The Desiring-Image : Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema 9780199993154, 9780199993161, 9780199993178, 9780199993185, 2012045787

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: The Desiring-Image
The Triple Womb
Queering the Cinema Books
New Queer Is . . . New Queer Ain’t
Seven Pillars of Schizo Homo Pomo
A Word on Orientations, or Around 1991
Preview of Coming Attractions
1. “Beyond Gay”: Dead Ringers and Queer Perceptions
“We’ re Just Not Sure What Kind It Is”
Dissenting from “A Dissenting View”
Mutant Textuality
Perceptions of Perception: Movement, Time, Subtraction
Perceptions and Desire: Types of Flows
Out-of-Fields and the Desiring-Image
The Desiring-Images of Dead Ringers
First Out-of-Field: The Mantles vs. the World
Second Out-of-Field: The Love that Keeps Almost Speaking Its Name
Third Out-of-Field: The Triple Womb and the “Either . . . or . . . or . . . ”
Fourth Out-of-Field: Impulse and Immanence
The Desiring-Image as Relation-Image
2. Hard Bodies and Sex-Blobs: Deterritorializing Desire in Naked Lunch and Shortbus
Innaresting Sex Arrangements
Peaks, Sheets, and Series
“Everything Is Permitted”: Incompossibilities of Desire
Schizos and Counterpublics
If on a Summer’s Night a Sex-Blob
Sounds, Stutters, and Scatterplots
A Kafk a High or a New Low?: Quandaries of the Minor
Shortbus: The Queer Politics of “Actual” Sex
Does This Bus Only Make One Stop?
3. “Something in Her Face”: Queering the Affection-Image in The Watermelon Woman
Who Is She, and What Is She to You?
The Riddle of the Lesbian Affection-Image
Like Clockwork, or How to Make a Face
Facing Elsie, and the Mystery of the Other Person
Black Lesbians and Their Others
Peaks of Present, or What Ever Happened to Lesbian Community?
Sheets of Past and Centers of Indetermination
A Single Face, Implying Multitudes
Deflective Unities and Oracular Chores
Faces in the Crowd
Facing Forward
4. Brother to Brother and Adventures in Queer Crystallography
Queer Crystallography
Crystals, Then and Now
The Four Types
Looking for Bruce / Looking for Perry
Through a Crystal-Image, Darkly
What’s Sex Got to Do with It?
5. Crystal-Queer Economies: Beau travail
What’s Money Got to Do with It?
The Oyster and the Book in Blood
The Broken Compass and the Three Economies
Beau travail, or the Ambiguities
Compound Crystals
Bachelors and Belles Transitions
6. Theses on a Philosophy of Queer History: Velvet Goldmine
Changing the World and Changing Ourselves
Angels, Aliens, and Orphans
Point A to Point B
Wild Cards and Unexpected Critiques
Toward Productive Ends
The Minors and the Miners
Conclusion: The Pin and the Pearl
Glossary
A
C
D
F
I
L
M
O
P
R
S
T
Notes
Works Cited
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
V
W
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Citation preview

The Desiring-Image

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The Desiring-Image Gilles Deleuze And Contemporary Queer Cinema Nick Davis

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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

© Oxford University Press 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Davis, Nick, 1977– The desiring-image : Gilles Deleuze and contemporary queer cinema / Nick Davis. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-999315-4—ISBN 978-0-19-999316-1—ISBN 978-0-19-999317-8—ISBN 978-0-19-999318-5 1. Homosexuality in motion pictures. 2. Gays in motion pictures. 3. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925–1995—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PN1995.9.H55D395 2013 791.43c653—dc23 2012045787

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

for Derek, practically perfect in every way (give or take “practically”) and for Alex Doty, old chum, because every book in this field owes you something, and this book owes you everything.

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{ Contents } Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction: The Desiring-Image

ix xiii 3

The Triple Womb 3 Queering the Cinema Books 7 New Queer Is . . . New Queer Ain’t 10 Seven Pillars of Schizo Homo Pomo 13 A Word on Orientations, or Around 1991 27 Preview of Coming Attractions 30

1. “Beyond Gay”: Dead Ringers and Queer Perceptions

35

“We’re Just Not Sure What Kind It Is” 35 Dissenting from “A Dissenting View” 40 Mutant Textuality 42 Perceptions of Perception: Movement, Time, Subtraction 45 Perceptions and Desire: Types of Flows 47 Out-of-Fields and the Desiring-Image 49 The Desiring-Images of Dead Ringers 51 First Out-of-Field: The Mantles vs. the World 53 Second Out-of-Field: The Love that Keeps Almost Speaking Its Name 55 Third Out-of-Field: The Triple Womb and the “Either . . . or . . . or . . .” 58 Fourth Out-of-Field: Impulse and Immanence 63 The Desiring-Image as Relation-Image 67

2. Hard Bodies and Sex-Blobs: Deterritorializing Desire in Naked Lunch and Shortbus

70

Innaresting Sex Arrangements 70 Peaks, Sheets, and Series 74 “Everything Is Permitted”: Incompossibilities of Desire 77 Schizos and Counterpublics 79 If on a Summer’s Night a Sex-Blob 82 Sounds, Stutters, and Scatterplots 86 A Kafka High or a New Low?: Quandaries of the Minor 89 Shortbus: The Queer Politics of “Actual” Sex 96 Does This Bus Only Make One Stop? 101

3. “Something in Her Face”: Queering the Affection-Image in The Watermelon Woman Who Is She, and What Is She to You? 106 The Riddle of the Lesbian Affection-Image 110

106

Like Clockwork, or How to Make a Face 113 Facing Elsie, and the Mystery of the Other Person 115 Black Lesbians and Their Others 119 Peaks of Present, or What Ever Happened to Lesbian Community? Sheets of Past and Centers of Indetermination 125 A Single Face, Implying Multitudes 131 Deflective Unities and Oracular Chores 133 Faces in the Crowd 135 Facing Forward 138

122

4. Brother to Brother and Adventures in Queer Crystallography

142

Queer Crystallography 142 Crystals, Then and Now 146 The Four Types 150 Looking for Bruce / Looking for Perry 160 Through a Crystal-Image, Darkly 168 What’s Sex Got to Do with It? 170

5. Crystal-Queer Economies: Beau travail

174

What’s Money Got to Do with It? 174 The Oyster and the Book in Blood 178 The Broken Compass and the Three Economies 180 Beau travail, or the Ambiguities 186 Compound Crystals 193 Bachelors and Belles Transitions 199

6. Theses on a Philosophy of Queer History: Velvet Goldmine Changing the World and Changing Ourselves Angels, Aliens, and Orphans 213 Point A to Point B 218 Wild Cards and Unexpected Critiques 226 Toward Productive Ends 232 The Minors and the Miners 236

Conclusion: The Pin and the Pearl Glossary Notes Works Cited Index

206

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247 251 257 295 309

{ Acknowledgments } I was inspired to write this book by the filmmakers whose work appears in it, so I want to thank them first. I was inspired to finish it by my endlessly supportive colleagues at Northwestern University, so I want to thank them most. Whenever this project was going well, they reflected the joy I found in writing it, with incisive suggestions all along the way. In periods when I struggled to find my claims or my confidence, they shared their own tales of writerly travail and boosted me along, as both experts and friends. Joining the English Department and the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program while Wendy Wall and Jeffrey Masten chaired them was like arriving amidst a golden age of camaraderie, jocularity, and wisdom, which they have offered in endless supply ever since. My subsequent chairs, Susan Manning, Ann Orloff, Chris Herbert, Mary Weismantel, and Laurie Shannon, have also taken humbling amounts of time and care to support this project and ensure its success. Other folks in those units who made a point of checking in, commenting on drafts, and otherwise making the office so nice to go home to include Eula Biss, Katy Breen, John Bresland, John Alba Cutler, Tracy Davis, Mary Dietz, Jillana Enteen, Betsy Erkkilä, Harris Feinsod, Lane Fenrich, Mary Finn, Christine Froula, Susannah Gottlieb, E. Patrick Johnson, Rebecca Johnson, John Keene, Christopher Lane, Tessie Liu, Evan Mwangi, Barbara Newman, Amy Partridge, Emily Rohrbach, Carl Smith, Viv Soni, Julia Stern, Liz Fekete Trubey, Will West, and Ivy Wilson. Elsewhere on campus, this list extends to Mimi Brody, Holly Clayson, Scott Curtis, Penny Deutscher, Scott Durham, Bonnie Honig, Hamid Naficy, Miriam Petty, Will Schmenner, Jacqueline Stewart, Domietta Torlasco, and many others. Staff members, beyond just enabling intellectual community, have been full partners in it. I’m so grateful to Kathy Daniels, Nathan Mead, Jennifer Britton, Kate Sutor, and Dave Kuzel in English; Emily Gilbert and Katy Weseman in Gender and Sexuality Studies; Natasha Dennison in American Studies; Susie Calkins at the Searle Center; and Carol Anthony, Beth Clausen, Charlotte Cubbage, Victoria Zahrobsky, and Molly Zolnay at the library. Gracious support from the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, including a College Fellowship in 2006–07, enabled the development of this project, for which I am very thankful. I owe so many sagacious, solicitous colleagues who made working on this book a pleasure so much of the time, and who proved indispensable to getting it (and me) back on track whenever things backed up. Since I was an

