptic seizures are invented symptoms, which nevertheless are simultaneously real. In my view, Thelma’s psychogenic non-epileptic seizures originate from the make-believe trauma that has been implanted by her father as a form of parental control in order to suppress her sexual orientation. Like Charcot in the Salpêtrière hospital, Thelma’s father is a physician who is in control of medical decisions not only for Thelma, but also for her abandoned paternal grandmother, held out of sight in a psychiatric institute for decades. According to a clinical definition, psychogenic non-epileptic seizures are caused by unconscious, symbolically expressed psychological processes leading to conversion, i.e., the pressing need to interpret one’s problems in ways which are both rationally and socially acceptable. This psychological mechanism has tangible gains, such as reduction of anxiety, and is a specific defense against the experience of other powerful and negative emotions. The external observer often feels that the patient is faking symptoms, unwittingly or even deliberately. [. . .] The patient is not simulating, however. The misery associated with dysfunction is genuine and tangible. (Jędrzejczak and Owczarek 2012, 233)

From the clinical point of view, there is nothing supernatural about Thelma’s mental disorder, insofar as it is merely a symptom of the traumatic, dysfunctional interpersonal relationship between Thelma and her parents. Her seizures can be considered a psychological defense mechanism against trauma, which cease to exist as soon as the trauma has been worked through. This is also why Thelma’s love interest Anja reappears toward the end of the film after she has left her parental home for good, or at least this is what the narrative suggests. Anja had disappeared during one of Thelma’s seizures induced by a neurologist in order to determine the cause of her epilepsy. The scene

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is preceded by a flashback in which six-year-old Thelma makes her brother disappear psychokinetically for the first time, by teleporting him under a weighty sofa. It starts off with a top shot of Thelma bathing in flashing strobe lighting, with electrodes attached to her head. A point-of-view shot shares Thelma’s vision with us, as heavily breathing, she stares directly into the pulsating light in a scene which convincingly orients the spectators toward the effects of induced epilepsy. As her neurologist invites Thelma to reach some emotionally unpleasant thoughts, the film crosscuts to Anja returning to her apartment with all the lights on and the stereo blaring, while a previous shot has empathically shown her leaving the same place darkened and quiet. Short flashbacks of Thelma and Anja kissing occur as the neurologist continues his probing questions, triggering an electric disturbance with lights flickering and buzzing in both locations, as if an electrical current connected them. Thelma plunges deeper into her emotional confusion while the electric pulsation of the scene slows down, and she falls into an epileptic seizure which makes her levitate. At the same time, the window in Anja’s apartment is blown to smithereens, and she is drawn into an instantaneously materializing void, after which the window appears miraculously intact again. Thelma believes that she has caused Anja’s disappearance by her guilty feelings about their homosexual affection, just like her grandmother, who labored under the “serious delusions” that the sudden disappearance of her husband was of her doing. This information is shared with us by a nurse, who believes that the medication Thelma’s grandmother is on, is “way too strong,” but that this is no cause for concern for Thelma’s father. In the film, Anja reappears after the scene with the burning father, as Thelma resurfaces from the lake, soaking wet. The scene with Thelma’s emerging from water could express the acceptance of her sexuality as freed from oppression—the Freudian “return of the repressed”—which in turn enables her to use her supernatural powers to bring Anja back. At the same time, the scenes with Anja’s narrative disappearance and reappearance remain open to a possible interpretation that Thelma’s conviction of her being the cause of such events is a delusion, and that would include the death of her brother. Yet, the second interpretation would seem to be in contradiction with the opening sequence of the film, coded as a flashback, in which six-year-old Thelma is taken on a hunting trip by her father. The sequence starts with opening credits rolling across a black screen and a dramatic musical score, featuring a recurring rhythmic pattern on the sound track, the formal circularity of which could be associated with the traumatic structure of “eternal return.” Before the first film image appears, we hear the howling sound of an icy wind, and the film starts off with an establishing shot of a frozen water landscape. The image is dominated by cold colors glowing in scant winter daylight as we observe the young Thelma with her father as two tiny figures

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walking on the lake, their long shadows reflected by ice, the friction sounds of their clothing amplified. The young Thelma notices a fish swimming under the ice, its silvery dorsal fin reflected by the sunlight, before the film cuts to an impossible underwater angle, with the camera looking up at her from a “fish-eye perspective.” In Anders Lysne’s reading of the scene, the shot from beneath the sheet of ice suggests a perspective of “some deep malign force that is neither seen nor understood.” It is a point of view characterized by a vague sense of absence, functioning to create an affect of dread, which is a matter of mood rather than the presence of some identifiable danger. According to Lysne, the function of Thelma’s‌‌‌‌‌ chilling prologue is to inaugurate “the sense of imminent but unfocused threat” (Lysne 2019, 237, 236), which haunts the spectator throughout the film. Even though this is a convincing analysis, in retrospective it would also be easy to interpret the image metaphorically, with the camera perspective functioning as the dead brother’s gaze arresting young Thelma in its force field. In such an interpretation, the frozen landscape would epitomize the element in guilt described by Thomas Fuchs as “a radical change in experienced space [in which] the person falls out of the common world [and where] an abyss has opened between her and others that cannot be bridged again” (Fuchs 2002, 231). The end of the opening sequence gives expression to the traumatic, interpersonal abyss between Thelma and her father, when instead of pointing his rifle at the unsuspecting deer farther away in the snowy forest, the father aims it at his daughter, who is closely observing the animal. Eventually the father lowers his rifle though, with a sigh as if he were disappointed in himself for not having the nerve, and the deer escapes. The triangular composition in the image between the deer, the father, and Thelma in the frozen landscape appears heavily loaded with symbolic meaning. It may signify the arrested inability to process trauma by which both characters are pathologically fixated. In other words, their trauma is shared, not only because the traumatic event has wounded them both, but also because both Thelma and her father affect each other in a way that disturbs their bodily integrity. Yet I insist that rather than depicting reliable diegetic events, the opening sequence of Thelma narrates allegorically and symbolically the toxic relationship between the title character and her father. Like the opening sequences of It Follows and Get Out, it establishes a cinematic mood that prepares the spectator for the film that is about to unfold. Thus, rather than literally killing Thelma, her father “kills” her (sexual) identity by suppressing it with medicine and a strict religious upbringing. And rather than literally killing her father in a later scene, Thelma “kills” the true source of her trauma, which psychologists would define as interpersonal. Interpersonal trauma occurs when children are directly victimized by their parents, for instance, by

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over-disciplining them “with severe forms of physical and verbal correction, while minimizing affection and warmth” (Schwerdtfeger et al. 2013, 211). Therefore, the frozen landscape could also convey the way in which Thelma had been pulled into emotional “glaciation” by her parents, a condition from which she can only find her way out by allowing herself to be consumed by the fire of passion and sexuality. In the film fire functions as the opposite emotional symbol to the landscapes dominated by water and ice, which have entrapped Thelma in her incapacitating identity crisis. Therefore, the winter imagery from the opening sequence could be seen to epitomize Thelma’s identity trauma, which she is unable to act upon until she is enflamed by her epileptic seizures, as well as by a blazing glow that appears beneath her skin as soon as her true sexual identity starts to awaken. This is accompanied by the materialization of a snake, which first appears in a dream sequence, crawling on the grass outside Thelma’s dormitory, with the camera following its movement in a ground-level shot. The snake makes its way into a room through a crack in a window and glides toward a bed in which a person is sleeping. We assume this is Thelma, but the following close-up of the snake crawling on a wrinkled neck reveals this person to be someone much older, that is: Thelma’s grandmother. The second materialization takes place at a house party, where Thelma thinks she is smoking marijuana, while in reality the cigarette is made of regular tobacco. A hallucinatory scene follows, in which Thelma observes this blazing glow appearing beneath the skin of her classmates, spreading within their bodies like a drug invading their bloodstream. Within this hallucination, Thelma imagines a sexual encounter between herself and Anja, during which the snake appears from behind her shoulder and wraps itself around her neck like a multistrand living choker. The hallucination ends with an overhead shot of the snake penetrating Thelma’s body through her mouth, which is illustrative of Roland Barthes’ “punctum” (Barthes 1981, 40), a distressing element in the image that pierces not only the title character but also the spectator. A snake is an obvious biblical symbol of sin, the animal which tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden to convince Adam to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. At the same time a snake is also the symbol of healing and transformation, which is why its appearance embodies the identity crisis Thelma is thrown into. Panopticism As the above analysis demonstrates, the film is abundant with symbolic moments and allegorical segments, which provide further poignant and visceral expression of Thelma’s trauma and of its origin. One recurring element is the panoptic presence of the camera, as we notice as soon as the story starts unfolding after the title card of the film, which incidentally appears

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as “broken” just like the title character herself. First the camera floats high above a university campus before it singles out Thelma as one of the tiny figures among many others, slowly zooming in onto her, leaving the spectator with the impression that Thelma is constantly under surveillance (see also Lysne 2019). This sense of someone watching is promptly confirmed by the following scene, in which a telephone conversation reveals that Thelma’s parents are monitoring her lecture timetables (“Daddy showed me how to keep track of everything online”), among other things. The camera is there outside Thelma’s dormitory like a panoptic watchman observing an occupant without the occupant knowing whether or not they are being watched. The presence of the camera strongly suggests that the parental relationship between Thelma and especially her father is defined by Focauldian panopticism, which in turn is rooted in religious biopower governing her life and her sexuality. Furthermore, a sense of trauma emanates from the affective intentionality of the camera’s presence, originating from a conflict between Thelma’s lived bodily experience, and the religious doctrine designed to mold her into a chaste individual. Another recurring element expressing panoptic entrapment is found in the vertical lines and the confined architectural spaces, which symbolically encapsulate Thelma in the ever-present parental control. This is contrasted by extremely open spaces where she is often shot from the birds-eye perspective. For instance, there is this vertical paneling of the lecture hall, in which Thelma remains under the observing eyes of her parents even from afar. There is the low-ceilinged passageway, through which Thelma and her parents walk on their way to the underground, and which captures the oppressive mood triggered by an argument that had escalated in a previous scene during their visit to a Chinese restaurant. In a keynote scene, Anja’s mother takes the girls to see a dance performance in the famous Oslo Opera House. The narrative theme of ice is duplicated in the architectural idea of this building, which is designed to evoke the association of an iceberg emerging from the sea. Furthermore, the vertical lines which are noticeable in many scenes of the film are repeated here in the curving “wave wall” which encloses the main auditorium in the interior of the building (Anon. 2008). It is in this space that Thelma experiences her first dance performance, which is a contemporary piece entitled “Sleight of Hand,” choreographed by Sol León and Paul Lightfoot to Philip Glass music. It features two monumentally tall characters dressed in black garments resembling clerical cassocks. The two stylite figures immediately emanate a form of religious authority, not only by their costume, but also by their sheer height. Furthermore, that one of the figures is coded female and the other one male makes an association with authoritative parenting hard to avoid. At some point during the performance Anja takes Thelma’s hand and starts caressing her intimately in the darkness

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of the auditorium. As the Glass music reaches its climactic cadence onstage, Thelma starts to tremble as if in an attempt to suppress the emerging affect. The affective energy contained in her blocked emotional expression is so strong that it unfastens the large oval acoustic reflector suspended from the auditorium ceiling, which then starts swinging above her head, flashing the lights that are part of its construction. The scene with the acoustic reflector suggests that Thelma’s telekinetic gift functions as a symbol for her repressed sexual identity, which nevertheless remains stored in her sensorimotor, bodily sensations. It supports the argument for Thelma’s powers emanating from the suppressed trauma of identity that resides in her body even when her reflective consciousness attempts to deny its existence. At the same time the swinging acoustic reflector functions as what Anne Bartsch has called an “emotional-metaphorical image” (Bartsch 2010). It combines the metaphor of sexual desire as a physical force that can move large objects, with the metaphor of danger loosely suspended from the ceiling like the Sword of Damocles. Gjelsvik writes that in this scene the distinction between Thelma’s lived body and her physical surroundings is blurred, so that in the diegetic world of the film the reflector is not actually moving at all. Instead, its swinging expresses Thelma’s inner emotion, which she experiences as a threat to the balance of the self (Gjelsvik 2019, 84). The scene with the reflector thus epitomizes the central conflict of the film between the force of sexuality and the repressive/regressive counterforce of religious, traumatizing biopower as operating on Thelma’s body. Biopower and trauma are related insofar as both phenomena alter the agency and embodiment of an individual through pervasive, invisible operations in everyday life (Vermeulen 2014, 145; Ferrández San Miguel 2018, 29). The fatherly influence that shapes Thelma’s life in terms of biopower renders their relationship traumatic, until her body becomes a point of resistance. As I hope to have shown, this resistance manifests itself in psychogenic non-epileptic seizures on the one hand, and as telekinesis on the other, eventually creating for Thelma a sense of self-determining, autonomous self. While in Freudian thinking the metaphorical killing of the father is required for the formation of the subject, Julia Kristeva emphasizes the role of the mother in the individuation process, in which the maternal body is experienced as repulsive. In her famous description from The Powers of Horror, the milk offered by a mother becomes abject, marking a moment when a child begins to recognize a boundary between “me” and “(m)other,” providing the child with an initial sense of its own boundaries: Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection. When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk I experience a gagging sensation and spasms in the stomach. Nausea makes me balk

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at that milk cream, separates me from the mother who proffers it. But since the food is not an “other” for “me” I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself. During that course in which “I” become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit. (Kristeva 1982, 3)

Such a moment of abjection is present in Thelma when the title character, after the scene of induced epilepsy, drinks milk and starts nose bleeding into the beverage. Horrified, she drops the glass onto the ground while the film cuts into a close-up of her blood slowly staining the white substance with red threads. It is an image which evokes an immediate effect of disgust, thereby inviting a Kristevan interpretation of the film. Whereas Thelma’s father can be seen as representing an ever-pervasive controlling presence in her life, her mother could be interpreted as a life-threatening agent despite her apparent disability. In fact, toward the end of the film there is the suggestion that the mother wants Thelma dead, out of revenge for her son’s death, and that she is manipulating her husband into committing the filicide by appealing to some twisted Christian logic (“We are being tested”). However, again the scene is framed in a narratologically ambiguous fashion, so that we cannot know with certainty whether her words were ever uttered in the first place, or whether the exchange between Thelma’s parents is a trap for the mind, a moment of unreliable narration. Therefore the threat by the mother might best be understood symbolically, not as a literal threat motivated by revenge. It could also be said that, like Georgina in Get Out, Thelma’s mother displays features of the “monstrous feminine” described by Barbara Creed in her Kristeva-inspired analysis of horror film, who “threatens to re-absorb the child she once nurtured” (Creed 1993, 65). In addition, while being overprotective toward her daughter, Thelma’s mother also demonstrates “bad motherhood,” which manifests itself as rejection of the traditional expectations of devotion to one’s children, disguised as obsession with their welfare. According to Molly Haskell, such maternal ambivalence “is a maneuver for circumventing the sacred taboo [. . .] for the deep, inadmissible feelings of not wanting children, or not wanting them unreservedly, in the first place” (Haskell 1974, 170). In the flashback sequences it is clear that the mother’s affection is with her (imaginary?) son, while her daughter is rejected. In one scene the mother observes Thelma through a window. The shot is strangely blurry and diplopic, demonstrating perhaps the blurriness of Thelma’s drugged mind. But the blurry double vision could also be seen as an expression of her mother’s double intentionality: one tending toward affection, the other toward hatred. Nevertheless, apart from the thematic importance of the troubled mother-daughter relationship in Thelma, the mother does not seem a significant narrative agent in the film. Instead, her motherly hatred is indirectly

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presented in the film, in the form of symbols such as the birds that attack as soon as Thelma’s sexual identity starts to awaken. This happens for the first time in the scene where Thelma is studying in the library and Anja comes in, taking a seat next to her. The scene cuts to an aerial exterior shot of the building, while an ambient industrial sound mixed with distant caws of crows starts off on the sound track. The shot resembles the birds-eye perspective in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) looking down on Bodega Bay, a stance we are invited to occupy before we observe the seagulls circling above the bay preparing their attack. The scene cuts back to the interior of the library, with the camera slowly zooming in toward a large window, against which a crow promptly crashes with a loud bang. Next we see a close-up of Thelma’s hand trembling while we hear her ostentatious, heavy breathing, before she collapses onto the floor in the throes of an epileptic attack. The camera crosscuts to the exterior view of the building, with the birds violently flying against the window, which once more drives home the association with The Birds. Slavoj Zizek has famously interpreted the attack of the birds in Hitchcock’s films as a physical manifestation of Oedipal guilt, representing maternal power in a situation where the male protagonist is torn between his love interest Melanie Daniels and his possessive mother (Zizek 2000, 104). In an alternative reading, Susan Smith argues that in the bird attack scenes Melanie is in fact under attack of her own emotions, rather than of any external force (Smith 2000, 139). Similarly, in Thelma the title character is clearly under attack of her own feelings of guilt, fear, and confusion about her burgeoning emotions toward Anja. At the same time the birds can be associated with motherly obsession and hatred. This is manifest in the deadly ambivalence which lies at the heart of Thelma’s trauma, in which two contradictory intentionalities meet: destruction and protection. This contradiction is captured in the image of the birds attacking (destruction), and the window stopping the attack (protection). Therefore, the birds appear simultaneously as a form of motherly protection “safeguarding” Thelma from her own sexuality, and as motherly hostility expressing desire to get rid of her. The claim that the birds symbolically represent Thelma’s mother finds support in the fantasy scene at the end of the film after the metaphorical killing of her father. In this scene Thelma walks to a shore and straight into the water in her white nightgown, as if she were performing a self-baptism ritual of sorts. She dives deep into the water, only to emerge in the swimming pool from a previous scene, where Anja is waiting for her. As they kiss, the birds start gathering outside the natatorium window, but before they smash against it the film cuts abruptly to a shot of Thelma lying on the shoreline, gasping for air. As she then reaches in the direction of the woods, Thelma throws up a small crow, which stays lifeless next to her as she turns on her back to stare at the sky. The scene is a Kristevan moment, in which Thelma throws

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up her mother to give birth to herself. A close-up of a caterpillar, the symbol of rebirth and transformation, reinforces this association. Thelma remains lying on the ground while the camera performs a cosmic zoom into a dresser, in which her vibrating phone flashes Anja’s caller ID. The sequence ends with a birds-eye view of Thelma and the crow flying away, resurrected. The resurrection of the crow could be seen as a moment of reconciliation, which for Thelma seems a necessary move in overcoming parental trauma. This is why she uses her powers to liberate her mother from the wheelchair she has been confined to—or was her disability a symbolic symptom for her crippled motherhood in the first place? The film’s end is similar to its beginning, with an aerial closing image shot from above the university campus. But instead of closing in on Thelma, the camera now zooms away from her, as if allowing her to become a character in her own right, free to love authentically beyond the parameters of parental control.

Chapter 3

Victims and Villains Traumatic Grief and the Roads of Payback

THE SKIN I LIVE IN; THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI; INCENDIES The three films discussed in this chapter—Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In; Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; and Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies—all convey traumatic pain brought about by the loss of a loved one, and even the loss of oneself. The films are therefore best characterized as grief-stricken in their affective orientation. Martha Nussbaum has defined grief as repeatedly experienced affective frustration, thoroughly intertwined with the grieving person’s bodily and cognitive fabric through rapid feelings of pain and tumult “colored by the kinetic properties of the bloodstream” (Nussbaum 2001, 45). Denise Riley writes that grief is experienced as “freezing of time” functioning to “erect a shield against the reality of death” (Riley 2012, 1–2) To her grief is a feeling of being cut off from the flow of time, resulting from an act of dissociation that shields one from the reality of the death of a loved one. And Laura Tanner speaks of grief as entrapment in the urgent bodily experience of pain on the one hand, and a sense of bodily separation from the world in which one is located on the other. As one simultaneously lacks the agency to participate in this same world, she calls this experience “intimate detachment” (Tanner 2007, 243). Grief involves knowing and not knowing that the loved one is dead, a sense of sameness with and separation from. This is why grief enhanced by traumatic feelings can become pathological, in an irrational attempt to “restore” the lost person or object. This chapter analyses such paradoxes of traumatic grief and how they are embedded in the aesthetic organization of all three films, providing an affective quality that 51

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embraces the spectator directly. I start with The Skin I Live In as an example of traumatic embodiment, in which the traumatized “dual-character” Vera/ Vicente suffers from affective detachment or a lack of connection between the lived experience and the sense of self. Vera/Vicente is a victim of forced mutilation/depersonalization, suffering from a sense of being disconnected from their own body, even though this experience does not prevent Vera/Vicente from recalling their trauma. In my analysis I argue that the film encompasses a traumatic conflict between artistic creation as a path to recovery on the one hand, and an act of revenge as a destructive path that leaves Vera/Vicente’s trauma intact on the other. A similar conflict can be found both in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and in Incendies. In both films the main characters mistakenly think that revenge somehow would restore the trauma caused by the violent death or disappearance of their children. All three films discussed in this chapter involve a wish for revenge which Nussbaum calls the road of payback. This consists of an (irrational) belief that the wrongdoer’s suffering would bring back the (dead) victim of the original injury, cancel out the traumatic pain, and restore the “cosmic balance” that was damaged by wrongdoing (Nussbaum 2016, 5). In all three films the element of fire plays an important role as the ignitor of trauma or the instigator of revengeful desire, which turns out to be a failed strategy to cope with the traumatic event. Only in Incendies water features as a counter-element to soothe trauma as well. Thus, while neither in The Skin I Live In nor in Three Billboards the act of revenge removes or constructively addresses the protagonists’ trauma, in Incendies there is a search for acknowledgment insisting on truth. Consequently, it is only in this film that a closure of sorts is achieved, while the wrongful act is not forgotten, nor the trauma completely wiped away. The Skin I Live In The title of Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In clearly communicates what the film is all about: the body as a prison with the skin as a barrier. This is already evident from the opening shots of the film, when the image of the locked gate of El Cigarral, an isolated Toledo villa, dissolves into the image of a barred window. Behind this window a woman in a nude-colored bodysuit is practicing yoga. This woman is Vera, a mysterious patient of Robert Ledgar, a brilliant plastic surgeon haunted by past tragedies. Later we will discover that Vera used to be a man by the name of Vicente, who was abducted by Robert after his involvement in a fateful event at a wedding party that triggered his daughter Norma’s final mental breakdown and her subsequent suicide. After a period of imprisonment in a filthy cellar, Vicente

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is forced to undergo sex-change surgery and he resurrects in the shape of Robert’s deceased wife Gal. Robert gives Vicente a new first name, Vera, meaning “the true one.” In Almodóvar’s film, Vera/Vicente find themselves in between the urgent experience of traumatic embodiment and the strategic negotiation of their absence from the world. As “Vera,” Vicente is forced to live in the world he cannot fully inhabit—hence the “skin” he “lives in”—while as “Vincente” Vera’s lived experience is characterized by affective detachment or depersonalization. In this situation the connection between the self who is experiencing and the self who is reflecting on their experience is lost. In other words, affective detachment is the subjective experience of losing the connection both to one’s lived body, and to one’s sense of self, as a consequence of trauma (Milchman 2012, 63). The Skin I Live In localizes Vera/Vicente’s traumatic struggle with the loss of self in the act of artistic creation on the one hand, and in the act of revenge on the other. This struggle traps the dual-protagonist within a conflict between healing and the inability to recuperate. In the film, art becomes the method and the medium to salvage what matters to Vera/Vicente: the sense of self in the face of loss of self. The Skin I Live In communicates a vision of embodied artistic practice as a redemptive strategy, used to resolve trauma in a way that expresses fractured, affectively detached inner reality and also purges it from negative emotion. This results in the artist potentially overcoming trauma, reinventing the sense of self, and reclaiming personal agency. This strategy is opposed by the act of revenge, which threatens and even cancels out Vera/Vicente’s recovery from trauma. I argue that the ending of Almodóvar’s film encompasses a narrative conflict between Vera/Vicente seeking both a path of recovery and a way of making their offender suffer, a conflict which leaves Vera/Vicente’s trauma intact. It could be argued that the revenge committed by Vera/Vicente retraumatizes the character, making it impossible for Vera/Vicente to move into the future beyond trauma. Affective Detachments The Skin I Live In is best understood as a psychological revenge thriller, in which Antonio Banderas’ Robert is driven by a pathological obsession, arising from his traumatic grief about the loss of loved ones, which develops into a desire for revenge. This desire finds its expression in an extremely violent variety of male gaze (Mulvey 1975). Robert is no longer satisfied by subjugating women as fetishized objects-to-be-looked-at, but he sadistically shapes them both as scientific projects and as works of art for his viewing pleasure (Barker 2020, 307). In the beginning of the film Vera is frequently seen on a huge screen in Robert’s bedroom in a frontal, posterior pose that

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draws a parallel to paintings such as Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” (1538), which have put women in the role of objects for male gaze (Berger 1972, 45). This screen dominates the mise-en-scene of the film, especially in one scene where Robert lies down in front of it, diagonally opposite to Vera as it were: the artist as a male subject while admiring his creation, the female object. This representation of the female creation as object of look, and the male creator as subject of look, is a central conflict in the first part of the film. We often witness Robert cultivating his invention of artificial skin, which he has created by combining the genetic material of a pig with that of a human being. In The Skin I Live In, the manufacturing of skin is a form of art, and plastic surgery is equivalent to artistic expression. After creating a new patch of skin, Robert is seen from a bird’s-eye perspective, while tightly fitting a piece of this skin on a mannequin, molded to look exactly like his deceased wife. Immediately afterward he uses the same piece to form a new layer of skin on Vera’s neck. At this point the film deliberately offers no narrative backstory for the events onscreen and we are led to believe that Vera is a creature Robert has fabricated from scratch, a living work of art or a transgenic masterpiece. The film’s meticulous attention to the scientific details of the skin-manufacturing process also reinforces this false belief: as Vera murmurs to Robert in one early scene: “I’m yours . . . I’m made to measure for you.” Yet this ambiguity disappears as soon as the central mystery (that Vera is Vicente) starts to unfold at the 43-minute mark when the narration shifts from present to past, to the events that took place six years before. The flashback is realized as a double dream sequence. Opening with a shot of Robert and Vera sleeping in the same bed, the camera descends vertically from directly above Robert, and then dissolves into a close-up of the bell of a saxophone, playing Sidney Bechet’s “Petite Fleur” at what is later revealed as a fateful wedding party. The sequence ends abruptly with Robert waking up from his nightmare in the present. The camera then moves to a close-up of Vera’s face, with the right side illuminated and the left side in shadow, leaving us with the suggestion that her sense of self is divided into a past and a present identity. This dissolves into a shot of Vicente busy in the vintage store he runs with his mother, after which past events start to unfold from his perspective. The sequence ends with a shot that is a kind of superimposed split screen, in which Vera in the present is shown on the left of the frame while Vicente, in the past, faces her on the right side. This image conveys the impression that Vicente and Vera are one and the same person. There is a reference to one of Vera’s own drawings that shows a head with two profiles facing in opposite directions, divided in the middle by a female figure. Evoking the head of Janus, the Roman God of transitions, in this drawing one face is looking into the past (Vicente) and another into the future (Vera) and thus it communicates Vera/Vicente’s traumatic identity crisis.

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This traumatic identity crisis is part of an artistic process, which integrates the forced gender transformation and the resulting work of art, enabling Vera/Vicente to respond to their trauma and to mitigate its effects. This is triggered by Robert sending them makeup products. Vera/Vicente refuses to accept them, apart from lipstick and an eye pencil. In some feminist discourse, makeup is considered an enforced adorning regime for the female body, reflecting prevailing ideals of femininity. However, instead of using these products to augment their female sexual desirability, Vera/Vicente use them for wall writings, drawing tally marks to count the days of their solitary confinement. As soon as Vera/Vicente learn from housekeeper Marilia what the current day and year is, they start writing down the actual dates, from the day that Vicente was abducted by Robert. During the course of their imprisonment, Vera/Vicente do not only fill the wall with date marks, but also with sentences such as “El opio me ayuda a olvidar. Respiro. Respiro. Respiro. Sé que respiro” (“Opium helps me to forget. Breath. Breath. Breath. I know how to breathe”). In addition, Vera/Vicente execute drawings of yoga poses, and surrealist drawings that depict female bodies and torsos, standing or lying down with their heads entrapped in small houses. These deliberate references to Louise Bourgeois’ work, most notably her sculpture Femme Maison (1994), invoke the traditional, Platonic metaphor of body as a prison-house, a hollow, evil, vessel-like space that encloses the soul. This metaphor is especially well placed, if we consider Vera/Vicente’s experiencing of skin as something alien, an impermeable boundary between the self and the world— a skin to “live in.” Michel Serres argues that skin is the milieu in and through which the self and the world commingle, and without which “we would live without consciousness.” In Almodóvar’s film, Vera/Vicente’s skin has lost its function as the milieu of “mixed contingency” with the world, and has become the location of trauma instead, which has thrown Vera/Vicente into a “slippery smooth” existence, as Serres calls it, “on the point of fading away” (Serres 2008, 22, 28). In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva stresses the importance of skin and the role of the mother in establishing a boundary of self for an infant through constant caressing and touching. Through tactile contact, it is the mother who presents a skin to the child. In The Skin I Live In Vera/Vicente’s skin does not “belong” to themselves but to Robert, and it imprisons Vera/Vicente inside their own body. Extraordinarily strong, the artificial skin Robert has created is resistant to extreme heat and insect bites, but lacks sensitivity as regards tactile contact and sensory perception. At first, Vera/Vicente does not even seem to feel the heat of the flame that Robert uses to “caress” their skin. This leads Rob White and Paul Julian Smith to conclude that the film is all about desensitization, disaffection, and a deficit of feeling, and ultimately as “surgically chilly” as its protagonist, Robert (White

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and Smith 2011). Certainly, it is disaffection that compels Vera/Vicente to mutilate themselves, using the sharp edges of the dust jackets of the Cormac McCarthy books (The Orchard Keeper and Blood Meridian) that lie scattered, blood-stained, all around their prison room. Vera/Vicente’s lack of cutaneous sensation signifies their affective detachment from the world, as they have become an object—Robert’s creation. Vera/Vicente’s self-mutilation can be seen as an attempt to get under the artificial skin, to feel something, and to be again “the feeling subject, a subject always active beneath the surface” (Serres 2008, 30). Vera/Vicente’s nude-colored bodysuit, functioning as a “second skin,” imprisons them further within their own body, while closing them off from tactile contact with the world. While Cathy Caruth argues that trauma is characterized by “overwhelming immediacy” (Caruth 1995, 6), it would seem that Vera/Vicente’s trauma emerges as a feeling of detachment from the sense of self, enclosed within a “protective” shell. Clothing is often understood as our second skin, defining our gendered identity. As Kaja Silverman argues: “Dress is one of the most important cultural implements for articulating and territorializing human corporeality—for mapping its erotogenic zones and for affixing a sexual identity” (Silverman 1986, 146). After the forced sex-change surgery, Robert provides Vera/ Vicente with a number of feminine dresses precisely for this purpose. But Vera/Vicente destroy the dresses, aggressively protesting the enforced sexual identity. Later Vera/Vicente use the dresses as artwork material, and it is at this point in the film that a different concept of dress as a second skin starts to develop. In this respect it is significant that in his previous life Vicente used to be a tailor: this knowledge enhances our understanding of how the film finally aims at dissolving the dualism between Vera/Vicente as a creation and Robert as their creator. As Marilia (Robert’s biological mother) observes, Robert tailors women, molding them into his ideal of a perfect female and into the image of his deceased wife Gal. By contrast, Vera/Vicente tailor themselves, using art in an attempt to rid themselves of the membranous identity fashioned by Robert. As Paul Julian Smith, in his discussion with Rob White points out, this “therapeutic suture” is simultaneously an act of deconstruction and reconstruction of identity (White and Smith 2011). The idea of therapeutic suture seems particularly apt in the context of Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud’s discussion of trauma, defined as “a foreign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still at work” (Breuer and Freud 1955, 6). Robert’s artificial skin can literally be seen as a foreign body, a formative agent of trauma, constantly keeping Vera/Vicente in its grip. Emanating Sara Ahmed (2004) one could say that trauma sticks in the subject like the artificial skin sticks onto the body of Vera/Vicente, while desensitizing them to sensory experience received of the world.

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Art as a Guaranty of Sanity The Skin I Live In frequently invokes historical art references to help delineate its themes. There is, for example, an interesting parallel between Vera/ Vicente’s artwork and that of the Italian artist Alba d’Urbano, for whom skin is of primary concern. In her 1994 work Hautnah (“skintight”) she traced the form of her body digitally, and then rendered it into a dress-pattern. From this she made a suit that could potentially be worn by others, and which, incidentally, strongly resembles the actual bodysuit worn by Vera/Vicente in Almodovár’s film. For D’Urbano the skin becomes “a site of convergence between inner consciousness and outer reality . . . the imaginary activity of abandoning one’s own skin or putting on somebody else’s” (Wegenstein 2010, 31). The imaginary activity of abandoning one’s skin is of primary importance in Vera/Vicente’s artwork. In one scene it is significant that Vera/ Vicente first put on a shredded dress before proceeding to use a nail file to rip it further. Vera/Vicente’s tearing of the dress while wearing it, might be seen as an act of metaphorical self-mutilation. Almodóvar gives us a close-up of Vera/Vicente’s hands as they cut the fabric, which, with its nude tones, is exactly the same color as their second skin bodysuit, thus evoking the sensation that Vera/Vicente cut their own skin. Importantly, this self-mutilation functions as a source of creativity and not as a (futile) attempt to restore a sense of self. By shedding their second skin in the form of ripped dresses, Vera/Vicente find a way to abandon the outer reality forced upon them, and to give expression to their traumatic inner reality. These themes are reflected in Vera/Vicente’s other artwork. Interestingly, one of their sculptures portrays a head that is covered in bandages, such as would be applied after serious head injury, while another clearly resembles the agonized figure in Edward Munch’s The Scream (1893–1910). Both evoke pain and (inner) suffering, externalized by the symbolic shedding of skin, which could therefore be considered cathartic, purging the negative affect residing under Vera/Vicente’s skin. Silvan Tomkins writes in the same vein, that affect resides in the skin, being mediated by specific sensory receptors all over the body. The skin does not merely express affect “closed off” inside but instead, “leads rather than follows” the affective movement of which it is an extension: “The skin is not simply an ‘expression’ of internal dynamics, nor is it limited in its motivational properties to the affect system. [Affects] all compel and persuade powerfully via stimulation of skin receptors, with or without benefit of further imagery or cognition” (Tomkins 1995, 42). In contrast to this idea of affect residing in the skin, the flawless and extremely strong artificial skin that Robert invents and brand-names Gal, seems designed to confine affect inside Vera/Vicente’s body. Nevertheless, in a procedure similar to Robert’s coating artificial skin onto their body, Vera/

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Vicente are able to shred their symbolic dress-skin, fitting pieces of it onto their plasticine sculptures. By this act of defiance Vera/Vicente are able to externalize the agony residing under their skin, purging their traumatic inner reality from negative affect. In his book Art and Embodiment: From Aesthetics to Self-Consciousness (1993), Paul Crowther argues that the essence of art is the conservation and expression of embodied human experience. In The Skin I Live In, Vera/ Vicente’s lived trauma is expressed in the recurring images, words, and sentences that Vera/Vicente scribble on the wall. This makes the psychological effect of their solitary confinement tangible for the spectator. Vera/Vicente’s monotonous daily routine is analogous to the regularity of their breathing, and it is as if Vera/Vicente consciously need to remind themselves to breathe (“sé que respiro”). Davina Quinlivan has argued that while filmic images of blood, viscera, and damaged skin carry the significance of traumatized human body, breathing in cinema can also visualize trauma through an (im)material, (in)visible mode of perception (Quinlivan 2012, 3). Vera/Vicente’s breathing expresses trauma in their (un)lived body, but in such a way that breathing becomes an agent of healing. Or better, Vera/Vicente’s breathing constitutes a healing body through its (im)materiality, resonating from within and from without the body, through which a sense of embodied self can emerge.   After having been released by Robert, Vera/Vicente enter their room and stop to observe the scribbled wall, especially one sentence that stands out from all the other sentences because of its size. It proclaims “El arte es garantía de salud” (“Art is a guaranty of sanity”), a motto that encapsulates the vision on the function of art in the film. Art is a guaranty of sanity insofar as it becomes an outward projection of negative affect, enabling the enactment and working through of traumatic experience (Bennett 2004, 67). Vera/Vicente’s wall art is executed out of the need to document experience and self-exploration, which is a fundamental factor in the artistic motivation of many artists, including Louise Bourgeois, whose art is prominently featured in The Skin I Live In. Indeed Bourgeois uses the sentence “Art is a guaranty of sanity” in one of her most famous installations, “Precious Liquids” (1992), in which the visitor is invited to enter a wooden chamber that contains bottles filled with bodily “precious liquids” (blood, milk, sperm, and tears). In The Skin I Live In, Bourgeois’ fabric sculptures, made from the artist’s undergarments, become the most important source of inspiration for Vera/Vicente’s artwork. Their works of art, also made from clothing, share significant parallels with Bourgeois’ fabric sculptures and express both their experience of living in an “alien skin” and the gender identity that Vera/Vicente is “dressed in.” Almodóvar is clear about the convergence between Bourgeois and Vera/ Vicente’s work in a sequence in which Vera/Vicente watch snippets from the

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documentary Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine (Cajori and Wallach, 2008‌‌‌‌). This documentary displays Bourgeois’ sculptures, which seem to embrace each other, in detail. The camera lingers especially on the unique seams of these sculptures, which are visually associated with Vera/Vicente’s own seams/scars. Like Bourgeois’ sculptures, Vera/ Vicente’s skin looks as though it has been assembled from pieces of fabric, their body a patchwork in which different sections are simultaneously united and divided by scars. Patchwork is also the method by which Vera/Vicente finish off their plasticine sculptures. In the opening sequence we see Vera/ Vicente cutting through thin, skin-colored fabric by means of a nail file, which causes a pronounced shredding sound. This fabric symbolizes Vera/ Vicente’s own skin as the traumatic locus of affective detachment from a sense of self, as expressed by their artificial skin and their bodysuit. At the same time, the fabric functions as a medium for reinventing the self, and as a path toward recovery from trauma. By using fabric as symbolic skin material for their artwork, Vera/Vicente are able to externalize their inner suffering, which correlates with the concept of art as a guaranty of sanity, the reclaim of agency and their sense of self. And for Crowther this is precisely the function of art. He argues that the artistic process involves a “symbolically significant sensuous manifold,” an inherent relation between the artist’s existence and the resulting work of art (Crowther 1993, 4). This relationship is born out of our fundamental need for recognition from outside ourselves: acts of “self-externalization,” such as producing works of art, help one “to ascribe experiences to oneself” (Crowther 1993, 150), a process, which is blocked for a trauma victim. Art significantly satisfies the need of an individual “to be at home with himself or herself” (Crowther 1993, 7) insofar as it embodies the ontologically reciprocal relations between the subject and the world: “The artwork . . . reflects our mode of embodied inherence in the world, and by clarifying this inherence it brings about a harmony between the subject and object of experience” (Crowther 1993, 7). In The Skin I Live In, Vera/Vicente’s embodied experience involves their affective detachment from their own sense of self—the feeling of being literally torn apart and then stitched back together. Vera/Vicente’s works of art bear physical witness to their carnal familiarity with feeling like a “ragdoll,” being sewn up by Robert from pieces of artificial skin. But while Robert exercises power over Vera/Vicente by re-sculpting their muscles and remolding their body parts, Vera/Vicente are able to empower themselves, at least to some extent, by reproducing the plastic surgery process in their plasticine art. If artistic creativity is understood as constructing something that expresses certain aspects of the artist’s lived experience, then creativity and agency must necessarily be overlapping notions. By depicting Vera/Vicente explicitly

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reconstructing their existential, traumatic pain in their ragdoll art, The Skin I Live In offers a vision of creativity as an embodied, agential practice with redemptive, healing potentiality. As Vera/Vicente watch Cajori and Wallach’s documentary on Bourgeois’ art, one piece astonishes them. “Untitled” (2001) represents a figure with an ambiguous gender identity that, when viewed from different angles, appears to be either a lying, corpulent female torso with legs spread apart, revealing an opening as if giving birth, or else a huge penis. Similarly, Vera/Vicente’s sculptures are either androgynous, with deep holes instead of eyes, or feminine and masculine at the same time: one object seems to represent the upper part of a female figure with breasts, a long neck and an oblong head, but its form might equally be seen to resemble a phallus. In “Seven in Bed” Bourgeois represents a child’s imagination of the Freudian primal scene that is based on her own traumatic family history. Assembled from pieces of knitted pink fabric and consisting of seven bodies (some of them Janus-faced) entangled in an orgiastic embrace in bed, the artwork is at once erotically charged and disturbing, ever maintaining a sense of distance between the spectator and the trauma embodied in it. It is this piece that clearly inspires Vera/Vicente to construct a bust of a three-headed figure—in which two heads passionately kiss—an artwork that may be considered a symbolic reference to the traumatic triangular relationship between Robert, Vera, and Vicente. The kiss itself anticipates a gesture at the end of the film, when Vera/ Vicente kiss an old photo of Vicente and, in doing so, attempt to dissociate themselves from the traumatic identity fastened onto them by their “creator.” According to Crowther, in creating an artwork artists engage with their own embodied experience of a creative idea, which basically is an internal process grounded in the medium, i.e., paint, clay, stone, etc. In acts of artistic creation, handling the medium anchors the artist’s inherent involvement with the creative idea, informed by past experiences. This is why artwork is an embodiment of human experience, and the actual, physical work that remains is: discontinuous with the artist’s actual bodily states, and yet . . . preserves both his or her style of experiencing the subject or idea, and implicitly, all the experience which informed the creation of the work. It is experience become concrete, and intersubjectively accessible. It is a microcosm of the artist’s own being. (Crowther 1993, 46)

In The Skin I Live In, Vera/Vicente’s artwork both embodies and expresses their trauma, while performing the healing function of the creative process. In general, to be a person is to ascribe experiences to oneself, but in trauma this process is blocked. Referring to the work of Pierre Janet, Jill Bennett

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explains that experiences are normally processed through cognitive schemata that enable them to be identified, interpreted, and given a narrative and/or semantic meaning. Traumatic experiences, however, resist such processing, while the victims yearn to find some meaning in the trauma (Bennett 2004, 23). Since trauma remains stored in somatic memory as imagery, creating art can provide a means to overcome it. According to Valerie Appleton, artistic creation engages the trauma victim in sensory, affective, and cognitive novelty, rather than traumatic repetition. Therefore it can lead to a sense of catharsis. She writes that the artistic process “has the effect of bringing into manageable form those otherwise overwhelming experiences” and through the creation of art “mastery is achieved when conflict is re-experienced, resolved, and integrated” (Appleton 2001, 9). For Griselda Pollock, because trauma lacks intelligibility and meaning, a memory of the event that triggered it has to be created: The art work’s otherness . . . its function simultaneously as labored and thus externalized projection of some inner compulsion of the subject who produces it. . . . These recalcitrant materials . . . coming into art necessitates the very invention of forms, materials, texts, sites, in which the traumatic offence . . . could become memory, could find some manageable relief. Being now a memory, however, these materials are no less painful; they have become simply less unmastered and predetermined. (Pollock 1999, 90)

In Almodóvar’s film Vera/Vicente’s art is an attempt to resolve the trauma of altered physical appearance, distorted social identity, and affective detachment from the sense of self, the struggle with the chasm between how Vera looks and who Vicente is. Vera/Vicente’s figurines represent symbols of the self, expressing the struggles of their identity crisis and attempts to emerge out of the chaos of their traumatic experience. Vera/Vicente frequently revisit the original event of forced transgender surgery, and it seems no coincidence that plasticine is their favorite choice of material, as the word’s meaning is associated with plastic surgery. As such it cements Vera/Vicente, a creation of art, to Robert’s own artistic creation. The closing credits of the film run on top of a black screen showing a rotating double helix made of chains, which continually changes color as the direction of its rotation slows down, speeds up, stretches and shrinks. This double helix expresses the defining sensibility and inner dynamics of the film, providing us with insight into the complex relations between the work of art and the identity of its creator. The final image, then, is an apt metaphor for a film that conveys an entangled understanding of the artist and the work of art, presented to the spectators in a form that truly gets under their skin.