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undergraduate, Elaine Scarry has been my role model and champion, convincing me I could write this book and so many other projects, and nudging people to read them. Ellis Hanson and Tim Murray were invaluable catalysts, readers, and proponents of The Desiring-Image in its dissertation form, as was Amy Villarejo, who cultivated and challenged so many ideas that led to this book; she also taught me to be mindful of what we as scholars owe our institutions and our publics. Hortense Spillers once made the positively avant-garde statement that I might not wish to work with her since her expertise was not in cinema. This remains the only time I have ever doubted Hortense. She offered some of the most trenchant readings this project ever received, and remains my personal touchstone for making scholarship an unambivalent vocation, a site for boldness, creativity, and, whenever possible, a rollicking good time. Early, priceless support for The Desiring-Image also came from James Morrison and Maria Pramaggiore; from Tom Waugh; from Wendy Moffat; and from my friends at Trinity College, including Milla Riggio, Sheila Fisher, Paul Lauter, Margo Perkins, and the much-missed Fred Pfeil. Patrice Petro offered sterling guidance I quote all the time, and stalwart friendship. Ken Wissoker responded to an early outline of this book and improved it in every way. My Chicago Film Seminar friends, especially Sara Hall, Pamela Robertson Wojcik, and Jennifer Wild, also elevated the book and extended generosity. Michele Aaron, Matt Bell, Theresa Geller, David Gerstner, Elena Gorfinkel, Lucas Hilderbrand, David Martin-Jones, Erica Rand, and Damon Young asked great questions at conferences and initiated ongoing conversations. In the category of the truly above and beyond, Patricia White and Michael DeAngelis found time to read entire chapters and invigorated my thinking in new ways. I trust my students from Cornell, Wells, Trinity, and Northwestern already know how pivotal they are to how I think and to why I love this job. I am grateful to all of them, but especially to Hollis Griffin and Quinn Miller, who expanded and refined this project while they were technically my advisees. Their own work offers proof that queer media studies will only get more exciting from here. Film writers and fellow cinephiles, especially on the internet, fed this project to degrees it would take a lot of tweets to express. Nathaniel Rogers, Tim Brayton, Mark Harris, Brian Herrera, David Hudson, Kevin Lee, Guy Lodge, Colin Low, Melanie Lynskey, Mike Phillips, Nic Rapold, Joe Reid, Katey Rich, and especially Tim Robey have offered ideas, encouragements, writing opportunities, and productive pushback. MaryAnn Johanson and Gabriel Shanks got me involved in the first place. My colleagues in the Queer Film Society, especially Richard Knight and Hank Sartin, have contributed online and off. Some of the writing in this book started as film reviews or stray speculations on my now-teenaged website and blog www.NicksFlickPicks.com, where discussion and disagreement yield constant prompts toward clearer thinking.

Acknowledgments

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Everyone I have mentioned made possible the book that arrived to Oxford University Press. From that point, a whole new group of friends and facilitators did the Lord’s work, or possibly even Oprah’s, to make The Desiring-Image into its best self. My acquisitions editor Brendan O’Neill is a godsend. At every step, he cared equally about the book being good, about me being happy with it, and about its production running like a dream. The anonymous readers to whom he circulated the project offered such nuanced and affirming responses, making virtuoso suggestions to augment what they saw as strengths and to fix anything they thought needed fixing. I could not have been more grateful to them, or to my production editors Marc Schneider and Ryan Sarver, to India Gray for her deft copy-edits, or to Allison Finkel for such a vigorous marketing plan. As for Alex Doty, who revealed himself as one of the initial readers for the Press, and who talked me through claims in this book and stages of getting it published—extending such bonhomie and unerring counsel in the months before we all lost him—I can only be grateful I expressed my thanks when I could, and I only hope to do for future colleagues what he did for me. If this were the Oscars, Bill Conti would now start playing me off. In that grand tradition, I refuse to leave before thanking my family, including friends I am shocked, shocked to discover I am not technically related to: Jennifer Bouchard, Kristin Vander Els, Ann Buechner, Patrick Somerville, Anna Parkinson, Irina Ruvinsky, Hélène Zylberait, and especially Leora Bersohn, who saw the right path for this book to take years before I did. Kasey Evans, Jay Grossman, Jules Law, and Helen Thompson have been onthe-job mentors, scrupulous editors, intellectual inspirations, and, most of all, glorious friends who more than once said exactly the most helpful thing at the most helpful time. Susie Phillips and Kimberly Manganelli co-parented this book with me. At times they practically co-parented me, which Dietmar Baum, Johannes Baum, and Joe Manganelli were heroically nice about. That a Medievalist and a nineteenth-century Transatlanticist could discern at every step what a book about Deleuzian queer cinema needed to assert, explain, or sideline is proof of their brilliance. This is not the venue to express everything they mean to me as friends, thank goodness, since the book would double in length. The only disincentive toward finishing a manuscript is the time it keeps costing you with people you love. How reassuring to have a Mom and Dad who express so often the value they see in this book specifically, in what I do individually, and in what we all do collectively as academics. I am talking about people who drove across state lines to hear what I had to say about queer sexblobs popping out of typewriters—people who have encouraged and applauded every single thing I have ever been inspired to do or to become. They instilled such curiosity in the first place by themselves being so open-minded and eclectically interested in life. Both of them, my wonderful brother Nathan, my extraordinary grandparents, and so many Keelings, Davises, Matsons, Joneses,

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Tighes, Smiths, Simmonses, Hoyles, Michalowskis, Johnsons, and others have been with me through so many steps, even when the work kept me from being with them. Lastly, with a swerve into second-person address, to my partner Derek: I love that all you ever wanted from this process was for me to feel proud of what I wrote. I am so grateful for your rigorous readings, your perspicacity and great judgment, your cheerfulness, and your patience, at literally all hours of the day. You have been lovely about the surprisingly central role that desiring-machines, macabre gynecologists, and subforms of the crystal-image have played in our conversations for thirteen years now; I do not imagine you quite had this in mind when we met. I would neither have started nor have finished this book without you, and I do not plan to start or finish anything without you ever again. An earlier version of material from chapter 2 appeared under the title “The View from the Shortbus, or All Those Fucking Movies” in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14.4 (2008): 623–37. Reprinted with the permission of Duke University Press. Chapter 6 contains material adapted from a previous essay included in The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven Allows, edited by James Morrison. Copyright © 2007 James Morrison. Reprinted with the permission of Columbia University Press.

{ Abbreviations } Given the frequency with which I invoke them throughout The DesiringImage, the following books written by Gilles Deleuze, with or without Félix Guattari, are cited parenthetically within the text, using the following abbreviations. Full bibliographic information appears, of course, in the Works Cited at the end of the book. AO C1 C2 K TP WIP

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Deleuze) Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Deleuze) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Deleuze and Guattari) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari) What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari)

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The Desiring-Image

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Introduction: The Desiring-Image Gilles Deleuze and Queer Cinema The Triple Womb David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, a key film in this book, pivots decisively on the figure of a three-chambered womb. Two examining physicians diagnose this organ as hopelessly infertile, and the film upholds this verdict despite the rule-flouting tendencies of Cronenbergian bodies, genders, and desires. The Desiring-Image, however, defies these expert opinions, testifying to the fecund potentials of a trifurcate gestation. The book’s ideas and methods derive jointly from queer theory, film studies, and Deleuzian philosophy—three fields that, around the time Dead Ringers premiered, were headed in appreciably different directions. The late 1980s and early 1990s witnessed the efflorescence of queer theory, as scholars and activists reclaimed and politicized “queer” as a critical term, keeping its parameters purposefully mutable if not notoriously vague. “It is not simply that queer has yet to solidify and take on a more consistent profile,” Annamarie Jagose attests, “but rather that its definitional indeterminacy, its elasticity, is one of its constituent characteristics.”1 Exploiting such elasticities, The Desiring-Image constructs new frameworks for understanding what is “queer” about recent queer cinema, including films rarely classified this way. Many of queer theory’s earliest, most widely circulated tropes influence my arguments, including performative repetition, minoritizing and universalizing paradigms, and debates over the fate of gendered and racial differences within this pliable term for sexual alterity. Equally influential are more recent theorizations of queerness as a basis for counterpublic coalitions, a force bound up with affect and temporality, a vantage for conceiving transgender as both an identity claim and a conceptual turn, and a site for rethinking the phenomenology of “orientation” as such. Queer theory’s emergence coincided with a more fallow period for film theory. Even in its title, David Bordwell and Noël Carroll’s prodigious 1996 anthology Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies indicated widespread discontents with theorizations of cinema, following several years when feminist

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readers of psychoanalysis did more than anyone, especially among Englishlanguage critics, to invigorate such scholarship.2 Early leaders in queer cinema studies adapted similar methods to defamiliarize and dissect sexuality in classic Hollywood films. Indeed, “theory” increasingly connoted Freudian and Lacanian approaches, although these entailed gender-normative and heterosexist biases that queer and feminist critics had to dexterously resist.3 Meanwhile, cinema studies turned strongly toward materialist, industry-centered, cross-media, and nationally framed investigations, whose specificities theoretical work had often been charged with ignoring. These modes still dominate the field, prompting Todd McGowan to venture recently that “film theory today is almost nonexistent.”4 The third discourse that nourished The Desiring-Image, distinguishing it from most studies of queer cinema, is the work of Gilles Deleuze, which has lately inspired copious new monographs, book series, articles, and special journal issues across many humanities fields—cinema studies and gender and sexuality studies prominently among them. Without engaging film theory per se, Deleuze merges his philosophical concerns with his ideas about film in his books Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983, trans. 1986) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985, trans. 1989), monumental and influential volumes that remain very challenging reads.5 By the late 1980s, however, as queer theory flourished and film theory entered a waning period, the Cinema books were only just arriving in English translation, as were other Deleuzian texts; at that point, their disparities from his other works and from more typical conceptions of film required further rounds of retranslation.6 Even today, his idiosyncratic concepts necessitate careful unpacking in order to resonate with skeptical or uninitiated readers. The Desiring-Image commits itself to the rare project of theorizing, reading, and speculating from the exciting conjunction of all three of these fields.7 Even when artists or scholars have memorably linked film to Deleuzian thought (as the Cinema books themselves do) or film to queer theory (as the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s did), these pairings signal to me the limiting absence of whichever third term they omit. For example, desire of any kind is all but absent as a theoretical category in the Cinema books despite Deleuze’s volubility and radicalism on that subject in such texts as Anti-Oedipus (1972, trans. 1983).8 This asymmetry within his corpus is more surprising than the books’ neglect of feminist filmmaking and scholarship, especially given Deleuze and Guattari’s repudiations of both psychoanalysis and identity politics, and their famously vexed handling of gender. In any case, Cinema 2’s overt meditations on how film can serve dissidents or the disempowered never addresses gendered or sexual minorities—an elision scholars have begun to redress, though with hardly any recourse to Cinema 1. Meanwhile, in a little-noted confluence, these books arrived to Anglophone readers amid the early foment of what became the New Queer Cinema.9

Introduction: The Desiring-Image

5

Aesthetically and politically, this celebrated insurgency of profitable, controversial, and stylistically bold movies owed more to AIDS activists’ imagemaking, to postmodern tropes of parody and pastiche, and to incipient queer studies scholarship than to mass-market gay and lesbian films of the same era. Even so, New Queer Cinema never aligned as closely as it might have with contemporaneous tenets of queer theory. For one thing, the enshrining of universally gay- or lesbian-identified auteurs as leaders of the New Queer movement, telling stories almost exclusively about LGBT characters, signals an embrace of identity logics, however qualified in other respects, that queer theory typically challenges. In these and other ways, the furor around New Queer Cinema—conceived, after all, as a journalistic meme, not a scholarly rubric—exposed its ill-preparedness to travel beyond its situated responses to the hit films, emergent auteurs, and historical contexts of its early-1990s moment. Against these backgrounds and drawing on their contributions, The DesiringImage argues for profound formal, thematic, and political transformations in how commercial narrative cinema reflects and indeed produces non-normative desire by the end of the twentieth century and leading into our own. In so doing, this book allows the strengths of Deleuzian film concepts and New Queer tropes to challenge each other, emending oversights and broadening contexts on both sides. What results is a mutually beneficial, Fred-and-Ginger swap whereby Deleuze gives queer cinema a firmer theoretical basis, while queer filmmaking incites the Cinema books to engage with sexuality and desire—a task for which Deleuze seems ideally qualified but which he avoids. New Queer Cinema thus emerges less as a discrete phenomenon than as a signal of wider shifts in film’s relation to desire, much as Cinema 2 views Italian neorealism or the French New Wave not as anomalies but as signs of global change in film’s relation to time. Queer filmmaking resonates, too, with the Deleuzo-Guattarian platform of “minor art,” as defined principally in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975, trans. 1986).10 In this schema, culturally marginalized members of a “major” culture internally recalibrate its expressive forms and grammars. Minor artists have a threefold task: deterritorializing sense and syntax from their usual frameworks; politicizing these renegotiated structures; and endowing them with a collective value, less on behalf of existing “minorities” than for new coalitions they catalyze among the oppressed and invisible, along previously unrecognizable lines. Among these “minoring” operations, my Deleuzian model of queer cinema stresses the deterritorializing of desire into new relations and definitions, renouncing structures of heteronormativity but also what Lisa Duggan, Michael Warner, and others have called “homonormativity.”11 This latter ideology absorbs gay- and lesbian-identified people into major-culture structures of identity, alliance, and power, which frequently perpetuate key inequities and deny desire its fundamental unruliness.

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To discourage such norms from taking hold, this book theorizes a minor queerness with permeable borders and rangy constituents—one that includes but does not limit itself to gay and lesbian narratives, producers, characters, or audiences. As such, The Desiring-Image shares with Deleuze’s Cinema books and with the richest writing on New Queer Cinema a commitment to eclectic styles in singular assemblages, which nonetheless evince meaningful patterns and implications. Approached this way, theoretical claims can intensify rather than dilute our appreciation of the formal and cultural particularities of the films they address. As part of that project, The Desiring-Image answers the need to gloss concepts I recruit from Cinema 1, Cinema 2, and other Deleuzian works, especially Anti-Oedipus and Kafka. If the reader craves a first or a clearer account of such Deleuzian precepts such as the minor, the actual and the virtual, or the impulseimage, this book aims to gratify those hopes.12 I see no reason why the Cinema books and their vocabularies must remain so occulted for many scholars and cinephiles—not when their animating spirit is so democratizing and so ecumenically rooted in a broad love of film. After all, following years of deft exegesis and bountiful circulation, such complex psychoanalytic mainstays as fetishism, castration, and the mirror stage have become broadly exchangeable currency, as much in the undergraduate classroom as in the lobbies of the Angelika, the Arclight, and the Alamo Drafthouse. Similarly, Deleuze’s terms should exist not just in rarefied conversation with one another but also as widely usable tools toward diverse ends, to include perceiving desire as it atomizes and reformulates itself in cinematic images. Granted, some difficulty is inevitable in working with Deleuze. Discomfort can even be valuable in defamiliarizing terms that have different meanings in other systems or in estranging habits of thought and perception on the way to inaugurating new concepts, which Deleuze espouses as the crucial function of philosophy. Still, I aim to make his terms more accessible to a wider circle of readers without sapping them of intellectual specificity. By emphasizing Deleuze’s uniquely derived sign-types (the perception-image, the affectionimage, the crystal-image, etc.) within close readings of a broad range of films, I concretely illustrate these concepts, I demonstrate their value for analyzing sequences and theorizing their relations, and I specifically expand the repertoire of texts we might affiliate with queer desires, collectives, and politics. Beyond just elucidating Deleuze’s concepts, however, The Desiring-Image synthesizes ideas in new ways from across his texts, even from semidiscrete threads in his thought. In prioritizing movies that challenge Deleuze’s assumptions or flex his categories, I allow the filmmakers to serve as theorists of desire in their own right. The same tactic prevents rigid maxims from imposing themselves identically on all texts, refusing a critical mode that “discovers” theoretical ideas in texts tautologically devised as allegories for these concepts, as often transpires with Hitchcock and psychoanalysis.13 Through these strategies,

Introduction: The Desiring-Image

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The Desiring-Image extends but assiduously tests Deleuze’s conceptions, just as it avoids reconsolidating a current canon of New Queer Cinema or establishing a new one in its place. Against the death knells often sounded for that tradition, I promote conjecture as to how a heterogeneous and more porously defined queer cinema might continue developing, and what it could still inspire or accomplish. In sum, this book essays a wide-ranging, theoretically adventurous account of contemporary films that offer complex, unresolved visions of desiring—not as a fixed state but as a restive gerund, perpetually in flux and constitutionally susceptible to change.

Queering the Cinema Books Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 respectively propose movement and time as the material and conceptual bases of filmmaking, which Deleuze partitions into two semidiscrete epochs, before and after World War II. In the simplest terms, cinema’s reliance on motion and controlled duration differentiate it from still photography—prompting Deleuze to eschew frame reproductions within his texts, since these are precisely not cinema.14 More to his philosophical points, it is within the planes of movement and time that cinema’s transformative potentials inhere, goading us to rethink perception, relation, and collectivity as aesthetic and also political precepts. From these roots I derive my own arguments for how cinema generates and reformulates desire. Cinema’s first challenge was to legibly organize overlapping movements and do so coextensively within the frame, across a sequence, and throughout a film. In Deleuze’s genealogy, various national film cultures perfect forms of movement that echo their existing ideological and artistic bents. Thus, early U.S. filmmakers emphasized narrative movements and kinetic spectacles within character-driven, ahistorical entertainments; Soviet filmmakers expressed historical movement through dialectical montage; and French filmmakers privileged luminous, impressionist, and superimposed motions, in conjunction with painterly and photographic trends. For Deleuze, these advances provoke new, era-specific ideas of what movement is, of how it relates to categories of thought, and of how it participates in cycles of “becoming.”15 He concerns himself with more than images of motion: say, a galloping horse, an agitated crowd, or a flowing river. Instead, Deleuze theorizes movement-images that prompt entirely new conceptions of movement, not as space traversed but as some qualitative change enacted in time, carrying different ideological connotations, as conveyed through varying styles of montage. Two converging pressure systems provoke the transition from Cinema 1’s movement-images to Cinema 2’s time-images. One involves Deleuze’s view of how the medium stalls aesthetically. By the middle of cinema’s first century, the movement-image exhausts potentials for growth, bound increasingly to