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Alienation of the Self Vera/Vicente’s psychic trauma and the horror of sensory unresponsiveness that is the result of the artificial skin are mirrored in the case of Gal, the ghost from Robert’s past. Thus, even though the death of his daughter was the trigger that impelled Robert to perform transgender surgery on Vicente, the person he inadvertently resurrects is not Norma but Gal. Many years before, Gal ran away with Robert’s half-brother Zeca, but when their car crashed and burst into flames, she was left for dead and badly burnt, her skin virtually non-existent. Her epidermal sensations profoundly reduced, she is condemned to a deathly existence, unable to move, to remember, or to communicate verbally, wrapped tightly in bandages, entirely dependent on her husband. For Gal, the loss of skin is essentially a loss of agency, and her failure to recognize herself in her own reflection generates an identity crisis, which is so severe that she is driven to suicide. In Lacanian thinking, it is famously the mirror that creates a sense of ego for an infant, though this is simultaneously a misrecognition, the ego always being a mediated image that is already alienated from the self. In Gal’s case, her whole self becomes unrecognizable, her internal self-image forever unmatchable with its mirror image—a traumatic situation she finds unbearable to the point of self-destruction. There is a congruity between Gal’s fate and Vicente/Vera’s physical situation in The Skin I Live In. In a telling scene, Vicente stands in front of the mirror after his vaginoplasty. In the first shot he is shown standing on a chair in order to see his genitalia in a small round mirror. We then see the mirror in medium shot, showing a reflection of Vicente’s torso, but with his head “cut off” by its edges (figure 3.1). Finally, we get a medium close-up of Vicente’s face. The montage effect used here suggests that Vicente’s mirror image and his self-image are permanently alienated and, as with Gal before her suicide, this lack of recognition of the self triggers an identity crisis. The scene in which Vera/Vicente glimpse an image of themselves as Vicente also refers to this crisis. The image is a blurry photograph in a newspaper left behind on a table by Robert’s colleague. First Vera/Vicente stare at the photo intensely, then bend down to kiss it, and finally Vera/Vicente caress the photo with their fingertips. It is as if touch, rather than vision, re-evokes the identity crisis that Vera/Vicente previously appeared to have come to terms with. This moment of tactile perception is connected to the creative possibility of touch by which Vera/Vicente produce their sculptures. One could argue that in the film Vera’s “female” creativity is used to facilitate the restoration of Vicente’s “male” identity, which leads up to Vera/Vicente’s ultimate act of agency: their killing of Robert and Marilia with no ethical contemplation whatsoever. However, this interpretation would seem to reinforce a reading of gender based on

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Figure 3.1.  The Skin I Live In: Identity crisis reflected in the mirror.

binary opposition, indicating an unsolvable disparity between the presentation of a female body and the reiteration of male core identity. The final shot of the film shows “Vera” uttering the line “I am Vicente,” after which the image slowly fades to black. The ending indicates that even though Vera/Vicente are one individual, there is a crucial difference between the person of Vicente and who he appears to be as the persona Vera. For spectators too it is very difficult to see the two as one character, even after we have learned about Vera/Vicente’s past. Furthermore, the discrepancy between Vera and Vicente, confirmed by the final line of the film, suggests that the road of payback had canceled out the path for recovery. The ending demonstrates that Vera/Vicente made a mistake, thinking that the killing of Robert and Marilia somehow would restore their trauma and the sense of self that was damaged. Even better, the abrupt ending suggests that Vera/ Vicente’s reinvention of the self is deeply threatened by the act of revenge, partly because it is impossible to imagine what their ensuing actions will be. In a sense, Almodóvar’s ending refuses to be an ending, as the spectators are left doubting the extent to which Vera/Vicente, after having taken back their freedom, are truly free to determine their actions of their own accord. We are not granted the narrative expectation, or even hope that things will go well for Vera/Vicente after the film has finished, as Robert and Marilia’s death does not balance the horrible act they have committed. By contrast, the ending conveys the sense of enduring trauma as a detached force, which constantly keeps shaping Vera/Vicente’s existence.

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Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, stars Frances McDormand in an Oscar-winning performance as grief-stricken Mildred Hayes, whose teenage daughter Angela was raped and murdered in an extremely cruel way by unknown perpetrators, who got away without a trace. The three billboards in the title refer to the large, abandoned signboards along the old, unused highway leading up to Mildred’s house, which she rents in order to demand publicly why the town’s police chief Willoughby has achieved nothing in the line of solving the heinous crime. Willoughby, who is suffering from terminal pancreatic cancer, will not be provoked by the billboards though, but his incompetent, openly racist deputy sheriff Dixon has strongly different feelings about the situation. The triangular relationship between Mildred, Willoughby, and Dixon means that the film, like The Skin I Live In, is best categorized as a character-driven revenge drama, in which the protagonists are consumed by their personal traumas, unable to work through their grief and anger. All three protagonists remain highly damaged characters, who are only able to exit the narrative either through suicide (Willoughby) or through an open-ended revenge mission (Mildred and Dixon), which does not really bode well for them, regardless of the rather mellow tone of the ending. In her Upheavals of Thought, Martha Nussbaum tells us that “anger is sometimes justified and right. It is an appropriate response to injustice and serious wrongdoing” (Nussbaum 2001, 394). The scene in which Mildred is interviewed by the regional television news reporters at the location of the billboards, is an example of such an appropriate response. It both acknowledges that serious wrongdoing has taken place, and addresses it in a way that combats injustice. The scene starts with an arc shot that frames Mildred within the image in such a way that two of the three billboards stay behind her in a diagonal line. Mildred stands as firmly before the camera as the billboards are founded in the ground, thus turning her into a living embodiment of the message that the billboards communicate. The billboards themselves show a bright red background with the message written in a heavy black uppercase font with an in-your-face effect. The scene is crosscut to Dixon watching the live transmission with his mother in his living room, while the diegetic, simultaneous voice-over by Mildred recounts the dreadful events of her daughter’s death in a remarkably calm and composed fashion, which ties the scenes together. The outwardly calm affective quality of Mildred’s voice-over, which is both in conflict with her inner reality and with the content of the story she is recounting, is significant in many ways. Her voice-over account leaves us only her narration to imagine what has happened at a crucial moment in the story, making her the author of the narrative in a situation she hardly

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controls. Nussbaum would call her emotion “cool anger,” which functions as “a way of regaining control or asserting dignity in a situation of helplessness” (Nussbaum 2016, 47). Thus, the saliency of Mildred’s voice-over in this scene functions as a powerful reclaiming of female voice, enunciating the traumatic story with direct effect on Dixon as well as on Willoughby, who is also watching. And lastly, her voice-over articulates moral conscience, effectively putting the blame for the unsolved crime on Willoughby and his associates, who consequently feel guilty after having been addressed by Mildred in this way. Bernard Williams has proposed that guilt is rooted in the sense of hearing, as in listening to the voice of judgment (Williams 1993, 89), which in the interview scene results in Willoughby’s being emotionally upset. This is clear from the shot following Mildred’s television interview, which shows Willoughby seeking solace with his horses, accompanied by the melancholy guitar tune that functions as a musical motif in the film, signifying loss. Affective Frustrations Mildred’s anger conveyed in the interview scene demonstrates that her emotion does not only include pain caused by serious injustice, but also a desire for the wrongdoer’s true suffering in exchange for causing it, as if the pain of the offender would somehow restore the cosmic balance in her world (Nussbaum 2016, 25). Throughout Three Billboards the focus of Mildred’s anger is on the wrongful act committed to her daughter, which is an appropriate response. But since the person who committed the crime is untraceable, the target of her anger is Willoughby and his subordinates by proxy, which makes things more complicated as regards appropriateness. Therefore, even if the focus of Mildred’s anger is both rational and appropriate, its target is irrational and inappropriate, because it is too self-contained, too much saturated by her personal trauma, and almost entirely motivated by revenge. For Nussbaum revenge is an “especially unsatisfactory, costly way to effect the punishment of offenders, one that usually simply ensures that the exchange of damages will perpetuate itself without limit” (Nussbaum 2016, 396). In Three Billboards, the whole narrative is driven by such an exchange of damages, resulting from the offended parties repeatedly seeking payback from one another. First Dixon arrests Mildred’s friend Denise for possession of two marijuana cigarettes without a possibility for bail hearing. Then Willoughby anonymously donates five thousand dollars for the purpose of keeping Mildred’s billboards up for another month, right before he commits suicide. This results in an upsurge of antagonism against her among the townspeople. Finally, Mildred launches a nightly arson attack on the police station after her billboards have been destroyed by fire, unaware of the fact that Dixon is still inside. To the melody of the traditional Celtic tune “The Last Rose

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of Summer,” sung by American soprano Renée Fleming, the darkly lit scene starts out with Dixon breaking into and entering the unoccupied station. He is in search of the letter that Willoughby wrote him as a personal suicide note, which he then finds next to Angela Hayes’ file. At the same time we witness Mildred crossing the street and entering the building opposite the station, hesitatingly preparing her Molotov cocktails. Visually the scene is dominated by crosscuts between the action in these two locations, which are simultaneously separated and connected, but it is the sound track and especially the music that makes this scene interesting. First of all, the tune—which we are already familiar with from the opening sequence of the film—seems to emerge somewhere between the diegesis and the nondiegesis. To the audience it is unclear whether Dixon is listening to the same song through his headphones, which prevents him from hearing the telephone call placed by Mildred to ensure that the building is empty of people. The high volume dominates the soundscape, thus conveying that we would not pay attention to the ringing either, were it not for the red light indicator flashing the incoming call on the telephone. Yet the same song is on the sound track in the crosscuts to Mildred, signifying that the song might have nondiegetic status after all. Secondly, in the same scene Willoughby’s voice-over narrating the contents of his suicide note is diegetically ambivalent as well, since it occurs from beyond the event of his death. Then we witness the station catching fire, which Dixon does not notice until he reaches the end of the letter simultaneously with one of Mildred’s Molotov cocktails breaking a window, which throws him back on the ground because of the impact of the explosion. The sense of urgency in this crosscut scene accompanied by the layered soundscape epitomizes the extent to which Mildred and Dixon’s personal traumas are intertwined, showing their anger and grief to be connected somehow. Willoughby’s letter has revealed to us that Dixon suffers from his own trauma. This originates from the loss of his father, which results in an unhealthy relationship with his manipulative mother, and culminates in his sensed inability to take control of his own life, his own emotions. The act of arson by which Mildred aims for the pain of the offender (the police) in order to compensate for her own pain, is hardly successful, because it is based on her obsessive fixation with the suffering of the other, which merely deepens involvement in her own ongoing, unbridled anger. Furthermore, the torched police station does not remove her suffering, but contributes to her feelings of guilt about her daughter’s death. At approximately the thirty-minute mark of the film Mildred is outside her daughter’s room. A children’s red sign on the door says “danger,” now signifying that it could be dangerous for Mildred to enter the room and be confronted by her own trauma, her own guilt. Then, without turning on the lights, she goes in

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and sits on her daughter’s bed, surrounded by rock posters, while the by now familiar melancholy guitar motif plays on the sound track. Then her daughter’s voice shouting “mom” serves as a sound bridge linking the past with the present. Next we witness a flashback scene where they are in the middle of a fight about the daughter borrowing the family car, which ends with the following upsetting exchange: Angela: I will walk! And you know what else? I hope I get raped on the way! Mildred: Yeah, well, I hope you get raped on the way too! ‌‌‌‌(Angela and Mildred in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri)

After this flashback, we gaze across Mildred’s shoulder into the room, while she is in the doorway, an image that clashes graphically with the shot just before the flashback, in which Mildred was sitting on the bed. Again, there is doubt about the diegetic status of the image: Did Mildred actually enter the room or did she only do so in her imagination? In any case, the scene is full of self-inflicted pain, which for Nussbaum is the result of guilt and anger directed at the self, the result of a wrongful event that one thinks one has caused. The flashback scene functions as the explanation for the violent quality of Mildred’s anger, suggesting that it is saturated by guilt. This means that Mildred’s desire for punishment is not only a desire for restoring cosmic balance but also for “punishment by proxy,” as if punishing the perpetrators would fulfill the punishment that Mildred feels she deserves herself. According to Nussbaum, the self-inflicted pain that accompanies anger at self is a form of payback, the intentionality of which is to cancel out the wrongful act. But this “retributive wish” does not make any sense, insofar as payback does not undo whatever wrongful damage one has caused (Nussbaum 2016, 129). In Three Billboards, Mildred’s retributive wish is not only directed at the unknown perpetrators and the inefficient police officers, but also at herself, as caused by the events that are revealed to us in the said flashback. Mildred experiences guilt for the wrongful act that has been committed by someone else and wishes for this wrongdoer’s suffering, hoping that such suffering would cancel out her own pain. In the absence of any recognizable wrongdoer, Mildred wishes for the suffering of secondary wrongdoers, which explains why she is so eager to take matters into her own hands. This does not result in redemption though, but heaps even more unproductive hostility and suffering onto herself. Mildred’s emotionally charged facial expression as she watches Dixon almost burning alive during her arson attack, testifies to a woman imprisoned within her own trauma. In addition, Dixon’s burn wounds draw a parallel between him and her daughter Angela, whose body was also burned after her ghastly rape and murder.

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Yet at a certain point in this zero-sum game of self/other-directed anger and guilt, Mildred’s desire for payback becomes a desire shared by Dixon, and the film ends with Mildred and Dixon getting into a car and heading toward Idaho, acting on their silent agreement to go and kill a suspect. This turns out to be someone passing through, whom earlier in the film we witnessed threatening Mildred in the gift shop where she works. It is the same stranger Dixon provoked into a fight in order to obtain his DNA sample, after eavesdropping on him during a sinister conversation in a saloon. The three billboards watch over them as they drive toward the rising sun behind the green hills, accompanied by a bittersweet Americana song. The mood of this ending is strangely hopeful, epitomizing comradeship between the two former enemies Mildred and Dixon, which gives new purpose to their lives. This purpose is the reason Dixon does not commit suicide in a previous scene, in which his handling of a shotgun strongly suggests such intentions. Their new purpose in life seems to express desire not only for payback, but also desire for dignified punishment of the person who has offended them. Nussbaum calls this the “road of status” as it is based on inappropriate and narcissistic desire for dignified punishment. Mildred and Dixon’s mission to kill a conceivable, but impossible killer is not intended to undo their shared pain, but to take away the dignity of the offender in order to boost their own. For what had happened to Mildred in the gift shop and to Dixon in the saloon scene is not merely psychological and physical violence, but constitutes violation of their own dignity as well. The way in which the offender is framed in low angle both when threatening Mildred and assaulting Dixon, conveys the sense of humiliation that is inherent to both scenes. Thus, the revenge pact that Mildred and Dixon agree on at the end of Three Billboards can be seen as triggered by status-focused anger that follows injured self-esteem, and as motivated by an attempt to retrieve personal dignity, which would heal the traumatized self. Agentive Fallacy Similarly to the final scenes of The Skin I Live In, the ending of Three Billboards deliberately fails to be an ending proper, since it leaves the spectator without any narrative resolution. As with Vera/Vicente in Almodóvar’s film, it is impossible to ascertain what will happen to Mildred and Dixon, while both remain angry and morally confused. We are left to hope that things will go well for both of them, but this is a form of hope against hope, since hardly any aesthetic elements throughout the film are oriented toward a “happy end.” In this context Yvette Bíro argues that the ending of a film often “has the charge to sum up the whole” (Bíro 2008, 204). The final scenes of Three Billboards purposely seem to refuse any summing up of previous

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elements of the film, thereby resisting any possibility of narrative or emotional closure. Mildred and Dixon’s revenge pact is nothing more than what Nouri Gana calls “agentive fallacy” (Gana 2013, 84), disguised as a fantasy of mastery of their trauma, while in reality they both remain victims of traumatic events, not agents of their fate. While the ending of Three Billboards implies agentive fallacy instead of mastery, already the opening of the film is interesting in this respect as well. Accompanied by “The Last Rose of Summer” on the sound track, already the very first shot of the film, which is an establishing shot of the dilapidated billboards in a misty field, evokes a melancholy mood. This mood is enhanced by a second shot from the opposite perspective, in which the camera is positioned within the frame of the closest billboard looking out over at the other two farther away (figure 3.2). The image is simultaneously deep and shallow, with all the planes in the image in focus, while the scenery appears flattened out because of the fog. The total opening, all in all eight establishing shots of the field with the billboards from different perspectives, functions as a prologue to the film. Or rather an overture, which in cinema is used as a strategy to set the mood of the film before, during, or instead of the opening credits. Some establishing shots emphasize the skeleton silhouette of the billboards surrounded by high grass. Sun-bleached panels still attached to the frame show parts of slogans meant to entice those passing through to visit the imaginary town of Ebbing (“worth stopping for”). Another shot draws closer, showing a panel with the face of a baby. The final overture shot covers a larger area, with the farthest-away billboard hardly visible due to the extreme distance and the foggy mist. The overture is cut to a black screen while the title of the film fades in and out and then the story starts unfolding from the very same location, the billboards, now bathing in bright sunlight, as we first notice a car approaching. In this overture, the song “The Last Rose of Summer” that contains such lines as “left blooming alone” while

Figure 3.2.  Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: A frame within a frame.

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“all her lovely companions are faded and gone” refers by association to the dilapidated billboards “blooming alone” in high grass. The billboards thus clearly function as emotion metaphor for (the memory of) Angela. In other words, the billboards are a headstone for Angela, metaphorically replacing or doubling her deceased body, which explains why Mildred places flowers underneath the billboards as a token of remembrance. Therefore this cinematic overture does not merely illustrate the title of the film, but it establishes the cinematic mood, or rather it functions to “prepare the stage for story comprehension and spectator involvement,” as Thomas Elsaesser puts this. Regardless of the centrality of anger in the film’s narrative, the overture is not about anger but about traumatic grief, which suggests that this is the most important emotion as regards “understanding how [the film] wants to be read and how it needs to be understood” (Elsaesser 2012, 114–15). Nussbaum has defined grief as repeatedly experienced affective frustration, thoroughly intertwined with the grieving person’s bodily and cognitive fabric. It is this reverberating, repetitive structure of traumatic grief that is embedded in the overture of Three Billboards, providing the film with an affective quality that directly interacts with the spectator. One important element to achieve this is Carter Burwell’s atmospheric, haunting, delicate score. It reoccurs arranged for piano, clarinet, and mandolin in the scene with a deer, starting off as a sound bridge from the previous scene, showing Willoughby and family by the lake. A shot of the lake scenery with its surrounding hills dissolves into a shot of the field with the billboards and Mildred, who is about to place baskets of flowers underneath them. The minor-key melody is slow, intimate, and harmoniously attuned to Mildred’s trauma, as she is arranging the flowers, which are color-matched to the intense, fire-engine red background of the billboards. Suddenly as if from nowhere a deer appears in the scene, and an astonished Mildred greets the animal with affection, before plunging into an emotional monologue, while the unperturbed animal proceeds its grazing. The scene ends with a sobbing Mildred shot from behind, dissolving into the twilight scenery of an eerie sunset. All the elements in the scene—the score, the deer, the flowers, and the landscape, as well as Frances McDormand’s performance—combine to communicate the depth of her grief, but simultaneously for us realization dawns that ultimately her war with the police will prove useless, and nobody’s arrest will ever take away her emotional trauma. Landscape plays an important part in the film, especially the field with the billboards, epitomizing John Wiley’s idea that places are not merely reminiscent of the past, but that they form a continuum between the past and the present in which (traumatic) memories are continuously stored (Wiley 2007, 173). There seems to be an allegorical relationship between this landscape and Mildred’s inner feelings, as she moves around in it. This means

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that the exterior, physical landscape conveys the significance of her interior, affective landscape to the extent that it becomes a shared, “tangible territory,” as Giuliana Bruno describes this (Bruno 2002, 207). First there is the misty, fog-filled valley of the overture sequence reflecting Mildred’s trauma of loss without resolution, and evoking a sense of being immersed in cold, opaque, and static matter, which is what grief would feel like. There is also the same valley in dim evening light, after all the vivid colors of nature have vanished with the last light of day. Gloom prevails, except for the bright red glow emitted by the billboards, epitomizing Mildred’s affective landscape, in which anger penetrates her grief. Then there is the nightly scenery with the billboards in flames, an all-consuming, traumatic destruction referring to the gap in Mildred’s sense of self. Finally, there are numerous close-ups of Mildred’s face, which consequently becomes a landscape in itself: full of life when enraged, but barren and defeated when in grief. This means that Mildred’s anger is thoroughly intertwined with her grief, so much so that there will be no solution for this deadlock within the course of the narrative. Her trauma is expressed in and through the billboards, which is her way of being with Angela, even though the very same billboards signify Mildred’s eternal separation from her daughter. In Three Billboards Mildred is under the illusion that she needs her anger to preserve the love for her daughter, while at the same time this anger prevents her from working through her grief. This is why her grief is traumatic and pathological, enhanced by her feelings of guilt. Nussbaum writes that turning from grieving to anger “may function psychically as a way of restoring the lost person or object. In such cases, grief can be deflected into an unusual intense anger, in which all the energy of love and loss is turned toward persecution” (Nussbaum 2016, 47). The recurring element of the billboards, with their aggressive red background and confronting black font, functions as a visible manifestation of Mildred’s obsessive anger that keeps her imprisoned in her excessive grief. Actually, apart from the billboards, red as a color motif is frequently used throughout the film. It noticeably appears as the color of numerous props in the advertising agency, which is managed by a man by the name of “Red” Welby. Red is also the color of Mildred’s T-shirt under her coveralls, as well as of the garment her daughter was wearing on the night of the murder. There is red in schoolgirls’ backpacks, coffee mugs, cornflake packages, picnic clothes, telephones, and other everyday objects. The gerberas that Mildred plants under the billboards are of the same bright red as the carnations on the table where Willoughby writes his suicide note. Mildred’s name itself contains the letter group “red,” its etymological origin signifying “mild strength.” In addition there are various forms of red blood in the film: blood caused by illness, blood resulting from violence, blood as evidence, and family bloodlines.

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It is important to notice that by using both blood and the color red the film pays direct homage to Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), the thriller that Dixon and his mother are watching at some point in the film. In Roeg’s film, color symbolism is used as a cue for the traumatic emotions of a mourning couple working through grief after their daughter’s death. Even though used in this way in cinema, the color red is often understood to signify anger and aggression, in Three Billboards it also indicates traumatic pain brought about by the loss of a loved one. In this context Nussbaum describes grief as rapid feelings of pain and tumult “colored by the kinetic properties of the bloodstream” (Nussbaum 2001, 45). Indeed, in many images in Three Billboards red color areas stand out in a way that indicates sudden moments of pain. This is brought home to us by the movement of this color, its unique kinetic properties, resulting from a combination of the lowest frequency and the longest wavelength within the visible spectrum. Yet, the color red is noticeably missing from the final shots of the film, suggesting perhaps that Mildred’s road of payback functions as a means to work through her grief after all. But as I hope to have shown, when all is said and told this is not a plausible interpretation due to the open-ended nature of the final scene. The ending of Three Billboards does not contain the possibility of a remedy from trauma for Mildred, since her actions are based on deliberate rejection of information about events in the world, including the salience of these events for her own well-being. And both she herself and the spectator know this to be so. Incendies As noted, both The Skin I Live In and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, deliberately avoid an ending with a clear outcome, leaving their protagonists locked up in the paralyzing repetition of trauma. By contrast, the ending of Incendies is characterized by a strong sense of closure, which suggests that a narrative convergence can suture the psychic wounds caused by traumatic events, as Caruth has suggested (Caruth 1996). In contrast to the characters in The Skin I Live In and Three Billboards, the protagonists in Incendies do not seek revenge, but recognition for the wrong done to them, which enables the realization of such closure. Incendies tells the story of twins, Jeanne and Simon Marwan from contemporary Quebec, unraveling the mysterious past of their recently deceased mother Nawal. Adapted from Wajdi Mouawad’s play of the same title, the story is set in a fictitious Middle East country, which is clearly meant to be Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, divided by civil war. Similarly to Lust, Caution and The Handmaiden, which will be discussed in chapter four, the traumatic structure embodied in the aesthetic organization

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of Incendies exposes ethnic conflict originating from the colonial history in the Middle East. The personal tragedy at the heart of Incendies can be read in allegorical terms. Not only does the film show how colonial trauma figures in the relationship between Christians and Muslims, but also how such trauma can traverse through generations and across different continents. Like Robert in The Skin I Live In and Mildred in Three Billboards, in Incendies Nawal attempts to overcome trauma by seeking revenge. But unlike the two films discussed earlier in this chapter, Incendies essentially serves as an example of coming to terms with trauma by pursuing truth and testimony. Even though it is Nawal’s children who have to work through (secondhand) trauma in lieu of their mother, who herself remains stuck in the desire for revenge, much like Mildred in Three Billboards. Incendie is the French word for destruction by fire, whereas in English “incend” means to inflame or to excite. The film’s title is sometimes translated as “Scorched,” perhaps a reference to the marks left behind by traumatic (war) experiences, from which not only survivors suffer, but also frequently their offspring. In the film such trauma presents itself literally as a physical landscape that simultaneously entraps Nawal within her incapacitating experience, and estranges her from her life-world. Like the frozen landscape in Joachim Trier’s Thelma, discussed in chapter two, Incendies exemplifies the power of cinema which, in the words of Janet Walker, can “transform physical landscape into a mental traumascape for characters and spectators alike” (Walker 2001, 219). In a similar vein, Rupert Ashmore argues that landscape imagery can embody the traumatic human experience of a changed life-world, not only on a personal, but also on a collective and intersubjective level. Landscape and human experience are related, insofar as what happens to people within the landscape also happens to the landscape (Ashmore 2013, 290). And vice versa, for our sense of being in the world is continuously affected by our interaction with different landscapes. Thus, the relationship between people and landscapes is an affective one, and human-landscape encounters are charged with issues related to identity, belonging, displacement, and embodiment. As far as trauma is concerned, the human-landscape relationship can be characterized by affective dissociation or “a radical estrangement” (Trigg 2009, 90), in which the subject’s embodied spatial experience in the present remains essentially alienated from the materiality of the landscape. It is precisely this tension between the experience of place in the present and the emergence of traumatic memories from the past that is conveyed in Incendies. Its landscape establishes a troubled stage between the past and the present. This means that trauma is situated not only in time but also in space, a concept which is epitomized in Incendies through its spatial logic, upon which

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the traumatized subject is unable to act. Furthermore, the landscape in the film also exists independent of Nawal (and her twins), insofar as the landscape itself can be considered a narrative agent that entraps Nawal viscerally in the realm of trauma. This communicates a vision where trauma is not contained within human subjects, but extends materially into the surrounding world (Bennett 2004, 49). Visually this is realized in the film through the panoramic establishing shots that literally immerse Nawal in a representation of space that exceeds any allegorical relationship between human subject and landscape. The depiction of landscape in Incendies thus suggests that subjective and historical trauma is intertwined, both on a temporal and on a spatial level. In Incendies, the landscape itself is subject to fires, road blocks, and destruction, thus consequently, burnt, dry landscapes play a dominant role in the visual design of the film. They provide the seedbed or a bodily habitat for the protagonists’ embodied experience: trauma of identity, trauma of motherhood, and second-generation trauma. Another element prominently present in the film’s mise-en-scè‌‌‌‌ne is water, which functions both as an environment for death and a source of redemption or (re)birth. Thus fire and water establish trauma as an experience similar to death and resurrection. This emerges out of the violent rupture that divides Nawal’s life “before” in the rural Middle East from her “after” life in urban Quebec. Later her children attempt to overcome that trauma through spatial remapping of her life. It is as if this temporal structure functions as a disjunction between two selves divorced in time, but united in place through the traumatic landscape. This in turn refers both to what Cathy Caruth calls the “unclaimed experience of trauma” (Caruth 1991, 181) and to the act of testimony through which a transformed future is created. The film thus suggests that trauma can be overcome through searching for truth, as a way of negotiating trauma within the continuum of past and present, even if carried out by those who have not experienced the trauma firsthand. The complex temporal structure of Incendies is inextricably concerned with mapping traumatic memories, rather than processing them through linear, unfragmented narratives. Furthermore, rather than a road of payback, Incendies contains a road of reckoning that entails acknowledgment for the wrongdoing but without the transactional “gift of atonement” (Nussbaum 2016, 11). The temporal and spatial disarray of the film’s structure renders its organizational logic similar to the figuration of trauma itself: chronologically fragmented and spatially spectral. The effect of fragmentation in the film both disrupts and soothes the sense of being unified in time and space, and the landscape plays an important role in realizing this effect. It functions as the site and the soil of embodied experience, thus forming a basis for understanding trauma and for working through trauma. In Incendies, Nawal herself

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is unable to make the necessary mapping of her trauma though, which leads her to spiritual and ultimately physical death. It is only after her children’s (more or less) successful testimonial journey that Nawal “looks back from her grave” and completes her story with her letters to her children, read in her own voice at the end of the film. The extradiegetic status of Nawal’s voice-over emerging from between life and death conveys her sense of agency, which is nevertheless hopelessly belated, and only made possible by the inevitability of her own passing away. Affective Dissociations The predominant characteristic of Incendies is its complex temporal structure which is retrospective and circular, progressing through a storyline in the past, which alternates with the present. This strongly emphasizes that the protagonists’ trauma is not only rooted in their ancestral heritage, but that it also prevails in the present, calling for immediate resolution. This is already suggested in the opening scene of the film, which is a flashback providing us with a sense of what the inner dynamics of the film will be. The flashback starts with an establishing shot of a landscape, in which some vegetation is seen at the foreground, while in the background of the image desert hills loom at the horizon. A rift separates these different terrains, which insinuates a divided, war-torn country. To a song by Radiohead, “You and Whose Army,” the camera tracks backward and pans from right to left, revealing an interior in which guerrilla soldiers shave the heads of dirty, wounded children. The shaving gesture is significant, since this group of orphan boys is literally groomed to become soldiers themselves, as will be revealed later on in the film. The camera shows a close-up of the tattooed heel of one of the boys, followed by an extreme close-up of the same tattoo, which consists of three black circles. The three circles function as a visual metaphor for the enigma presented in the film, which does not only concern a circular structure of trauma, but also its mathematical premise. This premise is the devastating truth conveyed by Simon to Jeanne at the end of their investigation, in the form of an equation: “One plus one . . . can it really make one?” The opening ends with a tracking shot into a close-up of the boy’s face, who is intensely gazing directly into the camera. Finally the scene cuts to an interior shot of a notary’s office in present-day Quebec, from where the story starts to unfold. Incendies consists of ten episodes or chapters, the titles of which are announced by means of large letters in a heavy font and an aggressive red color, often standing out in harsh contrast to the earthy tones of the remaining filmic image. The narration unfolds in a non-linear fashion through two circularly interwoven temporal layers. There is the past with Nawal searching for her son, becoming a terrorist, and serving her prison sentence. And there

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is the present with first Jeanne and then Simon traveling in Nawal’s native country, carrying out her final wish and discovering the secrets Nawal kept from her children during her lifetime. Nawal’s final wish involves two sealed envelopes, one of which is for Jeanne to deliver to the twins’ father. The other envelope is for Simon to deliver to their brother. The narration “in the past tense”—for the sequences in which we follow Nawal cannot be labeled regular flashbacks, as they take up most of the screen time—is triggered by the twins’ meetings and their conversations. This clearly signifies that their present life and their mother’s past are parts of the same continuum, overshadowed by trauma. This is reinforced by the way in which the film abruptly cuts between the two temporal layers, so that the spectators get regularly confused about the current moment in time, which seems exactly the point Villeneuve wants to make. Furthermore, the visual style of the film is dominated by establishing shots of various landscapes, and these landscapes themselves function as nodes, connection points through which past and present meet. I argue that the landscapes embody trauma as an experience of affective dissociation and bodily disconnection, the disembodied feeling that “I have a body,” instead of an embodied experience that “I am my body” (Zeiler 2010, 335). Shot in Jordan and Quebec, the landscape in Incendies has direct affective quality, and Villeneuve himself has said in an interview that he wished to focus on the inner experience of the characters instead of making sensational action scenes, for instance. Furthermore, he stressed that “it was important that there was a relationship between the landscapes and the inner feelings of the characters walking through them” (Dawson 2017). This renders the landscape into something more than a mere allegory of the protagonists’ affective dissociation indicative of traumatic experience, or an allegory of a nation in distress. It becomes what Jane Bennett terms “vibrant matter,” a nonhuman source of action that flows through and around humans, aiding, thwarting, enriching, disabling, enhancing, or degrading them as it does (Bennett 2010, viii–‌‌‌‌x). In his Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama writes that even though we are accustomed to considering landscape and human experience as two distinct realms, they are inseparable nevertheless (Schama 1996). This means that human experience is not grounded in self-contained existence, but that it emerges through the relationship with its surroundings. Similarly, W. J. T. Mitchell writes that landscape is not so much an object to be seen or a text to be read, but a process through which one can find oneself, through which subjective identities are formed: “Landscape is a dynamic medium, in which we ‘live and move and have our being’”(Mitchell 2002, 4). And according to Guiliana Bruno, the exterior landscape always conveys an interior one, the geographical and human landscape sharing a “tangible territory” (Bruno 2002, 207). This is why the landscape embodies what and how we feel about

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places, and there is an overlapping, often complex relationship between landscape and our sense of identity. In trauma this relationship is disturbed though, and the landscape becomes a place to lose, rather than to have one’s being in. In Incendies this is not only conveyed in the way in which landscapes are depicted as inhospitable, desolate spaces which one has to struggle against, but also in Nawal’s instructions to Jeanne and Simon considering her funeral arrangements: Bury me with no casket, no prayers, naked, face down, away from the world. [. . .] I want no gravestone, nor my name engraved anywhere. No epitaph for those who don’t keep their promises. (Nawal in Incendies)

Furthermore, Nawal’s traumatic experience is transmitted to Jeanne and Simon, of which the Montréal cityscape becomes an ideal manifestation. The city is regularly portrayed as a cold, gray, disconsolate place, an environment to suppress trauma passively, rather than fit to deal with it actively. Toward the end of the film the editing creates a visual juxtaposition between Nawal in her prison cell and the drab, industrial block of flats in Montréal where Simon resides. This juxtaposition suggests that the twins are as much entrapped in their mother’s trauma, as Nawal is a prisoner, not only physically in her prison cell, but also in her own (dis)embodied existence. In one early scene Jeanne stares at a swimming pool, which was the location of her mother’s final traumatic realization, and which ultimately triggered her death. It is autumn, and the pool is empty, which is a traumatic image that combines the metaphor of motherhood in absence, with the metaphor of emptiness that Jeanne needs to fill in by discovering the truth about her mother. The image dissolves into a flashback of Jeanne swimming under water, and finally surfacing only to find her mother paralyzed, catatonic even. The flashback ends with Nawal being admitted to hospital, where later she dies. Nawal’s storyline starts with an establishing shot of craggy rock formations on the right-hand side and thin shrubbery on the left side of the image, separated by a narrow path. As in the opening shot this suggests a fundamental cultural gap through which Nawal attempts to navigate, shown as a tiny figure making her way down the path. Nawal, who is a Christian, wants to flee her environment together with her Muslim lover Wahab, a Palestinian refugee by whom she is pregnant. But they are stopped by Nawal’s brother who appears from among the cliffs. The brother subsequently kills Wahab and intends to kill Nawal too. But her grandmother intervenes and Nawal is confined by her to a small hut, until she will have given birth. In one scene Nawal’s brother sits in solitude on top of a cliff with his back to the spectator, ignoring her inconsolable cries while contemplating the landscape. Positioning the

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character in the landscape in this way directly communicates to us his culturally determined attitude, which is as unyielding as the rock on which he sits. After Nawal has given birth, and her son has been taken to an orphanage, she flees to the fictional city of Daresh, which is also the title of the next chapter in the film, presented to us with an establishing shot of the colorful, chaotic, densely populated cityscape. At this point the narration shifts to the present with Jeanne arriving in the country. The city of Daresh embodies two different narrative aspects. In Jeanne’s storyline the chaotic setting of the city could be seen as an equivalent to the complicated mathematical equation she is determined to solve, without having an idea where to start from. In Nawal’s storyline the city becomes a potential space of tolerance, cultural diversity, and possibilities, as well as of political resistance. That is, at least until the civil war breaks out and Nawal returns to her region of origin, in an attempt to rescue her son from the throes of war. It is at this point that the film becomes nomadic—to use Teshome Gabriel’s terminology—alternately tracking Nawal and Jeanne on their arduous tours through the rugged landscape in the south of this imaginary country. In one characteristic scene Nawal crosses a safeguarded bridge that both connects and divides the torn-up country. The camera follows Nawal as she passes barbed wire at the military checkpoint and forces her way through the refugees coming from the opposite direction. As from this point onward she has to travel on foot, her journey is represented as an endless, solitary struggle in oppressive heat against the rugged, craggy landscape, through which she labors her way. There is one moment of serenity, when Nawal passes through a small grove where she stops to embrace a tree, while mourning her dead lover Wahab. The tree stands for what could have been, a possibility lost forever. This is what Steve Neale has defined as the traumatic temporality of “if only” which leads us and the characters to wish “if only they had met in different circumstances in a different time, in a different place” (Neale 1986, 12). After this short moment of relief she has to return to the landscape that is more hostile than ever. When she arrives at the first village of her destination, she finds that it has been bombed and burned to the ground. In the second village the destruction is even more complete, and here she finds out that Muslim guerrillas have taken all the boys from the orphanage where her son had been left. At this point we do not see the destruction itself; we only see its consequences. It is as if the unseen threat holding this region in its spell has deepened the notion of hostility which is the dominant feature of its landscape. The landscape of her life that used to be “one of familiarity, certainty, and the known” (Offord 2008, 6) has now become a territory full of danger and the unknown. Thus the fire and smoke surrounding Nawal as she seeks a moment of rest in the ruins of the village, are shown as rising up from her surroundings,

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suggesting the traumatic, disturbed relationship between her bodily experience and the physical landscape, which in turn reflects her trauma of loss without resolution (figure 3.3). The image prompts an affective, visceral experience by evoking a powerful, claustrophobic sense of the body restrained by the landscape, resulting in loss of identity, loss of spirit, and loss of agency. Dylan Trigg has approached ruins like this as a location of memory that can effectively haunt the subject of trauma through spectral or “negative spatiality.” Ruins are empty of memory, and bring about “a non-memory, a puncturing in spatio-temporal presence” (Trigg 2009, 95). The image of Nawal within the ruins is a powerful one, drawing a parallel between a ruined subject and the spectrality of the ruins themselves, for there is a suggestion of Nawal being out-of-place here, as if she came to the scene too late, “as though the presence is defined by what fails to materialize in the present” (Trigg 2009, 98). TESTIMONY BY PROXY Incendies emphasizes an identity crisis resulting from traumatic experience, but it refuses to represent Nawal solely as a victim, lacking spirit or agency, as she is determined to proceed on her journey even beyond her grave. At the same time, throughout the film Nawal is so deeply steeped in traumatic despair, that the only continuation possible is in the present, where the trauma could be resolved, be it by Jeanne and Simon as her superseding agents. In the series of events that trigger her trauma, Nawal first gets a ride on a bus carrying Muslim passengers to the refugee camp of Deressa. Taking in the passing panoramic views of the landscape, she dozes off, only to find the

Figure 3.3.  Incendies: Nawal within the burning ruins.