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mass-production of its most lucrative and widely embraced form, the actiondefined narrative. Propitiously, this “crisis of the action-image” inspires artists across the globe toward new cinematic forms. Yasujiro Ozu, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, the Italian neorealists, and many others renovate habits of framing and editing, involving the spectator’s thought in new ways, and releasing temporal dimensions of film from constraints imposed by linear, action-driven stories, or even by the most doctrinaire forms of political cinema. Crucially for Deleuze, time comprises an even more complex field of forces than movement, its boundless multiplicities and confluences of pasts, presents, and futures thus motivating increasingly intricate structures of art and thought. These innovations do not transpire, however, in a political vacuum. World War II devastates global belief in rational movements or collective alliances, or in actions that respond adequately to prompting circumstances. The lockstep gestures and sinister fluency of Nazi propaganda offer terrifying encapsulations— even, Deleuze worried, an inevitable teleology—for any cinema oriented around reflex perceptions, iconic images, or a privileging of continuity over irreducible heterogeneity. Only a cinema that repudiates automated patterns and requires interventions of thought can thwart the collusion of rationalized aesthetics with fascist or exploitative wills to power.16 These dual contexts, formal and historical, explain how Deleuze’s time-image embraces both the elegant, abstract puzzles of Antonioni or Resnais and the neorealist semifictions, ethnographic images, and political parables of various postwar and postcolonial cinemas. In the former, people are overtly scattered and alienated, their places in space, time, and story hopelessly adrift. In the latter, too, “the people” gather or scatter according to new era-specific pressures, remaining subordinate to the vagaries of historical time, rather than falsely apotheosizing themselves as rulers or agents of history. Amid a very different era, I posit the desiring-image as both a sequel to Deleuze’s cinematic conceptions of movement and time and as a constitutive dimension of all cinematic images—just as the time-image lingered as untapped potential within more regulated cinemas of movement. Queer insofar as they take open-ended variation as their guiding premise, desiringimages work against normative models of sexuality and their social, political, and epistemic buttresses. They simultaneously mirror time-images in resisting uniformity and rational organization; they dovetail with persistent structures of movement- and time-based cinema; and they resist the masculinist and heterosexist ideologies so prevalent in both. Grounding cinema in the unruly productions and permutations of queer desire cannot help but induce novelties at the level of form and style, as explorations of movement and time previously did. This helps to explain why so many films and filmmakers addressed in The Desiring-Image earn reputations as “weird,” “ambiguous,” or “confusing.”

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Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic convulses every arena of life after the early 1980s, just as Cinema 2 leaves off; it thus functions as World War II does between Deleuze’s two volumes as a historical catalyst for transforming artistic methods, political orientations, and collective affects.17 Additional late-century movements convened around gendered and sexual dissidence, including poststructuralist feminisms and the queer movement, further encourage new image-regimes. These emerge not around a gay or lesbian politics of identity that would have bored or dismayed Deleuze, swerving back toward a cinema of iconic “representation,” but via a politics of difference that, as in queer theory, interrogates its own terms, goals, and presumed constituents.18 Queer theory’s concerns, born from combustive encounters among intimate experience and historical circumstance, strike me as Deleuzo-Guattarian concerns as well: the unpredictable changes and paradoxes of desire, its range of affects and embodiments, and its uneasy but insoluble connections to capitalist apparatuses of social control. Both discourses urge creative coalitions amid hostile regimes, which co-opt dissident desires toward major-culture interests or else eliminate the dissidents outright. Queer collectives often incorporate subsets that do not easily mesh, just as Cinema 1 defines the cinematic frame or sequence as a field where dissimilar elements engage in unpredictable, evolving relations with each other. Jagose thus stipulates that “queer” operates “sometimes as an umbrella term for a coalition of culturally marginal sexual self-identifications and at other times to describe a nascent theoretical model which has developed out of more traditional lesbian and gay studies.”19 The “umbrella” definition recalls pluralistic, often fractious chains of LGBTQI organizing, like a frame to which new elements keep accruing, a problem Cinema 1 ponders at length. The nascent, “antitraditional” model suggests a more pervasive, self-critical conception of queer difference, destabilizing assumptions within the L or the G or the T as well as among them. Cinema 2’s images make complex, palpable impressions that nonetheless defy simple perception and connect idiosyncratically at best with other images. As such, they percolate with as many potentials for self-difference as does any poststructuralist category of sex or gender or desire. Queer theory, however, does not simply replace the first, additive, identitysoliciting model with the second, more entropic one. Each unsettles but complements the other; practitioners mobilize strategic essentialisms or radically anti-essentialist claims to achieve varying purposes.20 Similarly, the desiringimage incorporates elements of Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 to different degrees and in different cases. Deleuze describes these volumes not in hierarchical or evolutionary terms but as posing different responses to some shared conundrums of the prewar and postwar cinematic image, and also to more era-specific problems.21 By extension, the quandaries and changes in desire we detect in late twentieth-century queer cinema are not “new” in every way. True, the crises of any historical moment produce new relations of desire while corroding others,

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but they also reveal and mobilize desiring-potentials that prior films and political frameworks rigidly constrained, either within their dominant forms or beyond their proscribed fields of vision.

New Queer Is . . . New Queer Ain’t Scholars allow such constraints when they pose queer cinema as the exclusive enterprise of gay or lesbian artists and stories, or when they isolate star directors, canonized films, or bracketed historical periods as summative of much broader trends. These risks have nonetheless accrued in commentary about New Queer Cinema, certain avatars of which still predominate in most studies of queer-themed films of the last twenty-five years.22 Because The DesiringImage reprises some New Queer titles and tropes while diverging from many others, I will quickly rehearse some key nodes of that discourse before outlining a different model of sexually dissident cinema. The New Queer phenomenon remains unique in U.S. film culture insofar as artists, activists, academics, and audiences jointly fed the movement, heralded with equal fervor in scholarly journals and in such public periodicals as the Village Voice. That was where B. Ruby Rich first declaimed, in a line dropped from later revisions of the essay, “Something extraordinarily queer is going on, and you don’t have to be one to get the picture.”23 She refers to a “flock of films” from the Sundance, Amsterdam, and Toronto Film Festivals in 1991 and 1992 that privileged LGBT themes and characters but in notably disparate ways: “The new queer films and videos,” not yet capitalized as a trend unto themselves, “aren’t all the same and don’t share a single aesthetic vocabulary or strategy or concern.”24 Beyond their exhilarating and unexpected simultaneity, what these films share is a “common style”: Call it “Homo Pomo”: there are traces in all of them of appropriation and pastiche, irony, as well as a reworking of history with social constructionism very much in mind. Definitively breaking with older humanist approaches and the films and tapes that accompanied identity politics, these works are irreverent, energetic, alternately minimalist and excessive. Above all, they’re full of pleasure.25 A revision of Rich’s essay anchored a special section on New Queer Cinema in the British Film Institute’s monthly magazine Sight & Sound. A decade of scholarly and journalistic responses ensued, as did unprecedented, largely unduplicated opportunities to produce and exhibit queer films that were topically, stylistically, and (though this has been debated) politically challenging. Like many movements, New Queer Cinema thrived more on media interest than on coherent definition, especially with “pleasure,” “style,” or “attitude” as uniting principles.26 Unsurprisingly, opinions varied about how “new”

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or oppositional this flock really was; alongside Rich’s opening salvo, Sight & Sound published responses from queer, UK-based filmmakers whose estimations ran from the eager to the skeptical, all the way to Pratibha Parmar’s assertion that “queer cinema has been going on for decades, although not in its current manifestation—that is, a marketable, collective commodity produced by white gay men in the U.S.”27 Even Rich signals the movement’s demographic and material inequities in her initial dispatch, stressing its “usual quotas of internecine battles: girls against boys, narrative versus experimental work, white boys versus everyone else.”28 By the late 1990s, despite or even because of the mainstream success of several queer features (implying suspicious synchronicity with majoritarian values), coverage of New Queer Cinema encompassed more epitaphs than encomiums. Writers often lamented the career arcs of the early-1990s tyros, or a flood of mediocre LGBT-themed pop fare, or a forfeiting of the movement’s political investments. Rich published the most famous obituary, again in Sight & Sound, calling New Queer Cinema “from the beginning . . . a more successful term for a moment than a movement” and ascribing its demise to excessive production, touristic contributions from straight directors and performers, unreliable patronage from queer audiences, niche-marketed takeovers by deep-pocketed studios, and, in the case of Boys Don’t Cry, the odd disqualifying factor of being “not about a lesbian at all.”29 The title of Rich’s long-gestating book The Rise and Fall of New Queer Cinema encapsulates where the conversation has drifted. Subsequent scholarship tends to delimit the phenomenon within tight historical bounds, reiterating this early-tolate-1990s Icarus narrative.30 In sync with overall trends in film scholarship, recent studies often frame themselves around archival rediscoveries, experimental and nontheatrical image-making, and/or underexamined regional and national traditions—in each case challenging white, masculinist, Anglo, and feature-oriented biases within prior accounts.31 Such work invaluably expands our collective vantage on queer cinema, but retheorizing that concept, which few studies attempt to do, can also enable a broader base of texts, a more nuanced grasp of its politics, and a more open future. Truth be told, despite their rhetorical framings as a birth announcement and an autopsy for New Queer Cinema, Rich’s famous articles already furnish grounds for subtler, less overdetermined conceptions; both accounts bespeak internal heterogeneities that The Desiring-Image theorizes and sustains. The doom-spelling criteria of Rich’s later essay align only loosely with the manifold premises and data points of the former; each cites a bounty of related but divergent works that defy comprehensive portraiture and refuse undiluted optimism or pessimism. The joyous Sight & Sound piece in 1992 ends amid concerns over whether this new “door” into queer filmmaking might shut.32 By contrast, the closing paragraphs of the later eulogy endorse Being John Malkovich (1999) as a New Queer diamond in the disheartening rough, despite