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bus ambushed by militant Christian soldiers when she wakes up. They shoot the driver in the head, riddle the bus with bullets, and mercilessly proceed to pour petrol into the bus, while Nawal manages to stumble to the door, taking out her crucifix and proclaiming loudly that she is a Christian. As she is being taken outside, she grabs the daughter of a Muslim woman, who also had survived the bullet attack, but whose horrible fate it is to be burned alive. The bus goes up in flames and the child breaks loose from Nawal, running toward her mother inside, only to get shot in the back by a soldier, after which Nawal is shown to collapse next to the burning bus. On the right-hand side of the frame there is Nawal’s desperate expression facing left, whereas on the left there is the burning bus in the background. The sequence ends with an establishing shot of the scorched, rocky landscape with Nawal as a tiny spot on the left-hand side of the image and the bus emanating fire and black smoke on the right. With this final shot of the bus in flames and with Nawal as a tiny detail in the large, surrounding wasteland, the film suggests that the burning landscape consumes Nawal, as she experiences the devastating effects of returning trauma, after the sensory bombardment of violent events. Up to this point Nawal’s journey is a spiraling decline deeper into trauma, and her ever-aggravating struggle against the landscape conveys her inability to achieve any significant foothold in her surroundings. The film suggests that this traumatic condition can only be resolved on another time level, as soon as Jeanne undertakes the geographically exact same journey as her mother. The film contains numerous shots of Jeanne’s struggling progress to the south that are almost identical to the shots from Nawal’s journey. For instance, there is an establishing shot of a bus traveling a road in the present that is indistinguishable from an earlier shot showing the same road and bus in the past. In addition, this shot is cut to a similar shot of Jeanne sitting in the same posture as we have previously seen Nawal in, even using the same framing. This parallelism strongly suggests that the first purpose of Jeanne’s journey is to experience her mother’s trauma from within, after which it could be worked through. Thus the geographical and mental road of reckoning that Jeanne (and later on Simon) undertakes in order to deal with her second-generation trauma, implies her purgatorial urge to shape a coherent identity by re-creating her mother’s journey. Therefore, both journeys reveal the entanglement of different temporalities (past/present), spatialities (Canada/Lebanon), memories, and identities. In trauma terms perhaps it could be said that Jeanne and Simon’s journeys are attempts to heal the rift between deep memory and common memory, their journeys functioning as a mediating process that traces their quest to conquer both Nawal’s traumatic experience as well as their own. That is because journeying like this is a way to incorporate the very structure of their mother’s trauma. Even if they never fully inhabit her trauma

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experience, their journeying remains a precondition for the ability to work it through. Marianne Hirsch calls this phenomenon a postmemory of trauma, an inheritance of traumatic memory that burdens trauma survivors’ children who are not the ones who suffered the primary loss (Hirsch 1997, 5). Yet it must be stressed that this is not a matter of appropriating the parents’ pain by empathetically putting oneself in their position. Rather it is the recognition of similarities across personal histories, past and present. This soon turns into a question of claiming responsibility for the past since, as Mieke Bal puts it: “we are in the present of what happened in the past, we are also in the ‘here’ of what happened elsewhere” (Bal 2013, 25). Similarly, Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi argue that by attempting to construct a historical continuity that leads from the (traumatic) past to the present and the future, cinema can depict a repressed past, not by replacing the image of the present, but rather by presenting the present through the past (Gertz and Khleifi 2008, 15). Jeanne and Simon “inheriting” their mother’s trauma—quite literally, enclosed in sealed envelopes—seems especially relevant, seeing that for Nawal no closure of trauma was ever available. In fact, she remained in search of her son even after she had found him, that is, even after her death. Yet after her traumatic experience with the Christian militia, Nawal seemingly abandons her decision to find her son as he is “swallowed by the war,” in order to join a radical Muslim group and, in the spirit of “road of payback,” to “teach the enemy what life has taught” her. She arrives at Deressa in the dark, only to find the refugee camp burning and destroyed to the ground, again scenery metaphorical of her own scorched bodily existence. Perhaps her ensuing actions serve as a strategy to hold her trauma at bay, but they eventually preserve and reinforce it, since her intentions are borne out by hatred and torment turned inward. When Nawal is imprisoned and tortured at the notorious penitentiary of Kfar Ryat, in which she becomes known as “the woman who sings,” it is as if there is an analogy between her physical circumstances and the traumatic state of her embodied existence. Many trauma theorists have noted a clear relationship between trauma and affective dissociation, complete with alterations in the trauma victim’s experience of time, place, and the sense of self. For instance, according to Charles Marmar, affective dissociation may take the form of altered time sense, with time being experienced as slowing down or rapidly accelerated; profound feelings of unreality that the event is occurring, or that the individual is the victim of the event; experiences of depersonalization; out-of-body experiences; bewilderment, confusion, and disorientation; altered pain perception; altered body images or feelings of disconnection from one’s body; tunnel vision; and other experiences reflecting dissociative responses to trauma. (Marmar 1997, 1)

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It is this painful dissociation that is depicted in Incendies. Shots of the interior of Nawal’s isolated, bare cell, in which she is held in solitary confinement, are juxtaposed with shots of the exterior of the prison, safeguarded by a ramshackle barbed-wire fence and surrounded by a bleak desert landscape, dotted with withered bushes. This is truly a landscape of pain and desolation, the oscillation between shots demonstrating Cathy Caruth’s claim that traumatic stories ultimately address “the oscillation between the crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival” (Caruth 1995, 7). And finally Nawal’s own body becomes a landscape of life and death to fight against as she becomes pregnant from her torturer, after which she is unable to be at home in her own body: yet another traumatic event that does not only alienate her from the rest of the world, but also from her own embodied existence. After Nawal has given birth to twins, a prison guard takes the newborns to a river to drown them, but the prison nurse saves the infants, saying she will take care of them because “these are the children of the woman who sings.” At this point in the film it becomes clear to the spectator that Jeanne and Simon are about to discover the truth, not only about their mother’s past, but also about their own. The shot in the past with two torch light spots on the river surface is cut through a graphic match to a shot from within a tunnel, from which Simon emerges to arrive at Daresh in the present. Witnessed from outside, a tunnel is customarily seen as a metaphor for phallic penetration, but seen from the inside it is suggestive of the birth canal, implying the possibility of rebirth into the land where the twins had already been born. This suggestion is reinforced in the scene in which the twins jump into a hotel pool after they have learned the truth about their father, with Simon floating underwater in the fetal position for several moments before surfacing. But this rebirth is traumatic and can only be resolved if Jeanne and Simon are able to handdeliver their mother’s envelopes to the addressees. In the final part of the film Simon sets off for Deressa in search of the Muslim warlord Chamseddine, who can provide the last piece for this jigsaw puzzle of traumatic mystery. Indeed, the establishing shot of the rugged hills surrounding the winding road along which Simon progresses, strikingly resembles such a jigsaw puzzle piece, strongly hinting that all pieces will soon fall into place. The film cuts to Nawal’s storyline in the past one final time, with two cars parked on a bridge. This is done so abruptly that one cannot be sure whether it is Simon or his mother in the second car meeting the warlord. The bridge brings the circular structure of trauma to a close, as the film presents to us a flashback of Nawal at the swimming pool, staring at the heels of her son standing by this pool in exactly the same framing as used in

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the flashback the film opened with. After the encounter the film shows us a close-up of Nawal’s face, which consequently becomes a landscape in itself, as stark and desolate as the harsh desert in her homeland. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have made this association between face and landscape in their A Thousand Plateaus: “The face is a surface: facial traits, lines, wrinkles. [. . .] The face is a map. [. . .] The face has a correlate of great importance: the landscape” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 170). Incendies realizes this association by juxtaposing this close-up of Nawal’s face with an establishing shot of landscape with barren hills and imposing rock formations, as an allegorical environment for Nawal’s traumatic experience (figure 3.4). In other words, the wrinkly jagged ditches cutting through the rocky hills become an

Figure 3.4.  Incendies: Face as landscape, landscape as face.

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allegory for Nawal’s trauma that is mirrored in her physical, almost scar-like facial lines. In his Landscape Allegory in Cinema, David Melbye argues that landscapes in cinema can obtain significance beyond the function of the setting, becoming “outward manifestations of characters’ troubled psyches.” In other words, a landscape can become an allegory, which reflects the protagonists’ psychological state of mind as they interact with their surroundings. According to Melbye, this takes place as soon as “the film positions the landscape as independent subject” (Melbye 2010, 1), after which we come to understand the protagonists through the landscape instead of the other way around. That Incendies positions the landscape as an independent subject is already evident from the very first shot of the film. But instead of merely reflecting the protagonists’ psychological state, the film shows how their whole embodied existence is inextricably enlaced with the landscape, in such a way that we become directly engaged with the effects, if not the experience, of their trauma. In moments like this the film itself becomes a landscape that is fundamentally more than an allegory, insofar as through its operational structure, the landscape as the site of trauma and the spatio-temporal experience of trauma form a “structurally parallel unity” (Trigg 2009, 88). Furthermore, there is the suggestion that a journey through a demanding landscape toward the truth can become a means to resolve trauma. In the end the twins’ journey functions as a testimony of their resolve to understand and overcome not only the effects of their mother’s trauma but also their own. It is common understanding that testimony is a way to confront and work through trauma in order to get beyond it. That the testimony is realized “by proxy” seems to be of no concern in Incendies, which presents the narrative of a trauma victim’s tale and the transference of it unto her offspring with ultimate healing effects. Indeed, there is a strange consolation in the film’s final shot of a graveyard, with Nawal’s final resting place now supplied with a tombstone and an epitaph. This final image embodies the general desire to make up for a traumatic past, instilling hope for the traumatized subjects’ future possibilities, provided they are prepared to take bold steps, a process which Incendies illustrates particularly well.

Chapter 4

Lovers and Liars Performing Trauma

LUST, CAUTION AND THE HANDMAIDEN This chapter presents an analysis of Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution and Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden, both situated against the backdrop of the Japanese occupation in Southeast Asia. Even though both films are generic hybrids for mixing erotic period drama with psychological mind-game thriller, they can also be considered melodramas as they consist of opposites as good/evil, pure/impure, and loyalty/disloyalty in a highly stylized setting, with an emphasis on exaggerated emotion. In both films this emotion is foregrounded as trauma, which epitomizes a deadlock of identity that inhibits the protagonists from influencing the events they are confronted with. It is trauma that exposes cultural and political consequences of national betrayal in Lust, Caution, and of colonial hierarchy in The Handmaiden. Both films tell us something about the colonial history in East Asia, emphasizing ethnic hierarchization, not only between the colonizers and the colonized, but also among the colonized peoples themselves. The latter strategy involves the colonizer using one dominant subaltern ethnicity to rule others to promote colonial interests (Leung 2021). While trauma is often associated with specific causes of post-traumatic stress disorder, ethnic hierarchization can be a source of trauma as well, insofar as it exposes the subaltern to injustice, to discrimination, and to humiliating situations, which are experienced as an attack on the sense of self (Comas-Díaz et al. 2019, 2). In both Lust, Caution and The Handmaiden this ethnic hierarchization is marked by gendered class division. In Lust, Caution the wealthy and mobile collaborationist male elite are favored, as they are able to traverse the borders of Japanese-occupied International Settlement and French Concession in Shanghai. In The Handmaiden it is the male characters who obscure their Korean identity through their lifestyle 85

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and pattern of consumption that are at the top of the cultural hierarchy. In both films language highlights the colonial fluidity: while in Lust, Caution the ability to switch from Mandarin to Cantonese and from Shanghainese to Japanese denotes the shifting of power dynamics between characters, in The Handmaiden fluency in the Japanese language engenders increased authority and social control (Chen et al. 2009; Brzycki and Montgomery 2019). By contrast the female characters in both films attempt to make themselves ethnically harmless in order to avoid further trauma. But their attempts are futile and only seem to aggravate traumatic effects. Lust, Caution is largely situated in Shanghai, the cosmopolitan epicenter of Republican China from 1928 to 1949. The city was first ruled by European imperialists, then from 1941 to 1945 it was occupied by Japan, which had already been invading China since 1937. In postwar China, the period of Japanese Occupation was denounced as a national disgrace and cultural treason which, according to Poshek Fu, reduces the Occupation to a binary, “moralized battleground between resistance and collaboration” by means of “melodramatic and stereotypical images” (Fu 1997, 67). By transforming such melodramatic images into affective-aesthetic elements of trauma for both the protagonists and the spectators alike, Lust, Caution addresses the dividing line between loyalty and treachery, heroism and villainy, in a way that complicates binary moralism. Similarly, The Handmaiden is set during the colonization of Korea by Japan (1910–1945), the period which brought “modernity” to the Koreans under the rule of their colonial master. According to Kelly Jeong, it is an emotionally charged question whether Japan is to be seen as the active agent and Korea as the passive recipient in the process (Jeong 2011, 1). By establishing trauma within the very fabric of colonial hierarchy, The Handmaiden does not only register the complex historical relations between South Korea and Japan, but the film also touches on a sense of renewal through the developing relationship of the main protagonists. Both films are based on literary works and have been studied substantially as film adaptations. Lust, Caution has its origin in Eileen Chang’s 1979 novella by the same title. Much scholarly work has investigated the differences between the complete film and the abridged version released in China, in which mainly images of suffering in wartime Shanghai had been significantly reduced, as well as sex scenes with the two protagonists. However, in his comparative study, Robert Chi observes that in the uncut version of Lust, Caution the sex scenes are much more explicit than in Chang’s novella. A more interesting observation is that a subtle change in the dialogue of the adapted version “holds open a distinct possibility that [Wong] does not change her mind [. . .]. In this latter interpretation, Wong is a failed heroine, but at least she is not a traitor” (Chi 2009, 180). According to Chi, this kind of alteration should be seen within the context of the “binary battleground”

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between Chinese historical past and its present-day morals. Apart from the description of sexual encounters, Chang’s original story is also largely void of sentimental and romantic elements. There is a striking change in the role of Yee, who is “cold and cautious throughout” in the novella, but much more vulnerable in Lee’s film (Lee 2008, 234, 237). According to Hsiao-hung Chang this “attractification” of the villainous traitor—enhanced by actor Tony Leung as the casting choice—inspired an extremely negative reception of the film in mainland China. But he stipulates that it can also be seen as a form of deterritorialization of history that prevents nationalistic readings of the film (Chang 2009, 46). The Handmaiden is inspired by Sarah Waters’ gothic crime novel The Fingersmith (2002), which is set in Britain during the reign of Queen Victoria. Similarly to Lust, Caution, The Handmaiden contains sexually explicit scenes which appear to be staged for the male gaze. As one Slate critic wrote, for instance: “Finally [. . .] the maid and her mistress fall back into the tired visual clichés of pornographic lesbianism, their bodies offered up for the camera’s delectation in a carefully arranged exhibition that would fit right into Uncle’s collection” (Miller 2016). The Handmaiden’s sex scenes have invoked comparison with those in Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013), which is also a lesbian love story and also directed by a cis male filmmaker. Blue Is the Warmest Color sparked controversy not only by its framing of female bodies with voyeuristic closeness, but also by the exploitative shooting conditions which the lead actresses were subjected to (Slern 2017). To avoid at least some of the problems that arise when a male filmmaker represents queer female sexuality, Park Chan-wook explained in an interview with The Scotsman (2017) that the trope of male gaze was already considered at the scriptwriting stage, that feedback was sought from the actresses to make sure they were comfortable performing the sex scenes, and that men were banned from the set while the camera was operated remotely. At first sight the themes of gaze and sexual desire in The Handmaiden seem to be solely built around traumatic, patriarchal structures. However, they become transformative, harboring the potential of challenge and transgression of these very same structures. Therefore, unlike in Uncle Kouzuki’s sadomasochistic books, which are based on strict hierarchy between the active, sadistic (male) subject and the passive, masochistic (female) object, the lovemaking scenes in The Handmaiden are characterized by reciprocity and the mutual exchange of affection, while male gaze is reduced to the function of abject fetishism (Bote 2016). Sarah Waters herself would seem to agree with this reading when she formulated her artistic blessing to the film’s sex scenes as follows: “although [the film] portrays women trapped by male structures and trapped within the limits of male-authored text, [it also] shows them escaping from those structures or using them [. . .] for their own

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pleasure” (quoted in Vibhakar 2021). Or alternatively: “by appropriating a very male pornographic tradition to find their own way of exploring their desires” (quoted in Richardson Andrews 2017). Trauma forms the thematic core in both films, rooted in colonial history and drawing our attention to a politically charged predicament of suspended agency. At the same time, in both Lust, Caution and The Handmaiden, trauma as the “affective bearing” (Ngai 2005) is also significant as regards the spectators’ understanding of their cinematic world. This affective bearing is not a quality “attached” to the film externally, but it is immanent to its aesthetic-expressive specificity, which evokes direct emotional engagement in the spectator. In the context of melodrama, Linda Williams has argued that this genre does not merely represent but even enacts trauma by means of its spatio-temporal organization, which directly resonates with the spectators’ affective sensitivities. Williams has characterized the affective quality of this genre by the notion of “temporality of regret,” since melodramatic fantasies are “always tinged with melancholy of loss [. . .] the encounters always take place too late, on death beds or over coffins” (Williams 1991, 11). This feeling of “too late” links melodrama to trauma insofar as traumatic experiences consist of out-of-joint feelings. The sensation is one of being cut off from the flow of time, as a result of an act of dissociation by which people distance themselves from pain. Such feeling is strongly conveyed in the last shot of Lust, Caution, for instance, which finds its male protagonist all alone, sitting on his dead mistress’ bed with his back toward the camera. Only the empty doorway is staring at him from the left side of the frame, while his frontal image is reflected in a mirror on the right. The image composition of the shot suggests a world one cannot fully inhabit after the loss of a loved one—or even the displacement of self from the physical world into the inside of the mirror, in the face of such traumatic loss. When I examine trauma in this chapter in both Lust, Caution and The Handmaiden, I focus less on the representation of national traumas than on matters of affective intensity experienced and understood organically from within the cinematic experience. This focus on trauma makes both films universally accessible, insofar as this approach does not only demonstrate what cinema is able to represent, but also what cinema can do. It is by means of its affective bearing that film can directly engage the spectators’ emotion in a way that alters their cinematic experience. First, I shall argue that Lust, Caution establishes trauma as its affective quality by giving aesthetic expression to “love’s paradoxes” as theorized by Niklas Luhmann. The film draws our attention to performance as a failed attempt to distinguish between the embodied self that is experiencing an emotion, and the impersonated self that is performing emotion, which is the source of trauma in the film. Secondly, in The Handmaiden trauma is borne out by abject masculinity as a constraint

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on female sexual desire. In this film it is the notion of masquerade that functions as an aesthetic-affective strategy for escape from trauma and reclaiming of self-determined agency. While this second perspective is missing from Lust, Caution, I shall show that the ending of The Handmaiden suggests the possibility of overcoming trauma through a relationship with an “addressable other” (Laub 1992, 68), who can annihilate the traumatic story. Lust, Caution The fifth feature film by the acclaimed Taiwanese director Ang Lee, Lust, Caution revolves around Wong, a young woman who in 1938 flees from Shanghai to Hong Kong after the death of her mother and her father’s immigration to England, where he will eventually remarry. Left on her own, she is invited to join a patriotic theater group, whose leader Kuang wants to use her talents as an actress to seduce police chef Yee, a collaborationist of Wang Jingwei’s puppet regime, in order to get him assassinated. The plan ends in violent disaster and Wong runs away. Three years later, after having returned to Shanghai, Wong again encounters Kuang, now an official member of the Chinese resistance, who enlists her into a renewed assassination plan to kill Yee. This time Wong’s advances to become Yee’s mistress are rapidly reciprocated, and they embark on an intense, passionate relationship. At some point Yee has arranged an appointment at a jewelry store for him and Wong, where she is invited to select an extremely rare, pink diamond to be mounted on a ring. This occasions the resistance group with an opportunity to get at Yee without his bodyguards. But when Wong puts on the ring, she gets overwhelmed by emotion and gently urges Yee to flee, who then swiftly escapes the scene of the attempted assassination. The resistance squad is captured and executed near the edge of a ravine, and the film ends with a shot of Yee sitting on Wong’s empty bed, emotionally in turmoil. Earlier in the film we find Wong in a Hong Kong film theater, ardently weeping through Gregory Ratoff’s Intermezzo (1939), starring Ingrid Bergman. In a later scene in Shanghai, she escapes her precarious life to see Cary Grant star in George Stevens’ Penny Serenade (1941), which nevertheless is interrupted by a Japanese propaganda reel. As many critics have noted, these intertextual nods refer indirectly to a third film, which brings the two Hollywood stars together, and which was completed in 1946, four years after the events in Lust, Caution. The film is Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, which also features a young woman recruited by the Allied secret service to seduce an enemy officer in order to infiltrate a treasonous organization. In Hitchcock’s film, Ingrid Bergman’s Alice agrees to marry a caring, but ideologically evil Nazi operative, while secretly in love with Cary Grant’s seemingly callous government agent. Similar to the Notorious plot, in Lust,

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Caution Wong becomes Yee’s mistress, who turns out to be a charming but immoral conspirator, while her true feelings lie with Kuang, a fighter for political justice. Kuang reacts with resentment when Wong sleeps with Yee in accordance with the plan which he himself had helped to conceive. The way in which the film handles the affective tension between Wong, Yee, and Kuang challenges a nationalist discourse of loyalty and betrayal concerning the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. From the perspective of nationalistic passion, Wong’s failed performance renders her a collaborationist herself, allowing her emotions to distract her from her love for the nation, which makes “the weak-willed Wong [. . .] an insult to Chinese women and therefore an insult to China itself” (Chi 2009, 181). However, the affective quality of the scene that follows the climactic moment in the jewelry store, does not seem to suggest at all that Wong is a victim of emotion, but that she voluntarily submits to it. In contrast to the urgency accompanying Yee’s dramatic exit, the ensuing sequence is noticeably calm and pensive, tangibly implying that Wong’s decision to save Yee was not taken under pressure of “hot” emotion, but is based on her emotional “cool,” assisted by thoughtful reflection and free will. The camera follows Wong as she enters the street, abruptly stripped of her carefully fashioned cover identity, then mimics the direction of her gaze as she pauses in front of shop windows, as though she were admiring the dresses on display, before she calls a rickshaw to take her away. In this sequence a POV shot of a colored pinwheel, wildly spinning on its handle could be seen as a visual manifestation of Wong’s emotions, while her appearance remains strangely ambiguous. The gentle, melancholy score accompanying the rickshaw ride through the Shanghai streets full of hustle and bustle functions as what Jeff Smith calls polarization, the shifting of a film scene’s emotional significance toward the affective pole communicated by the nondiegetic music (Smith 1999, 148). When the rickshaw is halted by a road block the camera closes in on Wong’s facial expression. We see her smiling sadly as though reminiscing a lost love, while her hand, adorned by Yee’s pink diamond ring, reaches for a suicide pill hidden in the collar of her coat. But the flashback with which the sequence surprisingly ends is of Kuang inviting Wong to join the resistance squad, suggesting that Wong’s thoughts are with Kuang instead of with Yee, just before she will be captured. The calmness of the scene with Wong heading toward her inevitable fate which will be shared by the resistance group she consciously betrayed, reflecting her death sentence issued by the enemy collaborator she was supposed to seduce ruthlessly, conveys a sense of emotional dissonance. This dissonance offers an opportunity for reflection on the power of passion and the extent to which we voluntarily choose our emotions, even when this choice does not

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allow us to take our lives in our own hands. I argue that the aesthetic-affective function of Lust, Caution is based on such emotional dissonance, which oscillates between love and trauma through a variety of paradoxes as described by Niklas Luhmann. Examples of these are the paradox of voluntary submission and the paradox of increasing the probability of the improbable. In this chapter I aim to demonstrate that Luhmann’s paradoxes of love are structurally related to the paradox of colonial subjectivity. This is when the colonized subjects seek to negotiate the hegemonic order by appropriating the colonial discourse, while disavowing their sense of self. As Adlai Murdoch writes, one consequence of such appropriation is “the production of a paradoxically mimetic sense of alterity on the part of the colonized subject, manifest in her tendency not only to see herself through the eyes of the Other, but to draw on aspects of the colonizer’s model in order to elaborate her own sense of subjectivity” (Murdoch 1993, 73–74). Luhmann’s paradox of love, in which desiring subjects can only exist as objects of desire, reflects the impossibility of harmony inherent in the colonial paradox. This is not only about hierarchy between ethnicities, but also about the desire for autonomy through an appropriation of the colonial discourse. The “paradoxically mimetic sense of alterity” is the reason why the notion of performance is important both in Lust, Caution and in The Handmaiden. It is a constitutive element in the traumatic love story which mimics the tendency of the colonial paradigm to reinforce ethnic hierarchies through culturally appropriated forms of self-affirmation. In both films, love encompasses the paradox of colonial subjectivity, in which agency is determined by voluntary submission to practices of self-denial. But while in Lust, Caution the lovers spiral deeper into the mimetic sense of alterity, in The Handmaiden the love performance transforms into something authentic, which cancels out the paradox. Furthermore, such paradoxicalization is also expressed through the cinematic mood of this film, which enables us to apprehend its affective logic dynamically as we engage with it. My analysis hopes to show that our understanding of the affective tension between the protagonists in Lust, Caution is borne out by aesthetic choices as integral components of our viewing experience, providing us insight into the functioning of emotional trauma. Furthermore, this tension deconstructs the nationalist/traitor distinction in the hegemonic narrative, by establishing trauma as its affective bearing. This renders the film into an exercise in cinematic ethics, orienting the spectators toward reflection upon the “historical crisis in which both the traitor-predator and the patriot-victim are trapped” (Lee 2008, 233).

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Love’s Paradoxes Lust, Caution opens with a flash forward in medias res, with closed captions telling us that the events unfold in Japanese occupied Shanghai in 1942, at the headquarters of the Chinese collaborationist government. The opening functions as a sort of premonitory prologue, which nevertheless avoids to narrate the scene explicitly, or introduce the characters. By contrast, the opening is realized by means of crosscutting between discontinuous scenes, developing its own cinematic mood. The first shot of the film is a close-up of a German shepherd pulling off an appealing, sad look, which evokes contradictory associations. On the one hand the breed carries the negative connotation of violence and aggression, due to German shepherds having been used as guard dogs, for instance, in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. On the other hand, the sad-faced dog conveys the sense of vulnerability, which we recognize from its expression, especially its intensely raised inner eyebrow which resembles the face humans produce when sad and defenseless. This contradiction between violence and fragility is one of the central narrative conflicts in the film, and it also characterizes the relationship between Wong and Yee, although this will only become fully apparent retrospectively. Following Thomas Elsaesser it could be said that the close-up of the German shepherd is a “privileged image.” By merging conflicting elements in a single shot, a privileged image functions “rather like an emblematic picture,” a condensation of various narrative motifs, while implying a “structure of anticipation and suspense” (Elsaesser 2012, 117). The sad-faced German shepherd embodies emotional ambiguity, which becomes the affective blueprint throughout Lust, Caution, and which defines the triangular relationship between Wong, Yee, and Kuang. The image of the German shepherd becomes a dual metaphor of danger and vulnerability, suggesting that one’s capacity of hurting others is intrinsically associated with one’s own possibilities for suffering and pain. Judith Butler calls this our “common corporeal vulnerability” (Butler 2004, 42), which is the condition that complicates Wong’s actions in the film in particular. The spectator, too, is invited to reflect on this duality inherent to the danger/vulnerability axis represented by the German shepherd’s facial expression. From the very first shot of Lust, Caution the image thus generates a narrative momentum the spectator is invited to invest into as the film starts to unfold. From the close-up of the German shepherd, the camera tilts up to a facial shot of a soldier holding the dog on a leash, while looking suspiciously awry. A series of whip pans follows, changing focus from one soldier to another, all keenly observing their environment in a setting that bathes in the cold, blueish hue of an early morning, instilling a harsh, suspenseful mood common to thrillers and crime films. At the same time, the scene is oddly void

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of diegetic sounds, as only the nondiegetic score by Alexandre Desplat can be heard on the sound track. This melody is a slow, elegant waltz with melancholy violins and delicate sounds of a xylophone, which leaves an impression of generic incongruity even though the score is infused with a sense of mystery. The melody fades out, and gives way to a diegetic Cole Porter tune playing on the radio, as the film crosscuts in a seemingly haphazard fashion to an interior shot with a servant handing out bowls of noodle soup to a group of wealthy women about to play mah-jong. A series of close-ups frame the women’s hands tightly as they are mixing and arranging the mah-jong tiles, rapidly switching from one camera angle to another as the game progresses. The camera stays focused on the hands while the women gossip, which creates an almost Godardian mismatch of image and sound. Even when the camera assumes face-level height, it remains highly mobile, thereby avoiding being aligned with the conversation. We know neither who these women are, nor what their relationship is. Yet the detached cinematography, independent from any of the characters, adds to the intrigue conveyed by the scene. Furthermore, the focus on the mah-jong game suggests that game-playing in the film extends to its central characters, in a situation where Yee is unknowingly played games with by Wong, who in turn will get caught up in her own game. The unimportant conversation goes on for some time without the camera really responding to the dialogue, until the film crosscuts with a loud sound bridge to a third location, which is the interior of a military prison. In a shot illuminated by dark chiaroscuro lighting, we notice three male characters in army uniforms, while distant cries can be heard in the background. The middle one approaches the camera situated behind the bars and stays in close-up for an instant, before a door to a corridor is opened for him to enter. In this shot, the chiaroscuro lighting together with the prison bars casting a shadow over the male character’s face, implies dualism with regard to his persona, comparable to the sad-faced German shepherd from the opening scene. Next, we follow this character when he leaves the prison with his bodyguards, passing the said German shepherd, and arriving at the house where the women are still playing mah-jong. We find out that this character is Yee, as he starts exchanging meaningful glances with Wong, who is one of the players. While the dialogue stays on the level of gossip, the camera associates with the exchange of looks between Wong and Yee. By so doing, the camera does not only settle on the protagonists of the film, but it also articulates crucial information about their relationship, which is illicit and cautious, and most likely concerns forbidden love. Yee’s arrival is immediately followed by Wong hurriedly leaving the mah-jong game, and now we follow her as Mrs. Yee’s driver takes Wong to her destination through the streets of Shanghai, filled with Japanese flags.

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Through the car window Wong witnesses a violent scene between a civilian and two Japanese soldiers, as well as a long line of Europeans queuing for old bread. Exiting the car Wong quickly scans her surroundings, before entering a tearoom where she makes a nonsensical telephone call. Here the opening sequence ends and the plot moves back in time to 1938 through a very layered image of Wong in the window, which fades into a scene of her observing Chinese soldiers marching into battle. One of the soldiers is waving the flag of the Republic of China, which nowadays is flown in Taiwan, where the director of the film was born and raised. This opening sequence, which lasts for approximately fourteen minutes, is intriguing in many ways. Through crosscutting it gives us access to a wide range of story information, while concealing the characters’ intentions, their secret plans, their motivations concerning the others. Everything that is revealed about the meaning of events, is shown through implicit, subtle, and indirect narrative hints, which renders the film’s narrative premise intangible at first. This is further enhanced by the focus on seemingly insignificant details: a close-up of hands applying perfume, a trace of lipstick on a piece of china. This opening projects a major enigma onto the heart of Lust, Caution, an enigma already conveyed in its title, which combines primal emotion with prudent forethought. The title implies that caution should be taken when one is led by sexual desire, as lust is never wholly at anyone’s command, which renders lust and caution “functions of each other” (scriptwriter James Schamus quoted in Lee 2008, 235). From the start Lust, Caution presents to us a game of loss, which draws the individuals in, inviting them to voluntary self-endangerment and even self-destruction. Furthermore, the opening establishes trauma as the narrative theme of the film in a way that engenders a variety of paradoxes related to the concept of love. One of the paradoxes is what Niklas Luhmann calls the paradox of “voluntary submission” in which people in love become the source of their own emotion. This inherent paradox of love enables a lover to become both the “author” and the “object” of their personal love story (Luhmann 1988, 166). Similarly, while a traumatic event might not actually be remembered, its remembrance is often acted out instead, not as a memory, but in an action. Thus, in trauma a person can enact a traumatic memory, even without being consciously aware of this enactment (Freud 2003, 132). Such a paradox of voluntary submission is epitomized in a scene of intimacy at the end of act three in the four-part structure of the film, a moment which the screenwriters nominally refer to as “The Dark Night of the Soul.” The sequence is preceded by a nightly exterior scene, opening with an establishing shot of the Chinese collaborationist headquarters, which we recognize from the first shots of the film. A crane shot directs our attention to a car parked in front of the building, followed by a POV shot from inside the car observing the soldiers guarding these headquarters, as well as the

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German shepherd also familiar from the opening. A reaction shot reveals that the observer is Wong, carefully studying the headquarters’ surroundings as she is waiting for Yee to arrive. A mood of anxious anticipation similar to that of the opening sequence characterizes this exterior scene, complete with the blue hue which dominates the mise-en-scène. Furthermore, it establishes Wong as the subject of looking, her agency defined by her power to observe, as well as to anticipate in turn the extent to which she is observed herself. That is, until Yee steps into the car to the sound of the barking German shepherd, as if the dog was forewarning Wong. She starts complaining about the long wait, which stops short as Yee forcefully grasps her face and stares at her intensely, thereby canceling out her agency as subject of looking. His stare is a textbook example of Mulveyan male gaze. It is the embodiment of sadistic power exercising dominance over the female protagonist without consent (Mulvey 1975). Yee then sadistically shares with her some violent details of the arrest of two Chinese resistance members, while aggressively touching her body, before the film cuts to an interior shot of a warmly lit bedroom, where their power struggle continues in a remarkably intense sex scene. The scene shows a sequence of all sexual techniques in the book, while the camera stays close to the action, almost caressing the performers’ bodies. On one occasion the framing shifts focus to the exchange of looks between the two lovers, before Yee, almost as an act of desperation, forcefully embraces Wong, who also clings to him in return. At some point during this scene of intimacy Wong looks offscreen. The next shot has two focal layers, with only the farther plane featuring Wong and Yee in focus, while the nearest plane is markedly blurry. Nevertheless, in this murky foreground a hand weapon is visible, which has caught Wong’s attention. The camera racks onto this object, throwing Wong and Lee out of focus for a brief moment, before the focus racks back onto the background, with Yee now glancing at the weapon. Wong then grasps a pillow and covers Yee’s eyes with it, as though in the heat of the moment, while the true purpose of this erotic gesture is to prevent him seeing the weapon. The scene ends with a close-up of Wong crying, which is an ambiguous image, open to multiple interpretations. On the one hand, Wong’s emotion can be seen as self-disappointment, for not having had the nerve to grasp the gun and shoot Yee perhaps. On the other hand, her crying can be seen as a symptom of jouissance, the French term for both enjoyment and sexual orgasm. In Lacanian thinking, jouissance is a transgression of the Freudian pleasure principle, which nevertheless results in pain instead of in greater pleasure (Lacan 1997, 209). In this sense jouissance is linked to trauma insofar as both refer to a (bodily) experience beyond representation. Furthermore, both trauma and jouissance are characterized by the compulsion to replicate painful events, but without a relief from these events.

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Thus, Wong cries because the voluntary submission to her own emotion entails that she is driven to impulsive re-enactment of jouissance, a process in which trauma and jouissance reinforce one another in a feedback loop. In the same scene the paradox of voluntary submission can also be found in the organization of looking relations and the arrangement of bodies in the cinematic space, which suggest that both Wong and Yee can conquer each other by voluntarily submitting to the other. In this context the notion of “resistance” combines two connotations pertaining to the central emotional conflict that Wong is facing. On the one hand, Wong has to “resist” Yee in the sense of fighting against an enemy collaborator. On the other hand, Wong has to “resist” Yee in the sense of safeguarding herself from her feelings for him, while at the same time she must voluntarily submit to her emotions in order not to be detected as a spy. In accordance with Luhmann’s description, Wong is of necessity both the author and the object of the love story between herself and Yee, for otherwise she would be exposed as an agent of the resistance to the ubiquitously prying eyes. But even Wong’s fatal choice of warning Yee for his attackers must be seen as an act of voluntary submission insofar as her emotion is actively chosen. It does not appear as a fatal possession she is subjected to, as entirely outside her control, even though her emotion does not only put herself, but also the other members of the resistance group into an unexpected and very vulnerable position. According to Robert Solomon, this is characteristic of the emotion of love itself. Love is not some torrent of passion by which one is swept into uncertain actions as if by fate, but an active decision through which one puts oneself at risk by opening up to an unforeseeable future (Solomon 2006, 204; 2007, 199). This is why Wong’s “love decision” is linked to trauma: not only does its voluntary character render her the author-object of her own love story, but also the author-object of her trauma, not to mention the trauma caused by the fate of the other members in her resistance squad. The idea of voluntary submission is also captured in the emotional monologue Wong bursts into in the sequence following the sex scene described above, which takes place in the resistance headquarters after she has been told that it is too early to make an operative move to assassinate Yee: He not only gets inside me, he worms his way into my heart as a snake. Deeper. All the way in. I take him in like a slave. I play my part faithfully so I, too, can get to his heart. Every time he hurts me until I bleed and scream. Then he is satisfied. Then he feels alive. In the dark only he knows it’s all real. That’s why I can torture him until he can’t stand it any longer and still I go on until we collapse from exhaustion. (Wong in Lust, Caution)

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The trauma expressed in the monologue is enhanced by the paradoxical situation that Wong cannot voluntarily submit to her love feelings for Kuang, who reciprocates this same emotion. On the one hand, Wong must actively volunteer submitting to her emotions toward Yee, which she rather would reject. On the other hand, she must consciously resist submission to her love for Kuang, which is mutually felt and reciprocated. The nature of Wong and Kuang’s relationship is mainly communicated through exchanges of looks between the two characters. The first meaningful exchange takes place in a streetcar, which the theater group boards after Wong’s inspirational performance in a patriotic play. Euphoric after her success, Wong takes a seat apart from the rest of the group and leans out of the open window to let her face be touched by the falling rain. Then Kuang sits down behind her, and the framing brings them together in the same shot, while a shot-reverse-shot structure creates an eloquent tension between them. Conventionally, in a shot/reverse shot two film characters are shown looking at each other offscreen, but in this scene Wong and Kuang are constantly framed together within the image, which suggests mutual affection. Only a few words are exchanged, as it is mostly their glances and their facial expressions that do the talking. By contrast, in a later exchange of looks the two characters are not caught within the same frame, and there is a noticeable affective distance between Wong and Kuang. This takes place in the scene in which it is decided that Wong must become Yee’s mistress, but that first she should lose her virginity to another member of the resistance squad than Kuang, to prevent her giving the game away through signs of inexperience. At first, Kuang does not even return Wong’s look, but glances down and swiftly leaves the room. As soon as Wong realizes what the squad has planned, her eyes meet Kuang’s only briefly, who then turns away in shame. The situation is reversed in the scene with Wong’s emotional monologue discussed above. Now it is Kuang trying to catch Wong’s eye, but she resolutely and unflinchingly keeps looking in front of her, determined to carry on the plan even though it threatens to destroy her. When Wong finally returns Kuang’s desperate stare, he cannot bear the feelings of guilt her gaze triggers in him, and he flees outside. Finally, when waiting for their execution at the edge of a ravine, Kuang and Wong lock eyes for a long time before the camera cranes upward to reveal the dark pit opening before them. This recurring theme of Wong and Kuang exchanging looks of affective significance ranges from coy looks (fondness) through avoiding looks (shame) and confronting looks (guilt), to a sort of mutually affirming look signifying love, which could never be actualized. Therefore, the relationship between Wong and Kuang epitomizes another paradox of love, which is that its permanence is to be found only in impermanence. The ideal of love dictates love to be an eternal oath, but love can only last for a limited amount of

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time, insofar as love has its own dynamics that constantly “needs to change forms and continually devour something new. [. . .] Love destroys itself [by dissolving] the characteristics which have lent wings to imagination and replaces it with familiarity” (Luhmann 1988, 71, 73). Lust, Caution seems to suggest that Wong and Kuang are able to keep their love constant, because it does not lay claim to time: it has neither a beginning nor an end, and it is free from the waxing and waning of affection which indicate that the end of love is in sight. This means that love between Wong and Kuang can only exist beyond the boundaries of temporality, in impermanence, that is, in and through death. Therefore, the aerial shot of the dark pit opening before them in the execution scene suggests that the “essence” of their love can only be found in nothingness, beyond the framework of meaning. MIRROR, MIRROR Luhmann also describes the paradox of love as increasing the probability of the improbable. The “semantics of intimacy” tell us that who we love ultimately determines what we are. But it was also true that as the importance of individual identity grew in one’s life, “the more improbable it became that one would encounter partners possessing the characteristics expected” (Luhmann 1988, 131). As a consequence, “generalized indicators of love, such as merit, beauty, or virtue are cast aside in favor of an increasing personalization of the principle which will make the improbable possible” (Luhmann 1988, 24). So when the leader of the Chinese resistance tells Wong that she has succeeded where all the other female agents have failed, he suggests that she has achieved the probability of the improbable. This achievement is not due to her beauty, courage, or intelligence, but to her “love performance,” which not only requires voluntary submission to emotion, but also a (failed) attempt to separate the embodied self that is experiencing emotion, and the impersonated self that is performing emotion. At the same time, Wong’s success in performing love is also the cause of her downfall: the intention of Wong’s performance is to seduce Yee, but in the end the performance itself takes over as a constitutive fabric of her actions, in a way that “offends the prudish masculinity and the compulsion for controlled harmony at the heart of Chinese political culture” (Donald 2010, 56). Emphasis throughout the film on the notion of performance is the reason why the mirror is an important recurring motif in Lust, Caution. This also includes other reflecting surfaces such as a shop window in the scene after the failed assassination attempt. This shot creates an effect of superimposition of the fancy dress on display, and Wong’s face reflected in the window. The shot is a close-up of Wong and simultaneously an approximation of her POV, conveying her awareness of

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the life she has been impersonating, and which all of a sudden has become unattainable forever. Yet the first shot with a mirror is not of Wong but of Yee inspecting his appearance before he enters the room in which his wife is entertaining her mah-jong-playing guests in the opening sequence of the film. This oval mirror enables his switching roles from a scrupulous counter-intelligence officer to a considerate husband as well as a passionate lover. At a later moment Wong performs a similar role switch when preparing to leave for the fated rendezvous at the jewelry store. In the safety of her room, she takes off the wedding ring from her imaginary marriage and takes out a trench coat—an archetypal signifier for a classic spy—while we witness the action through the reflection in a large dressing mirror. These two “mirror shots” in turn reflect one another to some extent, suggesting that Wong and Yee are mirror images of each other and for each other, both operating from a false image. Both Wong and Yee attempt to charm the other by a façade, only to end up being deceived by their own emotions for each other, beaten at their own game. This is why both Wong and Yee are traumatized by each other, alternating between being subject and object of trauma in their reciprocal game of love. This “mirror structure” from the opening sequence is repeated with variations in several other scenes in the film. One such moment occurs after Wong has reinserted herself as “Mrs. Mai” into Mrs. Yee’s social circle in Shanghai. We witness Yee inspecting his reflection in the hallway mirror, but in this shot his expression is noticeably distressed, while the mirror frame duplicates the reflection, suggesting the disintegration of his sense of self. His expression quickly brightens though, as he learns about Wong’s presence, whom he subsequently visits in her room. An elegant image composition places Yee in the doorway to the left in the background of the image, looking at Wong who is centralized in the foreground, sitting on her bed and turning away from Yee, while a diagonally placed mirror reflects her image frontally toward the camera (figure 4.1). In contrast to the previous disintegrated mirror shot of Yee, in this shot he is the epitome of self-possession. Furthermore, the triangularity in the image composition expresses a staged relationship in which Yee’s façade is drawn to the façade put up by Wong, while her “authentic self” observes the “drama of passion” as if through the mirror. At the same time their emotions are not counterfeit but genuine, which results in both Wong and Yee experiencing the inability to dissociate themselves from the roles they have been assigned to: Wong as a spy and an assassin employed by the Chinese nationalist regime, Yee as a torturer and an executioner for the Japanesedominated puppet regime to which he belongs. This is why Wong’s trauma is both caused by and related to Yee’s trauma and vice versa, in a reciprocal cycle of hurting and being hurt that characterizes their affair.

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Figure 4.1.  Lust, Caution: Wong and Yee’s mirrored relation.

This trauma is strongly conveyed in the last shot of the film, which shows almost exactly the same triangular image composition as described above. It finds Yee alone sitting on Wong’s bed with his back to the camera, an empty doorway staring at him from the left side of the image, and his frontal image reflected in the mirror on the right (figure 4.2). The shot suggests that, by losing Wong, Yee has lost the mirroring of his trauma which shaped his life, while leaving his own trauma intact. An equally plausible interpretation would be that the mirror motif in the film signifies the moment when putting on a façade threatens to absorb the characters’ sense of self. This is why the scene of Wong volunteering to be deflowered by Liang is preceded by a lengthy shot of her through a mirror, taking off her clothes as if she were shedding her old self, so that she can be dressed in a new identity. In fact, dressing and costume are important throughout the film. Not only is Wong’s transformation into Mrs. Mak effected through her elegant and luxurious cheongsam dresses, her strategy of seducing Yee also involves a visit to a tailor shop, where she gives Yee advice on the cut of his suit, while they gaze at each other through the mirror. In this scene the mirror seems to represent the mutual validation which both Wong and Yee seek, before they allow themselves to be caught up in their game of love in the first place, only to get messed up by it afterward. This is how Lust, Caution dramatizes the paradox of increasing the probability of the improbable. The film shows what happens when two sets of experiences, absolutely opposite to each another, are forged together by mutual deception. Similarly, the scene of Wong and Yee’s first lovemaking is partially shot through a mirrored headboard, suggesting that their love affair only exists in and through the impossibility of its occurrence. It exists in a

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Figure 4.2.  Lust, Caution: Absence mirrored.

mirror image, while its effects are not experienced in the abstract, impersonated body, but in the concrete, personal body. Furthermore, it is interesting that in this scene of their lovemaking the moment of Yee’s climax is cut to a brief close-up of the familiar German shepherd, which once more strengthens the association of this character with the canine. This associative circle is closed with the final close-up of Yee’s facial expression, simultaneously animated with emotional pain and cold toughness. The affective bearing of this final shot thus resists assimilation with a one-dimensional story of good versus evil in the context of the Japanese occupation of China. But it also communicates the traumatic realization that his lover’s death made his survival possible, as Yee’s life can only continue in the inevitability of Wong’s death. In the Mood Even though from the generic point of view Lust, Caution is most appropriately described as an espionage thriller, the film is remarkably unassuming in its formal and stylistic organization. With the exception of two scenes in the entire film, explicit violence is largely missing and only indirectly referred to, as in the introductory shot from the opening sequence. Here, identifying Yee as an executioner is almost purely achieved by cinematic means of lighting, framing, and distant offscreen sounds. Such subtle signification is in harsh contrast to the scene in which Tsao is violently killed. He is a former acquaintance of Kuang’s and a present subordinate to Yee, and he unwittingly helps Kuang’s resistance squad to infiltrate Yee’s household by introducing Wong to Mrs. Yee. After the Yees have left Hong Kong for Shanghai, Tsao discovers

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that Kuang and his mates are not who they claim to be and he confronts the squad with the intention of blackmail. This scene starts off in a despondent mood, with the defeated resistance squad dismantling their headquarters in silence. At some point Wong steps outside onto the balcony, where birdsong and loud chirping of crickets prevent her from hearing Tsao entering. The camera stays with Wong in the foreground of the image, her back to the balcony door, as we notice through a windowpane how Tsao comes in as a blurry figure. The scene cuts to an interior shot with the camera focused on one squad member’s shocked face, while we hear Tsao’s voice offscreen. In the next composition Tsao is out of focus in the foreground, directing his gaze at Wong who is in focus in the rear plane of the image, still unaware of what is going on inside. Her realization of the situation is marked by a racking shot, which draws our attention to the threat Tsao poses, and which throws Wong out of focus, her fabricated identity fading away. In the next frame the camera is behind the window again, as if we were invited to share Wong’s point of view observing the situation, which steadily escalates. Yet this frame is not a genuine POV shot, as her reflection swiftly appears on a right-side windowpane, revealing her emotional state. A messy, violent scene follows, with a highly mobile frame, during which Kuang attempts to stab Tsao but only injures himself, and Tsao attempts to fight back regardless of his serious injuries, bleeding all over the place. Toward the end of the scene Tsao, stabbed in the back, falls down the stairs but is still alive. The scene comes to its conclusion when Kuang descends and breaks Tsao’s neck, only to meet Wong’s horrified gaze. She then quickly escapes into the night and the sequence fades into black. Many critics have argued that this scene of violence conflicts with the rest of the film and is even counterproductive to its artistic and expressive intentions (i.e., Purvis 2018). But this stylistic dissonance could also be epitomizing hidden trauma as the undercurrent of the film, unexpectedly surfacing in this scene. Furthermore, the scene drastically changes the mood of the film, which no longer can be enjoyed as an elegant espionage thriller. The scene shows us the clumsiness of the plotters, which forebodes Kuang’s inevitable failure, and which in turn leads to Wong’s fate. It also exposes the unhealable wound that motivates the actions of the characters and incessantly returns to haunt them. This scene of violence is what Cathy Caruth describes as “an experience that is not fully assimilated as it occurs” (Caruth 1996, 5), expressing a gritty reality that has not yet been fully available to consciousness. The scene also demonstrates that Lust, Caution primarily functions through what Robert Sinnerbrink calls “stimmung” or the aesthetics of mood, describing “how a (fictional) world is expressed or disclosed via a shared affective attunement orienting the spectator within that world” (Sinnerbrink 2012, 148). Sinnerbrink speaks of relevant “mood-cues” in cinema, which

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we apprehend as affectively charged and emotionally evocative. In Lust, Caution, color would seem to be among the most salient mood-cues and more specifically the color blue, which is clearly the predominant hue in the film. For us the color is linked to Wong, who throughout the film wears blue outfits on a gamut that runs from unsophistication through elegance to downright extravaganza. As Natalie Ng argues, not only does this fashionable upgrading express the ever-increasing complication of Wong’s shifting identities, but there is also a development in color from dark, unassertive navy blues to brighter, complicated blues of cobalt and indigo, embodying her progression from emotional innocence to sexual experience (Ng 2017). Furthermore, blue is also the prevalent color in the film’s mise-en-scè‌‌‌‌‌ne in general, with a subtle bluish overtone in nearly every scene, which leaves the spectator with the impression that either a color filter or digital color grading has been used to create a chilly mood. The generic association of this blue hue is with contemporary thrillers, such as Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002) or Joel Schumacher’s Phone Booth (2002), where it often conveys a sense of gloomy coldness. By contrast in Lust, Caution the emotional association of the blue is with a haunting mood of regret, reflecting the always-elusive outcome of the desired event. Such pathos of regret disturbs the sense of progress between past, present, and future, similarly to traumatic experiences, which “become freeze-framed into an eternal present in which one remains forever trapped [. . .] past becomes present, and future loses all meaning other than endless repetition” (Stolorow 2003, 159). With this cinematic world imbued in the blue mood of regret, the scenes of Wong and Yee’s sexual encounters are in striking contradiction. The first one takes place after Wong has casually given Yee a hint that his wife has given her a reprieve from mah-jong to go to the movies. Similar to the scene with Tsao’s killing, this sequence starts off in a melancholy mood. It first shows an establishing shot of Wong passing through a checkpoint in a blue raincoat and a matching sou’wester in heavily pattering rain weather. The rain gives Yee an excuse to have his driver pick up Wong in his car, but instead of taking her to the movie theater, the driver drops her off in front of an apartment building, where Wong is supposed to wait for Yee. In an image composition similar to the scene with Tsao, Wong goes to close a window in the room, not suspecting that Yee is already in the apartment. We observe her reflection briefly in the windowpane before the different angle of incidence changes the angle of reflection to Yee. Wong sees Yee’s reflection and reacts with a jump scare—a premonition of the events to follow swiftly—after which she quickly regains her composure and carries out her performance. This is a silly game of seduction, which ends abruptly when Yee violently attacks Wong, hitting her with his belt buckle, and raping her.

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At this point the camera moves outside again, as if taking distance from the shocking events which we nevertheless witness from behind the window, in the pattering rain. The mood change in the scene is not only due to its disturbing action, but also to the disorderly mobile frame, and the lack of nondiegetic music, which renders the sounds of pattering rain and Wong’s painful cries all the more pronounced. The scene ends with an extreme high angle shot of the room, where Yee observes Wong lying on the bed in an unresponsive state, while a ray of warm yellow light enters the scene diagonally from the right-hand side of the image. From a nationalist perspective, the rape scene reproduces a misogynist, clichéd trope in which a nation is symbolized by a woman, so that when Wong is raped, the nation she represents is invaded and violated too. From the perspective of color design, the scene can be interpreted in terms of the film’s title. The introduction of warm yellow— a complementary color to the previously dominating cool blue—symbolizes the dangerous lust which has now pervaded cautiousness. This is why Wong and Yee’s other scenes of consenting sexual intercourse bathe in warm yellow light, contributing to the mood of emotional heat that engulfs both characters. But warm yellow can also be interpreted more abstractly as trauma penetrating the fabric of reality. Therefore, the affective-aesthetic tension that oscillates between lust and caution, love and trauma, also extends to the cinematic mood of the film as conveyed in its color design. This is dynamically experienced as we engage with the film. Its complexity renders Lust, Caution a cinematic multilevel event that immerses the spectator through the logic of paradox which is simultaneously real and fabricated, imaginary and tangible, similar to the traumatic love between its protagonists, which is why the film defies reading based on nationalist and gender stereotypes. THE (IM)POSSIBILITY OF LOVE: THE HANDMAIDEN The three-part structure of The Handmaiden evokes an association with Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), famously consisting of multiple, subjectively focalized accounts of one event, each of which is visually presented to the spectator with an equal degree of truthfulness. The central character of The Handmaiden is Lady Hideko, a wealthy Japanese heiress, confined to a mansion where her abusive Uncle Kouzuki forces her to read sadomasochistic pornography aloud to his aristocratic male clients, while dressed in a traditional geisha costume. Yet, the first part of the film is told from the perspective of Sook-hee, a pickpocket hired to become Hideko’s handmaiden by “Count” Fujiwara, a Korean con man and art forger. His ploy is to marry Hideko and then to send her off to a psychiatric institution in order to seize her fortune. The setting of this power play is an isolated, richly decorated

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mansion, which combines two architectural styles, Victorian and Japanese. The Victorian elements do not only function as a nod to the original novel by Waters, but they are also characteristic of Korean society at the time, as it had been “modernized” by assimilating elements of British culture during Japanese rule in the late nineteenth century (Suwa 2019, 280). The mansion functions as a microcosm of shifting colonial power dynamics, reflected in strategies of cultural appropriation and the use of languages. The most powerful figure in the film is Uncle Kouzuki, who is Korean, but who has internalized the language and culture of the Japanese colonial power so profoundly, that he has become a colonizer himself. However, this makes him vulnerable to Fujiwara’s scheming, when he strategically uses Japanese to deceive Kouzuki into accepting his double-crossing ploy. By contrast, the only main character who is Japanese by birth, Lady Hideko, prefers to speak Korean, as Japanese is the language of the pornographic literature she is forced to read aloud by her uncle-in-law (Shin 2019, 5). The extent of her predicament is visually communicated through the omnipresent shoji screens, the Japanese sliding doors which separate the different sections of the mansion, and which consist of narrow vertically constructed stiles evoking an association with prison bars. This association is enhanced by a number of exterior shots in the mansion, with the camera pointing at Hideko through multiple frames within the frame, creating an oppressive cinematic mood. A paradox, then, lies at the heart of The Handmaiden, as it is Hideko, though Japanese, who due to her age and gender is actually more than others entrapped in double structures of (cultural) colonization. The film’s opening sequence starts off in medias res with opening credits rolling across a black screen to the layered diegetic sounds of soldiers marching in heavily pattering rain, accompanied by the sound of children chanting. Then the film visualizes this soundscape by an establishing shot of Japanese soldiers storming down a rain-soaked alley chased by some barefoot children. The scene is observed by Sook-hee who is holding a child in her arms, which she promptly hands over to Miss Boksun, the “director” of an orphanage of thieves, which is also Sook-hee’s home. With a noticeable gesture, Miss Boksun takes a green butterfly hairpin out of her hair and hands it over to Sook-hee as if in return. Next, we witness a car driving through a gorgeous landscape bathing in warm light, with Sook-hee inside closely examining the hairpin, while she is heading toward the isolated Kouzuki mansion, along coastal cliffs and through densely wooded grounds. Shortly after having settled in her modest quarters at Kouzuki’s mansion, Sook-hee is awakened by Lady Hideko screaming in her sleep, while having a nightmare. She tells Sook-hee the story of her aunt who hanged herself from a branch of a cherry tree outside Hideko’s window, the ghost of the aunt still haunting the mansion. The camera zooms out through the window, revealing Hideko as a white

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figure suddenly appearing on the far side of the room, perhaps a deliberate clichéd image flirting with the haunted house genre. For a short moment, the camera then focuses on the cherry tree, its branches rustling ominously in the wind. The opening sequence ends with Sook-hee calming Hideko with spoonsful of sake and a lullaby, which functions as a sound bridge to a flashback revealing Count Fujiwara’s plan: how to use Sook-hee to persuade Hideko to fall in love with him. Similarly to the opening of Lust, Caution, this sequence avoids explicit narration or character introduction. It can even be considered as a moment of unreliable narration, as it seems to confirm the identity of Sook-hee’s character as the “handmaiden” in the film’s title. Only in the first flashback is it revealed in Sook-hee’s voice-over narration, that in reality she is working in partnership with a con man, and just masquerading as a handmaiden in order to infiltrate the Kouzuki household. However, retrospectively it could be said that even Sook-hee’s narration is unreliable, appearing to give us truthful access to her mental subjectivity, and thus persuading the spectators to believe in Fujiwara’s malicious swindle. Simultaneously, the opening functions to immerse the spectator within the film’s cinematic world in a way that suggests there is more to this intrigue than meets the eye. One central prop in the beginning of The Handmaiden is Miss Boksum’s butterfly hairpin, prominently brought to our attention in multiple close-ups. A flashback reveals that the hairpin is actually a lockpick, before the prop disappears from the picture altogether like a Hitchcockian MacGuffin. In Hitchcock’s films, a MacGuffin is an object which seems to motivate narrative action—blueprints for a silent airplane engine in The 39 Steps (1935), radioactive uranium in Notorious (1946)—but which later appears psychologically irrelevant to the dynamics of the story (e.g., Braudy 1972). Similarly, the green butterfly hairpin appears to be a cinematic red herring, only to gain narrative significance in the third plotline of the film, in which it makes its return. The hairpin is therefore best characterized as what Mladen Dolar terms a “privileged object” in a Hitchcock film (Dolar 1992, 34). First, the butterfly motif is a symbol of transformation. Secondly, it is a token for Sook-hee’s identity, connecting her to her past as a pickpocket. And finally, it has an important function in the narrative action as an object which she extracts from her hair when a fire breaks out in the psychiatric ward she has been committed to, allowing her to pick the locks on her chains and to escape. Staging Trauma As in Lust, Caution a number of elements suggest that trauma lies at the heart of The Handmaiden, but unlike in Lust, Caution, this trauma has to do with female sexual desire, aching to break free from the shackles of abject,

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toxic masculinity. Such inherent trauma is already conveyed in the narrative premise of the film, when a young woman is raised to be married to her sadistic uncle-in-law, so that he may purloin her fortune. But there is also the visual juxtaposition between lush green scenery surrounding the mansion, and its architecture resembling a Japanese puzzle box, which sunlight never enters. There is Hideko herself, appearing as a ghost-like figure haunted by her own tormented thoughts, such as the memory of her aunt hanging herself from the cherry tree which overlooks the mansion, evoking memories of past traumatic experiences. According to Pierre Janet, in trauma part of one’s personality becomes fixated and inflexible, stopping its development (quoted in van der Kolk and van der Hart 1995, 177). It could be argued that in The Handmaiden the sexual part of Hideko’s personality has stopped developing, due to her childhood trauma. It is only with the help of Sook-hee that Hideko can imagine an alternative, positive future scenario and to realize an act to terminate her trauma. Furthermore, the notion of masquerade functions as an important strategy for this reclaiming of agency, facilitating consummation of Hideko and Sook-hee’s mutual desire, which in turn enables re-assertion of their self-esteem. However, regardless of this hinting at trauma as the narrative theme of the film, Sook-hee’s plotline does not explicitly corroborate this apart from one scene in Kouzuki’s library in the Japanese part of the mansion. To tense diegetic music, we are invited to enter the library together with Sook-hee. This is followed by a cosmic zoom deep into the room where Hideko and Kouzuki are conducting their “reading practice.” An establishing shot centralizes Sook-hee at the threshold of the library in an image with a vast depth of field, emphasizing its multiple planes, suggesting entrapment. The scene cuts to an abrupt close-up of Kouzuki angrily shouting “Snake, snake!” scaring Sook-hee to the core, after which she takes a quick step backward. Her pointof-view shot reveals the sculpture of a snake in a strike position, marking the “bounds of knowledge” which Sook-hee should not cross, before steel folding scissor gates are slammed shut in front of her. Not only does this startle Sook-hee, but it also strikes us as spectators so forcefully, that we have to take a “step backward” from the library entrance as well. Behind the bars of the scissor gates, Sook-hee is then confronted by Kouzuki’s piercing gaze, as he reaches for a white pill and pops it into his mouth, revealing his black, snake-like tongue. The snake is an obvious metaphor for the toxic masculinity embodied in the figure of Kouzuki. It is a recurring narrative element, which, for example, obstructs Hideko’s aunt, when she tries to escape during a particularly troubling reading practice. But the snake is also a dual symbol of life and destruction, transformation and stagnation, which is why its sculpture has to be destroyed before Hideko and Sook-hee can escape Kouzuki’s mansion.

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The violent nature of the scene with Sook-hee in the library, realized by abrupt, startling cinematic techniques, produces a “mood dissonance” in the otherwise rather tranquil first part of the film. With the exception of the library scene, traumatic reality is only implicitly suggested, mainly by means of the film’s mise-en-scè‌‌‌‌‌‌ne. To this purpose the setting—the mansion itself—plays an important role. As noted, the mansion is a peculiar hybrid of Japanese and Victorian architecture, perhaps as an homage to Sarah Waters’ Victorian crime novel. The Sook-hee plotline stays mostly within the Victorian setting, which is richly decorated with ornamental wallpaper, exquisitely detailed chandeliers, regal portraiture, octagonal staircases, opulent furniture, decorative timepieces, and hand-painted flower vases, with an occasional bonsai tree arrangement breaking the stylistic harmony. This lavish setting is often brought into view through a wide-angle tableau shot centralizing some thoughtfully placed piece of furniture, framed by a doorway, paneling, and/or draped curtains. The deep-planed verticality achieved by such an image composition suggests a division between past and present, inside and outside, thus rendering visible the traumatic discontinuity of Hideko’s temporal and spatial experience. On other occasions, the camera moves through the setting almost as a pure point of view, not perceptually associated with any subjective point of view in the cinematic world, but nevertheless recognizable as a presence within the diegesis. It is as if this inner vision of the camera itself, at times observing Hideko and Sook-hee like a pursuer from behind a shoji screen, conveys the sense of trauma that is haunting Hideko. This oppressive setting together with the introverted, haunting presence of the camera mean that the mise-en-scè‌‌‌‌‌‌ne of The Handmaiden parallels Hideko’s mental subjectivity, expressing the impact of traumatic events that she is unable to put to rest. It is within this setting that other symbols of Hideko’s trauma are hidden, such as a string of three metal beads, a length of rope, and an enormous collection of hand gloves, all of which Sook-hee discovers when going through Hideko’s closets. All these items are references to traumatic events in Hideko’s life, as much hidden out of sight as her trauma is hidden in her somatic memory. The meaning of these items is revealed in the second plotline of the film, which is from Hideko’s viewpoint. The transition from Sook-hee’s to Hideko’s storyline has an interesting and complicated temporal structure, which visualizes different layers of time, entering them into dialogue with each other as it were. It starts with Hideko’s handing over to the doctors her own medallion, claiming that it belongs to Sook-hee, when the latter is admitted to a psychiatric ward in Hideko’s stead. The medallion is shown to contain a miniature portrait of Sook-hee herself, secretly made by Fujiwara, which Hideko claims to be a portrait of Sook-hee’s mother “before she went mad.” The camera zooms in on this portrait in a close-up, which then elegantly dissolves into an exact graphic match with a profile shot of

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Sook-hee, whose (untrustworthy) voice-over contemplates Hideko’s deception, calling her a “rotten bitch.” The shots of Sook-hee struggling with the psychiatric nurses in the present are crosscut with shots of young Hideko struggling in the grasp of her governess (who is also Kouzuki’s former wife) in the past, crying that she is “not a rotten bitch.” The transition cuts back and forth between past and present a few times, before the narration settles on the past, where Kouzuki takes out a string with four metal beads. With a disturbing gesture, he inserts one bead into young Hideko’s mouth before ruthlessly striking her outstretched hand with the instrument, her palm facing down. Not only does this transition in plotline establish Kouzuki as the source of Hideko’s trauma, it also suggests that Hideko and Sook-hee’s trauma is shared, interwoven even. It is this interlacing that enables both Hideko and Sook-hee to distance themselves from their trauma through the logic of masquerade. The same transition also suggests that trauma is something that Hideko and Sook-hee share. This entangles their desire for self-determination in a way that bypasses their social inequality. Therefore, rather than telling a mere (love) story based on mutual (sexual) desire, The Handmaiden is fundamentally about shared desire for mutually enriching self-determination, which enables both Hideko and Sook-hee to break free from patriarchal constraints. But before this can happen, their trauma needs to be exposed. This takes place in Hideko’s plotline, starting with a series of varied flashbacks, ranging from young Hideko receiving reading lessons from her aunt with erotic literature as learning material, while closely observed by Kouzuki’s vigilant eyes, to Hideko’s aunt hanging from the blooming cherry tree with Hideko herself observing the scene surrounded by servants. There is also Hideko impersonating an “illustration” from a sadomasochistic story inspired by Marquis de Sade, in which she is suspended mid-air while fastened to a life-size wooden puppet as her “sex partner” (figure 4.3). The scene forcefully

Figure 4.3.  The Handmaiden: Hideko being puppeteered by Kouzuki.

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draws our attention to her traumatic entrapment, ensuing from her deadlocked agency, her state of being literally used as a puppet by puppeteer Kouzuki. In these flashbacks we witness young Hideko and her aunt being brutally punished by Kouzuki for a bad reading, as well as the aunt’s attempted escape in the direction of the snake at the entrance of his library, only to be stopped on the inside by the steel scissor gates, which in Sook-hee’s plotline firmly shut her out. We also learn about Kouzuki’s obliging Hideko to attend at the readings in which her aunt recites erotic literature to cigar-smoking male aristocrats in an elegant Japanese setting. This results in her taking over in this role after her aunt’s suicide. In one flashback, Hideko simultaneously enacts both the role of dominatrix and submissive in the story she is reading, strangling herself with black leather gloves, which we associate with her uncle’s brutality. In another flashback later on in Hideko’s plotline, she is taken to the “basement” by Kouzuki after she has become suspicious about some aspects of her aunt’s “suicide.” The basement is a dark and scary space, but what Hideko witnesses there is not explicitly shown to us. Only a reaction shot of her horrified face, promptly thrown out of focus, invites us to imagine the horrors she is confronted with. This is accompanied by strange offscreen underwater sounds, which in a later scene makes us associate the basement with an erotic painting in one of Kouzuki’s books, featuring an octopus-like sea monster. In the third plotline, which is largely from Fujiwara’s point of view, this octopus is briefly brought into picture, splashing away while cramped in a measly aquarium, demonstrating that the poor animal is not a monster in reality, but another victim of abuse at the hands of Kouzuki. Both the black gloves Hideko is constantly forced to wear as a persistent reminder of events in her childhood and Kouzuki’s basement designed for emotional and physical torture function as allegories or emotion metaphors for Hideko’s trauma. The gloves hide the visible marks on her hands, which testify of Kouzuki’s violent brutality toward her as a child. But the shiny blackness of the gloves’ material also evokes an association with the tar-like substance that sticks to Hideko’s skin and suffocates by its sheer substantiality. Sara Ahmed has found the notion of “stickiness” an apt metaphor for affects that surface between bodies, objects, and signs as a result of specific histories (Ahmed 2004, 90). So, metaphorically speaking, the gloves represent the black stain left on Hideko’s skin where Kouzuki has touched. They have the affective value of trauma that has accumulated over the many years of abuse, while Hideko’s possibilities of acting upon the situation were highly restricted due to her age and gender. As Bessel van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart point out, such a feeling of helplessness toward extreme events “is fundamental to making an experience traumatic” (van der Kolk and van der Hart 1995, 175). This is why Sook-hee triumphantly flings the black gloves into the ocean as she and Hideko are safely on their way toward Shanghai,

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shedding the stained skin in a symbolic gesture. Similarly, the hidden basement epitomizes what Laura Brown refers to as “secret trauma,” what is occurring to girls and women behind closed doors, at the hands of those they depend on. These are traumatic experiences “to which women accommodate; potentials for which women make room in their lives and their psyches. They are private events, sometimes known only to the victim and the perpetrator” (Brown 1995, 101). Accommodating to the source of her psychic trauma, Kouzuki’s everyday assaults on her personal integrity and physical safety, is exactly what Hideko has done in order to survive the repetition of domestic violence and brutality. Masquerade as Resistance After the series of flashbacks opening the second plotline, the narration unfolds from an earlier moment in the story and from Hideko’s point of view. This plotline revolves around the original pact Hideko initially made with Fujiwara, whom we recognize as one of the former excited guests at a reading event organized by Kouzuki. To seal their pact, Fujiwara promises to give Hideko a fatal dose of pure opium to commit suicide with, should she ever be caught out by Kouzuki. A major part of Hideko’s plotline consists of retelling the events of Sook-hee’s narrative, which could be seen as an aesthetic expression of her repeated, traumatic (childhood) abuse. Furthermore, Hideko and Fujiwara’s swindle pact itself can also be interpreted as a parallel to the trauma caused by Kouzuki’s cruelty: Fujiwara too seeks to take advantage of Hideko in a situation, where the only alternative for assertion of her individual agency is suicide. Among the events retold is Hideko and Sook-hee’s first sexual encounter, which Charlotte Richardson Andrews describes as intentionally staged, and characterized by irony and reflexivity (Richardson Andrews 2017). This ironic intentionality means that the sex scenes become instances of masquerade, which can potentially challenge and resist the patriarchal framework. In psychoanalytical theory, masquerade is a concept introduced by Joan Riviere to define a (feminine) mode of being for the (male) other. When a woman masquerades, she renounces her subjective agency in order to become an image of femininity for the male gaze (Riviere 1929/2000). But as Mary Ann Doane has argued, the practice of masquerade can also hold a patriarchal framework at bay, which creates room for the acknowledgment of its fabricated nature: “The fact that we can speak of a woman ‘using’ her sex or ‘using’ her body for particular gains is highly significant. [. . .] The masquerade doubles representation: it is constituted by a hyperbolization of the accoutrements of femininity” (Doane 1991, 26). Following up on this idea, I argue that the sex scenes in The Handmaiden function as masquerade on two levels. On the one hand, in Sook-hee and

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Hideko’s masquerade of Hideko and Fujiwara’s future wedding night, Sook-hee and Hideko construct an alternative space beyond the constraints of abusive patriarchy. On the other, the quasi-pornographic film conventions of these scenes destabilize the male gaze presupposed in such conventions. This results in defamiliarizing a viewing system in which men are defined as active subjects of looking and women are reduced to passive objects to-be-looked-at (Mulvey 1975). In Sook-hee’s plotline the scene starts with Hideko inviting her to come into her bed, because she “feels a nightmare coming.” The camera flies to a bird's-eye view of the bed, with Sook-hee and Hideko’s backs turned toward each other, then hovers closer as they turn face-to-face. While the dialogue conveys the pretext that Sook-hee tutors an inexperienced Hideko for her impending wedding night with Fujiwara (“and he’ll touch you like this”), Sook-hee takes out a lollipop and puts it in her mouth before she kisses Hideko very gently on the lips, be it with a pronounced “smack.” A playful score starts on the sound track as Hideko starts kissing her in return, while the camera moves upward in a circular motion. The framing switches between long shots and extreme close-ups of the action as Sook-hee discovers Hideko’s body as if in amazement at its beauty, and the scene ends with a close-up of Sook-hee between Hideko’s legs, stuttering as she describes Hideko’s vagina as “S . . . s . . . spellbindingly beautiful.” The whole dialogue, and especially the stuttered spoken lines, provide comic relief for the scene, which enhances its quality as a masquerade. Jia Tolentino makes a similar point when she writes that in the sex scenes Hideko and Sook-hee “know what they look like, it seems—they are consciously performing for each other—and Park is deft at extracting the particular sense of silly freedom that can be found in enacting a sexual cliché” (Tolentino 2016). In terms of masquerade, the “sexual clichés” enacted by Hideko and Sookhee become “tools” of sexual self-expression, which in turn become a source of self-determination for them both. In Hideko’s plotline, the lovemaking sequence is preceded by a scene in which Hideko performs one of her readings, this one involving an erotic encounter between two women using Ben Wa balls to facilitate sexual pleasure. The story would appear to leave Hideko excited herself, which triggers an enthusiastic reception from her ecstatic male audience. This is cut to Sook-hee exposing Hideko’s breasts while the camera circles above the two lovers in a bird’s-eye view. The framing is more mobile than in the previous account of the event, as if the camera movement were more expressive of the throes of passion Hideko and Sook-hee have fallen into. Furthermore, while the previous scene was cut to another event before Sook-hee proceeds to perform cunnilingus on Hideko, we now stay up close and personal with the lovers. This is the moment when the nondiegetic score starts off on the sound track, but the music is strikingly different from the previous playful melody.

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The affective quality of this music is romantic, which changes the emotional significance of the scene by polarization. But as in the previous retelling, the scene does not lack in humor, such as when Sook-hee emerges from between Hideko’s legs, out of breath and her face wet with Hideko’s fluids, uttering the line “Shall I teach you more, miss?” At some point a three-pane mirror reflects the image of the lovers from three different angles (figure 4.4). This image is but one example of the mirror reflection motif in The Handmaiden, which as in Lust, Caution is also a recurring element here in Park ChanWook’s film, suggesting perhaps that Hideko and Sook-hee are mirror images of each other. As Charlotte Richardson Andrews points out, this suggestion of “radical sameness” is problematic insofar as it is based on narcissism, homogeny, and elimination of alterity (Richardson Andrews 2017). At the same time, the mirroring motif can be interpreted as Hideko and Sook-hee being open to experiencing the other beyond class difference or any other kind of unknown experience. The scene ends with Hideko and Sook-hee grasping each other’s hands, embracing each other in the “scissors” position previously described in Kouzuki’s book, while the camera zooms out to a long shot, framing the two lovers within a frame. The differences between the first and the second lovemaking scene suggest to me that sexual attraction between Sook-hee and Hideko is not a masquerade after all, and could even be interpreted as resulting from love. But this interpretation is complicated by a compelling alternative view, which shows Hideko literally enacting her own trauma in a parallel way to the stories in Kouzuki’s books. Furthermore, given all the unreliable twists and turns in the film’s narrative, we as spectators cannot be sure at this point whether Hideko’s impetus in the scene is genuine or merely another act to lure Sook-hee deeper into her web. Like their sexual encounter, the scene in which Hideko and Sook-hee escape from the mansion is repeated in both plotlines, but with important

Figure 4.4.  The Handmaiden: Sook-hee and Hideko mirroring one another.

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differences. In Sook-hee’s plotline, the escape sequence starts with Kouzuki leaving the mansion for a week, after having told Hideko to “remember the basement.” We then witness Sook-hee and Hideko hurrying through the mansion, sliding the shoji screens open in symmetrical, almost ritualistic gestures, before passing by the cherry tree shedding its petals. This is perhaps a reference to the Japanese aesthetic ideal of mono no aware, ‌‌‌‌‌‌which highlights impermanence or beauty in passing. However, our attention is not drawn to the floating petals, but to the noose suspended from the tree, while no narrative explanation is given for its being there. An aerial camera shot follows Sook-hee and Hideko running through a green field toward a waterway, where they are met by Fujiwara in a rowing boat. In Hideko’s plotline, the escape sequence is preceded by the scene with her suicide attempt, which explains the noose. Cinematographically, the framing of this scene confines Sook-hee strictly to the offscreen space, so that we cannot see her waiting underneath the cherry tree, ready to catch Hideko as she throws herself from the branch, with the noose around her neck. In a darkly comical scene, they both confess swindling the other, while Sook-hee still holds up Hideko to prevent her from suffocation. Next after Kouzuki’s departure, Hideko takes Sook-hee to his library, where the outraged Sook-hee starts tearing down books and parchments from the shelves, ripping them up as she goes. The scene is accompanied by Jo Yeong-Wook’s billowing score, rushing forth with an emotional intensity which matches Sook-hee’s furious destruction. The camera flies to a bird's-eye view of the destruction, accentuating the blood-like stains of red ink Sook-hee throws on Kouzuki’s books, before she starts removing the floor panels in the library, revealing an underground water source. At first, Hideko merely observes the destruction as if dwelling in some trance-like state. Her emotional paralysis finally ends and she pensively joins in throwing red ink and dumping books into the water, until the destruction climaxes with Sook-hee smashing the snake sculpture to smithereens with a fierce blow. The scene with the destruction of Kouzuki’s library fulfills multiple narrative functions. First, it is hard to question the authenticity of the emotional energy conveyed in the scene, which establishes the relationship between Hideko and Sook-hee as genuine. Secondly, insofar as the library functions as a form of traumatic memory that persists without end, it must be destroyed for Hideko to have access to and recover her past. It is significant that the scene is wedged in between Hideko’s suicide attempt and the retelling of the escape from the mansion, as it demonstrates that Hideko’s overcoming trauma is characterized by her working out a slightly different story than known to us, the spectators. As van der Kolk and van der Hart argue, memory is essentially “the action of telling the story” (van der Kolk and van der Hart 1995, 175). Hideko and Sook-hee destroying the library thus becomes the action

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of telling the story of the library differently, after which it can be assimilated into narrative form and transformed into representation (Bennett 2004, 23). Chi-Yun Shin makes a similar observation when she writes that the destruction of the library “counterbalances the film’s fetishist rendering of Hideko’s recital scenes that subject her to male guests’ gaze,” which makes the scene “a highly cathartic as well as transgressive moment in the film” (Shin 2019, 9). Sook-hee plays an important role in this transgressive moment, almost as if she were volunteering the emotion Hideko herself is unable to feel. As they escape the mansion, Hideko is first unable to cross the gradual, knee-high stone wall surrounding its garden, until Sook-hee piles up their luggage to build a stepladder for Hideko to mount. As she takes a leap of faith, her jumping across the wall is smoothly match-cut to a close-up of laughing Hideko running through the greenery toward freedom. This elegant transition feels like a sudden burst of joy, and the camera now stays with Hideko and Sook-hee instead of following them from afar, as it was in the previous account of their escape scene. In this scene, Sook-hee literally fulfills the function of providing a safety ladder Hideko can use, as she takes her crucial step toward self-determination and overcoming trauma. Therefore, the beauty of the scene lies in the way it communicates a vision of love, in which the lover supports the loved one as an essentially independent individual, instead of playing the role of some omnipotent rescuer figure. The third and final plotline is from Fujiwara’s point of view. It starts with Fujiwara addressing the camera directly, as if he were addressing the spectator, while his words are actually meant for Hideko’s ears. The function of Fujiwara’s plotline is not only to tie all the loose ends of the narrative together, but it also functions as a witness account, as suggested by this directly addressing the spectator. Throughout the film, Fujiwara’s role is that of a witness confronted by Hideko’s trauma, which he views with an emotional distance shifting toward cynicism. His fate is to end up being tortured in Kouzuki’s basement, while Sook-hee and Hideko board a ferry to Shanghai, with Hideko disguised as a man to evade being found by Kouzuki’s henchmen. In the basement, Kouzuki cuts off Fujiwara’s fingers one by one, while demanding a testimony of his wedding night with Hideko. In this scene, we have access to Fujiwara’s mental subjectivity in the form of visual flashbacks providing a truthful account of this wedding night. Meanwhile his present-tense voice-over description of the same event consists of lies, intended to hold Kouzuki’s attention so that Fujiwara can simultaneously commit suicide and commit a murder by smoking mercury-laced cigarettes. Similarly to the rape scene in Lust, Caution, the torture scene in The Handmaiden can be read as an allegory of a willing instrument of the colonizing powers violating a subject of the occupied nation. However, by persuading Kouzuki to let him smoke, Fujiwara simultaneously commits suicide and

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murder with his mercury-laced cigarettes, so that at least he can die with his penis intact. Both sadaejuui—a Korean term for a person who voluntary subjugates to the colonial power—are thus left fundamentally powerless, “which ironically underlines the impotency of the male characters in the film” (Shin 2019, 6). Meanwhile, Sook-hee and Hideko face the risk of their real identity being uncovered, for in case Hideko had to speak, her voice would have betrayed them. By “silencing” Hideko and allowing Sook-hee as her “subaltern” to speak, the scene affords Sook-hee an agency which conclusively brings the two characters on an equal level. The film ends with an epilogue taking place in an ocean liner cabin, with an underwater soundscape similar to the one in Kouzuki’s basement. However, this sound is quickly drowned by the jingling of Ben Wa balls, familiar from the earlier reading scene. The last shot of the film is one of the ocean, the camera flying upward to focus on the moon, which through a graphic match dissolves into the painting on the door that separated Sook-hee’s bedroom from Hideko’s living quarters in the Kouzuki mansion. As Charlotte Richardson Andrews points out, the ending conveys a sense of transformation from trauma to pleasure which might be blatantly simplistic (Richardson Andrews 2017). At the same time, the ending highlights Sook-hee, a Korean thief, who comes together with Hideko, a Japanese noblewoman, while they look into each other’s eyes as equals (Shin 2019, 11). This mutual affirmation encapsulated in the ending implies a cathartic possibility, in which the past and the present are integrated in such a way, that it enables both Hideko and Sook-hee to loosen the grip of their traumatic experiences and to reset their compass for the future.