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several traits that disallow other films in the same essay from such consideration: Malkovich made money, was written and directed by straight men, earned prizes and professional opportunities for straight Hollywood stars, and so forth.33 Rich tags it as “a mainstream movie made possible by the New Queer Cinema,” and despite nostalgia for the “old days” of 1992, she admits to feeling “happy to be part of a new niche market,” thus refusing the myth of pop-cinema pleasures unpolluted by capitalist interests.34 The unruly beginning and ambivalent end of Rich’s story invite Deleuzian approaches, posing New Queer Cinema as all along a multiform product of an acephalous, deterritorialized collective, blurring into larger trends, its relations to corporate politics and economics vexed but never unilateral.35 The millennial crop of Malkovich, Boys Don’t Cry, Happy Together (1997), Gods and Monsters (1998), High Art (1998), Love Is the Devil (1998), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), et al., does imply co-optations of outsider perspectives, yet each film makes qualified escapes from business-as-usual themes, styles, and distribution patterns. In their aesthetics, their circulations, and their category-resistant desires, they join their New Queer forerunners in exemplifying Deleuze and Guattari’s remarks on the “coexistence of revolutionary, reformist, and reactionary elements” in any assemblage, critiquing those who fulminate “as if every great doctrine were not a combined formation” (AO 117, original emphasis). Indeed, writing between the watershed years of 1992 and 2000, Rich herself conceded that “forces of progress and reaction coexist” in New Queer Cinema.36 Deleuze’s and Rich’s standpoints share other productive sympathies. Importantly, she conceptualizes New Queer Cinema not from an academic rookery or a single exhibition market but by voyaging widely, patronizing features as well as video programs, where lesbian artists enjoyed greatest success. Rich’s mobility, her ecumenical appetites, and her commitment to evoking films in their irrefragable uniqueness mark her in Cinema 2’s language as a minor intercessor: she tracks and voices imminent changes on behalf of an incipient collective, without positing herself or her assessments as definitive among any group for whom she speaks. These same traits align Rich with another figure Deleuze and Guattari promote: the “schizo,” a term these theorists unambiguously valorize, refusing its pejorative connotations as activists later did with “queer.” Deleuzian schizos wander and read the world in its differences, joining into its active and erratic currents, rather than projecting programmatic idealizations from sterilized isolation.37 Inconsistencies within and between Rich’s accounts of New Queer Cinema thus register as usefully unlaundered data for deriving rangy conclusions, not as problems to be overlooked or emended. More dubious for Deleuzians are critics who consolidate New Queer abundance and variation around a few representative figures and routines.38 Equally ominous would be any vision of queer cinema, New or otherwise, that preserves the same styles,

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desiring-states, and collective orientations in 2002 or in 2012 as in 1992. Nor can a false dichotomy between art and commerce simplify our sense of cinematic aesthetics and politics. Rich’s rhetoric, especially in the later pieces, sometimes tilts in these directions. Still, her cited examples, from Oscar nominees to experimental shorts, reiterate that any frame placed around contemporary queer cinema must be a pliable one, capable of admitting nuance, contradiction, and compromise.

Seven Pillars of Schizo Homo Pomo New Queer Cinema, then, gets articulated in explicit relation to sexuality and desire but lacks any coherent theorization that might impede narrow conceptions or pessimistic prognoses. The Cinema books, meanwhile, evince Deleuze’s customary theoretical density but banish any desiring impulse. Conjoining these assemblages thus augurs significant benefits for both, though that mission will require careful parsing throughout the chapters that follow—a parsing I hope to facilitate with some theoretical tenets laid out in advance. My ensuing case studies deliberately concern a heterodox array of films, both to signal the variety on which queer cinema thrives and to allow explications of multiple concepts from both Cinema books. Still, despite the book’s purposefully supple construction, my claims grow from exacting syntheses of Deleuzian logic. These echo ideas from queer theory but serve, too, as independently derived, nonprescriptive premises by which to conceive desire outside of any default settings—revealing itself to be as active and as generative a force as movement and time, and just as endemic to how images work. The Desiring-Image does not just respond anecdotally to erotically challenging films but places them within a sturdy hull of ideas that can keep admitting new passengers and sailing in new directions. What follows, then, is a set of maxims by which Rich’s Homo Pomo aesthetic undergoes what Anti-Oedipus calls “schizoanalysis,” a method blending detailed description of a complex assemblage with structural accounts of what that assemblage discloses about desire. I apply this same process of schizoanalysis (soon defined in more detail) to both Cinema books and, later, to my curated films, in all their formal and narrative eccentricities. All this critical work yields a conceptual base for rethinking Deleuzian desire as queer desire and for positioning any fusion of the two as a vital genome for a diverse and thought-provoking cinema. These principles do not comprehend every important idea that Deleuze has about film or desire, or every aspect of those ideas this book will explore. I defer, for example, discussing cinema’s endemic, uneasy relationship to capital—a hamper on the medium’s subversive potentials, but one which Deleuze refuses to bemoan in absolute terms, since it bears different effects on

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different movies. (Chapters 2, 5, and 6 explore these ideas further.) Still, in quick steps that later readings will expand, here are seven principles on which the book’s readings depend. They include some tenets I import directly from Deleuze, and others I synthesize from separate strands in his work. 1. Desire is at the root of all things. With only a chapter title, “DesiringProduction,” as its antecedent, a protean pronoun launches Deleuze and Guattari into a delirious thesis about desire and into their career as co-writers: “It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts.  .  . . Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections” (AO 1, original emphasis). One cannot overstate the metaphysical priority they ascribe to desire. Nothing precedes it, textually or conceptually, which makes the later evaporation of desire from the Cinema books all the more astounding. Stipulating that “desire is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it” (AO 26), Deleuze and Guattari specify that these machines form the engines or, in another of their preferred lexicons, the atomic root of phenomena we typically trace to different sources, including individual agency, psychology, or social rules: “Social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions. . . . There is only desire and the social, and nothing else” (AO 29, original emphasis). Moreover, “the desiring-machine is not a metaphor” (AO 41). Our notions of a sexed body, or any body, or of sexual identity, or any identity, are themselves metaphors for ceaseless, productive, but malfunction-prone machinery, not the other way around. Machinic desire includes what we think of as sexual desire, since “sexuality is no longer regarded as a specific energy” (AO 183); Deleuze and Guattari do not isolate sexuality as an intrapsychic mechanism like Freud’s drives or differentiate it from other forces operating in the world. Admittedly, relations between “desire” and “sexuality” remain hard to parse. While they sense “beneath the conscious investments of economic, political, religious, etc., formations . . . unconscious sexual investments, microinvestments that attest to the way in which desire is present in a social field” (AO 183), Deleuze and Guattari confess regarding the desiring-machines that “what they have to do with a properly sexual energy is not immediately clear” (AO 291).39 Still, the conflation of desire with all ontology, all production, and all relations affords it a conceptual scale commensurate with that of movement in Cinema 1 or with time or thought in Cinema 2. Logically, too, it must follow that if all things emerge from conjunctions of desiring-machines, then these must produce cinema as well. In refusing definition through object-orientations, especially sexed or gendered objects, desire in Anti-Oedipus invites queer appropriation: it does not adhere to “types” or prescribe to itself any normative targets. In a corresponding

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model of cinema, sexuality orients itself toward people but equally toward objects, ideas, or sensations, or to no stable site whatsoever. Deleuze and Guattari frame desire in terms of intensity rather than identity, and as a force of flux even if it does not fluctuate in every situation, or in every person’s experience. They compare sexuality to an exilic state or molecular agitation rather than Freud’s “pitiful little familialist secret,” insisting that “desire does not take as its object persons or things, but the entire surroundings that it traverses, the vibrations and flows of every sort to which it is joined, introducing therein breaks and captures—an always nomadic and migrant desire” (AO 292). Thus, though desire obeys firmly sexed, gendered, and object-oriented strictures in most films, this preponderance does not define desire or banish its queerer potentials from abiding even in films that superficially refuse them. After all, most movies do not carry movement or time to the remarkable peaks they attain in Cinema 1 or Cinema 2’s key films, either. By the 1990s, more and more films release sexuality into these machinic potentials, deterritorializing desire from its usual, misleading coordinates. To illustrate the emergence of such images, and to avoid conflating them with gay cinema per se, my early chapters privilege the films of the avowedly straight director David Cronenberg. His movies teem with unsettling conjunctions of erotic, organic, and machinic matter, prone to radical transformations within the films that suggest a fundamental mutability of all desire. I share Ian Buchanan’s view that, in its very status as “among the least understood aspects of his work,” desire serves two functions for Deleuze, both of them indispensable to this book’s arguments.40 One of these is a boldly denotative function: however iconoclastic, Deleuze and Guattari mean just what they say in designating desire as the world’s core machinery and its subatomic power source. The other role is performative, whereby desire, so grandiosely invoked, yields “an untranscendable horizon which, once posited, has the effect of rendering everything else immanent to it.”41 If desire renders all problems as manifestations of itself, films are not just made about desire but must, like all else, be made of desire. How this is so in any given case remains an open provocation, requiring assiduous argument. Deleuzian desire thus echoes that “definitional indeterminacy” and “elasticity” that Jagose highlights in relation to “queer” as a term. Desiring-images labor to keep this elasticity very much in play. 2. The basis of desire, as of cinema, is production. The audacity of DeleuzoGuattarian desire lies partly in refuting psychoanalytic axioms about desire as insatiable lack. They endorse Freud’s hypothesis of a productive unconscious until he turns out, in terms they often reprise, to construct it as a theater rather than a factory, forever restaging the same Oedipal scripts. Freud’s unconscious thus fills itself with metaphors and models of power that it hypocritically posits as indigenous content: the incest taboo, strict gender polarity, patriarchal authority, and so forth. By contrast, on the assembly line of Deleuzo-Guattarian desire, “production overtakes all idealistic categories,” so that no two factories

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yield the same output, and even single factories generate erratic products (AO 5). Desiring-production is “positive,” then, in a different sense than serving happy ends. It brings new objects and relations into the world, increasing the total absolute value of concepts and potentials the world thereby contains, rather than reprising known elements or simply marking their absence.42 Thus, desire’s vocation for Deleuze and Guattari is to produce, and to do so in unrestricted ways. This emphatic claim overrides distinctions other theorists might draw among what desire produces; for these thinkers, active desiringmachines yield images, objects, subjects, concepts, and relations in comparable ways. They do not, however, produce clean binaries. Anti-Oedipus replaces “either/or” habits of perception and thought with a metaphysic the book describes as “either . . . or . . . or . . .” (AO 12), revising or exploding dichotomies through sheer additive brio. That trifurcate womb that Claire Niveau’s “mutant” body produces in Dead Ringers, catalyzing affective relations, conceptual paradigms, even material objects that would not exist otherwise, exemplifies these “either . . . or . . . or . . .” dynamics: refusing to recognize gender or sex in binary terms, and thus producing habits of thought that elide such binarisms. Deleuzian desire also annuls obligations to biological reproduction. “Sexuality is not a means in the service of generation; rather, the generation of bodies is in the service of sexuality” (AO 108), whereby it creates more venues for its unpredictable productions. This same axiom governs Deleuze’s view of cinema as a “continual production of shapes, reliefs, and projections” (C2 147, original emphasis), manifest in formal relations and sensory stimuli, distinct from narrative structures or dogmatic agendas. To elucidate this concept via a queer cinematic touchstone, critics typically read the modes of sex and gender presented by the queens of Paris Is Burning (1990) as resignifications of maleness and femaleness, or of masculinity and femininity, whose lack of “natural” origin the documentary exposes, in sync with queer theories of its moment.43 Clearly, though, the ball-walkers also produce sexes, bodies, and genders that do not preexist these performances, even when they are explicitly cast as imitations of an archetype; hence the serial gripes about “categories” abruptly devised to guarantee everyone a prize. Again in common with queer theory of its era, Paris is quieter about sexual desire than about anatomical sex or performed gender, yet based on available evidence, the erotic economies among these subjects seem oriented toward signs, objects, and nuances of style, at least as strongly as they concern sexed bodies or subjects.44 One suspects no two desiring-productions precisely align among these contestants, and that they might alter on different evenings or in different environments. Almost any film that formally links intensities of desire to profuse sensations, perceptual density, or expanding modes of “relation” signals this basis in novel production—not just showing how these stimuli compel characters, but also provoking viewers to produce new desiring-relations of our own, outside

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any hetero/homo grid. Examples include the transubstantiation of desiring states into objects, music, clothes, or milieus in films by Peter Greenaway or Derek Jarman; the hyperconductive, frame-filling accumulations of sound and spectacle in Moulin Rouge! (2001), indicating desiring-machines in overdrive, and making kitsch, cliché, and excess into lust objects or desiring-orientations in themselves; or the eroticized, colloidal matter that seeps and congeals across Matthew Barney’s cryptically sexualized gallery films, most famously the Cremaster and Drawing Restraint cycles. My close readings in The Desiring-Image focalize this aspect of how desire generates itself in endless permutations, stressing how framing, editing, mixing, and other formal techniques perform the work of desiring-production, despite firmly instilled spectatorial habits of ascribing desire to characters in the images. 3. Desire and cinema follow the same processes of production. I indicated already that desire, despite its centrality to earlier Deleuzian texts, oddly absents itself from the Cinema volumes. I indicated, too, that several films whose erotics one is loath to reduce to hetero or homo models suggest an essentially productive desire, as Deleuze and Guattari theorize it. Exacerbating the irony in the first claim and the sense of missed opportunity in the second, Deleuzian desire does subsist in the Cinema books—unacknowledged as such—at the level of conceptual structures. Their ideas about how images function, how they relate to each other, and how they signify beyond themselves echo the models of desiring-production in Anti-Oedipus. Still, hardly anyone acknowledges this, and certainly Deleuze himself does not.45 Among my seven pillars, this one entails the most granular engagement with rarefied Deleuzian ideas, but I want to briefly indicate some key, basic symmetries. As we have heard, desiring-machines link up in constant, aleatory ways. This marks the first stage of what Deleuze and Guattari call a connection-disjunctionconjunction cycle. Even as machines connect, contrasts and tensions assert themselves; in this way they disjoin, a term that implies productive differentiation rather than detachment. These bonds, involving compatibilities and intensive renegotiations, yield huge dividends of useful energy that power further, novel assemblages, in a stage Deleuze and Guattari call conjunction. The conjoined product (a concept, a subject, a desiring-state . . .) is often naturalized as an entity, while thermodynamic forces of attraction and difference, having produced this assemblage, veer into new encounters. This connection-disjunctionconjunction series, basic to all desiring-production, can accelerate or slow down, pending environmental forces that propagate or impede it. Cinema, for Deleuze, takes form through a homologous three-stage process—a whole series of them, in fact. He presents these through different vocabularies of perception, montage, or relations among images, but we should note their weirdly unstated isomorphism with how desire also works—and not by analogy, a form of idealizing relation that Deleuze abhors, but by following what seems to me the same process. Consider, for example, the three-step

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sequence by which Deleuze alleges, citing terms from Charles Sanders Peirce, that we perceive and respond to images. Within shots, first levels of sensory stimulus (greenness, wetness) attach to second-level objects (green moss, wet mud). These in turn engage in kinetic, spatial, and dramatic relations at greater stages of complexity, within and across shots. Deleuze, after Peirce, calls this level thirdness. The resulting perceptual events draw stimuli into ornate relations, adding seamlessly in some respects while transmitting freestanding or even discordant impressions in others. In my example, from Jane Campion’s The Piano, “navigating the New Zealand bush” coheres as a third-level perceptual event and a realistic story point, even as the aqueous light separately exerts its own unnerving, first-level effect on the viewer, relating to other objects and scenes in the film, such as the climactic near-drowning. Just as desiringmachines conjoin into complex formations, then, while hurtling surplus energy into subsequent encounters, the sensory connections and disjunctions within or across cinematic shots complicate the frame’s internal relations at any given moment while also ramifying outside of it. The desiring-image, thriving on the same protocols, yields a cinema where “first” principles related to desire (beauty, charisma, intensity, profusion) attach to queer multitudes of “second”-level objects that may be male or female, animate or inanimate, conventional or otherwise, and so forth. Think of how Buñuel eroticizes a box whose contents we cannot see in Belle de Jour (1967), or how Barney sensualizes the folding of origami in Drawing Restraint 9 (2005). Conjunctions among these objects produce any number of “third”-level images and assemblages as highly contingent figures of desire: black lesbians, glam rockers, Beat poets, mutant bodies, and counterpublic salons are examples I will explore at length. Moreover, desire furnishes a plane Deleuze does not acknowledge through which we reckon with images.46 As I later explain in detail, Deleuze theorizes in Cinema 2 a postwar breakdown of the standard grammar in prewar movies, which Cinema 1 describes as a tightly coordinated perception-affection-action cycle. Postponing more nuanced discussion of those terms (though I view this tripartite sequence, too, as an unacknowledged cognate of desiring-production), I will say for now that postwar montage often strands viewers among free-floating perceptions and amid obscure affects radiating from opaque characters, minus any action that illuminates or unites them. In such circumstances, Deleuze proposes “thought” as our means of conjoining such confounding images into third- and fourth- and fifth-level relations. I submit, however, that a spectator might enlist desire rather than rational thought to make sense of the shifty sexual mosaics of Shortbus or the slippery double helix of the Bruce and Perry plots in Brother to Brother, two films I showcase in future chapters. Queer cinema, in solidarity with queer theory, in fact discourages partitioning desire and thought into wholly separate rubrics, as Cinema 2 implicitly does.