Chapter 5

Pariahs and Parasites The Dark Satire of Useless Passion

THE LOBSTER AND PARASITE “Man is a useless passion” is the phrase with which Jean-Paul Sartre concludes his major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness (1943). Human‌‌‌‌‌‌ is a useless passion, because it is impossible to fulfill our desire to be fully self-sufficient, and to overcome the fear of our fundamental freedom. This is a central theme both in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster and in Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, discussed in this chapter as examples of films in which the protagonists are torn between the desire for self-determination and its inevitable impossibility. The affective-aesthetic organization of both films can be defined as cinematic satire, with hilarity as a coping mechanism for life as a useless passion, which is the origin of our fundamental trauma. Both The Lobster and Parasite revolve around useless attempts to overcome and negate one’s facticity—the facts in one’s past that one cannot change—through (inauthentic) performative strategies. These are doomed to fail because they involve irresistible temptation of bad faith, or the materiality of the body deadlocked within its social space. In both films the production of social space plays an important role in the way in which the main characters both negotiate and negate their facticity, contributing to the traumatic reality of the uselessness of their passion. The first part of the chapter deals with The Lobster, and the conflict between determinism and indeterminism upon which its satirical logic is founded. I will analyze this on the basis of Jean-Paul Sartre’s concepts of facticity, bad faith, and authenticity. I shall argue that the film’s dark satire emerges from the deadlock of bad faith that renders authentic self-determination an evereluding project. However, the prospect of this constantly returns to haunt the individual, like trauma. The analysis of Parasite in the second part of the chapter is inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s notion of “production of space.” I 117

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shall demonstrate that in the film the social space of the underprivileged is overpowered by neoliberalist capitalism in a way that prevents the protagonists from negating their facticity. This in turn becomes the source of their class-based trauma. All in all, I hope to establish that the poignant social satire in both films invites reflection on social conditions, in which individuals only lose themselves more deeply and more irrecoverably the harder they attempt to escape. The Lobster The Lobster opens with a scene that appears to be a kind of prologue, which starts off rather abruptly with the interior shot of a car moving through rain. The vehicle is driven by a woman with a laconic yet bitter facial expression, framed in a lengthy close-up shot. The scene is void of any noteworthy sound, apart from the pattering rain and the prominent squelching of windshield wipers. The woman pulls over and steps out of the vehicle while the camera stays inside, panning slightly so that we witness through the windshield how she makes her way toward three grazing donkeys on a farther-away field. The windshield wipers squelch on, so that our vision alternates between blurry and sharp, as the woman approaches one particular donkey and shoots the animal dead in cold blood, while the others look on with mild interest. After this the black title card with a heavy white font slams onto the image, filling the frame. Like in many other opening scenes discussed in this book, no explanation whatsoever is given for the actions of this character, who after the prologue disappears from the film completely. She might as well have been transformed into an animal. However, this opening effectively sets the mood, which is darkly comical despite the disturbing killing of a (sacred) donkey. The scene is comical due to the framing and the locus of the camera, as well as the sound and movement of the windshield wipers, which create aesthetic distance to the scene, thus drawing our emotional attention not to the act of killing, but to the “disinterested malice” (Herron 2016) motivating it. Furthermore, the scene is characteristic of this filmmaker, who in his oeuvre has demonstrated a continuous interest in the aesthetic expression of trauma through affective incongruence. There is often conflict between a disturbing event and pleasurable emotion or between aesthetic pleasure and ugly feeling. It is from this affective incongruence that the dark satire emerges in The Lobster, and more generally speaking in Lanthimos’ oeuvre, which frequently deals with unsettling events in an atmosphere of bland, laconic straightforwardness. The Lobster can be characterized as an unusual dystopian film, even though it lacks many distinguishing characteristics of the genre. Nature plays an important role in the film, but the world of The Lobster cannot be seen as

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an environmental dystopia. It does not envision the commonplace nightmarish scenario of what happens to humanity after its natural environment has largely been destroyed. Similarly, even though technology is used to control and discipline human bodies by turning them into animals, this technology does not ultimately threaten to dominate or destroy humanity at large. It is not a totalitarian dystopia either, resulting from the failure of some utopian aspirations. Nevertheless, The Lobster can be defined as a political dystopia of sorts, defined by social inequality and cruel oppression of one underprivileged group: single people. In this world to be in partnership means to achieve liberation from insecurity and fear, while for singles the options are either to be transformed into an animal of one’s choice and be released into the wild, or to live a fugitive life in the woods in a persistent state of anxiety. The title of the film refers to the animal its main protagonist David would choose to become should he fail to find a partner, for “lobsters live for over 100 years, are blue-blooded like aristocrats, and stay fertile all their lives.” Many critics define The Lobster as a dark, absurdist satire, an allegory for the obsession with algorithmic compatibility in the landscape of digital romance. A world in which questionnaire-based dating apps function as “technologies of choice” through which individuals “brand” themselves as “profiles” in order to attract “right swipes” in a highly competitive setting (Illouz 2019; Bandinelli and Gandini 2022). One central theme in The Lobster is the algorithmic conviction that romantic attachment is fundamentally incorporative or idiopathic, rather than excorporative or heteropathic. It is this absurd idea that the absurdist humor of the film is based on. “Idiopathic” and “heteropathic” are terms which Kaja Silverman uses in her Threshold of the Visible World to describe processes of psychological identification. Silverman proposes that idiopathic identification is based on the principle of the selfsame body, by means of which the individual forms imaginary alignments exclusively with those normative body images which can be most easily incorporated (Silverman 1996, 24). The opposite of this idiopathic and narcissistic insistence upon selfsameness is heteropathic identification, which acknowledges the other’s difference and “implies forming an imaginary alignment with bodily coordinates which cannot be assimilated to one’s own” (71). This form of identification leads to what Silverman calls the “active gift of love,” which entails an openness to the other’s particularity beyond the idealized bodily coordinates of selfsameness (79). In The Lobster love clearly takes the first route of narcissistic selfsameness. As Sarah Cooper puts it, “Narcissus dwells in The Lobster at the very heart of the twosome: what one looks for in the other is what one sees in oneself” (Cooper 2016, 8). However, such a narcissistic love-choice is not only idealistic, but also an impossible model for love. It is comparable to Aristophanes’ story in Plato’s Symposium, which describes our eternal longing for our

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“missing half” after Zeus had split apart the once unified lovers. Much of the satire in The Lobster consists of ridiculing this idealistic concept of “perfect fit.” In the film, singlehood is not some natural state above which individuals can rise after having been fortunate enough to find a romantic partner. Instead, partnership is deliberately imposed on the singletons by having them check in at a stately but grim seaside hotel, where they have forty-five days to find the right match based on shared defining characteristics, such as chronic nosebleeds, a fondness for butter biscuits, a lovely smile, or beautiful hair. At the same time, these characteristics are not necessarily innate, as some of them are developed later in life, such as Limping Man’s limp, and Campari Man’s acquired taste for alcoholic bitters for breakfast. This means that the couples must fit together on the basis of their appearance, or their physical and mental abilities, which are evidently determined by their individual histories and backgrounds. The singletons are not free to choose their defining characteristic, as it is their past that haphazardly determines their possibilities. Therefore, an intriguing paradox or a conflict between determinism and indeterminism can be found at the heart of The Lobster’s narrative premise. This conflict means that the film offers itself well to a Sartrean interpretation operating on two planes. On the one hand, the conflict between determinism and indeterminism is expressed in affective incongruence from which the film’s dark satire emerges. On the other hand, the same conflict exposes human possibilities as choiceless choices which establish trauma as an emotional core of the film. In the following, I shall analyze the film through Sartre’s concepts of facticity, bad faith, and authenticity, demonstrating that The Lobster is more than a dystopian allegory for digital dating culture. Fundamentally the film contains an existential reflection on the (im)possibility of what Sartre calls the "fundamental project" of a person. The traumatic qualities of The Lobster are not only embodied in the dystopian reality of the film, but especially in the way in which the film constitutes a deadlock of bad faith that renders authentic self-determination an ever-eluding project. Facticity Facticity is the general term Sartre uses to describe the weight of our social configuration, the pre-existing world which we are thrown to, and which is not of our choosing. Facticity is “a condition which [the for-itself] has not chosen [. . .] it is thrown into a world and abandoned in a ‘situation’ [. . .] this contingency is what we shall call the facticity of the for-itself” (Sartre 1992, 127, 131). In The Lobster, a person’s facticity is constituted by their defining characteristics as a “contingent block of identity” (131), which nevertheless always escapes the person’s agency. This contingent facticity is conveyed in the scene after the prologue, in which we find David crying in his living

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room, captured at a diagonal angle from behind so that we are unable to see his facial expression accurately. Farther behind within the frame observing the situation is a friendly border collie, Bob the Dog, who is David’s recently transformed brother. The soundscape of this scene is minimal and consists mainly of the distant noise of passing trains, until David’s female conversation partner utters the sentence “I’m really sorry” offscreen. Even though we implicitly assume that the scene is about a break-up situation, the line with which David reacts strikes us as absurd: “Does he wear glasses or contact lenses?” It is only retrospectively that the dialogue becomes meaningful, after we have learned about the narrative premise of the importance of shared defining characteristics in romantic relationships. While the camera closely zooms in on David, the doorbell rings, Bob the dog barks, and the woman impatiently urges him to hurry up. At this point, nondiegetic music starts off, which is an adagio by Beethoven for string quartet, a type of ensemble which is heard in a major part of the score in The Lobster. The use of music for string quartets seems to highlight the tense absurdity of Lanthimos’ film, due to its pensive, sublime quality. There is a strange contrast between its rich tonality and the joyless setting on the film as it is, bathing in a noticeably limited palette which depicts a world drained of all color. This is a world in which facticity is a state of being caught up in contingency, as an inescapable and unalterable context. The Beethoven adagio functions as a sound bridge or a musical accompaniment into the world of the film, as the scene with the crying David dissolves into the next shot located in the outskirts of the city. In this shot David is escorted into the white hotel coach like the prisoner that he is, marching in single file between two hotel attendants wearing traditional waiter costumes: a long white apron, a black jacket, a white shirt, a black bow tie. Next, a female voice-over narration provides a bland, business-like description of insignificant details of the situation, such as what kind of shoes David found appropriate to wear. It is unclear what the diegetic status of the voice-over narration is. It is only halfway through the film that the narrator reveals herself as a diegetic character. She is Short-Sighted Woman, who belongs to the resistance group Loners living in the woods, so committed to rejecting the ideology of romance that they severely punish those members who show romantic affection toward one another. The hotel in which David is relocated after his abrupt entering into singlehood can be seen as a liminal space, a transitory place between two states. These are to be housed either in the city (couples) or in the woods (animals, singletons), the house thus forming “a membrane between sexual citizen and sexual outlaw, as well as between civilization and the wilderness, and the human and the nonhuman” (Laurie and Stark 2021, 210). This liminality manifests itself visually in the bus ride, which we follow from the busy

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motorway surrounded by industrial areas to a quiet country road winding through hilly landscape. Once at the hotel, the residents are photographed in mug-shot style, and their personal belongings, including their clothes, are left in the management’s keeping. In return they are given a new wardrobe, which consists of identical trousers, button-down shirts, and a blazer for men, and floral halter-top dresses for women. Upon their arrival the residents have one arm handcuffed across their backs so that they may gain insight into how much easier life is in pairs. The room David is assigned to is number 101, which is likely to be a reference to the torture chamber in the Ministry of Love, in George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949). The hotel itself is orderly but outdated, furnished with vertical drape curtains, and methodically arranged rows of furniture (figure 5.1). The majority of interior shots of the hotel are characterized by an immobile frame, a vast depth of field, and the use of wide-angle lens, in a fashion that is stylistically related to the cinema of Ulrich Seidl and Roy Andersson. In their distinctive ways, each of these filmmakers offers bleak, absurdist experiences of discomfort, brought about by affective incongruence, contrasting down-to-earth mundanity with bleak morality in a way that appears darkly satirical. An important part of the dating scene in the hotel consists of the regular dance events, hosted by Hotel Manager and Hotel Manager’s Partner, designed to facilitate meeting of “one’s other half.” The events take place in the ballroom, decorated with draped curtains and pompous flower arrangements, dimly lit but the effect of this lighting is dreary, rather than romantic. It is in this setting that the neatly, but identically dressed residents sit at their tables, orderly arranged in straight lines, getting ready to dance. First Hotel Manager and Hotel Manager’s Partner bellow a duet to which I will later

Figure 5.1.  The Lobster: The bleak setting of the singles’ hotel.

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return, in such a heavy-handed mode that it totally belies the song’s tender content, thus forewarning the viewer of what is to follow. Even as they work up to their climatic ending, a vigorous nondiegetic score starts up. We hear the energetic and determined first variation from Richard Strauss’ Don Quixote entitled “Adventure at the Windmills,” an appropriate accompaniment to David as he resolutely gets up and makes his way straight through the dancing couples toward Nosebleed Woman, while the camera follows him horizontally, in slow motion. Out of measure with the diegetic duet reaching their highest notes, David and Nosebleed Woman then awkwardly do a formal dance together while she bleeds all over his white shirt. Awkward dance scenes are a recurring element throughout Lanthimos’ films, in which “we find contrasts of awkwardness and ecstatic abandon, bodily training and physical limitation, individual and group activity,” as Tim Nichols points out (2017). Thus David’s march toward his very own adventure with a windmill can be seen as an attempt to exercise free will and to withdraw from his facticity, but he just gets more profoundly entangled in its inflexible stiffness. The scene is darkly satirical, because it creates a joyous possibility while exposing the same possibility as a grim fantasy. An even darker scene is to follow, in which the residents have been gathered in the ballroom for educational demonstrations entitled “Man Eats Alone vs. Man Eats with Woman” and “Woman Walks Alone vs. Woman Walks with Man.” To the bleak, atonal score by Alfred Schnittke, the scene starts with an establishing shot framed as a tableau that overwhelms with its rigidity. The centrally placed immobile camera emphasizes the verticality of the draped curtains behind a stage with a podium, set up in front of the hotel residents, who are sitting at long, horizontally placed tables dressed in identical navy blue clothing like schoolchildren. After Hotel Manager has wryly announced the title of the scene to be performed from behind the podium, 70 Year Old Waiter approaches a set table. From an approximation of a POV from the diegetic audience, we witness him eating alone and then choking on (nonexistent) food while 30 Year Old Waiter and The Maid observe the scene with feigned interest from upstage. In the following second version of the same scene, 70 Year Old Waiter is rescued from choking by The Maid, which triggers obedient applause from the audience. Roles are reversed in the second demonstration featuring The Maid out alone on a stroll being assaulted by 30 Year Old Waiter, while halfheartedly waving her arms in the air and whining for help. But she is duly left alone in the second version, when walking arm in arm with 70 Year Old Waiter, who happens to be her diegetic husband. These acts alternate with scenes in which The Maid arouses David with a blatant, clinical lap dance on the one hand, and Lisping Man is sadistically punished for masturbation by having his hand burned in a toaster at breakfast. The dark satire in these scenes emerges from the exposure of possibilities within the

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structure of facticity as choiceless choices offered by “the history of the collectivity of which [the individual] is a part” (Sartre 1992, 619). The stiffness of the scenes described above forms a harsh contrast to the carefree vehemence characterizing the sequence in which the singletons hunt Loners with tranquilizer guns in the woods, which earns them extra days of stay at the hotel. The entire sequence is shot in slow motion, and it is free of diegetic sound apart from birdsong and the pronounced swoosh sounds of the sedative darts. It starts with a peaceful establishing shot of a lush forest bathing in warm evening light, until a nondiegetic, uptempo piano intro to a Greek chanson starts off. We then notice one human figure emerging from the lower right-hand corner of the image, followed by several others who start filling the frame like invading insects. This is cut to a wide shot emphasizing the horizontal movement of the hotel residents from left to right as they make their way deeper into the forest, the hems of women’s pale dresses fluttering about like war banners in the wind. The humans-turned-into-animals also residing in the forest, such as a fluffy Persian cat, out of place in their unnatural habitat, flee from the approaching battle with paws flying. On the one hand, the conflict between the slow motion image and the energetically flowing music creates a strangely elegant cinematic effect, the camera moving along in the forest with the embodied presence of a dancer. On the other hand, the slow motion emphasizes the physicality of the hunters’ bodies wobbling and stumbling through the branches in an almost vulgar fashion. The scene climaxes with Heartless Woman attacking a female Loner with a triumphant outburst of joy, causing her to topple over toward the camera. Instead of using the tranquilizer gun, Heartless Woman then overpowers her victim with her fists, while the camera closes in on the poor woman’s injured, bleeding face. The scene ends with a defeated David, sitting on a tussock resigned to his fate of not having been able to capture a single Loner, while the speed of motion and the sound slow down to standard normal. Obviously this scene is a parody of a war film battle scene, but its aesthetic qualities also seem to suggest that in the forest the rigid social roles which the citizens of this dystopian society are required to play, and which limit their human freedom, are somehow lifted. Essentially the scene expresses both the inescapable facticity of their situation and their simultaneous denial of it. For instance, Heartless Woman charging wildly through the woods is not expressing her (authentic) freedom in Sartre’s sense. This is not because her freedom is conditioned by facticity, but because her freedom fails to transcend facticity, thus unavoidably entrapping her in bad faith, the notion which I now turn to.

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Bad Faith In the world of digital romance, matchmaking apps not only enable the users to brand themselves favorably, but they also facilitate misrepresenting oneself in a significant way. Instances of this are deceptive, outdated, or filtered photos, or bending the truth about numbers (age, height) and lifestyles (wealth), which makes users appear radically different online from what they are when showing up in person. In The Lobster too, the hotel residents start faking their profiles to impress significant others, including David, who starts pretending he has no human emotion in order to partner Heartless Woman. Similarly, Limping Man fakes his profile by bashing his head against various surfaces to self-induce nosebleeds, so that Nosebleed Woman would think they are a perfect match. Does this mean that by creating fake profiles, both David and Limping Man make authentic choices beyond the deterministic order of things? Yes, insofar as their “love choices” are not beyond their control, but willful decisions to pursue relationships and deliberate attempts to “perform love.” No, because both David and Limping Man are conscious of the fact that they are performing a role and simultaneously in denial of it. In other words, they are in “bad faith.” Bad faith is a concept by which Sartre defines a form of self-deception. In bad faith, one lies to oneself while knowing the truth and hiding it from oneself. Due to bad faith, both David and Limping Man’s voluntary choices of love are doomed to fail. David and Heartless Woman’s “romance” ends with a bloody catastrophe. Limping Man and Nosebleed Woman are assigned a child to solve their unworkable problems arising from the difficulties they have in really fitting together. This can be seen as a piercing critique of the illusion of free-spirited individualism reproduced in and through the techno-social constraints of digital dating. But while the romances between ill-fitting couples are doomed to be failures, the smoother the fit, the less passion there appears to be. This is evident in the scene in which Hotel Manager and Hotel Manager’s Partner perform a duet version of the song “Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart” which was made famous by Gene Pitney in 1967. The rendition, accompanied by an orchestra dressed in lab coats, is awkward to say the least, complete with Hotel Manager’s Partner’s silly bass vibrato and an uninspired, routinely performed symmetrical choreography. We notice both in their voices and their body language an attempt to imitate “some kind of automation or [a chaining of] movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other” (Sartre 1992, 101). Therefore, Hotel Manager and Hotel Manager’s Partner are in bad faith too. In Sartre’s thinking, the notion of bad faith lies in the attempt to cancel out the dynamics and spontaneous dimension of subjectivity (“being-foritself”), which lies at the heart of his principle of our existence preceding

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essence. This means that we are free to disengage from our facticity, because our presence is disjointed from our past by nothingness. While a determinist position maintains that our present state is causally determined by our past, making freedom impossible, in Sartre’s (much criticized) indeterminist position subjectivity is separated from the causal order between past, present, and future. Since our past choices do not determine the choices we make in the present, our reality is characterized by freedom and responsibility of action. The awareness of this state of affairs may be accompanied by anguish, which many people flee in bad faith. Therefore, bad faith is a paradoxical condition in which people use free will to refuse themselves their inescapable freedom. A person in bad faith chooses actively not to acknowledge freedom, while relying on freedom to perform this denial as if caught up in role-playing. In The Lobster, the hotel residents clearly act in bad faith. This includes the staff, whose patterns of behavior seem like so many games to us. Like the waiter in a café that Sartre describes to illustrate the notion, the hotel attendants’ gestures and postures are just a little too eager and solicitous while they remain clearly indifferent to the feelings of the patrons. The paradox inherent in the Sartrean concept of bad faith is epitomized in the scene with David’s “love choice,” in which multiple possibilities exist simultaneously until his final decision is made. It starts with a shot from David’s POV looking at Limping Man and Nosebleed Woman bidding their farewells to Nosebleed Woman’s Best Friend, who has been turned into a Shetland pony with a beautiful mane, corresponding with her defining characteristic. Offscreen, a silly sound of a telephone begins to tinkle until the answering machine takes the call, which is from Biscuit Woman reaching out to David, whose reflection we see on the window as the camera zooms out. Then a silhouette shot shows David in backlight before the window, suggesting indecisiveness. In the next establishing shot David is playing golf while the narrator explains his motivation to court Heartless Woman instead of Biscuit Woman, as the camera zooms in on the Loners’ forest in the background. On his way back to the hotel, he pauses to observe a couple playing tennis as if seeking confirmation for his choice. Next the scene is cut to a close-up of Heartless Woman drinking coffee in the hotel garden, while piercing screams of another woman can be heard offscreen. The screams come from Biscuit Woman, who is shown lying on the ground in a lengthy extreme high-angle shot, seriously injured after a suicide attempt, with a pool of blood slowly spreading around her head. In the upper right-hand corner of the image, Heartless Woman imperturbably watches the scene, until finally people come running to Biscuit Woman’s aid. Her painful cries continue offscreen as David arrives and promptly proceeds to feign heartlessness to Heartless Woman, who is nevertheless unable to hear him “with all this screaming.” Once in his room, David listens once more to Biscuit Woman’s

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voicemail, and the scene ends with a wide-angle exterior shot showing the hotel premises and the Loners’ forest farther away. The way in which the aesthetic elements are organized in this scene create affective incongruence, which involves David taking a disinterested stand toward this dreadful outcome, merely for the sake of upholding a fallacious line of argument, in which “it is more difficult to pretend that you do have feelings when you don’t than to pretend you don’t have feelings when you do.” At the same time, the integral backdrop with the Loners’ forest functions symbolically as the state of freedom beyond the web of choices that pre-exist for David, but which are really not at all for his choosing. Standing in front of his window, David is first faced with a future prospect while turning his back to a possibility in the present. By choosing Heartless Woman, David attempts to resist the constraints upon his autonomy, but his claim to agency is soon exposed as utter fiction. This takes place in the scene which starts with Heartless Woman waking David in their double room in the couples’ wing of the hotel, in which newly formed partners must stay for two weeks to prove their compatibility to the management. First, she stands emotionless in the golden morning light gazing at the sleeping David, before laconically announcing that she has killed his brother, Bob the Dog. While David struggles to keep his emotions at bay, Heartless Woman continues to describe cruel details of the dog’s death to him, even providing a silly imitation of its whining, thus testing their romantic match. At first, the emotional void in the scene again produces affective incongruence with a darkly comic effect. But this effect ends abruptly when the scene cuts to a lengthy close-up of Heartless Woman’s blood-stained leg, which is an approximation of David’s POV as he gets up to go to the bathroom. The next frame is David’s equally lengthy POV of Bob the Dog in the bathroom, lying lifelessly in a pool of blood, red stains all over the place. David becomes unable to hide his emotion, after which Heartless Woman insists on reporting him to the management so that David can receive the proper punishment of being turned into “the animal no one wants to be.” In contrast to the prologue in which the killing of the donkey is framed with absurdity and captured through aesthetic distance, the scene with Bob the Dog’s death confronts us with lack of distance, so that it is impossible for us as spectators not to get emotionally involved. The emotional effect of this disturbing scene is enhanced by its emotional “flatness” in the beginning, which compels us to fill the affective void with appropriate emotion—horror, grief, anger—which enables us to viscerally sense Heartless Woman’s cruelty even more forcefully. The affective contrast between this scene and the rest of the film not only demonstrates the fallacy in David’s emotional logic when he decided to pursue Heartless Woman, but also how this dystopic society functions at large. This logic is founded in bad faith. But apart from that it

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destroys the structures of subjectivity embedded in the relational, interpersonal world. Here the “outside” of the intersubjective experience becomes the “inside” of the individual’s psychic life. This links bad faith to trauma insofar as both phenomena shatter the individual’s fundamental project, their chosen orientation to the world, which allows for authentic relations with others. Nevertheless, even though Lanthimos’ characters appear eternally entrapped in the deadlock of bad faith, it would seem that The Lobster contains at least a possibility for authenticity which involves accepting one’s dual nature consisting of both freedom and facticity. This possibility exists in the form of love toward the other, who does not represent a threat but offers confirmation of one’s sense of self-determination. This concept is explored in the following section. The (Im)possibility of Authenticity In the popular ideas about Sartre’s philosophy, the notion of “existentialist” is exemplified by an individual who is completely free from the social world and able to escape facticity. It is tempting to use these terms to describe the Loners, who unconditionally welcome David in their midst after his escape from the hotel. In their forest which they share with truffle pigs, peacocks, flamingoes, camels, and other humans turned into animals, the Loners are free to do as they please (to masturbate, to listen to music) as long as they do not engage in romantic relationships. Such relationships are threatened with a punishment known as the “red kiss,” which involves the offending parties having their lips slashed with a knife and being forced to kiss. For more serious cases there is the “red intercourse,” the execution of which is left to our imagination. Furthermore, all Loners are expected to find a suitable spot in the woods to dig their own graves, in an attempt to control even their deaths, appropriating the event so that death becomes the phenomenon of my personal life which makes of this life a unique life— that is, a life which does not become again, a life in which one never recovers his stroke. Hence I become responsible for my death as for my life. (Sartre 1992, 682)

By digging their own graves, the Loners deny this dystopian society the possibility of captured life as an animal, which would signify a reconfirmation of its power. Furthermore, the Loners are also free to traverse between the social space of the city and the differential space of the woods like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s nomads, who come from outside of society to threaten its authority, its values and standards (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Shortly after having joined the Loners, we witness David together with Short-Sighted

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Woman, Loner Leader, and Loner Swimmer in transit, traveling on foot to the city. Dressed in business apparel, the four Loners look rather out of place as they are arduously making their way through a hay meadow surrounding the forest. Then they reach the highway, next the outskirts of the city, and finally the city center, where the sharp-dressed Loners now seamlessly integrate into the surrounding area dominated by high-tech skyscrapers. In chapter four I discussed the practices of masquerade as potential forms of resistance against the patriarchal framework in The Handmaiden. The Loners’ sharp suits also can be understood in terms of masquerade, by which they can hold the discursive structures at a distance and resist the dominant social codes, as opposed to submitting to them. In other words, the Loners’ business attire does not function to confirm hegemonic conventions in the dystopian world of The Lobster, but it expresses their counter-hegemony which threatens to deconstruct established power systems. Similarly, the Loners’ performances of partnership when in the city are more than mere acts of rebellion: they are transgressive claims for freedom and self-determination beyond the hierarchical system in the diegetic world of the film. This is conveyed by the score accompanying the slow-motion shots depicting the four Loners in public spaces executing mundane acts such as window-shopping in a megastore, or eating cake with disposable cutlery. The score is the second variation of the Richard Strauss composition which had been heard during the earlier ballroom dance scene, emphasizing the performative nature of the Loners’ city visit. Its function becomes more than merely replenishing necessary supplies for their forest comrades. Both the score and the slow-motion image signify the extent to which the Loners have withdrawn from societal conformity imposed upon them. It is through practices of masquerade that they are able to exercise freedom beyond these imperative conventions. The city visit scene opens the possibility to interpret the Loners’ masquerade as an existentialist strategy. This seems to be confirmed in the scene which shortly follows. The Loners break into the hotel to expose the bad faith of both the guests and its management. The scene starts with Loner Leader assigning other Loners a target by identifying the defining characteristics of each couple residing in the hotel—a shared love for skiing or the same field of study. This suggests once more that most of these characteristics are acquired, not inborn. While David confronts Limping Man and Nosebleed Woman with their faked compatibility, Loner Leader first extracts a love confession from Hotel Manager’s Partner and then tricks him into shooting his wife with a blank bullet. According to Cooper, this scene valorizes “love that is not based on a false foundation, and while it may be performatively constituted in the same way as the copy, it is the inauthenticity of the latter that is now exposed” (Cooper 2016, 18). This successful intervention is followed by a celebratory

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dance event, in which the Loners move to the music of percussive, electronic instruments, which originates from their individual headphones, and is only faintly audible to us as spectators. Within the same framing we witness one Loner thrashing around with the music frantically, while another wavers erratically from left to right, which establishes the awkward effect of being alone together. Such a contrasting sensation is characteristic of Lanthimos, as it is his forte to create dark satire in scenes which expose mistaken principles. For an interpretation of the Loners as existentialists contains a fallacy, which is based on simplification of the Sartrean concept of authenticity. In fact, for Sartre human freedom is not to be discovered in solipsism, but in the intersubjective relationship between the individual and a partner, a world: “In discovering my inner being I discover the other person at the same time, like a freedom placed in front of me which thinks and wills only for or against me. Hence, let us at once announce the discovery of a world which we shall call intersubjectivity” (Sartre 1978, 52). Thus the Loners’ existentialism is ambivalent, too obsessively centered around the object of hate, too hysterically invested in resisting the opponent, so that this opponent becomes an inherent part of their lives, and even a raison d’être (see also Ahmed 2004, 50). In other words, the Loners are trapped in a situation which Sartre describes in his play No Exit (1946) with his most famous phrase: Hell is other people. Hell is “other people” insofar as we all demand of others that we are valued as we would like to be, but since this is impossible, “none breaks free from a circular dialogue which turns forever about the same dead center” (Danto 1985, 90). Consequently, the more frantically the Loners resist the couples and what they stand for, the more entangled they become with the very conditions that threaten their existence, incapable of outdoing the choices imposed upon them from without. Our laughter at the exaggerated satire in The Lobster is therefore akin to the roaring laughter of the three characters in Sartre’s play, after they have realized that they are doomed to be together eternally in the same room in Hell. Furthermore, the Loners’ strict rules against any romantic attachment form obvious anti-existentialist constraints, prescribing the limits of their field of action and conditioning their attitude toward what is possible. As Timothy Laurie and Hannah Stark observe, far from celebrating resistance to dystopian totalitarianism, the antinormative rules of the forest display deep symmetries to the normative political formations they encounter (Laurie and Stark 2021, 211). Furthermore, these antinormative rules pose serious problems to David and Short-Sighted Woman, who are immediately and irresistibly drawn to one another. After having found out that they share the same defining characteristic—myopia—David and Short-Sighted Woman are sitting under a beautiful old conifer by a lakeshore, which functions as a natural backdrop for their

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shared experience (figure 5.2). This natural backdrop suggests that the affection between David and Short-Sighted Woman is authentic, insofar as it is not ignited in the confines of a societal space, but in the natural space of genuine emotion and true selfhood. Eva Illouz has argued that natural landscapes, like in this scene in The Lobster, are by far the most widespread tropes to communicate utopian ideas of romantic love, because they are symbolically separated from the dystopian world of technology and industrialism. In this symbolic context, both nature and love are connected to the idea of authentic self, the sense of a hidden but pure individual essence found at the core of romance (Illouz 1997, 91–93). I argue that Lanthimos presents the affection between David and Short-Sighted Woman as a form of authentic love, which carries possibilities for self-determination for both of them. David and Short-Sighted Woman love authentically inasmuch as they constantly invent, act, and make active choices to bring their love into existence, rather than that they submit to it passively as destiny. Cooper makes a similar claim when she writes that David and Short-Sighted Woman’s love story is “lived out in the first instance as a performance that masquerades as play-acting but is real” (Cooper 2016, 19). First they find a way to synch the music on their portable discmans so that they can dance in total harmony, pressing their foreheads together. Nosebleed Woman’s Best Friend, who was recently transformed into a Shetland pony with a beautiful mane, wanders about in the background, neighing quietly as if in approval. The music is “Where the Wild Roses Grow,” a murder ballad written by Nick Cave, who has also recorded a cover version of “Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart,” by the way. Then they invent a way to communicate secretly with each other even in the presence of other Loners by means of

Figure 5.2.  The Lobster: Nature as the setting for authentic love.

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coded body language, presented to us in slow motion and once more accompanied by the Beethoven adagio from the beginning of the film, which may suggest the inevitability of David and Short-Sighted Woman being drawn to each other. However, their love affair ends with a bleak twist after Loner Leader has found Short-Sighted Woman’s diary. It is only at this point of the film when we find out that Short-Sighted Woman’s voice-over narration is lifted straight out of her diary entries, which explains the dry delivery of her lines, but complicates their diegetic status. On the one hand, here the narration plunges into Short-Sighted Woman’s mental subjectivity: her observations, memories, and fantasies. On the other hand, within the diegetic world of the film these lines only exist in writing, as they have never been spoken aloud. This means that Short-Sighted Woman’s voice-over actually emerges from in between the diegesis and the nondiegesis, which renders her narration a peculiar case of female acousmation: a voice which exists in the extradiegetic space as an in/visible character (Chion 2009, 465). It is interesting that Short-Sighted Woman’s acousmatic voice lends authority to her narration throughout the film, but that this is abruptly brought to an end as soon as her diary is found. Even better, in the diary scene Short-Sighted Woman’s voice is appropriated by someone else who is profoundly embodied in the diegetic world, demonstrating Michel Chion’s insight that with each embodied localization, the voice-over loses its authority and becomes vulnerable to a radical alteration of one’s “fundamental project,” as Sartre calls this. And indeed, after Short-Sighted Woman’s diary has been discovered, her narrative voice is no longer heard in the film. Her resulting lack of narrative authority is promptly confirmed in the scene that follows, in which Loner Leader tricks Short-Sighted Woman into undergoing surgery, leaving her blind and thus romantically incompatible to David. Even better, Short-Sighted Woman’s blindness destroys the authentic relationship she is supposed to have with her own body acting in the world. By blinding Short-Sighted Woman, Loner Leader compromises her subjective freedom that could have transcended her facticity by asserting her free will, which would have included her authentic relationship with David. As a gesture of authenticity from his part, David comes to the conclusion that sacrificing his own eyesight is necessary for his staying together with Short-Sighted Woman. After having knocked Loner Leader unconscious and leaving her in an uncovered grave to be eaten alive by wild dogs (which are presumably exhumans), David escorts the blinded Short-Sighted Woman out of the woods, and into the city outskirts, where they stop at a roadside restaurant. He asks for a steak knife and goes to the restroom with the intention of damaging his vision by stabbing himself in the eyes. The last shot of the film is an immobile long take of Short-Sighted Woman sitting in a semi-circular restaurant

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booth, framed at medium distance, facing the empty seat at the other side of the table, while a muffled vroom of rushing vehicles is heard from outside. Except for the appearance of a waiter who fills up Short-Sighted Woman’s water glass, nothing much happens in this immobile shot which lasts for one minute and five seconds. The length of the final shot emphasizes the bleakness and the ambiguity of the ending, which is open to multiple interpretations, and it has prompted vivid online speculation among fans as to whether David blinds himself or not. In the affective context of Lanthimos’ film it would seem safe to say that he does not, though. To recapitulate: in Sartrean thinking individuals are initially thrown into a pre-existing world, which is not at all of their choosing: their facticity. But there always remains an occasion to surpass the world toward the individual’s own possibilities (Sartre 1992, 566). In fact, facticity is required for the existence of the individual’s freedom, insofar as people can transcend their situation and create new meanings of the world by negating it, even though this freedom comes with anguish: “Anguish then is the reflective apprehension of freedom by itself [. . .] it appears at the moment that I disengage myself from the world where I had been engaged” (Sartre 1992, 78). By choosing to blind himself, David literally attempts to cut himself off from both his past and his future, but his abrupt disappearance from the film could suggest that he gets overwhelmed by anguish and ultimately fails. Furthermore, while David’s decision can be seen as an authentic act by which he resists the anachronistic rules of both the hotel and the forest, it simultaneously demonstrates how thoroughly he has internalized the institutionalized “logic of sameness as a prerequisite for desire,” as Laurie and Stark point out (Laurie and Stark 2021, 211). In any case, The Lobster shows that all authentic choices are as difficult as the one David is faced with, which is why we are all prone to escape anguish by falling into bad faith. This renders our human condition inherently traumatic, an insight that is captured in Sartre’s phrase: “Man is a useless passion” (Sartre 1992, 784). The last image of the film with Short-Sighted Woman abandoned in the roadside restaurant seems to encapsulate both this idea of fundamental possibilities constantly haunting the individual, and the traumatic deadlock borne out by one’s inability to live this aspect of human reality. Parasite Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite tells the story of the Kims, a Seoul family who are financially broke, but affectionately strongly devoted to one another. The first part of the film revolves around a plan the Kims have hatched to bluff their way into the wealthy Park household by each in turn pretending to be someone else. The film is celebrated for its generic fluidity, which

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effortlessly moves between a social satire and a morality play, as well as between a con-artist comedy and an urgent, visceral thriller. The film starts with the Kims’ son Ki-woo unexpectedly being offered an opportunity to tutor Da-hye, the daughter of the Park family, who is preparing for her final exams. The Parks maintain a lifestyle which is dependent on hired help: a high-school tutor, an art therapist, a private chauffeur, and, most importantly, a faithful housekeeper, Moon-gwang. She has lived in the mansion even before the Parks, as she initially was housekeeper to architect Namgoong, who designed and subsequently owned the house. In a spirit of opportunistic entrepreneurism, the Kims bluff their way into being hired in their various domestic roles. However, at some point they find out that in the deepest basement of the house, accessed only by several steep staircases, there is a hidden bomb shelter, where Moon-gwang’s husband Geun-sae has been hiding from loan sharks for more than four years. Like the layered house designed by Namgoong, the film has many levels. It embodies both ascension and descension not only along the ladders of class hierarchy, but also as regards mental and affective aspects. It is this layered structure that epitomizes the trauma embodied by the narrative theme of the film. It moves in an upward/ downward spiral that slides into madness and desperation, resulting in violent chaos. The film culminates in a bleak finale with multiple deaths, and ends in a circular cul-de-sac. Accompanied by a sophisticated melody played on a nondiegetic keyboard instrument, the film opens with an eye-level/straight-on interior shot of a low-ceiling apartment in a basement house. The camera points out through an open window, matching its eye-level height with busy pavement life beyond the window grill, with traffic alongside garbage bags piled up in the street and delivery men pushing their hand trucks filled with packages. On the left-hand side of the image we witness a number of grimy sports socks on a drying rack suspended from the ceiling, while the title of the film slowly emerges within the right windowpane: Parasite. This word proves ambivalent on various levels. The first interpretation tends toward the Kims’ parasitic behavior. But as the film progresses, this interpretation is called into question rather than confirmed, as from a social point of view the Parks appear to be the parasites, leeching off the so-called lower, working class. The ambiguity embedded in the title was a conscious choice of the filmmaker, who in an interview confirmed that the phrase can refer to either of the two families (Ankers 2020). However, it could also be argued that in the context of neoliberal capitalism the socioeconomic system itself is the parasite. Not only does this system confirm social hierarchy, but it also makes the “lower” classes conform to it. This is why especially Ki-woo is obsessed with the question of whether or not he “fits in” with the Parks’ social milieu. Out of this insecurity arises his readiness to kill Moon-gwang and Geun-sae to prevent them from exposing

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the Kims’ scam, only to end up seriously wounded by Geun-sae in turn. It could be argued that his obsession is motivated by class-based trauma originating from his humiliating living conditions which inhibited him from improving his social status. After the first shot with the title card, the camera pedestals down to focus on Ki-woo, sitting on a couch with his smartphone, trying to get unauthorized access to a neighbor’s WiFi signal. The camera then moves along with him as he searches for a spot to connect with another, unsecured network, revealing a cramped, cluttered apartment which appears as grimy as the sports socks from the film’s opening image. But we are also shown a close-up of a framed silver medal on the wall, next to a picture of mother Kim hammer-throwing during a track and field sports event. Ki-woo manages to find a free WiFi in the uppermost corner of a filthy bathroom, next to the toilet bowl, which is intriguingly located on an elevated platform right below the ceiling. The toilet bowl is thus situated on the highest level of this basement apartment, above a bed or a dining table, rendering the vertical organization of the Kim household topsy-turvy, an effect which is emphasized by the use of a wide-angle lens. Soon after, as the Kims are all folding pizza boxes together for some petty cash, an approaching vermin extermination team fumigates the apartment through the street-level windows, which had deliberately been left open by them to have the place purged from stink bugs free of charge. The opening ends with thick chemical smog filling the image completely, as if immersing the spectators too in the Kims’ smoky predicament coughing away in agony. Regardless of the implicit tragedy of the Kims’ precarious situation, the opening scene is darkly comical due to their come-what-may style of being-in-the-world, their reciprocal sense of belonging, and their creative inventiveness. The topsy-turvy setting with the toilet bowl perching just below the ceiling emphasizes this comic effect by contrasting the disgusting idea of a toilet being above everything else in the apartment, with the cheery attitude of the Kims going about their business. However, the opening deliberately seems to evoke punch-down humor too, insofar as we are not only invited to laugh with this sympathetic family, but also at their predicament. Punch-down humor refers to a form of joking by a member of a privileged group who is mocking those who are in an unprivileged and marginalized position. In this context, Steven Gimbel argues that the moral permissibility of telling jokes “is an asymmetrically distributed right. Its distribution is inversely proportional to the distribution of social power” (Gimbel 2017, 151).What is remarkable in Parasite is that the intentionality of the joking changes orientation, as the satire dissolves into tragedy so that we, as privileged spectators, suddenly become very aware of our laughter at the underprivileged subjects. This, I think, makes Bong Joon Ho’s social critique all the more effective while satire in the film becomes darker and more fatalistic.

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After the fumigation of their apartment, the Kims are visited by one of Ki-woo’s friends, who gives the family a “scholar’s rock” as a token of good fortune. Next this friend arranges Ki-woo to take over for him as a tutor for Da-hye, the daughter of the rich Park family, while he is studying abroad. First, Ki-woo enlists the help of his sister, Ki-jung, who skillfully forges a college diploma for him, embossed with the logo of a prestigious university. We then witness Ki-woo climbing up a hill slope toward the Park residence, appearing as a tiny figure between high security walls along both sides of the road. The camera follows Ki-woo from a low angle as he is invited to enter the mansion, walking the stairs beyond an impeccable green yard in bright backlight, with water drops from sprinklers glistening in the sun. It is as if Ki-woo were ascending toward the heavenly light. The architecture of the multi-story mansion is characterized by open, high spaces, crisp lines, and an overall functional style, dominated by such expensive materials as wood, marble, glass, and chrome. The juxtaposition between the Kims’ poor basement apartment and the Parks’ high-end mansion is obvious. But even more striking is the subtle play with levels in their abodes: the open splitlevel structure of floors in the mansion mocks the cramped arrangement of furniture in various layers with the toilet bowl on top in the basement. This becomes the central theme of the film, and functions as a visual allegory for class struggle. Furthermore, the scenes in which each household is introduced, invites sense imagination by means of synesthetic aesthetics, evoking a contrast between the notions of smell and scent. For the Kims’ apartment is smelly, not only due to it having been suffused with extermination fumes, but also because it is half belowground overlooking a dirty back alley that drunks use as a toilet. It is situated in Ahyeon-dong, a coarsely built, poor downtown district with high population density, filled with street markets and small grocery shops, which has steep, narrow streets ending in several lengthy stairways that the family has to climb down in order to reach their home. By contrast, the Parks’ mansion is set in the quiet, open, elevated, and wealthy area of Seongbuk-dong, which is known as the South Korean “Beverly Hills,” and is home to business families and ambassadors who are protected by a special police detail (Hyun and Sangmi 2020). Clear of waste, this green neighborhood nestled on a hill overlooking the city emits a pleasant scent. In this way, Parasite is marked by olfactory stereotypes. The unpleasant and pungent smells of decay exuding from an urban slum are associated with poverty, while fragrant, fresh, and pleasant scents are considered distinctive traits of a wealthy lifestyle. My analysis of Parasite as developed in this chapter moves on three planes. First, I shall demonstrate that the film functions through the concept of social space, which is a concept from Henri Lefebvre’s Production of

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Space (1991). Inspired by Lefebvre’s thinking, the first part argues that the parasite in Parasite is the abstract space aligned with neoliberalist capitalism, which overpowers the social space of the underprivileged subjects. This inhibits their ability to improve their social standing, which becomes the source of their class-based trauma. Secondly, I analyze the way in which the Kims nevertheless attempt to negotiate their social space through performative capitalism. This can be seen as a form of praxis driven by the ideology of free competition and equal opportunity. It leads to a notion of the underprivileged groups as threats, which ensures the continuing hegemony of the privileged. Finally, I discuss the juxtaposition of smell and scent as an important aesthetic theme in the film. The Kims’ attempt to negate themselves from their facticity fails due to the odorous materiality of their bodies, which is associated with poverty and deprivation and will be extruded from the social space of the wealthy. The way in which Parasite synaesthetically immerses us as spectators in their sordid smells, also engages us in the Kims’ class-based trauma. This invites us to reflect on the fallacy of smell serving as a fundamental manifestation of the body’s social standing, justifying the existence of class hierarchy. The Production of Space According to Henri Lefebvre, space is not only equivalent to physical environment, but a semiotic abstraction that influences social relations at all levels. This means that there is simultaneously a representation of space, i.e., designed space of urban planners and social engineers, and a space of representation, where the lived body exists in interaction with other bodies (Lefebvre 1991, 38–39). In this context, Lefebvre distinguishes between abstract space and social space. Abstract space is covered by the interaction of technology, knowledge, and power. Insofar as it is aligned with capitalism, it seeks to overpower the social space of everyday lived experience. Furthermore, every form of social interaction produces a space and becomes the organizational logic of that space. Thus the production of space becomes a self-feeding loop. Social space is produced and reproduced in connection with the forces of production, so that space is in a sense inherently related to its production: “Space [. . .] is at once a precondition and a result of social superstructures. [. . .] It infiltrates, even invades, the concept of production, becoming part—perhaps the essential part—of its content” (Lefebvre 1991, 85). In Parasite, the Kims’ social space is associated with poverty, unemployment, and both psychological and physical immobility. Due to their cramped housing conditions, the family is confined to living and working, while

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sitting on the floor, with limited access to information and communication technology. Their space is characterized by bad hygiene, poor possibilities to earn a living or to obtain proper education, and few opportunities to socialize with others outside their own family, due to the social stigma that clings to semi-basement housing. This is why Ki-woo is clearly ashamed when his college friend pays the family a surprise visit, mentioning that they could have met outdoors. The Kims’ social space also has an impact on the type of food they consume, their diet mainly consisting of unhealthy snacks and beer. A rare opportunity for them to eat out is not in a proper restaurant, but in an inexpensive driver’s cafeteria situated in the outskirts of the city. All these elements inform us both of how the Kims negotiate their social space and vice versa how social space not only materializes in distinctive forms but reproduces itself, thus determining their lack of scope. By contrast the social space of the Parks is characterized by wealth, professional success, and cultural mobility, even on a global level. In Pierre Bourdieu’s terms the Parks possess all three forms of capital: economic, social, and cultural. Designed by a famous (fictional) architect Namgoong Hyeonja, the Park mansion has an extraordinary spatial arrangement reminiscent of functionalism. It includes a flat roof, large glass expanses, high-end household appliances, and modernist, minimalist style furniture dominating its interior. The Parks’ extravagant walk-in closet, functioning as a backdrop for a close-up shot of Mrs. Park’s hands counting a pile of money, includes multiple luxury suitcases and Hermès Birkin bags in different colors, strategically placed on display in art-installation style. For the Park household only fresh food is purchased from spacious, specialty stores, and consumed from elegantly arranged plates. Furthermore, the Park household encompasses areas outside the protective security walls as well, such as Mr. Park’s open-plan office, where all his employees work on the same floor and in the same open space, except for one glass-walled enclosure that separates Mr. Park and his close executive staff from the others. It also includes his lavish Mercedes Benz, which functions as an extension of the Parks’ social space. After Ki-jung has deliberately left a pair of her panties in the Benz to get Driver Yoon replaced, Mr. Park reacts outragedly not because of Yoon’s alleged indecent behavior as such. It is because an employee having sexual intercourse in the family car would mean “crossing the line” from one social space into another. “Crossing the line” is a recurring dialogue motif and a central narrative theme in the film, referring to the hierarchy of social spaces which, in Mr. Park’s reasoning, should remain intact. After father Kim has taken over Yoon’s duties as the family driver, he must deal with the line between his own social space and Mr. Park’s on a daily basis, the boundary between the back seat and the front seat physically marking this line in the car.