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Beyond more topical, personifying connotations, then, desire names a dynamic intrinsic to such Deleuzian cinematic schemas as firstness-secondnessthirdness or perception-affection-action. In these cases, as in Deleuzo-Guattarian desiring-production, some force or system of relation asserts itself; it encounters another force or relation that complements but disrupts the first; and this collision produces something, whether an action, an image, a relation, or a provisional subject. Deleuze even alleges that “each one of us . . . is nothing but an assemblage of three images, a consolidate [sic] of perception-images, affectionimages, and action-images” (C1 66).47 In other words, all perception, like all being, relating, and becoming, is fundamentally about desiring-production. 4. Desire, like movement and time, has no ideal forms. This notion, a broad refrain in LGBT politics, carries specific meaning in a Deleuzian context. Cinema 1 valorizes film’s unique ability among related arts to convey movement without reducing it to frozen, exemplary poses (a rearing horse, say, or a discus-thrower midtoss) or to simple distance traveled between two points. Early celluloid experiments parse movement into equidistant impressions, each separated by one twenty-fourth of a second, so that the movement of a stallion or sprinter inheres equally in awkward, midstride poses as in sculptural ideals: “the any-instant-whatever can be regular or singular, ordinary or remarkable” (C1 6, original emphasis). Still, the most finely diced snapshots of movement do not capture movement per se, which lies precisely in the dynamism that still-shots evacuate. In theorizing movement as the “any-instantwhatever,” Deleuze does more than just demote starting and stopping points or statuesque climaxes to an equal plane with every other image. He frames movement in temporal terms, and as a quality of pure change that cannot be reassembled from component parts. That is, adding together 240 frames of a bird beating its wings, blending iconic as well as “transitional” shots, does not equal the ten-second movement of the bird, which the frames can indicate but not capture, unless projected in series. This locution of the “any-whatever” that Deleuze introduces so early in Cinema 1, so as to distinguish philosophical essences from false idealizations, repeats frequently across both books: in the “any-instant-whatever” by which cinematic time estranges itself from linear telos or narrative arcs; in the “anypoint-whatever” at which images induce “a gap between the action and the reaction,” signaling breaks in time and solicitations of thought that continuity editing typically effaces (C1 61); or in the “any-spaces-whatever” where cinema increasingly unfolds, especially post–World War II films shot in rubbled urban areas or in rigorously abstracted spaces. Expanding on these ideas, I argue that queer cinema yields an any-desirewhatever, refusing to organize itself within an untenable hetero/homo binary or at equidistant, Kinseyan intervals between those poles. For Deleuze and Guattari, “the idea that there are two sexes, after all, is no better” then the bad structuralist habits of collapsing femininity into masculinity as its voided obverse

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(AO 295). By contrast, “making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand . . . not one or even two sexes, but n sexes” (AO 296), allowing desire’s machinic productions and orientations to spread in multiple, concurrent, even contradictory directions.48 Even when they appear recognizable as straight or gay or lesbian, desires bear entropic dimensions bound up with temporality, since those operating in a present moment presuppose untapped potentials for past or present variations, and for future transformations.49 The idea of an any-desire-whatever thus extends the umbrella-style LGBTQI model Jagose locates in queer politics to a series that can expand without limit, like a filmed movement spliced into ever-finer degrees at ever-higher frame rates. It also presupposes, however, Jagose’s more dynamic model of queerness, since desire does not settle into any one arrangement but concerns flows and frictions across and within them all. Desires thus remain impersonal in some core Deleuzian sense, passing through or forcing changes within subjects rather than belonging to them as static, innate, or identitarian fixtures. 5. Desire necessitates unique practices of reading. Anti-Oedipus yields many paradigms for what I call these any-desires-whatever: an “anoedipal sexuality” defying Freudian codes (AO 74); a sporelike “free disjunction” of desiringimpulses (AO 77); or a conception of “object choice” entailing not sex or gender but “flows of life and of society that this body and this person intercept, receive, and transmit” (AO 293), until the point “where homosexuality and heterosexuality cannot be distinguished any longer” and a “finally conquered nonhuman sex mingles with the flowers, a new earth where desire functions according to its molecular elements and flows” (AO 319). Both the ideas and the defiantly odd phrasing of these accounts attest to the difficulty Deleuze and Guattari ascribe to discerning or even conceiving desire, despite its ubiquity.50 Beyond the comparable stylistic difficulty or divisive politics of the writers Deleuze and Guattari credit as sages regarding desire (Proust, Melville, Kafka, Burroughs, Lawrence, and Miller, among others), the bigger hurdle desire poses to the readers and writers of Anti-Oedipus entails the “necessity for desiring-production to be induced from representation” (AO 314–315), a practice Deleuze and Guattari repudiate in every sense.51 This dilemma requires new modes of negotiating prose or images to keep machineries active and open-ended and to avoid “falling into either an unwarranted abstraction, or an untenable ontologization.”52 Readers of Deleuze often name the method of close reading texts as anathema to his method or politics—an evident overstatement, as Deleuze’s own work “clearly engages in all kinds of interpretive activity.”53 As literary scholars know, reading does not require positing fixed or enshrouded “meanings,” the great bugbear of Deleuzian thought. Still, one must avoid pulping texts through a Deleuzian mill, thereby always generating the same axioms or privileging what a text shows or says above how it functions, what problems it maps, what its specific machineries connect or disjoin or conjoin, or how it “escapes” that which it posits.

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Again, the procedure Deleuze and Guattari devise toward these ends is schizoanalysis, which traces patterns, breaks, and intensities within any representation to ascertain its machinic structures and potential trajectories—to include any account of one’s own desires.54 This technique preserves the anomalies it encounters, without decoding or taxonomizing them as symptoms of a hidden substructure.55 The task involves not archaeology but engineering, pursuing circuits within an eclectic assemblage and testing how flexibly these relations might cross, reroute, or split into still further networks, given the Deleuzian constants of dynamism and inevitable change. As we have seen, most writing on New Queer Cinema defaults to success/ failure, upstart/sellout, or life/death paradigms rather than ask how cinematic modes proliferate new versions and variations as a sign of schizo health. These accounts also omit how other contemporaneous films forge alternative paths from similar premises, to include taking variegated desires as immanent to cinema and to life; aligning desire and image-making with constant, polymorphous production; or favoring any-desires-whatever over strictly gay, lesbian, or straight formations. To fill these lacunae, The Desiring-Image poses Deleuzian “lines of escape” from New Queer assemblages, either within that movement’s era or as signs of change over time. My close readings schizoanalyze how films such as Dead Ringers or Beau travail unsettle their own apparent structures and discourses. Even when, say, The Watermelon Woman confronts us with an “actual” lesbian or Shortbus presents what its makers and reviewers describe as “actual” sex, the bases of queer cinema require us to question these definitive claims on sexed or gendered “reality.” The Desiring-Image schizoanalyzes the Cinema books themselves, probing their unacknowledged desiring-structures and demonstrating that reading, as a critical act, can achieve productive and open effects.56 Moreover, given Deleuze and Guattari’s convictions as to the inevitable yet unpredictable forces of change within any system, it is inconceivable that Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 represent a frozen dyad of Deleuzian thought about the cinema, minus any “lines of escape.” Movement and time ought surely to be joined or succeeded by other concepts that invigorate cinematic relations at comparable scales. As Deleuze freely concedes, “there is every reason to believe that many other kinds of images can exist” (C1 68), a likelihood that intensifies near the end of Cinema 2, amid claims about nascent political cinemas and about the “informatics” of then-emergent media technologies. I do not suggest desire is the only term one could pose as a further cinematic expansion from movementand time-images, or that desire synthetically reconciles these earlier systems according to a Hegelian logic Deleuze strenuously refused.57 However, exegetically reading the movement-image and, especially, the time-image as fixed endings to Deleuze’s thoughts about cinema seems as idealizing of those terms—and as misdirected a reading practice—as those that Deleuze explicitly warns against.

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6. Desire has no politics. Although the effects, styles, and situated relations of cinema always bear a political charge, even or especially when they appear not to, and although queer cinema politicizes desire in multiple ways, Deleuze and Guattari specify that desire itself has no inherent political bent. Since desiring-machines subtend everything in Anti-Oedipus, ascribing anything as innate to them is futile.58 Existing only to conjoin and produce, machines do not invite political review, though relations within and between their conjunctions do. “Becoming is always innocent, even in crime” (C2 142), Deleuze writes, and we have noted already his and Guattari’s expectation that virtually any combined formation bespeaks a tangle of reactionary and revolutionary dispositions. Even in Kafka, their book most concerned with theorizing the political and collective ramifications of art, Deleuze and Guattari stipulate that “we cannot say in advance, ‘This is a bad desire, that is a good desire.’ Desire is a mixture, a blend” (K 60). That would almost be enough to say on the subject, except that debates about New Queer Cinema hinge so decisively on invocations of politics. Moreover, queer theory perennially holds itself to high standards of political efficacy, often staking affidavits of its value as theory on this claim of being sufficiently “political.” I am fully susceptible to the practical and affective appeal of politically germane scholarship, and to its sublime moments of fulfilled promise, though these strike me as rather rare, unless we allow ourselves some unembarrassed flexibility about what counts as a political payoff. I am not amnesiac or insensitive about the degrees to which the poststructuralist life of “queer” arose on the grounds of staging actions, demanding legislation, forging alliances, combating AIDS, fighting homophobia, resisting racism and sexism within gay activism, and maximizing LGBT visibility in public spaces from the shopping mall to the Washington Mall. Given these legacies, it makes perfect sense that queer theories would bear a particular brunt of making themselves accountable to political exigencies. Even so, I worry about the constraining effects on any theory when we preassign a functional imperative, to include those we call political— without, it must be said, always defining just what we mean by politics.59 Deleuzian work both demands these political imperatives, since he abhors idealization and insists that philosophers produce efficacious concepts, yet also refuses them, since he resists mechanizing theory into a tool bound to some predetermined strategy.60 Theory must work, but that work cannot be “organized,” a frequent and always derogatory Deleuzian keyword. After starting, then, with its machinic, seemingly decontextualized schema of what desire comprises, the mounting stakes of Anti-Oedipus lie in direct reckonings with antifascist, anticapitalist, and anticolonial politics of the late 1960s. The book’s great questions concern how members of a collective come to misrecognize themselves strictly as individuals; how they thus enfeeble or render metaphorical their relations to other people and to power; and thus how singular desires become generic investments, promoting false constructions of the subject,