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At the same time, Mr. Park seems strangely fascinated by Ki-jung’s cheap pair of underwear, as he asks his wife to wear them during their moment of erotic contact in the living room, audibly witnessed by the Kims who are hiding under the coffee table. This suggests that “crossing the line” is acceptable for the wealthy classes only as a source of excitement, when class transgression functions as a “dirty” role-playing for sexual pleasure, for example. The same is valid for the use of Indigenous American symbolic objects, a recurring visual motif throughout the film. The inclusion of these items could be understood as a twisted reference to the historical introduction of capitalism in South Korea through the mediation of the United States in the 1950s (Noh 2020, 261). But the I‌‌‌‌‌ndigenous objects also function to illustrate the absolute indifference of the Parks to other modes of social organization outside their own, which renders the logic of their social space strictly exclusive. Young Park Da-song is obsessed with certain stereotype paraphernalia, which the Parks refer to as “Indian” folklore, such as a bow and arrow, a tomahawk, and a tepee placed in the exact center of the house garden, all of this purchased online, “directly from America.” The theme climaxes during Da-song’s birthday party, featuring both father Kim and Mr. Park in extravagant, feather war headdresses, which according to Indigenous American tradition are supposedly worn only by honored clan members who have earned a respectful position in their tribe. Mr. Park explains to his driver Kim that the plan is to attack Ki-jung as she brings in the birthday cake, so that Da-song can stop then and be a “good Indian” at his own party. In this scene, father Kim appears noticeably uncomfortable, as if he were painfully aware of the embarrassing cultural appropriation, a form of understanding which Mr. Park is wholly insentient to. Whether or not this is the case, the critique embodied in the use of these items is clear: due to the organizational logic of their social space, the wealthy live under the illusion of being above the realities of cultural appropriation and economical exploitation, even though their lives are dependent on the outcome. This means that the Park mansion is a microcosm for the Lefebvrian contradictory social spaces on a much more general scale. This is also reflected in its multi-layered architecture designed to enable vertical spatial dynamics through the multiple staircases in the building. There are stairs from the front door up through the garden to the living room, from the second floor down to the kitchen, from the garage up to the living room, from the kitchen down to the basement, and from the basement down to the secret bomb shelter underground. Spatial dynamics unveil the relationships between the characters, which are communicated by them constantly ascending and descending the stairs, with the camera often purposefully placed in either high or low angle to enhance the effect of the vertical movement. However, it is noticeable that while all the other characters in the film go both up and down the stairs, Mr.

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Park is only shown ascending the stairs, which opens an avenue for interpretation of the film from the gender point of view as well. In this context it is strongly implied that, instead of merely being “simple” in Min-hyuk’s suggestion, Mrs. Park is unhappy, as entrapped in her role as a housewife as the Kims are in their impoverishment. In exchange for sexual favors, she asks her husband for drugs, which make her sluggish, spontaneously dropping off to sleep once in a while during her meaningless daily chores. Leaving this aside, the scene in which Mr. Park is introduced, puts him in the center of the frame as he comes up the stairs into the living room. There he is enthusiastically welcomed by Mrs. Park and the family dogs. Mr. Park’s ascent is accompanied by three pendant ceiling lights turning on one by one as if his movement were detected by motion light sensor switches. A later scene in the secret bomb shelter provides the true explanation of this seemingly spontaneous lighting effect. The lights turning on as Mr. Park walks up a flight of stairs is an abstract sign for a space associated with a dazzling, elite mode of life. It is associated with being solely in the service of the “enlightened.” While the Park mansion is marked as a space within which “crossing the line” between social classes is strictly discouraged, the secret shelter underneath is an abysmal space which no member of the Park family ever visits, as they are not even aware of its existence. Therefore, the shelter is another spatial metaphor for upper-class ignorance of social exploitation. From a Freudian point of view it could be said that the shelter marks the return of the repressed. It houses those elements which have been banned from the public as well as the private realm in the production of social space. These elements include weakness, vulnerability, decay, and abject instability borne out by persistent hardship. This ultimately leads to resignation among the underprivileged that they cannot improve their fate, and drives them to exclude themselves from social spaces altogether. In Parasite, the existence of the underground shelter is revealed halfway through the film, after mother Kim has allowed entrance to sacked Moon-gwang, who has a bruised face. The film does not provide a narrative explanation for these bruises, but it can be assumed that she has taken a beating from the loan sharks for whom her husband Geun-sae is hiding underground. The shelter can be reached through a secret staircase behind a laboriously operated heavy sliding cupboard in the basement. The camera follows mother Kim rushing after her housekeeper predecessor Moon-gwang as she descends the set of two long narrow staircases to the crampy shelter at the bottom. Here she is met with the appalling housing conditions for Moon-gwang’s husband, which leave her visibly disgusted. It is as if this disgust justifies her taking the moral high ground against the clandestine shelter dwellers, hypocritically accusing them of stealing food, while her own family had gotten comfortably drunk from the Parks’ expensive liqueurs just moments earlier. This is visually expressed by means

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of the juxtaposition of high/low camera angle as Moon-gwang kneels before mother Kim, appealing to her sense of class solidarity by calling her a “fellow member of the needy.” Then, when the rest of the Kims tumble down the stairs and the tables are turned, mother Kim is met with the same contempt by which she herself had returned Moon-gwang’s request for solidarity. When later the Kims regain the upper hand, fatally injuring Moon-gwang in the process, we find out that the flickering light greeting Mr. Park when he returns home, is not operated by a motion sensor, but that it is of Geun-sae’s doing, who has descended into insanity after all those years in the underground shelter. Even while his hands are tied behind his back with an electric cord, Geun-sae bursts into a silly song to celebrate Mr. Park’s arrival while hitting his head against alternate light switches, blood streaming down his forehead. To shoot this action, the camera is positioned in an extreme low angle underneath the staircase (figure 5.3). These shots are crosscut to Mr. Park casually ascending the stairs, unaware of the tragedy taking place underneath his feet. When the horrified father Kim asks how Geun-sae can live like this, Geun-sae confesses that he actually feels comfortable in the shelter, the camera lingering on memorabilia on the wall: “It feels like I was born here. Maybe I had my wedding here too. As for the National Pension, I don’t qualify. In my old age, love will comfort me. So please . . . let me live down here.” Thus, unlike the forest in The Lobster where at least a possibility for communality existed, the interstitial space of the shelter in Parasite is void of all solidarity. Moreover, it is also an a-social space void of any socioeconomical lines to be crossed. Emulating Lefebvre, it could perhaps be said that this shelter is an abyss which comes into being between the abstract space of knowledge and power and the concrete space of lived experience, buried under the illusion of capitalism. Furthermore, the shelter is a space of trauma characterized by frozen, arrested time (“It feels like I was born here.”), experienced as a cessation of temporal flow, which further isolates the person

Figure 5.3.  Parasite: Geun-sae greeting Mr. Park’s homecoming.

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dwelling in trauma. The ending of the Parasite seems to suggest that such trauma cannot be overcome, but it can be passed on to someone else, since it is father Kim who ends up residing in this a-social space of no-time, as if the traumatic events in Geun-sae’s past suddenly imposed themselves upon father Kim’s present in a circular loop. Performing Capitalism In Sartrean terms it can be argued that the Kims’ social space constitutes their facticity, as it limits their freedom of action. However, in the spirit of Sartre, the Kims would be free both in relation to their social space and in spite of this space. In the first part of Parasite, the Kims’ project to improve their social space can be interpreted as a form of praxis, as an attempt to negate human need in the conditions of scarcity. According to Sartre, in the process of praxis, in order to transform the space of facticity, individuals must become the embodiment of the features of that space and they must make tools of their bodies. Thus there is a double movement at work in praxis, the social and historical world working upon the individual and the individual working upon the social and historical world, a “contradiction between man-as-producer and man-as-product” (Sartre 1982, 158). So when the Kims participate in the socioeconomic space as occupied by the Parks, they contribute to this space while being simultaneously turned into its product. This focus on the production of space enables an understanding of socioeconomic relations as a field of embodied experiences. In this way people articulate their individual praxis, thereby bringing those relations into being, a practice which Ingrid Medby calls “performing capitalism” (Medby 2021). When Ki-woo impersonates a tutor in a neat black suit with a relaxed, white granddad collar shirt, carrying a smart backpack, his attire communicates the right balance of formality and informality, professionalism and traineeship, to mark him out as a college student. However, instead of promoting Da-hye’s academic thinking, learning, and problem-solving strategies, Ki-woo’s tutoring consists of helping her building her stamina and calming her heartbeat, so that she can take the exam “like slashing through a jungle, dominating it with vigor.” Similarly, Ki-jung’s “unique methods” as a high-demand art tutor for Da-song are based on ideas found by means of Google on the search term “art therapy.” While as art therapist Jessica, an alumna of Illinois State University in art psychology, she sports all-black outfits which are stereotypically associated with creatives, at other times she mostly wears loose T-shirts and comfy pants. Maintaining a remarkably calm composure before Mrs. Park, she analyses Da-song’s “Basquiat-like” self-portrait as a “black box” of his mind, where psychotic symptoms are manifest in the lower-right region

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(the “schizophrenia zone”) of the painting. This performance does not only convince Mrs. Park to hire Ki-jung as Da-song’s art therapist, but also to do so at a considerably higher rate than expected. Both Ki-woo and Ki-jung’s performance of capitalism evoke a comparison with real-life fraudulent impersonators in the world of wealth and professionalism. People like Anna Sorokin of the private membership club Anne Delvey Foundation, Belle Gibson of the wellness and lifestyle app The Whole Pantry, Elizabeth Holmes of breakthrough health technology company Theranos, and Billy MacFarland of the luxury music festival Fyre. All these impostors used their personal charisma to sell fabricated stories to major financial organizations, to private investors, and to charitable foundations in order to embezzle enormous sums of money from these institutions. In the current media landscape, there seems to be a cultural fascination with these impostors, all of whom have inspired documentaries, podcasts, and docudramas such as Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened (2019), Bad Influencer: The Great Insta Con (2021), Inventing Anna (2022), and The Dropout (2022). This fascination with impostors would seem to be a cultural symptom of obsessive desire for wealth and prominence, as well as of the self-confidence myth captured in the phrase “fake it until you make it.” In contrast to Ki-jung and Ki-woo, who utilize their images, carefully cultivated through their appropriately chosen attire combined with an embodied sense of talent and expertise, the imposter strategies of the Kim parents are based on more traditional demonstration of skill. First father Kim must convince Mr. Park of his abilities as a chauffeur by driving his future employer around in the busy streets of Seoul. While Mr. Park’s offscreen voice assures him that the ride is not meant as an assessment of any kind, a close-up of his hand balancing a full coffee mug across the arm rest of his car seat tells us otherwise. Despite feeling nervous, Kim keeps the vehicle steady, so that the coffee does not spill, which earns him a compliment from Mr. Park for his “excellent cornering.” This phrase here idiosyncratically applied to driving, normally refers to pushing people or dominating supply in a market situation. Next mother Kim finds her way into the Park household through an imaginary employment agency, which projects an image of success and exclusivity through a thick textured visiting card with a minimalist design, and by maintaining meticulous screening of their clients. To the penetrating, loud soundscape of the aria “Spietati io vi giurai” from Handel’s opera seria Rodelinda, a scene then celebrates mother Kim having landed the job as the new housekeeper, the camera circling around her as she gracefully floats around the house with plates of fruit which she has arranged just as beautifully as her predecessor. The dance-like quality of this scene with mother Kim serving fruit to her children tutoring the Park children, and easing the load of her husband carrying the Parks’ shopping, brings home the point of all the

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Kims performing to the wealthy family how the Parks want to see them, never betraying their roles as dutiful servants. Rodelinda’s furious coloratura cries on the soundtrack, bewailing her fate at the hands of cruel usurpers, belie this tranquil attitude and by contrast insistently remind us of the fact that the Kims are intrinsically immoral in their actions, not just comic con men. As David Salazar writes, in this scene the use of Handel’s aria creates an effect that lightens the dark behaviors of the family in the audience’s eyes. Classical music of this nature creates relaxation for the audience and combined with the montage, we remain on the Kim family’s side. But the music is a Greek chorus in this film, commenting on the events in unexpected ways. This is one such instance. Rodelinda’s angry cries of vengeance is a condemnation of the family’s behaviors for this is the first time that they obtain their positions not just by lying, but by methodically forcing their predecessors out of their positions. They have gone from con-men to evildoers, as fun as it might seem. This moral ambiguity is being called out by Rodelinda in her aria, even if the film audience doesn’t register it right away. (Salazar 2019)

However, this performance comes to an ungraceful end when the Parks leave for a camping trip to celebrate Da-song’s birthday in the outdoors. This has become a tradition for the family after Da-song’s traumatic encounter with a “ghost” appearing from the basement at a previous birthday party. After the Parks have left, the Kims unabashedly invade their social space, using their living room facilities and bedrooms as if they were the owners. Mother and father Kim take a siesta lying together on the spacious couch overlooking the sunny garden where Ki-woo is prostrated on the lawn, “gazing at the sky from home.” Later, Ki-woo takes some Voss water to Ki-jung, who is watching television in the bubble bath, before jumping onto Da-hye’s bed, beneath which he finds her diaries. As evening falls, mother Kim demonstrates her skills at hammer throwing to her admiring family, none of whom seem concerned about the distant sound of shattering glass following her launching the hammer. The invasion climaxes in a booze blast, where the family ravenously consumes party snacks and varieties of alcohol poured into crystal glasses, as it starts to rain torrentially outside. At some point, Ki-woo remarks to Ki-jung that “this rich house suits her,” as if the house were a space experienced as a second skin in dressing, rather than a commodity to be housed in. Soon after Ki-woo’s comment, Ki-jung notices that the snacks she has been eating were dog treats, not for human consumption. The party scene is significant, not only because it marks the generic shift from a social satire to a class-conscious thriller. The scene also suggests that the Kims can perform the signs of capitalism in order to fake an appearance of belonging, but outside of this performance their actions develop as conditioned by their own

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social milieu. This is why Moon-gwang and Geun-sae frown upon the Kims for “drinking themselves stupid in this home suffused with Mr. Namgoong’s creative spirit.” The class-based trauma inherent in the situation has to do with a person’s sensed inability to transform one’s social space to achieve social and economic equality. Lefebvre writes that centers of wealth and power are dominant aspects of space, which seek to reduce the differences and obstacles encountered within that space (Lefebvre 1991, 49). Thus, when the Parks unexpectedly return home from their camping trip because the rain has caused a river to flood nearby, the Kims are first forced to hide under the living room coffee table, until they can sneak out of the house in the pouring rain. Next, right through the heavy showers the Kims descend along a sloping road toward the lower parts of the city, starting from the hill top where the Park mansion is well protected from the risk of flooding by plentiful water drains and sewers. We follow the Kims in the downpour, on their way down steep streets, through a car tunnel, into their own neighborhood where the streets are flooded with sewage water, and where they find their own semi-basement house completely inundated. In the interior shots the camera is placed level with the water surface so that the scene almost provokes the feeling as if we, as spectators, were also immersed in the filthy sewage (figure 5.4). The sequence is crosscut with scenes inside the secret shelter, where suffering from a fatal head wound Moon-gwang drags herself to Geun-sae, who in vain tries to hold on to the last threads of sanity. The shot of Moon-gwang vomiting into the toilet bowl in the shelter, is cut to Ki-jung finding the basement toilet spouting sewage water, an image which swiftly becomes an emotion metaphor for Moon-gwang’s justified contempt for the Kims. Furthermore, like the secret shelter, the overflowing toilet can be seen as a metaphor for the return of

Figure 5.4.  Parasite: Immersed in sewage.

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the repressed, for the excrement coming back from the unconscious netherworld—to use Slavoj Zizek’s expression—where once they were thought to have definitively disappeared. The narrative connotation of the flood scene is obvious: the Kims are compared to waste that must be managed and disposed of, flushed away from the higher levels of space to its lowest depths. However, by effectively immersing us as spectators in the same wastewater, the scene leaves behind a contagious residue of refuse, which is not easy to get rid of. In this context, Tina Kendall has argued that waste in cinema can be a powerful source of disenchantment. It mobilizes negative affect as a symptom of socioeconomic or ecological discontent (Kendall 2012, 49). The flood scene in Parasite taps into such sentiments of disenchantment, inviting us to reflect upon the conditions which determine people and things as being unworthy and disposable. While the first half of the film invited us to both laugh at and laugh with the Kims, the flood scene transforms the dark satire in Parasite and warrants a much more ambivalent response. It confronts us with our earlier enjoyment of the film as social satire, potentially inviting us to reflect on our own real-life privileges founded upon the exploitation of others. While the laughter kept us at a distance from the Kims as underprivileged, the immersive disenchantment of the flood scene bridges that distance in such a way that it renders a disinterested viewing position both impossible and unethical. Thus, when in a later scene Mrs. Park happily elucidates for a friend on the phone how yesterday’s rain was a blessing because it cleared the air of pollution, her remark highlights the idea that the water washed the Kims away from the social space where they really did not belong. The rain washes off the Kims performative layer in an instant, which suggests that their roles in the service of free-market capitalism can be swapped and replaced as easily as the rain cleanses the air, flushing the impurities into the drainage system. These roles are fluid, because they are not based on solid class unity or the “we” experience of group solidarity. Praxis as demonstrated by the Kims remains on an individual level, driven by the capitalist ideology of free competition and equal opportunity. This effectively upholds the Parks on top of the hill, but confines Moon-gwang and Geun-sae to the secret shelter of death and insanity. Parasite shows what happens when underprivileged groups consider each other as threat. There is direct hostility between them and they constantly appear to appropriate the possibilities of the other. This is a vicious circle reinforcing the separation between the underprivileged in order to ensure the continuing hegemony of the privileged, which is why toward the end of the film it is father Kim who ends up hiding in the secret shelter instead of Geun-sae’s. The only way out would be if Ki-woo earned enough money to buy the Namgoong mansion. But this possibility is presented as a mere fantasy, narrated by the dreaming Ki-woo over an illusory

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montage sequence depicting an emotional family reunion, a “happy” end that refuses to be a happy end. After which the film ends with exactly the same framing with which it started, with dirty socks suspended from the ceiling in the Kims’ basement apartment. Not only does this image close the narrative circle, but it also establishes a dead-end situation as at the root of the Kims’ class-based trauma, from which they are unable to escape. Joseba Gabilondo makes a similar argument when he writes that Parasite is essentially “about the impossibility of overcoming, dismantling, or exciting neoliberal capitalism” (Gabilondo 2020, 1). But rather than detaching the spectators from the traumatic “working class entrapment” (14), I propose that the immersive aesthetics in Parasite successfully bridge the distance between the first- and secondhand experience of neoliberalism. This includes Bong Joon Ho’s synaesthetic strategies which evoke the sense of smell, inviting the spectators to feel the negative effects of late capitalism through scent imagination. Scent vs. Smell As the above analysis demonstrates, the upholding of social hierarchy is a central theme and a satirical target in Parasite, with Mr. Park in particular appearing especially anxious that none of his servants ever “crosses the line.” However, while the Kims generally manage to stay on the correct side of this line, by their dutiful and courteous behavior, while visible and invisible at the same time, their body smell does pervade this line to Mr. Park’s repeated discomfort. This comes to a head in the key scene where the Kims are hiding underneath the coffee table in the Parks’ living room, with Mr. and Mrs. Park getting ready to spend the night on the couch to keep an eye on Da-song in his tepee. Mr. Park remarks to his wife that even though father Kim “always seems about to cross the line, he never does cross it and that’s good. But that smell crosses the line. It powers through right into the back seat.” In this scene, the straight-on camera performs a vertical movement across the edge of the table so that the frame is divided into a “ladder” in the image dividing the frame, with the Kims underneath, the Parks above. The camera stays with the Kims as Mr. Park describes father Kim’s odor as a “boiled rag” and the “stench of the underground,” closing in on his humiliation as father Kim subtly grabs the collar of his shirt to smell it. The scene confirms the observation made by Constance Classen et al. in their Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell, that smell is most threatening to the social order due to its transgressive and intimate pervasiveness (Classen et al. 1994, 4). This is why odors associated with poverty, deprivation, and squalor must be extruded from the spaces of wealth and cleanliness. But it also exposes the societal assumption that one person is lower than another, if recognized as such by smell. In Parasite this functions as a concrete metaphor expressing class-based trauma.

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Parasite is full of fragrant moments, ranging on an odor gamut from pleasant scents of fresh greenery through unpleasant smells of urban environment to the disgusting stench of drainage and stink bugs. Not only does the opening scene already engulf us in the musty smell of the Kims’ basement apartment, but it is also full of the suffocating stink of the extermination fumes, in which the screen seems to be immersed. By contrast, the scene in which Ki-woo first arrives at the Park mansion, invites us to experience the fresh, leafy, herbal fragrance of the abundance of green in the image, opening with the subtle hint of bamboo leaf, blended with the clean and crisp scent of black pine, and finally dominated by the uplifting smell of freshly cut grass. From its very first image with the grimy socks suspended from the ceiling, Parasite invites us to experience the film through scent imagination, prompted by its synaesthetic qualities. As Vivian Sobchack argues, even though films do not directly produce diegetic smells—with the exception of odor-releasing systems in film theaters such as Smell-O-Vision or John Waters’ Odorama—a film can invite us to “subjectively experience scents of what we objectively see on screen.” To her we do “not only [make] optical sense but also olfactory sense of our vision, as the latter expands to accommodate the sensual world onscreen” (Sobchack 2013, 130). In other words, we might experience that our vision expands so as to accommodate smell, when, for example, we watch the extreme close-up of a juicy peach, being shaved of its fuzz by means of a razor. This happens when next we see this fuzz blown through the air in tiny particles which find their way around Moon-gwang’s head, causing a severe allergic reaction. Sobchack writes that through such extreme intensification of detail, our seeing becomes “sensually hyperbolized” and transported beyond the range of visibility, so that our vision becomes felt as “quasi-aromatic” or “scented” (Sobchack 2013, 133). But there is more. Cinema can also evoke intensified olfactory attention by immersing our vision in the materiality of scent. This happens in the scene in which the flood nearly reaches the ceiling of the Kims’ apartment and the camera is half-drowned under the surface of sewage water. This shot then partly dissolves, partly wipes to an extreme long shot from a bird’s-eye view of the family escaping on an improvised raft, with clutter floating all around them. These flood scenes are immersive, not only with regard to smell (as well as our other senses), but also in terms of class-based trauma, as we are literally plunged below the surface of poverty. In Parasite, the juxtaposition between smell and scent is inextricably connected with the maintenance of class hierarchy. This is why the Kims’ performance of capitalism starts to falter as soon as the putrid smell attached to their bodies starts to penetrate the fragrant reality of the Park household. First there is the pair of Ki-jung’s used underwear which Mr. Park sniffs after

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finding them underneath the passenger seat of his car, so that it is hard to tell whether the source of his annoyance is the panties themselves or their smell. It is also remarkable that, instead of throwing away these panties, Mrs. Park carefully folds them away in a sealed envelope like a fetish item, the smell of which she wants to preserve. Ki-jung’s underwear is a carnivalesque prop in the world of the film, a sign of an unruly, leaky body in the serious and sober household of the Parks. Then there is the smell which Da-song notices first on father Kim’s chauffeur’s uniform and then on mother Kim, which he declares to be the same. When an annoyed Mrs. Park tells Da-song to go up to his art class, he remarks that Ki-jung “smells like that, too.” This triggers a bout of self-reflection in the Kims, who locate the origin of their shared odor in the social space of their smelly basement apartment. However, at this stage the Kims consider themselves fortunate that they only have to worry about trivial things like the wrong kind of aroma. It is only in the living room scene with the Kims hiding under the coffee table, that they become aware of a humiliating sense of class consciousness. The point is made that father Kim’s characteristic odor is his facticity, which justifies the social hierarchy between the two families. The Kims’ stench is the signifier of their class, which they cannot wipe out by washing their clothes using four different detergents, as it is beneath their clothes, within their bodies, and even at the very core of their ethical being. As Minjung Noh writes in her analysis of the film, the Kims’ smell is humiliating because it points to the hierarchy within the capitalistic religious cosmos, and it is also dehumanizing since it disguises itself as a natural and intrinsic difference between the same biological humans. The Kim family is described as if they are ontological Others, perhaps of subhuman nature. Smell, which is a more corporeal sensation compared to vision and sound, is claimed to be an organic and natural difference between the rich and the poor. (Noh 2020, 257)

Classen et al. argue that prior to the eighteenth century, smells were “thought of as intrinsic ‘essences,’ revelatory of truth” (Classen et al. 1994, 4). The Kims’ performance fails because they are unable to conform to the appropriate olfactory identity which is linked to class: fresh and fragrant scents belong to the wealthy classes, while the working classes are associated with “the reek of poverty and coarseness” (Classen et al. 1994, 161). In such thinking, smells are considered essential of the body, serving as a manifestation of its fundamental superiority or inferiority, which as a fallacy is particularly well exposed in Parasite. This is achieved in the cluttered semi-basement setting, with layers of dirt accumulated through the years on the walls, like

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the smells onto the Kims’ bodies, staining them with the affective value of class-based trauma. Smell also plays a crucial role in the film’s climax, which starts unfolding with the Kims staying at an overcrowded sports facility that functions as a makeshift shelter for flood refugees. By contrast the Parks wake up to birdsong on a beautiful sunny morning, the air around their mansion clear of pollution. This inspires Mrs. Park to the idea of throwing an impromptu garden party for Da-song’s birthday, to which Ki-jung and Ki-woo are invited as guests, while father Kim is summoned to help her with the shopping, going the rounds of a wine shop, a grocery store, a bakery, and finally a florist. The scene crosscuts between Mrs. Park in her spacious walk-in closet choosing a crisp white two-piece suit to wear, and the refugees in the sports facility lining up for food and fighting over donated clothing. While telephoning her friends to invite them to the party in the back seat of the Mercedes-Benz, Mrs. Park is hit by father Kim’s smell which is now even more pungent after the flood and the night spent at the makeshift refugee shelter. Wrinkling her nose at the foul smell, Mrs. Park sniffs the air a few times, then quickly opens the car window, while father Kim while driving the car smells himself, visibly saddened and humiliated. As the party gets in full swing, Ki-woo observes the guests through the window in Da-hye’s room, asking her whether he “fits in” with this setting. Then Ki-woo grabs hold of the family’s memento scholar’s rock which he has rescued from the flood and brought with him. He goes down to the secret bomb shelter in the lower basement of the mansion, presumably with the intention of killing Moon-gwang and Geun-sae, which would ensure him of definite access to the Parks’ social space. After finding Moon-gwang already dead, he gets himself attacked by Geun-sae, who brutally injures him with Ki-woo’s own scholar’s rock, in a viscerally violent scene that is abruptly cut to a second aria from Rodelinda in the film. This time the ominously quiet, resigned “Mio caro bene” is performed live by one of the guests in the garden. Blood-stained Geun-sae grabs a kitchen knife and walks out into the party where he stabs Ki-jung in the chest, after which Da-song collapses with a seizure at the sight of his “ghost.” A frenetic chaos ensues, with father Kim attempting to stop Ki-jung’s bleeding while Mr. Park yells at him to get Da-song to the hospital. Instead of obeying, father Kim throws him the car keys, but Geun-sae falls on top of them after having been stabbed with a meat skewer by mother Kim. As Mr. Park pushes the bleeding man aside to get the keys, Geun-sae’s grimy smell elicits in him a reaction of strongly visceral disgust, which in turn triggers a feeling of resentment in father Kim, that is so forceful that he stabs Mr. Park to death, after which he flees the scene. In slow motion, the camera gyrates upward in a bird’s-eye perspective, while the distant sound of a woman laughing can be heard on the sound

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track. This sound could be interpreted as Moon-gwang’s revengeful laughter, emerging from some extradiegetic space, from between the disturbing past and the horrifying present, or indeed from the secret bomb shelter, which still houses her lifeless body. The laughter is the sound of schadenfreude, which expresses a malicious joy of retribution, while ignoring the reality of the poor characters’ trauma emerging from the denial of socioeconomic equality. This extradiegetic laughter functions as a sound bridge to the diegetic sound of Ki-woo’s laughing, which starts off the film’s epilogue, entirely narrated by his voice-over. Just like the circularity epitomized in the film’s final shot of the dirty socks, the sound of Moon-gwang’s laughter haunting Ki-woo’s acousmatic narration signifies the persistence of trauma. This as such is due to the lack of focus on creating future welfare for all layers of society.

Chapter 6

Clones and Clowns Traumatic Bodies in Dystopian Settings

NEVER LET ME GO AND JOKER This chapter explores the interplay between trauma and social exclusion in Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go and Todd Phillips’ Joker. Aesthetically the spectator is directly engaged in the inner conflict of the films’ protagonists and their identity crises. However, it may not be obvious to compare these two films, as Never Let Me Go is an affectively subdued, elegiac comingof-age story, while Joker is raw, visceral, and brutally violent, designed to evoke an unsettling aesthetic experience in the spectator. Nevertheless, the two films offer more similarities than differences, and that is because they both take place in an alternative past that is best characterized as dystopian. The emphasis is either medical (Never Let Me Go) or economic (Joker), but in both cases the dystopian aspect is identified as the formative element of the main characters’ trauma. By re-imagining the past in dystopian colors, both Never Let Me Go and Joker invite us to remember the present from a different stance. There are obvious allegories for present-day problems, such as those originating from the bioindustry and an oppressive neoliberal culture. Both films are about otherness and othering, denying the main characters the social support that human dignity requires, which is the principal source of their unjustified suffering. And both films deal with traumatic identity crisis borne out by the unfulfilled desire for the absent parent. I shall first discuss Never Let Me Go, in which the protagonists are clones, who are not considered human by society, because they have not been born but were molded after random individuals or “Possibles.” It is for these Possibles that the clones keep a constant eye out, when in contact with the outside world. I shall provide a reading of the film inspired by the Foucauldian concept of biopower as a determining factor of the protagonists’ trauma. This is also reflected in the aesthetic organization of the film as it follows the clones 153

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in their desperate search for the significance of their own identity. The second part of this chapter analyses the relationship between childhood trauma and adult mental disorder in Joker. Here the protagonist lives in a disturbed relationship with a neglectful, adoptive mother, trapped within an economic dystopia, and only imaginary father figures to look up to. He experiences living in a world that is so hateful to him, that he develops a severe identity crisis, from which the only way out is cancellation of his own agential self. Both Never Let Me Go and Joker are therefore best described as failed tragedies (Elsaesser 2001), which deny their protagonists any other kind of fate than enduring, abject emptiness, an inevitable cul-de-sac of identity. Never Let Me Go Never Let Me Go is an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s eponymous novel, situated in an alternative-reality England between the years 1978 and 1994. Medical technology has banished sickness and stretched human life expectancy to over one hundred years. Like Ishiguro’s novel, the film is narrated by Kathy H. who is reminiscing her past in a rural, private boarding school called Hailsham. There she grew up together with her best friend Ruth and her love interest Tommy, the two other central characters in the film. It starts with a prologue, in which Kathy’s voice-over introduces herself as a “carer” whose “donors have always tended to do much better than expected,” while portrayed in a silhouette shot in front of a window overlooking an operating theater. The next shot is from the opposite side of the window, revealing Kathy’s downhearted expression as she observes a patient being wheeled into the room, as reflected on the windowpane. The last frame in the prologue is shot from behind the operating table. The image is the exchange of looks between Kathy and the patient who is being prepared, which we observe simultaneously through the window, and in the reflection on the window (figure 6.1). Even though the prologue is void of explicit narrative information about the story action, this intricate image composition does not only tell us that the patient on the operation table is indeed one of Kathy’s “donors,” but also that these roles can be swapped, and that “donor” can be substituted for “carer” at all times. After the prologue the narration moves back in time, through a graphic mismatch in the image between the 1994 adult Kathy looking right, and the 1978 young Kathy looking left, as if she were literally looking at her younger self through layers of time. The setting is the boarding school of Hailsham, as indicated by a text insert on an establishing shot of an impressive, 17thcentury Jacobean mansion surrounded by a large garden bathing in sunlight. On the sound track there is birdsong, which becomes layered by the sound of an organ opening up a school anthem. This accompanies the image transition

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Figure 6.1.  Never Let Me Go: Kathy and Tommy’s exchange of looks reflected on the window.

into an assembly hall where a large group of young students starts singing together. The song is an adaptation of the Harrow Song “Forty Years On,” which evokes an association with prestigious, elite education (Shang 2017, 559). The students are not in uniform, but neatly dressed in gray, apart from some holes and patches in their strangely unidentical clothes, which belies the initial association with a prestigious educational institution. The students are addressed by Miss Emily, the Hailsham headmistress, expressing her annoyance about three cigarette butts found on the school premises, while the said butts are presented in a jar as evidence by one of her faculty annex “guardians.” It is in this setting, partly idyllic, partly authoritarian, that the three central characters are introduced as childhood friends, in joyful scenes of children playing, accompanied by a lighthearted score. However, there is something strange and enigmatic going on behind these idyllic scenes. When Miss Lucy, a compassionate new school guardian, inquires why Tommy was incapable of fetching a ball that had landed outside the Hailsham premises, his classmates tell her horrific stories about the fate of children who have ventured beyond the school fence. On leaving and returning to the main building, the children check in and out by means of an electric bracelet that keeps track of their movement at all times, a detail that is lacking in Ishiguro’s original novel. A minor bruise, contracted by Kathy when Tommy accidentally hits her, attracts unproportionate attention from a nurse and a physician conducting a regular but meticulous health check in the school’s state-of-the-art surgery. The curriculum of this strange school seems to consist mostly of physical exercise, art classes, local geography, and sex education, which is remarkably explicit in demonstrating the ways in which men and women can engage in intercourse. There are also classes with role-playing activities, in which the children rehearse everyday situations, such as ordering tea at a restaurant. When the mysterious Madame

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Marie-Claude visits Hailsham to select artwork by the children for her Gallery, she appears visibly scared and disgusted by the children, avoiding all physical contact with them. At some point, Miss Emily announces that the school will host a special event, a sale of items she refers to as a “bumper crop,” to which the children react excitedly. When the delivery van with these items arrives, the drivers look equally distressed as Madame did in the earlier scene. They carry big cardboard boxes inside, surrounded by the impatient children asking, “Is it a bumper crop?” The bumper crop turns out to be a wretched flea market inventory stocked with castoff toys and broken hand-me-downs, which the children can buy with their “tokens” of plastic tiddledywinks discs. The camera lingers in a close-up of their eager hands exchanging these tokens for junk: broken wristwatches, dolls with no limbs, used buttons. It is at this sale that Tommy finds a gift for Kathy, a tape called “Songs After Dark,” performed by a fictional artist named Judy Bridgewater, whose picture on the cassette cover shows her in 1920s attire, sporting a white fur coat, a fascinator, and a long cigarette holder. The pitiful bumper crop sale functions as a prominent narrative hint insofar as it is incongruent with the prestigious setting of the school buildings, introducing to us little by little to the secret purpose of the Hailsham establishment. In both the original novel and the film adaptation, Kathy becomes captivated by the tape, particularly by the song called “Never Let Me Go,” after which Ishiguro’s book is titled. In the novel, Kathy finds the tape at the sale herself, only to lose it soon afterward. Then some years later she receives another copy from Tommy as a present. To the novel character Kathy, the song is about a young mother and her child as she dances to it while cradling an imaginary child to her chest, when Madame walks by and starts crying. She interprets Madame’s tears as a reaction to the fact that Hailsham students are incapable of having children. However, in the film, the song is rendered into a cheesy schlager with implicitly sexualized lyrics (“. . . fill my love with ecstasy . . .”), which Kathy listens to while holding a pillow, and now she is not being observed by Madame but by Ruth, who does not burst into tears. Instead, Ruth instantly decides to seduce Tommy to keep him and Kathy apart, because she experiences Tommy and Kathy’s possible romance as a threat to her own social standing. Furthermore, in the film Kathy does not lose the tape but packs it carefully among her modest belongings as she leaves for the Cottages, the liminal place where she stays between Hailsham and her later life as a carer. We witness her listening to the song on her cheap Walkman, as if to escape the sounds of Tommy and Ruth making love. Thus, while in the novel the Bridgewater tape embodies Kathy’s childhood innocence, in the film its significance is more explicitly tied to her romantic

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desire for Tommy, which undermines the political nuance in Ishiguro’s novel, according to Wu Shang (Wu 2017, 557). Yet it is not merely the narrative hints that communicate a disquieting undercurrent below the surface of an innocuous, painterly, pastoral setting, rendered in the muted color palette which is a salient feature of the film. Apart from the prologue and the epilogue, Never Let Me Go consists of three chapters, each of which fades in with a different color. The film starts with a title card in yellow ochre, on top of which the name of the film fades in and out in an understated, upper-case font. This is cut to a text card with a bluish-gray background, which is also the color of the school clothing worn by the Hailsham schoolchildren. It explains the narrative premise of the film, accompanied by the distant sound of an electrocardiogram, which functions as a sound bridge to the prologue discussed above. The text card in the beginning of the chapter on the Cottages in 1985 is in moss green, which corresponds to the green surroundings of the farmhouse setting, but also matches with the color of Kathy’s passed-down cardigan. The text card of the third chapter, entitled “Completion, 1994” is in light taupe, which is the color of the concrete, brutalist buildings of the Recovery Centers as well as Kathy’s trench coat, but also the hue of the sand and the grass at the coastal dunes, which she visits with Tommy and Ruth after having become the latter’s carer. Finally, the end credits roll by fading in and out with different hues, which replicate the overall, subdued color design of the film. This color design has multiple purposes in the film. Aesthetically it functions as a binding element to create a lingering mood of inevitability. Symbolically, it highlights the subtle mood of desperation with which the film exudes about its cruel subject matter. This is in accordance with the delicate style of Ishiguro’s novel, which like the film develops as an exercise in affective incongruity between form and content. Emotionally the color design communicates an intense form of bleak affect, conveying a sense of what awaits the main characters. Long before the explicit announcement of the facts is made by Miss Lucy in the film, we have discerned that the Hailsham children are clones, purely bred for organ harvesting, and that their seemingly self-sacrificial destiny is to become donors of their vital body parts, after which they will “complete.” It is after this narrative twist that the film’s mood changes from pastoral to melancholy, first indicated by a close-up of the face of a statue in the rain, “looking” at an abandoned red ball on the lawn. Perhaps the image of the lifeless statue “crying” symbolizes the indifference of all humans in the film about their own moral position as regards the fate of the clones. A frequent issue raised in the Internet discussions about both the novel and the film, is the question of why the clones passively submit to their fate. Why do the children not react with anger when Miss Lucy reveals the truth

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to them, or try to escape? In conjunction with this question, it might appear significant that the theatrical poster of the film depicts Kathy and Tommy running on a pier situated in the coastal town where they had been looking for Ruth’s “Possible,” the person after whom she had possibly been molded. In the poster Kathy and Tommy are running toward the pavilion at the end of the pier, behind which a view opens on the sea and the sky in almost the same taupe hue, so that the horizon is hardly observable. However, Never Let Me Go does not contain any such a scene. In the film, Tommy happens to find Kathy sitting on a pier bench looking at the sea, the waves lapping gently underneath. But instead of running toward the pavilion, they merely sit in silence, while the camera frames them in an extreme long shot, as two tiny figures on the lonely pier in front of the evening sun. The difference between the actual film scene and the image on the said poster embodies a narrative desire that cannot be fulfilled. In this poster Kathy and Tommy are running toward the world that is wide open for them. In the film, they are quiet and immobile, turned away from the possibilities of the world where the sun is setting in front of them. Kathy and Tommy do not run away, because they are held in place by the unseen tides of inevitability. The practice of biopower renders them powerless, not only appropriating their bodies to be harvested, but also that part of their agential selves which invents, acts, and makes choices. As Mark Fisher puts it, “Never Let Me Go is about a form of power that does not need to exhibit force” (Fisher 2012, 31). Never Let Me Go takes place in an alternative, utopian past while envisioning a dystopian, posthuman future. As it encompasses a varied discourse which examines the relationship between human and nonhuman, the film lends itself particularly well to an interpretation from a Foucauldian point of view. In my reading, I shall argue that Never Let Me Go decenters the notion of being human by complicating the discourse that holds clear human/ nonhuman distinctions in place. First, I shall discuss biotechnology as a transhumanist discourse that would seek to justify the donation program, while concealing its ethical problems in a way that invites us as spectators to reflect on the exploitation of the nonhuman. Secondly, I shall argue that sexuality functions to confine the main characters within their social alienation, thus enabling the donation program and functioning as a form of biopower. This in turn confirms their bodies as the property of medical authorities. Finally, the notion of love is discussed in terms of care that optimizes the donation program, and as a form of futile resistance against the societal relations of power. In the end I shall argue that what makes Never Let Me Go a disquieting experience is the lack of hope for any form of resistance, including the possibility of suicide as the ultimate act of defiance.

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Biotechnology In the context of posthumanism, there is a debate concerning the potential evolutionary, biotechnological leap of mankind. One side in the debate views such development as progress, permanently enhancing our human embodiment and aiming at the elimination of bodily weakness. This the unrestrained use of biotechnology that would take us further from our animal nature. This side adheres to the technological concept of posthumanism, or “transhumanism,” which is dedicated to the enhancement of our human capacities, physical, cognitive, and emotional, by means of advanced medical science and cybernetics. According to this school of thought, the transhuman is achieved by searching for escape from the physical entrapment of our material body by means of technological modifications of human biological constraints. For instance, in his “Why I Want to Be Posthuman When I Grow Up,” Nick Bostrom writes that posthumanism involves desire for the biotechnologically enhanced capacity “to remain fully healthy, active, and productive, both mentally and physically [. . .] to become posthuman by virtue of healthspan extension, one would need to achieve the capacity for a healthspan that greatly exceeds the maximum attainable by any current human being without recourse to new technological means” (Bostrom 2010). What Bostrom does not ask is who would pay the price for such a biotechnological fantasy, as he explicitly disregards all social consequences of his posthuman scenario. Similarly, when toward the end of Never Let Me Go Kathy and Tommy find out that Hailsham was more than a mere grooming institution for cloned children, they are told that Miss Emily and her colleagues were looking for “an answer to a question that no-one was asking.” It turns out that Hailsham had been a now-abandoned ethical experiment, in which the students’ artworks could potentially have verified that even as clones they had human souls. But such a possibility would have set humanity back into darkness, “the days of lung cancer and breast cancer, motor-neuron disease,” which is why all evidence throwing doubt on the strict distinction between humans and clones must be quelled. This is how in Never Let Me Go the biotechnological, transhumanist discourse both functions to justify the organ donations program and to conceal its ethical problems. It explains why the general public, those who do not work at the grooming facilities as guardians, or at the medical institutions as nurses, react awkwardly when they come into contact with the clones. Mr. Keffers, caretaker at the Cottages, returns Kathy’s friendly “good morning” with a brusque grunt, when delivering groceries. At the greasy spoon, where Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy panic when they are presented a menu, they are met with suspicious, disgusted looks from an elderly couple sitting a few tables apart from them. Obviously, the insensitivity that the clones experience is a symptom of othering, by which the

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non-clones assume a position of indifference toward their existence, whereas it nevertheless shapes the clones’ self-perception and self-reflection, thus functioning as an affective form of biopower. Although idyllic in its layout, the Hailsham mansion evokes a strong association with a correctional institution of sorts. It is a place designed to produce obeisant, healthy bodies, where every morning the children are herded out of bed, moving in single file past a station with an orderly row of bottles of milk and cups of vitamins to start their day with. This confirms the first interior shot of the mansion, in which the children, all dressed in gray, start singing side by side in straight rows under the institutionalized gaze of the guardians. When a boy and a girl whispering quietly appear to refrain from singing, they are quickly brought back into line by a single stern look from Miss Emily. Even though pleasure in taking physical exercise is efficiently encouraged, in a way that prompts social interaction between the children (soccer, rope jumping, cricket), the children’s bodily mobility is strictly confined to within the Hailsham fences. This confinement is functional as it effectively alienates the Hailsham children from the social world, in which they would never participate anyway, unless they were to become carers, in which case their participation would nevertheless be very limited. The Hailsham children’s social alienation is established in an early scene in the Cottages, where Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth get to watch television, which was obviously not possible at Hailsham. At first Ruth, who watches for the first time, does not seem to know how to react to the silly sitcom unfolding onscreen, but after observing the “veteran” residents’ (feigned) laughing, prompted by the canned laughter of the show, she hesitantly joins in on their merriment. Ruth’s inauthentic laughter functions as a calculated social bonding strategy, but it also signifies her failure to recognize the sitcom humor, even though she understands that a joke had been told. Therefore, in order not to look ignorant, Ruth laughs to conceal her inexperience. Ruth’s imitative laughter (Pfeifer 1994) is a plea for social acceptance, but it also signals the internalized oppression originating from a mechanism of alienation that keeps the clones in line as they are prepped to start their donations. While in the Hailsham part the biotechnological engineering of the clones’ lives is only implicitly present, in the chapter on “Completion” the strategies of biopower become ever more visible. The chapter is largely set in a Recovery Center, where the donors are under constant surveillance of the medical gaze, their physical condition recorded and filed in detail in a database, which we get a glance of when the film shares with us Kathy’s point of view noticing Ruth’s patient file on a computer screen by chance. The Center itself is built in a Panoptic fashion, consisting of a central pavilion with a glass façade, which has angular wings with cell-like enclosures on five floors. It is in this setting that we witness Ruth’s “completion” in a

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particularly disturbing scene in an operating theater. First, we see a close-up of her intubated face, then the camera circles to an angle revealing a surgeon in the background, preparing to lift an organ out of Ruth’s body (figure 6.2). Offscreen, the beeping sound of the electrocardiogram monitoring of her heart rhythm flatlines, which awkwardly triggers no reaction whatsoever from the medical staff, who are fully focused on harvesting Ruth’s liver and preserving it for transportation. The scene ends with the nurses switching off the equipment and leaving the room, with Ruth’s completed body abandoned on the operation table, bleeding. This is a body that Hallvard Lillehammer (2014) calls an object of indifference, which in this medical dystopia does not have ethical significance at all as the body is successfully excluded from all moral concern. However, for the spectator this affective void does invite ethical concern for Ruth, not as an object but as a subject, regardless of the indifference shown by the medical staff operating on it. Sexuality In addition to the explicit biopower exercised by the medical establishment upon the clones’ bodies, there is sex as an implicit modus operandi used by the authoritative powers in Never Let Me Go. Its logic is similar to the argument developed by Foucault in his History of Sexuality. When discussing capital punishment, Foucault writes that the sovereign power assumes the right to kill those who represent a lethal danger to others so that death is justified to preserve life (Foucault 1978, 138). This covers the world of Never Let Me Go, where a cloned life can be sacrificed to preserve human life without further thought. But Foucault’s discussion of the exploitation of the human body is couched in much more general terms such as: “mechanics of life [. . .] serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions

Figure 6.2.  Never Let Me Go: Ruth “completes.”

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that causes these to vary” (139). In this context, according to Foucault, those forms of sexuality existing outside the “mechanics of life,” could be viewed as a potential threat to the established order. In a kind of twisted Foucauldian logic, in Never Let Me Go the clones’ role is to invest in life through death. Furthermore, the application of biopower sustains this function by granting the clones full access to the capabilities of their bodies including sexuality, which in turn is harnessed for the purpose of their destined role, though. This is why the Hailsham children are encouraged to engage in intercourse as long as they do not have sex with outsiders, in order to avoid venereal diseases that would put their health at risk. It is striking that in a sex education class Miss Emily uses a skeleton to demonstrate the mysteries of intercourse to her totally unembarrassed young students, thus inextricably associating sex with death. In this scene, the skeleton is supine on a desk with its legs spread, while Miss Emily uses her hand to raise the skeleton’s hips, to illustrate how “by arching her back—or perhaps with the aid of a pillow—the woman can arrange herself to create the precise kind of friction she requires.” In his article on humanism and posthumanism, Neil Badmington claims that to feel sexual desire is to “trouble the sacred distinction between the human and the inhuman” (Badmington 2001, 9). Never Let Me Go seems to suggest something similar by signifying unabashed sexuality as a defining element of “clonehood.” Especially in Freudian thinking, shame is often considered an innate human reaction to the unruly, infantile sexual drives which have to be tamed so that the child can enter into the polite adult world of social order and cultural sensibility. This is why Kathy and Ruth can unreservedly speculate who will be the first in their year to have sex, during a nightly scene in which the dialogue is cut with close-up shots of castoff toys and wrinkly papercut dolls. Lack of shame is also why Tommy and Ruth can have sex at the Cottages with their door open, and Kathy when she sees them, does not feel embarrassment about witnessing a scene of intimacy either. When Kathy attempts to cancel out Ruth’s loud, ecstatic moans by listening to her Bridgewater tape on a Walkman, she does not do this because she has uncomfortable feelings triggered by her involuntary invasion of Ruth and Tommy’s privacy, but purely out of annoyance with Ruth’s deliberate provocation. Similarly, when Tommy walks in on Kathy examining a pile of porn mags she had found in the trash, neither of them feels awkward about the situation. Even when Kathy confesses to Tommy that she used to have urges to have sex so powerful that she thought she “would do it with anyone,” she does not feel embarrassment about the urges themselves, but rather about what these urges might disclose about the person she was modeled on. This is why she studies the porn mags, as she might find her Possible there. Thus, like the confinement the clones are subjected to, lack of sexual shame would also seem to alienate the

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clones from the outside social world while securing them more deeply within their own world of exploitation. In a logic paradoxical to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the aim of the Party is to “remove all pleasure from the sexual act” (Orwell 1949/2021, 75), in Never Let Me Go sexual pleasure serves to remove the clones from all privileges of citizenship. Or perhaps the role of sex in Never Let Me Go is a nod at Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where sex is strictly separated from reproduction and where “everyone belongs to everyone else” (Huxley 1932/2022, 37). Therefore, while the liberated spirit with which the clones engage in sexual activities could be interpreted as a drive to appropriate their own bodies, in reality owned by the medical police state, sexuality in fact functions as another application of biopower in the dystopian world of the film. Caring Bodies Perhaps the most subtle form of biopower in Never Let Me Go is love, which nevertheless does not play a role in the medical state’s official plan regarding the clones. For if the clones’ ability to feel love were acknowledged, one would have to consider whether clones have a soul after all. Yet, from its very beginning it is clear that the film wants to be taken as a love story. There is the loving exchange of looks between Kathy and Tommy in the prologue, saturated by their sense of impending loss. In fact, the whole narrative premise is centered around Kathy’s compassion for Tommy developing into unrequited love, which Tommy nevertheless inwardly reciprocates, even though he is not aware of his own emotions. When other children, including Ruth, bully the easily triggered Tommy, Kathy observes the scene as if she wanted to intervene. Together with a group of girls she sees how other boys refuse to pick Tommy for a soccer game, provoking him into a temper tantrum, which we witness approximately from Kathy’s point of view, while offscreen the girls’ laughter can be heard. As Kathy then walks toward Tommy in order to try and calm him down, the shaky handheld camera follows her from behind. In this shot, the raging Tommy is markedly thrown out of focus in the rear plane of the image, but when Tommy accidentally strikes Kathy in the face with an acoustically pronounced blow, the focus also changes abruptly from Kathy to Tommy. The effect of the blow is synaesthetic, striking us parallel to the way that Tommy’s hand hits Kathy. Stylistically the handheld scene is a deliberate mismatch with respect to the pensive style of the film, the shaky movement of the camera conveying here the affective energy of Tommy’s confused anger. Throughout the film we are aligned with Kathy, who makes an effort to develop a friendship with Tommy, which does not go unnoticed by Ruth. After the scene in which Miss Lucy tells Kathy’s class straightforwardly what the future has in store for them, Kathy notices Tommy and Ruth holding

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hands in the assembly hall, while trying to hold back her tears. The last scene in the Hailsham chapter is of Kathy secretly observing Ruth consoling the saddened Tommy by kissing him on the mouth. However, the later scenes in the Cottages suggest that such forms of affection between Tommy and Ruth are copied from the “veteran” clone couples living there, who in turn have copied the gestures from television shows in the first place. They are never expressions of genuine love. Halfway through the film Tommy presents his hypothesis that the Gallery is a laboratory of sorts, meant to discover the soul of an artwork’s creator, thus determining whether a clone would be eligible for a “deferral.” This comes with the realization of his own ineligibility due to his being in love with Kathy instead of with Ruth. This is not only suggested through the performance of Andrew Garfield and Carey Mulligan acting the scene, but also by its pastoral setting bathing in sunlight, filled with birdsong. In the gray reality of the film, this warmly lit scene is cut off from the confines of the dystopic society, suggesting that here is ideal love based on true affection, situated in the “liminal zone of nature [. . .] in which pure attraction and emotion reign” (Illouz 1997, 93–94), as Eva Illouz characterizes this romantic trope. And when in the following scene Kathy is confronted by Ruth for sustaining the illusion of Kathy and Tommy being a “natural” couple, this triggers such a bout of resentment in Kathy that she applies to be a carer the very next morning. A “deferral” is a rumor circulating among the veterans about the possibility for Hailsham couples to postpone the starting date of the donations for a couple of years, on the condition that they can prove that they are genuinely in love. Even though neither Kathy nor Tommy and Ruth have ever heard of such a deferral happening, they all become convinced of its existence. Such a conviction is conditioned by what Donald Gustafson calls “counter-belief desire,” which is a paradoxical form of hope against hope that emerges when an individual is faced with the inevitability of loss. It may involve (rational) belief that a loved one is dead and (irrational) desire that this is not the case (Gustafson 1989, 457). The clones’ conviction that the rumors about the deferrals are true, functions as a counter-belief desire which simultaneously acknowledges and denies the impending loss of their loved ones, and of their own self. The deferral rumor contains an impossible desire, as belief dictates that the rumor will never be true, which takes the form of denial of loss. This is why the third chapter on “Completion” revolves around a conflict between denial and reality of loss, and as such it becomes a traumatic event that palpably engages the spectator affectively. Throughout Never Let Me Go, but especially in its third chapter, there is an inevitable movement toward traumatic loss accompanied by false hope that would ineffectively resist such loss, in a way that holds trauma at bay and preserves it simultaneously.

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In chapter three, Kathy has been a successful carer for nine years due to her compassion, patience, and her ability to push aside her own feelings about starting her own donations, in order to focus on the needs of her donors. However, Kathy’s loving care for her donors is inevitably a form of biopower, ironically optimizing the donation program efficiently, which depends on the donors staying alive as long as possible after having their first internal organs harvested. Thus, the carers promote the function of the Foucauldian “anatomo-politics.” They seek to maximize the life force of the cloned bodies to be literally and effectively integrated into this medical system as objects to be harvested. Furthermore, in the Recovery Centers, the donors are both under the “clinical gaze” of the biotechnological paradigm, and under the “caring gaze” of the carers, who have internalized the discourse of the purpose and ethics of the politico-medical system. One of the reasons that makes Never Let Me Go so disquieting, is the integration of a notion of care within a system of which the existence depends on not caring, on deliberately refusing to recognize the ethical problems of the donation program. Does this mean that within the social system of Never Let Me Go, the cloned body is inevitably susceptible to the strategies of biopower? Foucault himself argued that “there is no relationship of power without the means of escape or possible flight” (Foucault 1982, 225). Even though he is suspicious of individuals as agents of resistance against power constellations, he nevertheless acknowledges a “residual power” that allows those individuals the possibility to resist the consolidation of power in systems of governance (Conway 1999, 68). In Never Let Me Go, love is presented as a possibility for a radical change in the relation between power and subject. The dismal setting for this possibility to become reality is the beach, with one desolate boat, where Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth take a day trip after having finally been reunited, years after their time together in the Cottages. With Kathy and Tommy half-carrying Ruth, they access the beach through a pinewood and across a sand dune with tall grass, until they see the forlorn boat farther down, lying on its side as a tiny object on the expansive beach opening before them. Tommy starts running across the sand toward the boat, behind which the ocean waves wash the shoreline with a pronounced swish-swoosh. Tommy climbs onto the boat, exhausting himself in the process, then he enters its dilapidated steering cabin, playing at sailing the boat. In the next shot all three of them are sitting on the dune, watching the flow of the tide. It is at that moment that Ruth confesses her deliberately keeping Kathy and Tommy apart out of jealousy for their genuine love for each other. In order to atone for her wrongdoing, Ruth then produces Madame’s address from her pocket and hands it over to Kathy and Tommy, so that they can go and apply for the deferral. (In Ishiguro’s novel it is Kathy herself who finds Madame, by the way.) The serenity and openness of the beach scene, which ends with

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an extreme low angle shot of pine trees reaching up to the sky, rustling gently in the wind, suggests that possibilities mulled over there, exist in spite of the biopower restrictions and their politico-medical reach. But this changes after Ruth’s completion, when Kathy and Tommy travel to a seaside town where at the provided address they find Madame in her front yard, tending her flower bed. Madame invites them in and takes them into a living room filled with period furniture, the camera closing in on mundane objects: a mantel clock, a jar of prescription medicine, an unfinished game of mah-jong. Madame listens politely as Tommy explains his hypothesis about the purpose of the Gallery, sitting hand in hand with Kathy in front of her, light filtering into the room from behind them through net curtains. As Tommy’s drawings had never been selected by Madame for the Gallery, he has brought fresh artwork to prove that he too has a soul. He starts displaying it on the floor for Madame to see, while the camera focuses on Kathy looking at a hestitating Madame, slowly realizing the truth which she had always suspected. At that moment Miss Emily appears, seated in a wheelchair and she takes immediate charge, explaining that there have never been deferrals, which neither for the spectator nor for Kathy comes as a real narrative surprise. When Kathy and Tommy leave, Madame reaches out and gently touches Kathy’s cheek, calling her a “poor creature” in a gesture that is strikingly different from her previous reaction of disgust at Hailsham. In the next scene, Kathy and Tommy drive in silence through a darkening countryside, bathing in the last rays of sunlight. Tommy asks Kathy to pull over and to let him out, and she watches him walking a short distance down the road. Then he stops in front of the car and in a heart-wrenching scene reminiscent of him throwing a temper tantrum at Hailsham, Tommy throws back his head and starts screaming at the sky as an expression of his trauma. After a short moment Kathy walks to him and they embrace in the glare of the headlights, before the scene is cut to the moment when Kathy watches Tommy being prepared for his fourth donation, the last one before he is complete. Parallel to the prologue, this shot of Kathy watching Tommy is cut to a flashback from the assembly hall at Hailsham, where they exchange looks among the group of cheering children. The film ends with an epilogue, in which Kathy steps out of her car in the countryside to look at the panoramic scenery opening before her. In her voice-over narration she explains this location to be the spot to which she imagines all the people she has lost will return, and that if she waited long enough, Tommy would eventually appear on the horizon across the field. The epilogue is similar to the scene with which chapter two in the Cottages ended, when Kathy left to start her donor training, and an emotional Tommy was walking around a large field, first followed by a handheld camera, then as a tiny figure in an establishing shot.

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As in the previous scene with young Tommy having a temper tantrum and accidentally hitting Kathy, here too the shaky camera expresses his confused inner emotion. In a film with predominantly stable camera mobility, the handheld camera is clearly associated with Tommy’s emotion. This is why it is also used in the scene in which he climbs into the abandoned boat at the seashore, and in the scene where he is screaming in front of Kathy’s car. In my view this aesthetic choice signifies that Tommy with his temper tantrums volunteers the emotion which the other characters repress, especially in the traumatic situation where there is no other way out than “completing.” Therefore, after Tommy’s completion, Kathy gives up her carer duties and is inexorably called up for donor duty herself. Foucault writes that suicide can be an act of defiance against the establishment insofar as by “sentencing” oneself to death an individual can take hold of the power belonging to the authoritarian power structures: “death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it” (138). But the clones are denied even this most fundamental, most private possibility to resist, as their deaths are thoroughly harnessed in the service of the medical nation-state. Not only does this highlight their hopeless impossibility of self-determination both in life and in death, but it also discourages us from imagining any life-affirming future alternatives for them. Joker In Joker, Joaquin Phoenix delivers an Oscar-winning performance as chain-smoking Arthur Fleck, a failed comedian gradually losing his mental stability. This process triggers his transformation into the title character of an origin story about the Batman’s most iconic enemy. Even though the film is situated in the fictional city of Gotham, its setting can easily be interpreted as a dystopian alternative for the United States/New York City in the beginning of the 1980s (e.g. Fernández-Moreno and Salvadó-Romero 2021). Here the socially vulnerable scramble to survive in dilapidated housing projects and there is no help for people with mental health issues, while the rich and powerful blame the poor to be the cause of their own problems. In this Gotham City, an alternative to the well-known home of Bruce Wayne and his close allies and foes, there is also Thomas Wayne, father to Bruce. However, Wayne the elder is not portrayed in the customary way as a saint-like philanthropist and surgeon, but as an unsympathetic, cutthroat entrepreneur. He is also running for mayor with an uncompassionate political agenda that would leave people like Arthur even further adrift. Similarly, our Arthur is not merely the Batman’s homicidal maniac counterpart the Joker, but a victim of economic dystopia and a symbol for ever-increasing social discontent, manifesting itself in violent riots. These are clearly reimagined actual historical events, especially the Occupy Wall Street protest movement.

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Joker strongly revolves around Arthur, who is present in every scene. In fact, the spectator is frequently positioned inside his head, sharing his (hallucinatory) perceptions, while the particularly haunting music and sound effects enact the mental effects of his transformation process. At the same time, the narrative unfolds on multiple levels. One narrative thread explores Arthur’s desire for a father figure and his troubled relationship with his mother, who calls him by the nickname “Happy.” The other thread recounts a chain of violent humiliations and lack of personal validation that Arthur is constantly faced with. From within Arthur’s mental subjectivity, we also witness him constructing a romantic fantasy to shield himself from his painful reality, a fantasy which quickly falls apart as he is confronted by his own traumatic past as a childhood abuse victim. Throughout the film there is a mounting level of violence, which intensifies as Arthur descends deeper into mental disorder, while this descent paradoxically facilitates his ascension into his position as a Gotham supervillain in turn. Many critics have pointed out that this association between mental disorder, extreme violence, and the loss of all morality is problematic and potentially stigmatizing (e.g. Driscoll and Husain 2019). But Joker emphasizes external factors, such as social injustice and personal humiliation, as causes of Arthur’s breakdown, resulting in an alternative identity emerging through the cracks. As Caroline Bainbridge argues, Arthur’s violence is an expression of “the depth of despair and anger provoked by a system of social exclusion that is rooted in the meritocratic organization of neoliberal subjects” (Bainbridge 2021, 56). Before heinously murdering Randall, for instance, Arthur declares that he has stopped taking his medication and that he feels a lot better as a consequence. But Arthur’s stopping his medication is not at all a decision of his own free will. There is a close-up of Arthur’s hand grabbing the last two pills from a table filled with empty medicine bottles, followed by a scene in which his social worker tells him that the social security office will be closed because the city has cut its funding, adding that “they don’t give a shit about people like you, Arthur. And they really don’t give a shit about people like me either.” To Arthur’s question as to how he is supposed to get his medication now, she then merely replies with, “I’m sorry.” The social worker’s line “they don’t give a shit about people like you” functions as a performative speech act. According to Jeffrey Alexander’s definition, such speech act projects trauma discourse from a particular place within a polarized social order where one particular group clashes with another (Alexander 2012, 16). The “they” to which the line refers are the elites indifferent to the lack of care which fundamentally limits future possibilities for people like Arthur, uprooting their sense of security in the social world of which they are part. Therefore, Arthur does not simply become the Joker because of his

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underlying mental disorder. Arthur becomes the Joker because his childhood trauma is left untreated within a social system that nourishes trauma instead of functioning as an effective source of support and care. It is within this system based on wealth inequality that Arthur is constantly humiliated and ridiculed, which ultimately breaks him. The notion of “breaking” is central in Sigmund Freud’s discussion of trauma who in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) introduces the concept of “protective shield.” This shield is a psychic mechanism that safeguards the individual against stimuli from the environment. Trauma is the breaking of this protective shield, “a breach in the otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli” (Freud 2003, ‌‌‌‌69). Similarly, according to Carlo Bonomi, trauma signifies a discontinuity between the personality of the traumatized person before and after a traumatic event. As the traumatic event resists mental assimilation, it introduces a break in psychic functioning, resulting in tearing the sense of reality which supports a person’s relationship with the world. This breaking effect of trauma can be so painful, threatening, and exhausting that the traumatized person disintegrates in despair: “When a person is struck by trauma it is precisely this unifying function [between the self and the world] which is broken. The result is the falling to pieces of that which was previously linked and blended together” (Bonomi 2004, 48). What we perceive in Joker is precisely this process of Arthur giving up hope after his relation with the outside world has broken into pieces. Only in his case the pieces are glued together, taking the shape of the Joker. Unapologetically, Joker pays homage to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and The King of Comedy (1982), both of which star Robert de Niro. In Joker, de Niro plays the role of Murray Franklin, which is inspired by the late-night comedy host Jerry Langford, with whom de Niro’s character Rupert Pupkin—a failed stand-up comedian—was obsessed in the latter film. Joker is set in the same year as The King of Comedy, and the film starts with a variation on the Warner Brothers picture logo designed by Saul Bass in 1974: an electronically inspired white letter “W” within a black square shape with rounded corners, suggestive of a television screen. Here, to the offscreen voice-over of a television news anchor, a bright red “W” zooms in toward us until it immerses the screen with this vibrant color, followed by a smaller white “W” which stops in the middle of the frame. After this, a black squarish shape fades in around the “W,” resulting in something similar to Saul Bass’ original logo. This play with logos evokes a retro association with the vintage era of analog television, in which the film takes place, but it also positions us as television viewers within the diegetic world of the film. This is appropriate given the central role that television plays in the film, functioning as a key motif within multiple narrative threads.

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For instance, in the scene where his mother is introduced, Arthur first cuts her meal into bite-sized pieces and then sits down next to her on her bed, when the Murray Franklin show starts on television. An image of the television screen fills the frame before the camera zooms in on Arthur's face bathing in the blue broadcast light. The scene cuts to the television studio with Franklin entering the stage, breaking into a few dance steps while the camera orbits around him in an arc shot. A point-of-view shot from Franklin’s perspective shows a live studio audience, equally immersed in blue light, with Arthur in their midst, giving Franklin a standing ovation as he greets the crowd. Arthur then interrupts the show by shouting “I love you Murray” to which Franklin reacts with “I love you too.” At this point the camera is situated in front of the stage, so that we simultaneously see the audience watching the show, and a downstage monitor displaying how it is being recorded for broadcasting. A spotlight is turned onto Arthur and Franklin asks his name, telling him “there is something special in you, Arthur, I could tell.” Next Franklin defends Arthur when he is laughed at for living with his mother, and after that the audience sides with Arthur for his commitment to her, while the camera pans to the left, showing Arthur’s face filling the screen of the downstage monitor. Franklin invites Arthur onto the stage, telling him privately in host-style fashion when receiving a guest, that he would give up his show and his audience “in a heartbeat to have a kid like you.” Then the fantasy ends with a close-up of Arthur back in his mother’s bedroom. In this sequence, the television screen functions as what Marsha Kinder calls an interface device (Kinder 2002) that enables moving from one narrative realm to another, or an entry point into the realm of fantasy. In Joker, the television screen is a “hot spot” through which Arthur can escape his trauma and create alternative worlds. Even better: the television epitomizes the “failed mediation” of trauma which in Amit Pinchevski’s words, is “what happens when the medium between interior and exterior does not hold. If mediation is taken to be the mental processes whose task is to mediate between the outer and the inner, then trauma is the result of failed mediation” (Pinchevski 2019, 4–5). But the fantasy scene also establishes a clichéd Oedipal scenario at the heart of Joker. There is a persistent desire for an absent father, and a monstrous, possessive mother figure offering toxic nurture, who must be destroyed before the (male) child can thrive. Clearly, Penny Fleck evokes an association with Julia Kristeva’s abject mother, who according to Barbara Creed is “present in all horror films as the blackness of extinction” (Creed 1993, 29). She is the main reason for Arthur’s descent into madness and ultimate transformation into the Joker. Throughout the film, Arthur’s mother writes letters to Thomas Wayne, asking him for help, until one day Arthur reads one of her letters and finds out that she believes Arthur to be Wayne’s son, the result of an affair she claims to have had with

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Wayne. This leads Arthur to confront Wayne directly in the restroom at a gala event he manages to sneak into. But in a series of furious altercations, Wayne asserts that the love affair never took place, that Arthur was adopted, and that his mother, who is an ex-employee, had actually been committed during her service to Arkham Asylum for being dangerously delusional. Confused Arthur makes his way to Arkham, where he steals his mother’s medical records. From these documents he learns that not only does his mother indeed suffer from delusions, but she had also stood by when an ex-partner abused Arthur so violently that he endured severe mental trauma. Arthur’s childhood abuse is also the origin of his peculiar, disturbing mode of laughter, which is prompted when he deals with awkward situations, and which has earned him the filial nickname “Happy.” By contrast, right before smothering his mother to death with a pillow, Arthur declares, “I haven’t been happy one minute of my entire fucking life.” From a feminist point of view, this blaming of the mother for the child’s madness can be seen as reflecting a misogynist attitude, insofar as it is based on patriarchal discourse in which the law of the father prevails (e.g., Kaplan 1992, 47). Later on in the film it is implicitly suggested that Arthur also murders his next-door neighbor and love interest Sophie, and—in the epilogue— even his female psychiatrist. This can be interpreted as a particularly hideous form of traumatic repetition, in which Arthur compulsively kills his mother again and again. Neal Curtis writes, for instance, that while the other killings in the film are “rooted in some preserved injustice,” the women are killed because they are “presented as interrupting, blocking or denying Arthur’s desire to express himself” (Curtis 2019). Even though I acknowledge that Joker opens avenues for interpretation from feminist perspective, misogyny is not what the film intentionally embodies in meaning, regardless that scenes from the film have been adapted into memes by the so-called incel community (on this topic see, e.g., Bainbridge 2021). For instance, the flashback of a battered Penny being interviewed as a psychiatric patient by an uncompassionate male authority indicates that she is a victim of trauma herself, and this trauma was passed on to her child. Thus Arthur’s trauma is simultaneously personal and intergenerational, even though he is (supposedly) adopted. This is visually suggested in the same flashback, which suddenly includes present-day Arthur looking at past-tense Penny, visually manifesting the entwinement of Arthur in Penny’s traumatic experience. Both Penny and Arthur are victims of abuse by a person in the position of trust, and thus suffer from what some scholars have defined as “betrayal trauma” (e.g., Kaehler and Babcock 2013). One might even say that both Penny and Arthur have a history of betrayal trauma which originates not only from their interpersonal relationships, but also from the untrustworthy social system in which they are additionally victimized. Therefore I argue that

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Joker is less expressive of misogyny, but far more of the connection between (intergenerational) trauma and mental disorder in a context of neoliberal economic dystopia that breeds despair and nihility (on Joker as critique of the consequences of neoliberalism, see, e.g., Bainbridge 2021, Doidge and Rosenfeldt 2021, and Ní Fhlainn 2021). Recent studies in psychology have shown that there is substantial evidence linking physical as well as mental childhood trauma with adult mental disorder, such as anxiety about everyday situations, dissociation from reality, and personality disorders or schizophrenia. I maintain that such psychic disturbances are tied to the aesthetic organization of Joker, thus shedding light on the link between trauma and mental disorder beyond the use of such conditions as mere plot devices. Arthur’s dissociation from reality, for instance, originates from his being torn between the suffocating presence of his mother and the ever-elusive absence of his father, a conflict which finds expression in the film through its lighting and color design. Joker is dominated by a color conflict between blue and yellow—a classic color combination for a circus tent—with Gotham City bathing in a cold, bluish hue in almost all the exterior scenes, while stark yellow taxis roam through its streets. Interior scenes though are characterized by earthy ochre, with blue light emanating from all the television screens that are everywhere and constantly turned on. The interior scenery in Joker include the housing project in which Arthur and his mother share a flat. Here the walls have been painted yellow, like the walls in Arkham Asyum, including its yellow-tiled staircase Arthur escapes onto, after having stolen his mother’s medical records. But there are exceptions, such as the scene in which Arthur climbs into the fridge after his futile confrontation with Thomas Wayne. In this shot, the interior of Arthur and Penny’s kitchen is saturated with blue light, while yellow light comes in through the open window. Yellow is famously the color most associated with madness, perhaps due to Vincent van Gogh’s fascination with it, whereas blue often symbolizes calmness and orderliness. According to some speculations (e.g., Newby 2021), van Gogh may have suffered from lead poisoning, which he had contracted by removing the paint from his brushes by sucking on the bristles. In Joker there may even be a reference to van Gogh in the scene in which Arthur paints his tongue with white pigment, while applying his clown’s makeup. The scene evokes an association with skin whiteners containing white lead, which affects the brain and can lead to mental disorder. White light, which appears in the film each time the process of Arthur’s personality dissolving into the Joker advances, further links the color white with mental disorder. Yellow and blue, though, convey the sense the presence of Arthur’s (imaginary) parents as the formative elements of his trauma. We can find these colors in

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Penny’s yellow pajamas, and the blue suits worn by both Murray Franklin and Thomas Wayne, for instance. In the context of this color design, the brick-red suit worn by Arthur as the Joker strikes out as antagonistic and contrastive, although he does combine it with a blue shirt and a yellow vest to pay homage to the parental origin of his trauma perhaps. In the analysis that follows, I first discuss the different forms of laughter found in the film. These unmask the (societal) attitudes with which Arthur’s mental disorder is met. Reactions are covered by an emotional gamut that runs from hostility (the Wall Street Three) through ridicule (Murray Franklin) to adoration (the rioters). Furthermore, laughter expresses how Arthur’s transformation into the Joker is mirrored by the development of his embodied emotion from anxiety to feelings of superiority. Secondly, I analyze the technique of mental subjectivity in the film. This is used as a transportation device to position us within the delusions that dissociate Arthur from reality, embodying the structure of his trauma. Instances of this technique are the numerous mirror images in the film, through which his delusional Joker self gradually takes over Arthur’s agency (see also Lehtinen et al. 2021). Finally, I shall discuss simultaneously ascending and descending images in the film. This is expressed by vertical movement, lighting, and physical acting. By way of conclusion I hope to show that Joker is fundamentally about the traumatic denial of self, which renders the film a failed tragedy with no possibility of redemption beyond the loss of one’s own identity. The Many Faces of Laughter After ‌‌‌‌ rolling the production credits, in Joker’s opening, the voice of a news anchor functions as a sound bridge to the interior scene of a backstage of sorts, filled with clown paraphernalia. The camera tracks in on Arthur in front of a Hollywood mirror, putting on makeup for his job as an advertising clown. As the news anchor reports on the accumulating trash in the streets of Gotham City under the ongoing garbage strike, the camera closes in on Arthur in extreme close-up, trying to smile at his mirror image, but instead he tears up. With his fingers, he first pulls the corners of his mouth up into a “happy” grimace, then down into an exaggerated frown, and finally up again while a makeup-stained tear runs down his cheek. The grimace indicates a broken character who is so deeply troubled that he is incapable of feeling genuine joy. As we watch Arthur in front of the mirror, a cheerful carnival tune played by a piano starts off, creating affective incongruence between the image and sound. The music functions as a sound bridge to an exterior scene in a busy street, where Arthur dances to its rhythm, flipping around a spinner sign in front of a dying store. The diegetic status of the music is deliberately confusing. Since the music starts from within the previous scene without

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any layer of diegetic city sounds, we might assume that this accompanying music is nondiegetic, even though Arthur’s movements are in synch with it. But then the framing changes and reveals that there is a diegetic piano player actually performing the music. This play between diegetic (dance) movement and diegetic/nondiegetic music is a recurring aesthetic theme in the film, and will be discussed more thoroughly toward the end of the chapter. The joyous scene ends abruptly when a group of teenage boys hassle Arthur and steal his sign. Arthur chases them through the crowded streets, almost getting hit by a car, into a garbage-strewn alley, where one of the boys, out of the blue, breaks the sign against his face, which metaphorically speaking breaks his “protective shield.” In my analysis, this moment of the sign breaking Arthur’s chase supports from early on the interpretation of Joker being about the destroying, breaching effects of trauma, causing the sense of self to dissolve into madness. Similarly to the scene with Ruth laughing in imitation of the Cottages veterans in Never Let Me Go, the laughter in Joker is not a laughing matter. After the opening scene which leaves a beaten-up Arthur lying in an alley in his clown costume, the film cuts to a lengthy close-up of laughing Arthur. The length of this close-up is 35 seconds, which is distinctively much longer than an average shot length in a contemporary big-budget film made by a major Hollywood production company. Arthur’s pounding laughter is piercing and high-pitched, and it is accompanied by a pained facial expression and raspy breathing, as it is brought to a hold only to start again. While current neuroscientific discoveries of the so-called mirror neurons have shown that we have an innate tendency to smile or laugh when we see someone else laughing, Arthur’s disturbing laughter is not contagious. This is also established in the serious expression of a social worker behind her desk, staring at Arthur with a stern look. In the next scene, Arthur takes the bus home, when a small child seated in front of him turns around and frowns at his gloomy expression. Arthur starts to play peek-a-boo with the child, making silly faces that make the child laugh, until its mother scolds Arthur, telling him to stop bothering her kid. The awkward situation triggers an uncontrollable laughing fit in Arthur, which annoys the mother seriously, and which he explains by handing her a plasticized card that describes a neurological condition he is supposed to suffer from. While the DC Comics character Joker is known for his distinctive, maniacal laugh, he leaves in the wake of the chaos and destruction he creates. In Phillips’ film Arthur suffers from a disorder called pseudobulbar affect, which occurs in people who have endured trauma from neurological conditions or injuries, affecting the way in which the brain controls emotion. Clinically, it is described as an inappropriate, exaggerated, and involuntary outburst of crying, laughing, anger, or other emotional displays that are incongruent with

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the emotion the individual is actually experiencing (Merchán-del-Hierro et al. 2021). So Arthur laughs to deal with social phobia, but his laughter only serves to plunge him deeper into anxiety, such as in the fateful scene where Arthur witnesses three drunken Wall Street stockjobbers harass a lone female commuter on the subway. The woman looks for help at Arthur sitting a few seats away, who returns her gaze, and then starts laughing uncontrollably in his red-nosed, green-wigged clown costume. This confuses the stockjobbers, so that the woman can quickly move to a different carriage. Then one of the attackers starts singing Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” as the three of them slowly approach Arthur, breaking out in vicious laughter themselves, expressive of aggression and hostility. Arthur’s anxious laughter is layered with the brokers’ vicious laughter to an ever-increasing insidious effect, until the situation escalates into brutal violence that leaves Arthur wounded on the ground, being kicked by the laughing attackers. The scene is so thoroughly menacing and bleak that it almost comes as a relief when the ringleader is suddenly shot through the head by Arthur, who has produced a gun from his pocket offscreen. Arthur shoots another attacker in the chest twice, then chases the third one out of the train, shooting him in the back on the station platform as he is crawling up the exit stairs. The relief that this scene of violence triggers in the audience is problematic from the perspective of ethical spectatorship. Arthur’s horrible act of violence is balanced by its implied punishment of the wrongdoers who had it coming. This consequently becomes a narrative theme in the film, and leads to the killing of both Arthur’s “father figures” in the film. As the Joker, Arthur shoots Murray Franklin during a live broadcast, while an anonymous rioter kills Thomas Wayne up a dark alley. The killer repeats Arthur’s earlier punchline “you get what you deserve,” thus making him indirectly responsible for this “patricide.” According to Martha Nussbaum, we have a tendency to take intense aesthetic pleasure in fictional narratives in which the wrongdoers suffer (Nussbaum 2016, 25). Joker as a film would seem to be reflectively aware of this. It offers what Rick Altman has termed “narrative crossroads” of two storyline paths, each representing a different type of pleasure for the spectator: morally sanctioned pleasure and aesthetic pleasure that departs from moral norms (Altman 1999, 145–52). The morally sanctioned narrative path would be Arthur overcoming his trauma and not transforming into the Joker, but it is safe to assume that many spectators would have left the theater with feelings of disappointment, should the film have ended in this way. I think, though, that the violent subway scene triggers affective relief—and not necessarily pleasure—because we have been invited to pity Arthur, as we have seen him taking one beating after another both literally and figuratively. The notion of pity is associated with inequality and superiority, since it is often considered an emotion that involves looking down upon the pitied

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person, even when there are feelings of sadness about the other’s misfortune (Nussbaum 2001, 302). The subway scene is basically a turn of events that cancels out pity for Arthur, based on the conventional wisdom of “enough is enough,” which triggers Arthur’s climb toward the (imagined) position of superiority as the Joker. This is evident from a shot directly following Arthur’s shooting of the subway aggressors when, after the initial moment of confusion, he expands his posture by pulling back his shoulders and tilting his head, the camera looking up on him from low angle. Returning to the different functions of laughter: When Randall, Arthur’s co-performer in the clown pool, tells an offensive joke about Gary, a person of short stature, Arthur responds with exaggerated, cackling laughter, then abruptly stops laughing as soon as he is out of sight from his colleagues. The unkindness embodied in the offensive joke is presented as inseparable from the unkindness of the one telling the joke, and Arthur as a listener feels likewise unkind by association. In this scene, Arthur’s laughing is a feigned, inappropriate reaction, not to the cruelty of the joke itself, but to the affect that was triggered by the joke. In a later scene Randall and Gary visit Arthur in his apartment, when he is already in the last phase of his transforming into the Joker. Again, Randall makes a discriminatory remark about Gary. This time Arthur feigns laughter only briefly, immediately after which he attacks and kills Randall with a pair of scissors in a particularly atrocious bout of violence that leaves his own white-painted face covered with blood. After that Arthur does not hurt the terrified Gary though, and urges him to leave the place without looking at Randall’s mutilated body. Here follows a heart-wrenching moment when Gary hurries to the door, but because of his stature fails to jump up to reach the safety chain. Timidly he has to ask Arthur to unlock the door so that he can escape. Arthur obliges, but only after telling a still terrified Gary: “You were the only one who was ever nice to me” and kissing him on the top of his head. Gary is the only character in the film to whom Arthur shows mercy as the Joker, and it would be easy to interpret this “alliance” by their shared sense of unbelonging, the fact that both Arthur and Gary were always the object, never the subject of the jokes of their group. Furthermore, in this scene the film emphasizes that Arthur has overcome being pitied by us, the spectators, whereas by contrast Gary will remain to be looked down upon, i.e., pitied by the spectators as well as by his mates in the clown pool. As far as I have observed, there are only two moments in the film when Arthur laughs genuinely out of joy, both times when he has not yet turned into the Joker. The first time he is sitting next to his mother’s hospital bed, watching the Murray Franklin show, when during the opening monologue the host plays footage of Arthur’s open mic act. At first, Arthur reacts with authentic laughter, which is abruptly brought to a halt when he realizes that this clip is only in the show to be ridiculed. The second time is at a benefit event Arthur

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sneaks into, where he catches a glimpse of the famous roller-skating scene from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). Once more he reacts with genuine delight and joyous laughter, expressing spontaneous pleasure at an amusing scene. But most of the time Arthur’s laughter is an expression of his being socially out of joint. This includes lack of understanding humor, which is ironic given his day job as a clown-for-hire. His ignorance of what is humorous is evident in the scene where Arthur sits among the audience at a comedy club. The camera tracks through the club on eye-level height of the audience, passing the comedian on its left, and slowly moving toward Arthur who is taking notes of the show. While the rest of the audience responds with appropriate mirth at the comedian’s naughty jokes, Arthur’s laughter is markedly asynchronous. The camera closes in on Arthur’s facial expression as he is trying to make sense of the jokes, his eyes rolling from left to right, scribbling away in his notebook. But his notes do not convey an understanding of what is funny about the jokes, such as that they are based on built-in incongruity, or are expressive of carnivalesque ridicule of social codes. Instead, Arthur’s notes consist of very elementary reflections written in twisty handwriting such as “slick hair???” and “always make funny obzervashins.” Thus, like Ruth in Never Let Me Go, Arthur laughs in this scene both because it boosts his sense of belonging in a social situation, and as a (failed) attempt to indicate that he understands the humor of the joke. Nevertheless, Arthur is determined to become a stand-up comedian and he takes the chance to try out his content in front of a live audience at an open mic night at the comedy club. The scene starts backstage with a close-up of a monitor screen relaying the live show onstage, before the camera turns away to show Arthur practicing his material in a narrow hallway, dressed in a suit without a jacket and sporting slick hair, imitating by his outfit the comedian from the previous scene. The camera follows him closely in one long take as he exists the backstage area and goes upstairs toward the red lights of the club, a generic technique unmistakably associated with a performer entering the stage. We wait with him in the wings, while the master of ceremonies introduces him sarcastically as a Gotham resident whose “purpose in life is to create laughter and joy into this cold, dark world.” Once onstage, he hardly manages to greet the audience with a barely audible gasp, before his body is given over to pounding laughter that alternatively passes into coughing or crying. The camera position alternates between close proximity to Arthur and an angle from the audience’s point of view, as he struggles to stop his laughter in the blinding spotlights, after which with a great difficulty he manages to make one lame joke. The scene could be funny in a similar way as Andy Kaufman’s Dadaist humor is funny, were it not for Arthur’s bodily agony and distressed breathing, as well as for the dramatic score starting off on the sound track influencing the affective significance of the scene. Like his laughter in

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the earlier bus scene, this is anxious laughter emerging from a situation of social tension and fear of embarrassment. And again, the more Arthur laughs the more anxiety-ridden the situation becomes, resulting in a self-feeding traumatic loop—until he breaks this cycle by turning into the Joker. Therefore, as Arthur’s process of transformation into the Joker progresses, he suffers less and less from the uncontrollable laughing fits in stressful situations. He does not laugh when confronted by Alfred at the Wayne mansion, nor when questioned by two detectives about the subway killings. Arthur does not even laugh when, following this interview, he walks straight into an exit-only sliding door of the emergency department after his mother has been admitted to hospital, having suffered a stroke. But when in the cinema restroom Thomas Wayne tells Arthur that his mother had previously been admitted to the Arkham Asylum, Arthur does burst into laughter so violently, that it provokes Wayne to punch him in the face, hard. And Arthur also laughs hysterically when he reads his mother’s medical records revealing that a Penny Flack has been admitted not once but multiple times to psychiatric care, the latest admission due to her passively allowing the abuse of her son. However, this latter burst of laughter is closer to a crying fit, his body convulsed by physical and emotional torment, telling us that Arthur “is wailing on the inside while laughing on the outside” (Kavka 2021, 31) Arthur’s final laughing fit takes place on the evening that follows his visit to Arkham, when he is alone sitting in his underwear in his living room. This bout of laughter is so loud and protracted, that it provokes his neighbor to hit the apartment wall and yell “Shut up!” The laughing fit is followed by the scene in which Arthur kills his mother with a pillow, while maintaining a remarkably cool composure, but it was preceded by one in which he breaks into the residence of his love interest Sophie. As soon as Arthur enters Sophie’s apartment, he carefully touches the objects in there—a child’s backpack, a tablecloth, a watercolor drawing on the wall, a quilt thrown on the sofa—as if he wants to become part of the familial qualities of these objects. Deeply hunched, he takes a seat in front of the television transmitting white noise, after which Sophie comes in. He affrights her and she pleads with him to leave. A series of flashbacks consisting of Arthur’s earlier hallucinations about their affair reveals what the spectator has always known: that their relationship was nothing but a delusion, comparable to the one Arthur’s mother imagined to have had with Wayne. The flashbacks first replicate the hallucinations, but then Sophie is literally removed from them, suggesting that Arthur too becomes aware of the (non)reality of his delusion. The scene ends with Arthur pointing a finger gun at his temple, mimicking the gesture that Sophie made when they first met in the elevator of their building, after which the film cuts to Arthur marching down the hall to a menacing score, the camera following him in low angle.

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The ambiguous way in which the scene is cut, opens up a possibility that Arthur has killed Sophie, but a deleted scene not shown in the completed film confirms that he actually did not, as she is still alive and well, watching television when Arthur appears as the Joker in the Murray Franklin show. However, even regardless of this deleted scene, I offer as my interpretation that Arthur does not kill Sophie, because it does not make narrative sense in the context of his laughter problem. Arthur’s last incontrollable laughing fit is framed in between the preceding scene, in which he breaks into Sophie’s apartment, and the following scene in Penny Flack’s hospital room, where he kills his mother. In the first, preceding scene in the flat of his love interest, Arthur is still Arthur, suffering from severe anxiety. In the scene following at the hospital, when Arthur coldly and unhesitatingly commits a calculated matricide, he has fully become the Joker, free of anxiety. This means that the last laughing fit scene in between is the moment of transformation, purging Arthur from anxiety so that the Joker can fully come into existence. For the idea of the Joker inhibited by anxiety would be a strange one indeed. After this final laughing fit scene, Arthur’s laughter in the rest of the film is less obtrusive and characterized instead by a sense of power and hostility. This he uses to claim superiority over and distance from the authorities, who previously attacked him with ridicule, scorn, and disdain. According to Alan Partington, this kind of laughter “not only expresses superiority, it is very often an attempt to create it, to reify it, to constitute one party as superior to its adversary” (Partington 2006, 232). In Joker, the adversary is not only constituted by certain individuals (Penny Fleck, Thomas Wayne, Murray Franklin), but also by the whole societal dystopia itself, as a brooding place for the series of traumatic events Arthur has endured. Thus, as the Joker, Arthur thus uses laughter both to create and to reify his own superiority in relation to previous dehumanizing events, and as a deadly weapon to make his harassers suffer. When in a crowded subway train an angry mob attacks detectives Burke and Garrity after the former has accidentally shot a protestor, Arthur jeeringly laughs at the scene of violence, celebrating it with a joyful bear dance. At the live recording of the Murray Franklin show, Arthur enters as the Joker with remarkable self-confidence. After traversing the stage with a series of pirouettes, he kisses another guest intensely on her mouth, before taking his seat. But once seated, Arthur becomes seriously calm and composed, neither reacting to the audience nor to Franklin addressing him, as if to show how he is completely in control of his emotions. When Arthur does laugh, his laughter does not appear impulsive but deliberate, and its intentionality is malicious, even though it is cut short by a television broadcasting test card depicting a so-called Indian-head test pattern. Finally, after protesters have freed Arthur by crashing into the police car transporting him, he elevates himself above the crowd, painting a broad smile onto his face with his own

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blood, his violent but adoring disciples cheering at his feet. But this image of Arthur transformed into the Joker is also traumatic, insofar that it signifies the definite disappearance of Arthur’s sense of self, while from now on the Joker receives all the attention Arthur himself was withheld. Mental Subjectivity As the fantasy scene with Murray Franklin demonstrates, the film regularly positions us as spectators within the delusions that dissociate Arthur from reality. A television screen mentally transporting him into Franklin’s production studio does the same for us. Throughout Joker there is an unbridgeable conflict between fantasy and reality, while at the same time they are inextricably intertwined, thus embodying the structure of Arthur’s trauma. According to John Read et al., there is a particularly strong relationship between childhood trauma and adult delusionality, manifesting itself in visual and/or auditory hallucinations that activate the memory of earlier trauma. Because of failure to integrate traumatic events into one’s memory at the time they occur, they emerge later in life independent of the event’s original context. Severe child abuse can evoke negative beliefs about the self (as powerless) and the others (as dangerous), which renders the child vulnerable to delusion as an adult (Read et al. 2005, 334; 342). Such negative beliefs can easily be associated with anyone reminiscent of the abuse perpetrator. This explains why Arthur explicitly refuses to dehumanize the teenagers who beat him up in the beginning of the film, calling them “just kids,” but responds with extreme violence to the Wall Street Three, whose aggression mimics the malevolent details of this traumatic victimization at the hands of Penny Fleck’s abusive boyfriend. But positive beliefs can also play a part in the development of delusions, insofar as they can function as strategies to cope with traumatic events. This is why some of Arthur’s delusions emerge in the form of wish-fulfillment, such as his imaginary romance with Sophie. Another element in the experience of delusion is confusion about the difference between internal and external events. According to Read et al., some intrusive flashbacks occur with awareness that the experience is an internal event relating to past trauma, while others occur without this awareness, and are experienced as external events in the present (Read et al. 2005, 341). In Joker, not only do his internal delusions blend seamlessly into external events for Arthur, but this happens for the spectator too, as Arthur’s delusional moments are not always stylistically distinguished from the rest of the film. Similarly, in The King of Comedy there is no transition when we move into Rupert Pippin’s fantasy about meeting Jerry Langford, which is designed to mislead the spectator until the scene is cut to Pippin’s basement where he is enacting the events. So when the doorbell rings in Arthur’s apartment and he

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opens the door to find Sophie outside, asking casually if Arthur was following her today, there is nothing in the formal organization of the scene that would reveal that this is a case of mental subjectivity on Arthur’s part. However, that Sophie appears to find it just amusing that Arthur had been stalking her, strikes the spectators as highly unlikely, which makes them suspect that the narration in the scene is partly unreliable. On the one hand, the scene gives us reliable access to Arthur’s mental subjectivity, as he himself is not aware that the external event of Sophie arriving at his doorstep is in fact an internal delusion. On the other hand, the scene is not explicitly discernable as a delusion, which enables us to feel its effects, if not its experience, even when suspicious of the narrative reliability of the scene. By contrast, the scene which Arthur’s failed performance at the open mic event blends into is clearly differentiated as a delusion. While Arthur is still onstage telling a joke, a nondiegetic angelic choir suddenly bursts into singing a tune, which is the opening of the Charlie Chaplin song “Smile,” sung by Jimmy Durante. As the blinding spotlights turn mellow, the offscreen laughter gets louder and friendlier, and a close-up of a beaming Sophie finds her among the audience. The song continues as we afterward observe Arthur and Sophie out on the street in the aftermath of Arthur’s performance, where he spots a newspaper headline “Killer Clown on the Loose,” complete with an illustration of a predatory clown baring its fang-like teeth, which Arthur then mimics. The delusion ends with Arthur and Sophie in a donut shop, with Sophie wholeheartedly laughing at Arthur’s jokes and Arthur smiling at this with delight. It is as if here the nondiegetic Chaplin song with its line “If you just smile” has functioned as a diegetic command hallucination of sorts. Like the laughing fits discussed above, Arthur’s delusions function to shield him from the hostility of the external world. They form an inner refuge into which he can escape. But as Arthur labors under the delusion that his open mic gig went well, the tape revealing the truth about his performance on the Murray Franklin show comes to him as a genuine shock, which produces further cracks in his personality. According to Read et al., a delusional psyche originating from the failure to integrate traumatic events can lead to displacement of psychic elements of the agential self by the dissociated parts of the self, potentially resulting in the emergence of schizophrenic disorder (Read et al., 2005, 342). In Joker, the narrative is driven by the process in which Arthur’s agential self is gradually taken over by a delusional self, which is the Joker. The Joker is already present in the very first shot of the film, visible in the mirror which Arthur uses to apply his clown makeup. Jenni Lehtinen et al. write that in this opening “Arthur’s reflection [seems] more real than his corporeal self, [establishing] a disparity between Arthur and his mirror image that haunts the early parts of the movie” (Lehtinen et al. 2021, 194). As the image of the Joker as reflected

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in Arthur’s mirror image appears indeed more complete than Arthur himself, an association with the Lacanian mirror stage is hard to avoid. In Lacan’s thinking, the mirror stage is the moment when a child (mis)recognizes itself in the mirror as an autonomous subject that is distinct from its environment and especially from its mother, after which the child can identify with its “ideal ego” reflected in the mirror. However, to become a subject the ideal ego must be replaced by the “ego ideal,” demanding the child’s allegiance with dominant cultural values which can be at odds with the first idealization of the image in the mirror (Silverman 1996‌‌‌‌, 45, 70). Given the importance of mirrors and other reflecting surfaces that Joker is full of, it is very tempting to say that the appearance of the Joker is Arthur’s ego ideal being taken over by his ideal ego. However, as this ideal ego is aligned with the Joker’s immoral remorselessness, the result of this conflict is Arthur’s schizophrenia (for a similar argument that interprets the Joker to be Arthur’s ideal ego, see Lehtinen et al. 2021). After the subway murders Arthur takes refuge in a shabby public toilet where, in the flickering light of a fluorescent lamp, he starts a sequence of dance steps as if his body had been taken over by some possessive force. Arthur’s body is reflected in the mirror as he continues to dance with elegant arm movements, almost as if he wants to reach out to embrace the figure in the mirror. And then suddenly he does, stretching out his arms by his sides with palms up, looking straight ahead into the mirror from where the Joker returns his gaze, triumphantly (figure 6.3). It is this same face that stares back at Arthur in a hand mirror when he is emptying his locker at the clown agency where he has been fired from his job. The mirror image lends him sarcastic self-assurance, as he reacts to his colleagues who are mocking him. This

Figure 6.3.  Joker: The Joker’s embrace.

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scene also contains genuinely funny jokes, When Arthur leaves the room, he turns back and says, “I forgot to punch out,” before literally punching the punch clock right off the wall. Then with a marker he smudges out the two middle words on a sign that says “Don’t Forget to Smile,” before dancing down the stairs into the bright sunlight, his transformation process being well under way. The scene in which the host ridicules Arthur’s open mic footage on the Murray Franklin show, is followed by Arthur watching a news item on anti-capitalist protests, his face reflected in the television screen. But he is also mirrored in the faces of the protesters, who are wearing clown makeup. As the newsflash cuts to Thomas Wayne making a statement in front of the television cameras, Arthur’s face is superimposed on Wayne’s, whom Arthur now believes to be his father. These reflected and mirrored images on the television screen produce a mise-en-abyme structure with multiple planes that link Arthur, Wayne, protestors, and the Joker lurking in the background, suggesting an unavoidable interconnectedness between the characters and the past and future events. Again, the television screen functions as an interface or rather a space-time warp which hyperlinks Arthur’s missing an absent father (Wayne), his childhood trauma (violence), and his adult distortion of self-experience, resulting in the feeling of being taken over by the Joker. In addition, the layered image suggests interconnectedness between individual trauma and social pain emerging on the level of collectivity and vice versa, the protestors functioning as “carrier groups” of trauma (Alexander 2012, 16). Rather than merely rioting, the goal of the protestors is to project the trauma claim persuasively onto a larger audience by using the most convenient symbolic resource at hand, which is the image of the Joker. It seems to be no coincidence that Arthur’s confrontation with Wayne takes place in a cinema restroom with mirrored walls, where the camera separates, but the mirror unifies the two characters. The scene starts with Arthur in his red usher costume in front of a mirror, through which he observes Wayne farther back in the restroom. As Arthur takes off his costume, the camera focus racks back and forth between the foreground and background a few times so that alternately Arthur is thrown out of focus and our attention is drawn to Wayne in the rear plane of the image, and the other way around. Arthur approaches Wayne, after which the two characters are shown in a frame-within-frame, mise-en-abyme composition, with the camera behind Arthur’s shoulder, and both characters looking at each another through the mirror reflection (figure 6.4). The camera tracks in onto Arthur’s reflection in the mirror, throwing Wayne out of focus when he tells him that he is not Arthur’s father. Wayne punches Arthur and leaves, and the scene ends with Arthur leaning on the restroom sink in front of the mirror. This shot is cut via a graphic match to Arthur in an identical—or should I say mirrored—posture

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Figure 6.4.  Joker: Camera separates, mirror unifies.

at home later that same evening, leaning on a kitchen table before he starts emptying the fridge, taking out both the food and the shelves, so that he can crawl inside and shut the door. It is as if he is glaciating himself emotionally after his confrontation with Wayne has reactivated his trauma. The significance of the mirror in the scene with Arthur and Wayne is that it reveals internalized distortion, the delusion Arthur has contracted from his mother. But this reality is only available in the mirror as an impossible desire forever disappearing into an abyss. Lehtinen et al. make a similar observation when they write that the restroom scene is “Arthur’s final attempt to find an anchor to his identity in conventional society, in the figure of his assumed father,” which nevertheless “brutally dismantles once and for all Arthur’s dreams of socially accepted normality” (Lehtinen et al. 2021, 196). This is why the image of the Joker emerges from the mirror as an alternative delusion, replacing the ideal scenario in which Thomas Wayne is Arthur’s father. This takes place in the morning of Arthur’s appearance on the Murray Franklin show. Shot through a mirror we witness him dyeing his hair green and applying white face paint in a montage sequence accompanied by Frank Sinatra singing “That’s Life,” which is also the diegetic signature tune of Franklin’s television show. At this point Arthur also casually studies an old photo of his mother, with the phrase “Love your smile—TW” written on the back. This may indicate either that Thomas Wayne is Arthur’s father after all, or that Penny Flack herself wrote those words in a delusional bout of tampering with the “evidence.” None of this is relevant for Arthur any longer though, who crumples the photo and throws it away. That Arthur’s transformation into the Joker has nearly been completed at this point is suggested

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by the next backstage scene at the television studio. Here he markedly does not look at his mirror image, but turns his back on it, although he has written with lipstick “Put on a happy face” on the glass. (A publicity photo of the film shows Arthur studying his mirror image under the scribbled line, but such a shot does not exist in the film itself.) Lehtinen et al. write that Arthur turning away from mirror signifies “that Arthur’s transformation into the Joker is complete” and that he no longer needs “to appeal to his mirror image for reassurance” (Lehtinen et al. 2021, 197). However, as in the earlier scene in the cinema restroom, the image composition is also significant here. It has Arthur as the Joker in the middle of the frame, flanked by two enormous facial images of a smiling Murray Franklin, one on a poster on the right-hand side of the image, and the other reflected in a mirror on the left, right below the line in lipstick. But even though Arthur does not examine his reflection in the mirror, he sees his mirror image as the Joker, as it is reflected in the masked faces of the protestors surrounding him, in a reversed logic to the Lacanian mirror stage in which the narcissistic, anti-social ideal ego gains the upper hand of the socially ratified ego ideal. Ascent/Descent Similarly to Parasite discussed in chapter five, Joker contains a number of moments highlighting vertical spatial dynamics by means of staircases. Comparable to its function in Parasite, this reflects hierarchical differences between various social spaces in Gotham City. However, even though Joker is clearly concerned with the problems of the underprivileged classes, Arthur’s frequently ascending and descending stairs serves other purposes. It conveys the hardship in his life on the one hand, and his spiraling deeper into the loss of self as his personality is taken over by the Joker. At the end of the day that saw Arthur taking a beating by a group of young hasslers and being told off by a mother on the bus, we see him slowly trudging up a long, gritty, and steep set of stairs to get home. After the Ha-Ha clown-hire agency boss has threatened Arthur with getting fired for losing the advertisement sign that was stolen by the group of teenagers, the camera shoots this same painful, laborious ascent from an even lower angle than in the previous scene. Sean Redmond describes these scenes as “zombified” insofar as they depict Arthur as “alienated and disenfranchised [. . .] as a soulless creature who, without market or economic value, is searching for the nutrients of validation” (Redmond 2021, 38). It is on these same stairs that Arthur’s definitive transformation into the Joker takes place, in the scene following Randall’s murder. A catchy song starts on the sound track, as we follow Arthur in slow motion, strutting like a rock star through a narrow, lengthy hallway toward the diffused bright light at

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the end. This composition renders the depth of the frame abysmal, with only the image plane of Arthur in focus, which evokes an emotion metaphor of Arthur finally as the Joker, walking toward the light. Until now we have only seen Arthur taking the elevator up, but now for the first time he takes it down, facing us directly in his full Joker costume and makeup, smirking subtly with just one corner of his mouth as the camera zooms in. The scene cuts to an exterior shot of Arthur dancing on the stairs to a background of sunbeams, in a highly mobile frame capturing his eloquent moves from (extreme) low and high angles, moving from long shot to extreme close-up of his feet, splashing about in water puddle. Anna Sophie Jürgens writes that in this scene of “pure visual spectacle,” Arthur’s “fantastic gestures and grandiose wriggling imply a conflation of extreme performance with extreme going-beyond of all moral barriers, sorrows, constraints, and underlying psychological issues that evolve through the course of the film” (Jürgens 2020, 332). The rock song fades into melancholic score music as the pace of the scene—if not Arthur’s movement—de-escalates into slow motion, while detectives Burke and Garrity appear at the top of the stairs to witness this dance that completes Arthur’s transformation into the Joker. This transformation simultaneously narrates Arthur’s descent into insanity and his ascent onto some twisted, blissful plane as the Joker. This is expressed by the bright, white-toned background lighting which Arthur is regularly drawn to. This effect first occurs in the scene following the killing of the Wall Street Three, when a dancing Arthur kicks open the door at the clown-hire agency, and steps into the immersing daylight after having been dismissed. It is there in the scene in which Arthur kills his mother. The bright light hits him from behind at high angle to create a glowing effect on the shape of his body, while Penny’s muffled cries can be heard offscreen. As soon as the sound of her electrocardiogram flatlines, Arthur turns his face upward toward the white light, as if experiencing an epiphany of sorts. Similarly, after having dyed his hair green, Arthur is shown from low angle dancing in his underwear in his bathroom, his body glowing in the white backlighting cast through the window. The white lighting and the low camera angle suggest that Arthur’s mental descent and loss of self is simultaneously an ascent, his soaring upward into some inhuman realm filled with luminosity. As the previous analysis has already demonstrated, the dance scenes themselves in Joker function as narrative devices, gesturally expressing the trajectory of the Joker coming alive from within Arthur. First there are Arthur’s exaggerated dance performances as a clown in the film’s opening and at the children’s hospital, where a gun accidentally drops from his pocket because of his energetic stamping around. But we also perceive him dancing in the privacy of his own solitude. After his (non-delusional) meeting with Sophie in the elevator, Arthur watches the Fred Astaire–‌‌‌‌Ginger Rogers musical Shall

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We Dance (1937) on television, while inspecting his newly acquired gun, pointing it at the television screen and at the empty chair of his mother. Arthur then starts dancing, shirt off, protruding his upper arms and his bruised, all-too-visible rib cage, while audibly imagining a dialogue between himself and an imaginary dance partner, as if he were at a nightclub, until he inadvertently fires the gun he is still holding. Here Arthur is still in command of his bodily performance, in contrast to his dancing after killing the Wall Street Three. In this scene, Arthur performs as if his body were suddenly possessed, an effect which is enhanced by the spontaneous choreography which is in perfect synchrony with the nondiegetic, eerie cello score, composed by Hildur Guðnadóttir. The complete score is melancholy and menacing, but in this scene where we witness the first appearance of the Joker, the affective quality of both the dance and the music is especially haunting, while simultaneously visceral. The cause for this is that Arthur’s dancing “mediates the physical excess that his nervous disorder expresses,” as Jürgens suggests. She writes that in the bathroom dancing scene, Arthur “processes, or exorcizes, his first killing spree and tells us a pantomimic story of oppressive pain and looming eccentric liberation [. . .] with Fleck offering himself up not to an audience [. . .] but to himself in the mirror” (Jürgens 2020, 329–31). This is why we hear this same score from the bathroom dancing scene, when Arthur is waiting behind the curtain for his appearance on the Murray Franklin show. It is layered on top of the diegetic sounds from the show’s recording onstage, including the taped sound of Arthur laughing during his earlier failed comedy act. Standing in front of a blue drape, he then starts moving slowly to this eerie music, bending his body in fluid motions, before the score gives way to the instrumental version of the “Smile” show theme and he pulls back his shoulders, ready to enter the stage. At the end of the film, the protesters crash into the police car holding the arrested Arthur, and then rescue him from the wreck, in a state of unconsciousness. The protesters put the recumbent Arthur on the hood of the car like a fallen hero, while on the sound track the cello score is filled out by several more instruments than before—a resonant drum, high-pitched violins—until the music is fully orchestrated. At this point Arthur gets up and, surrounded by the cheering protesters, starts swirling to the music, spreading his arms in the gestures which we recognize from his earlier bathroom dance. The synchronicity between the diegetic dance and the nondiegetic music in these scenes creates an extradiegetic space which, like in Parasite, is the dimension of trauma emerging from between past violent events, and the disturbing, haunted present. Additionally, the synchronicity may signify that all of the music in Joker is diegetic after all, given that it might emanate “from the fractured psyche of the protagonist/antagonist,” as Redmond has suggested (Redmond 2021, 41).

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Joker ends with an epilogue, supposedly taking place in Arkham Asylum, although the film does not give an explanation how Arthur ends up there from amid the protesters in the previous scene. The scene mimics the earlier one at the social security office, with a lengthy close-up of Arthur laughing in front of his psychiatrist, who does not join his laughter. But while in this earlier scene his laughter was compulsive and neurotic, as the Joker Arthur laughs out of genuine amusement, implying that the person who is laughing is no longer Arthur. Furthermore, the formal similarity between the scenes creates confusion about the temporal status of both, especially as the earlier one contains a flashback of Arthur in a white psychiatric cell, violently banging his head against the observation window in the door. Both the psychiatric cell and the social worker’s office have a clock on the wall, both showing the same time (11:12), which opens up a possibility at least for an interpretation that the whole story is Arthur’s recollection, or even the result of his delusion, while being kept at Arkham Asylum all the time. Misha Kavka makes a similar claim when she writes that the epilogue contains the possibility that Arthur has “hallucinated the entire rise-to-fame narrative” (Kavka 2021, 35). The epilogue is cut to a flashback of a young Bruce Wayne in an alley with his murdered parents, suggesting that this event is the “joke” Arthur laughs about: both characters now being fatherless, while the flashback further confuses the diegetic status of the whole film. The last take of the film is accompanied by a nondiegetic version of the song “That’s Life,” this time not performed by Sinatra but by Joaquin Phoenix, simultaneously with Arthur singing it diegetically, thus making it his own as it were. The take is shot from low angle with the camera slowly following Arthur from a distance as he walks toward white light shining through a window at the end of a long, white corridor, dressed in a white hospital outfit, his feet leaving blood-stained footprints on the floor. Some critics interpret these footprints to signify that Arthur has murdered his psychiatrist, but the film leaves this question open, not explaining how he would have freed himself from the handcuffs he is shown wearing during his consultation, for instance. The footprints can also be seen as a metaphor for death and destruction which the Joker character generally leaves in his wake. As he reaches the end of the corridor, Arthur starts a joyful dance, while his figure appears to dissolve into the white light. This dissolve suggests that the unifying function of Arthur’s sense of self has definitively disappeared as a result of him becoming the Joker. Therefore, the white light does not only indicate some inexplicable, inhuman enlightenment, but it also signifies the traumatic absence of the self. The ending puts different light on Arthur’s finger gun gesture, which pays homage to Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, and which we have witnessed at numerous occasions during the film. It suggests that any form of

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suicide Arthur might have contemplated was symbolic, for Arthur must “die” so that the Joker can be reincarnated in him as a coping mechanism for his trauma. As for the clones in Never Let Me Go, symbolic suicide is therefore not a real option that would restore Arthur’s agency, as it only functions to negate his sense of self so that the Joker can come into existence. Following Jenny Edkins (2013, 130) it could be said that the gesture with the gun signifies a situation in which Arthur dies symbolically and politically, but remains physically alive in Joker, and the whole narrative trajectory keeps Arthur captive in between crisis of life and crisis of death (Caruth 1996, 11). The ending shows that this origin story of the Joker is essentially a failed tragedy, with loss of self as the only way out of trauma. Therefore, the fundamental similarity between Never Let Me Go and Joker is the traumatic denial of self, a socially induced cul-de-sac for identity that haunts the spectators long after the films have finished.

Afterword

Around the time when I was finalizing the first draft of this book, Bessel van der Kolk, the author of The Body Keeps the Score (2014), appeared live on Zomergasten (Summer Guests), a popular Dutch television show, as a medical trauma expert. Zomergasten has been produced by Dutch public broadcaster VPRO every summer since 1988, when it runs for a period of six weeks. It is based on the idea of inviting inspirational people to put together an ideal television program by selecting audiovisual extracts and discussing them in a three-hour interview on a Sunday night. Some of the extracts chosen by van der Kolk were archival footage from the consultative procedures of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in 1996, as well as scenes from the American sports comedy-drama series Ted Lasso (2020–‌‌), Peter Weir’s survival film Fearless (1993), the documentary Mother Love (1959) featuring psychologist Harry Harlow, Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982), and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008). All these examples discussed by van der Kolk illustrated in one way or another the origin of trauma, what happens during a traumatic event (e.g., dissociation), the consequences of the body “keeping the score” of what the mind is unable to process, and the various possibilities for healing. For instance, in one of van der Kolk’s extracts a trauma victim described a car accident which left her traumatized, while her body took her back to the site of the accident. The example demonstrated that the ability to narrate one’s experience verbally is not always a sufficient way to work through trauma, since the body does not “know” what the reflective mind does: that the event happened a long time ago. This is why a traumatic event becomes a herbeleving (re-experience) instead of a herinnering (memory), in a situation which has to be rectified in the process of working through trauma. However, this episode of Zomergasten was hit by controversy, when two days before the airing of the program a widely read Dutch daily newspaper Volkskrant, published an opinion piece criticizing the decision to invite van der Kolk to appear on the show. The piece was written by legal psychologists 191

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Henry Otgaar and Peter van Koppen, and criminologist Annelies Vredeveldt, to express their fears that van der Kolk’s appearance would have “disastrous consequences” insofar as it might “give him a podium to disseminate incorrect and potentially dangerous ideas.” In this article, Otgaar et al. wrote that it is a “popular misconception that traumatic memories are (unconsciously) repressed” and that the therapists who are convinced about the idea of repression, are suspected of making their patients believe by suggestion that they have been sexually abused, for example, while in reality the abuse has never taken place (Otgaar et al. 2022, translations by TL). However, the article noticeably lacked any academic quotes or direct citations, attributing specific claims to van der Kolk without actually directly referring to any of his texts. Furthermore, it left at least this reader with the impression that here ideas presented by van der Kolk were deliberately misunderstood. In my view van der Kolk conceptualizes trauma in neurophysiological terms and, by so doing, actually rejects the concept of unconsciously motivated repression. For instance, in his Psychological Trauma, van der Kolk defines trauma as a pathology of memory in a way that explicitly distances itself from “the psychoanalytical notions of motivated forgetting, censorship, and repression,” arguing instead that “many traumatized people are aware of fragments of the traumatization but unable to recall specifics of trauma” (van der Kolk 1987, 194). In our cinematic experience of a “traumatic film,” we as spectators can become aware of the structure of trauma without necessarily gaining access to the affective “truth” of the painful event. As a result, we can meaningfully resonate with this structure, in a way that goes beyond empathy or “feeling with” the film characters, appropriating their pain as it were. What the interview with van der Kolk demonstrated is that, against common belief, trauma is not an unusual event, but a common phenomenon to which we are all vulnerable. This is why it is important to consider the significance of trauma, not only in terms of symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, but also as an affective fracture that runs through many more aspects of life. Through its audiovisual specificity, cinema can produce aesthetic structures that are expressive of trauma, conveying what happens in the mind and the body when an individual is struck by a painful event. The phenomenon of dissociation is one good example. This occurs on the one hand as a protection mechanism against trauma, but it can lead to the trauma victims shielding themselves from the flow of the world. Dissociation can be expressed by cinematic means that directly engage the spectator affectively. In chapter two I discussed Joachim Trier’s Thelma in these terms, when I analyzed the scene in which the title character surfaces from a swimming pool to find a sheet of ceramic tiles covering the water surface, blocking her way out. In this scene, the ceramic tiles and the swimming pool itself convey the suffocating sense

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of dissociation, the experience of being disconnected from present reality and who one truly is. But there is also the muffled sound of underwater struggle as Thelma fights against the blockage that closes her off from the world. In this film the title character’s trauma originates either from an identity crisis triggered by her emerging sexuality that she experiences as deviant, or from the strict, oppressive religious upbringing that has led to a misperception of her own embodied self. Thelma demonstrates the insight presented by van der Kolk in his interview that the range of trauma is much broader, more multidimensional than commonly understood, and that there are numerous ways in which an individual can react to trauma and work through it. Similarly, this book has hoped to demonstrate that cinema can embody multiple forms of trauma and that there are various structures through which these forms can manifest themselves: temporal, spatial, historical, psychological. In fact, traces of trauma can be found everywhere in our audiovisual culture, not only in cinema, but also in television, in visual and sound arts, in podcasts, and in digital games. The reason for this is presumably that trauma resonates with many of us affectively, even when we have not experienced trauma firsthand. Furthermore, it is important that we are able to engage with the structure of trauma in art, insofar as it renders us sensitive to traumatic affect, which is necessary for conscious reflection on trauma. One of the reasons why cinema is aesthetically valuable is its ability to make us sensitive to painful experiences, which can provide us with skills to cultivate deeper understanding of ourselves and of others. And that is something that the films discussed in Reframing Trauma would seem to achieve particularly well.

Filmography

Chapter Two It Follows (2014) Directed by: David Robert Mitchell Written by: David Robert Mitchell Main cast: Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Olivia Luccardi Country of origin: United States Language: English Get Out (2017) Directed by: Jordan Peele Written by: Jordan Peele Main cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Alison Williams, Bradley Whitford Countries of origin: United States, Japan Language: English Thelma (2017) Directed by: Joachim Trier Written by: Eskil Vogt, Joachim Trier Main cast: Eili Harboe, Kaya Wilkins, Henrik Rafaelsen Countries of origin: Norway, France, Denmark, Sweden Language: Norwegian Chapter Three The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito, 2011) Directed by: Pedro Almodóvar Written by: Pedro Almodóvar, Agustin Almodóvar, Thierry Jonquet (novel) Main cast: Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Jan Cornet Countries of origin: Spain, United States 195

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Language: Spanish Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) Directed by: Martin McDonagh Written by: Martin McDonagh Main cast: Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell Country of origin: United Kingdom, United States Language: English Incendies (2010) Directed by: Denis Villeneuve Written by: Denis Villeneuve, Wajdi Mouawd (play) Main cast: Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette Countries of origin: Canada, France Languages: French, Arabic, English Chapter Four Lust, Caution (Se, jie, 2007) Directed by: Ang Lee Written by: James Schamus, Hui-Ling Wang, Eileen Chang (novel) Main cast: Tony Leung, Tang Wei, Joan Chen Countries of origin: Taiwan, United States, China Languages: Mandarin, Japanese, English, Shanghainese, Hindi, Cantonese The Handmaiden (Ah-ga-ssi, 2016) Directed by: Park Chan-wook Written by: Park Chan-wook, Chung Seo-kyung, Sarah Waters (novel) Main cast: Kim Min-hee, Ha Jung-woo, Cho Jin-woong Country of origin: South Korea Languages: Korean, Japanese Chapter Five The Lobster (2015) Directed by: Yorgos Lanthimos Written by: Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthimis Filippou Main cast: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Olivia Colman Countries of origin: Ireland, United Kingdom, Greece, France, Netherlands, United States Languages: English, French, Greek

Filmography

Parasite (Gisaengchung, 2019) Directed by: Bong Joon Ho Written by: Bong Joon Ho, Han Jin-won Main cast: Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong Country of origin: South Korea Languages: Korean, English Chapter Six Never Let Me Go (2010) Directed by: Mark Romanek Written by: Alex Garland, Kazuo Ishiguro (novel) Main cast: Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley Country of origin: United Kingdom Language: English Joker (2019) Directed by: Todd Phillips Written by: Todd Phillips, Scott Silver Main cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz Countries of origin: United States, Canada Language: English

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Index

abjection, 1, 16, 25, 33, 46–47, 55, 87–89, 106, 140, 154, 170 agency, 5, 7, 15–16, 31, 34, 37, 40, 46–47, 51, 53, 56, 58–60, 62, 68–69, 71, 74–75, 79, 86, 88–91, 95–98, 108–11, 116, 120, 127, 143, 154, 158, 165–67, 173, 181–82, 189 Ahmed, Sara, 56, 110, 130 allegory, 19, 21, 25, 28, 43–44, 70–74, 76, 84, 110, 115, 119, 136– 37, 154, 182 anger, 64–72, 127, 157, 163, 168, 174 anguish, 126, 133 anxiety, 7, 16, 18, 22–24, 29, 41, 95, 119, 147, 172, 175, 178–79 artistic expression, 2, 52–62, 102 authenticity, 16, 36, 49, 91, 99, 114, 117, 120, 124–25, 128–33, 160, 176

Caruth, Cathy, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 23, 25, 56, 72, 74, 82, 102, 189 catharsis, 2, 9, 34, 40, 57, 61, 115–16 color (motif), 1, 6, 11, 21, 27, 42, 52, 56–57, 59, 61, 70–72, 75, 103, 104, 121, 138, 157, 169, 172–73 Crowther, Paul, 58–60

bad faith, 16, 117, 120, 124–29, 133 Bennett, Jill, 2, 6, 28, 58, 60–61, 74, 115 biopower, 16, 38, 40, 45–46, 153, 158, 160–66 Bourgeois, Louise, 55, 58–60

Elsaesser, Thomas, 3, 10, 16, 23, 28–29, 36, 70, 92, 154 ethics, 4, 8–9, 13–14, 34, 37, 62, 91, 146, 149, 158–59, 161, 165, 175

capitalism, 7, 16, 117, 134, 137–39, 141–49, 183; neoliberalist, 7, 16, 117, 134, 137, 147, 153, 168, 172

delusion, 36, 42, 171, 173, 178, 180–81, 184 disgust, 47, 135, 140, 148, 150, 156, 159, 166 dissociation, 5–6, 16, 25, 27, 31, 51, 60, 73, 75–76, 81–82, 88, 99, 172–73, 180–81, 191–93 dystopia, 8, 12, 16, 118–20, 124, 127–31, 153, 158, 161, 163–64, 167, 172, 179

facticity, 117–18, 120–21, 124, 126, 128, 132–33, 137, 142, 149 fire (motif), 1, 30, 34, 39–40, 44, 52, 65–66, 73–74, 78, 80, 106 213

214

Index

Foucault, Michel, 16, 37–38, 40–41, 153, 158, 161–62, 165, 167 free will, 7, 90, 123, 126, 168 Freud, Sigmund, 5, 39–40, 42, 46, 56, 60, 94, 95, 140, 162, 169 Get Out (2017), 2, 14–15, 19–21, 28–36, 38, 43, 47 grief, 4, 13–15, 36, 51, 53, 64, 66, 70–72, 127 guilt, 14, 20, 32–33, 38, 42–43, 48, 65–68, 71, 97 The Handmaiden (2016), 5, 15–16, 72, 85–91, 104–16, 129 healing, 6, 9, 12, 21, 40, 44, 53, 58, 60, 68, 80, 84, 191 horror, 14–15, 19–23, 27, 29, 36, 47, 55, 62, 110, 127, 170 humor, 113, 119, 135, 160, 177 identity, 2, 5, 12–13, 16, 38, 43–44, 46–47, 54–56, 58, 60–63, 73–74, 77, 79–80, 85, 98, 100, 102, 106, 120, 149, 153–54, 168, 173, 184, 189, 193 Illouz, Eva, 119, 131, 164 Incendies (2010), 5, 15, 51–52, 72–84 irony, 111, 116, 165, 177 It Follows (2014), 1, 14, 19–29, 33, 35, 43 Janet, Pierre, 60, 107 Joker (2019), 7, 10, 12–13, 16, 153–54, 167–89 Kaplan, E. Ann, 3, 8–10, 13, 171 Kristeva, Julia, 25, 38, 46–48, 55, 170 Lacan, Jacques, 62, 95, 182, 185 LaCapra, Dominick, 3, 5, 20, 27, 31–33 landscape (motif), 1, 4, 11, 42–44, 70–80, 82–84, 105, 122, 131 Lefebvre, Henri, 16, 117, 136– 37, 141, 145 The Lobster (2015), 6, 16, 117–33, 141

love, 10, 15, 49, 51, 53, 71–72, 88, 90–101, 104, 113, 115, 119–20, 125–26, 128–29, 131, 158, 163–65; romance, 119–21, 125, 131, 164 Luhmann, Niklas, 15–16, 88, 91, 94, 96, 98 Lust, Caution (2007), 6, 15, 16, 72, 85–104, 106, 113, 115 masquerade, 89, 106, 107, 109, 111, 112, 113, 129, 131 melodrama, 10, 15, 85–86, 88 memory, 1–5, 7–14, 19–21, 25–34, 36, 38, 61, 70, 76, 79–81, 94, 107–8, 114, 180, 191–92; amnesia, 20–21; postmemory, 3, 81; semantic, 2, 4–5, 20, 25–26, 31, 33, 61; somatic, 2, 4–5, 7, 9, 20, 23, 25–26, 31, 34, 61, 108 metaphor, 4, 32, 34, 40, 43, 46, 48, 55, 57, 61, 70, 75, 77, 81–82, 92, 107, 110, 140, 145, 147, 174, 186, 188 mirror (motif), 1, 62–63, 84, 88, 98–101, 113, 173, 181–85, 187 mood, 6, 14–15, 17, 20–23, 25, 28–29, 33–34, 43, 45, 68–70, 91–92, 95, 101–5, 108, 118, 157 Never Let Me Go (2010), 8, 10, 12, 16, 153–67, 174, 177, 189 Ngai, Sianne, 11, 14, 88 Nussbaum, Martha, 15, 51–52, 64–65, 67–68, 70–72, 74, 175–76 panopticism, 38, 40, 44–45, 160 paradox, 6–7, 15, 37, 51, 88, 91–92, 94, 96–98, 100, 104–5, 120, 126, 163, 164–65, 168 Parasite (2019), 7, 16, 117, 133– 51, 185, 187 parent-child relationships, 20, 33–41, 43–45, 47, 49, 81, 153, 172–73, 188; fatherhood, 20, 25, 37–43, 45–48, 66, 154, 168, 170–72, 175, 183–84, 188; motherhood, 20–21, 31–33,

Index

38–39, 46–49, 55, 66, 73–74, 76, 77, 80–82, 84, 154, 156, 168, 170–72, 178, 182, 184 performance, 16, 48, 60, 87–88, 90–91, 98–99, 103, 117, 125–26, 129, 131, 142–44, 146, 148–49, 166, 187 posthumanism, 8, 158–59, 162; transhumanism, 159 Quinlivan, Davina, 2, 9, 31, 35, 40, 58 revenge, 15, 47, 52–53, 63–65, 68–69, 72–73, 151 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 16, 117, 120, 124–26, 128, 130–33, 142 satire, 16, 117–20, 122–23, 130, 134– 35, 144, 146–47 Serres, Michel, 55–56 shame, 97, 138, 162 Silverman, Kaja, 56, 119, 182 Sinnerbrink, Robert, 6, 14, 23, 102 The Skin I Live In (2011), 2, 15, 51–68, 72–73 Sobchack, Vivian, 7, 17, 148 spatiality, 5, 36, 73, 74, 79, 80, 108, 138, 139, 140, 185, 193; abstract space, 137, 141; social space, 16, 117–18, 128, 136–42, 144–46, 149–50, 185

215

The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine (2008), 58–60 symbolism, 1–2, 4, 9, 12, 27, 33–34, 36, 38–41, 43, 44–49, 57–61, 72, 104, 106–8, 111, 127, 131, 139, 157, 167, 172, 189 synaesthesia, 7, 136–37, 148, 163 temporality, 5, 8, 10, 17, 22, 24, 36, 74–76, 78–80, 84, 88, 98, 108, 141, 188, 193 testimony, 3, 73–75, 79, 84 Thelma (2017), 2, 14–15, 19–20, 21, 35–49, 73, 192–93 Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), 1, 4, 15, 51, 52, 64–73 van der Kolk, Bessel, 4–5, 107, 110, 114, 191–93 water (motif), 1, 22, 27, 31, 35, 38, 40, 42–44, 48, 52, 74, 77, 82, 110, 114, 116, 136, 145–46, 148, 192–93 witnessing, 3, 8, 9, 115 Zomergasten (Summer Guests, 1988–), 191

About the Author

Dr. Tarja Laine is assistant professor of Film Studies at the University of Amsterdam and adjunct professor at the University of Turku, Finland. She is the author of Emotional Ethics of The Hunger Games‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ (2021), Bodies in Pain: Emotion and the Cinema of Darren Aronofsky (2015), Feeling Cinema: Emotional Dynamics in Film Studies (2011), and Shame and Desire: Emotion, Intersubjectivity, Cinema (2007). Her research interests include cinematic emotions, film aesthetics, and film-phenomenology. In addition, she works as a visual artist, after having graduated from the Wackers Academy of Fine Arts (Amsterdam) in 2018.

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