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acting in ways rebarbative to the interests of the individual and the group. Specifying a political dimension of one’s project thus remains a necessity in Deleuzian studies; no project marshaling Anti-Oedipus or Kafka into a conceptual aggregate with Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, toward the questionably political end of offering formally centered readings of profit-chasing films, should ignore disciplinary injunctions against strategically partial or ideologically toothless deployments of these volumes.61 I would like, though, to defend the value of a different form of politics, imbued with a power to isolate concepts and to reinterrogate relations that matter in the world, precisely by not knowing what aims will be met or what their destinies will be. The political work of The Desiring-Image, pervasive but unprescriptive, takes several cues from Kara Keeling’s success in The Witch’s Flight in articulating a framework of queer, Deleuze-inspired, cinematic politics that balances the representational and imperceptible facets of schizoanalysis. “The political challenge for filmmakers,” she says, is “to reveal that which has been hidden in the image by rediscovering ‘everything that has been removed to make [the image] interesting’ or by ‘suppressing many things that have been added to make us believe that we were seeing everything.’”62 Renegotiations or upheavals in our cinematic perceptions thus bear tremendous political import, since films constitute not a recreational annex to daily reality but an immanent component of it. Furthermore, that reality is itself cinematic: flattering, testing, and rebuking our perceptions, and doing so at any-instantwhatever, not just at privileged moments.63 The specific, corresponding politics of the desiring-image challenge us to observe what we remove or suppress in deferring to perceptual habits. These include forms or mutations of desire we omit when they do not sit easily within heterosexuality or homosexuality but fall between or outside them, or in gray areas within them, or have precious little to do with them. The open-endedness of politics in The Desiring-Image derives also from a wish to honor queer theory’s and queer cinema’s right to function as theory and as art—and to take seriously Deleuze’s insight that lines of escape lead less often to “liberated” futures than toward usefully uncertain ones. I do not wish to presume how, if at all, films like Naked Lunch or Brother to Brother or Beau travail will function as efficacious tools for politics—though each film supplies potent ripostes to our habits of producing desire, considering history, tolerating clichés, and forging collectivity. The failure of several of my films to be taken up as queer often arose from a perceived inscrutability (Velvet Goldmine) or infelicity (the Cronenberg films) in their political bents. Films like The Watermelon Woman and Shortbus signal strong political investments, but I think they portend more qualified trajectories than their rousing finales imply. What prevails in each case is the promise of change, of productively disorganized difference, and of new desiring-potentials that chafe against current categories.

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In solidarity, then, with other Deleuzian film scholars, I encourage the affective and political labors of disordering cliché and of reopening the interval of thought. Again, however, desiring should not be understood as a less valuable mode than thought in how we confront, denature, and respond to images, to one another, and to regimes and structures we collectively navigate. Rather than stake all claims of value, then, on achieving a certain politics, we do well to foster the conditions for perceiving and producing escapes from habits of recognition, or of thought, or of desire broadly construed. We can tilt the balance of “revolutionary, reformist, and reactionary elements” as far as possible toward the former terms without growing prescriptive, and without forgetting that different people even in the queer “community” will feel very differently about the effects of what we collectively produce or perceive. 7. Queer cinema is a minor cinema. “Throughout Sundance,” Rich wrote in 1992, “a comment Richard Dyer made in Amsterdam echoed in my memory. There are two ways to dismiss gay film: one is to say ‘Oh, it’s just a gay film’; the other, to proclaim, ‘Oh, it’s a great film, it just happens to be gay.’” Neither form of faint praise took hold in Sundance because the New Queer films “were great precisely because of the ways in which they were gay.”64 I submit, though, that many New Queer films, like other movies of similar vintage, are great for the ways in which they are not exactly gay, but queer—that is, neither “just gay,” nor “not gay,” nor, in Deleuze’s words, “caught up in a relation of exclusive disjunction with heterosexuality.”65 The most oft-repeated tenet in theorizing “queer” concerns how that term allows but frequently exceeds or refuses identity frameworks that lesbian and gay still connote, albeit with their own complexities in tow. Still, even the least nuanced LGBT romantic comedies and narrative dramas are often touted at festivals, in scholarship, or in marketing materials as queer cinema, a legacy of that locution’s swift and sturdy uptake. The semantic drift is impossible to rectify, especially since terms for sexual dissidence have always borne messily cocomplicit relations to each other. What becomes difficult, though, is gaining a purview on erotically challenging cinema that moves in and out of LGBT frameworks—films that show how desire shape-shifts in relation to politics, aesthetic forms, coalitional pressures, sociocultural positions, current objects or partners, and yes, identity claims. In all these ways, desire changes over time, sometimes rapidly, and often holds contradictory truths in place at once. This framework is what The Desiring-Image seeks to theorize as queer, taking desire as mutable, multifaceted, and contingent for all kinds of people, whatever their sexual identifications—hence the mix of desiring-orientations among the films and filmmakers I investigate. Under these auspices, I argue for queer cinema as a Deleuzian minor cinema—a context that explains the troubles we find in naming, curating, or conceptualizing queer cinema as more than a cognate for LGBT filmmaking. One crux of what Deleuze and Guattari tell us about so-called minor groups is

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that they are barely perceptible as such. The terms that would facilitate their coalition, recognition, or collective utterance have not yet taken hold, and so they often travel across Deleuzian texts under such phrases as “people who do not yet exist.” Such positioning clearly entails benefits and liabilities. It prohibits the public acknowledgment or political presence that a more familiarly defined minority might claim, but it also avoids attendant risks of profiling, typecasting, assimilating, ghettoizing, bureaucratic management by the major culture, or internal policing against immanent community standards of the “positive image,” “black enough,” “gay enough,” or “X enough” varieties. Minor groups bear important relations to art and language as venues by which to initiate their coming-into-being. Still, given the lack of clear contours that constitutes their minorness, plus the risks of increased homogeneity or surveillance, even texts like Kafka that purport to define minor art or artists reflect equal and opposite apprehensions about doing so. I have already rehearsed Kafka’s most germane criteria for conceiving the minor, aimed less at what a minor literature is than what it does or promises to do, sustaining Deleuze’s perennial preference for dynamics of becoming over aspects of being. Once more, these capacities entail: (1) reinhabiting and codescrambling a major culture’s language from within, and thus launching it in new directions, as a double act of deterritorialization; (2) privileging the political qualities even of anomalous stories, aberrant forms, or rarefied experience, since “the individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it” (K 17); and (3) achieving a collective orientation through these deterritorializing efforts and political reflections, ensuring their implications are portable enough to register as a “people’s concern” (K 18), but also without conceiving the people in question as homogeneous or as united around dogmas. These criteria will reprise themselves at several points in The Desiring-Image as various filmmakers convey desire or sexuality in disparate ways that answer some or all of these minor calls. Again, minorness is not just easier to perceive or to argue in situ than to define in the abstract but also constitutively necessary to approach this way. Everything from length to theme to budget to medium to generic mode to demographic orientation has been adduced as a basis for conceiving minor cinema, and yet no categorical rubric can hold without violating the minor project. I will underscore, then, that not just queer people but also the films themselves emerge as a shifting, semivisible, irresolvably porous collective. This is why the book does not posit any new canon of queer cinema, or redress any prior one on its own internal terms, or pretend to cover all the rich premises on which a queer minor cinema could be entertained. It is also why the asymmetrical terms by which various critics (even, sometimes, the same critics) heralded, expanded, second guessed, and eulogized the New Queer framework signal not a category in need of stabilizing but one that warrants infiltrating and expanding.

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That said, opposing queerness to gayness is as false a position as conflating them, and implying a case by case, proof-in-the-pudding optic for minorness is something Deleuze and Guattari make sure to avoid. To address the first point, Kafka’s most famous distillation of the minor dilemma, framed around Kafka’s writing of prose in a Jewish Bohemian dialect, concerns “the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, the impossibility of writing otherwise” (K 16). Note that, for these theorists, minor groups always form around language, location, racialization, or geopolitical status, but never in terms of gender or sex, an elision The Desiring-Image works to undo.66 Still, the structures at issue are similar, and all my chapters, in claiming various films as minor, eventually survey each text’s relation to some major definition of gayness, lesbianness, homosexuality, or homoeroticism. The goal is never to discard these codes but to illumine each film’s productive estranging of them, launching them into new flows, formally and conceptually, via acts of minor deterritorialization. Perhaps, then, queer films are those that producers cannot resist making, which cannot be made (or marketed) as gay or lesbian films, yet which also cannot be made (or marketed) otherwise. Minorness lies in the how and the why of each filmmaker’s response to that paradox. Speaking, then, to that issue, Kafka, a short book, changes its tack from start to finish regarding its criteria for minor art. It ends by posing four questions that resonate with the triad of deterritorialization, political salience, and collective value but stress different issues. Where the former terms predict the hopeful effects of minor work, the latter ones gauge the form of any actual assemblage. To paraphrase: can it endure without any master signifier to organize around? How rigidly or loosely do its parts fit together, so as to accommodate a minor polity’s variations? Is the assemblage well-equipped to overspill its current structures in useful ways, proving that its potentials exceed the present moment? Lastly, in exact language, “What is the ability of a literary machine, an assemblage of enunciation and expression, to form itself into this abstract machine insofar as it is a field of desire?” (K 88). In other words, do aesthetic strategies exist, even in unusual combinations, that can channel the collective, flexible, and durable promise of the minor group—framed at last as an assemblage of desiring-machines? The last question reintroduces issues of artistic form that The DesiringImage takes very seriously, engaging closely with images and sequences, testing their ability to convey unfixed desires in specifically cinematic terms, with some sense of their ramifications. Importantly, none of these questions presuppose where in the filmmaking market a minoring operation can unfold. My own conviction is that neither the “innermost” nor the most “marginal” positions provide exclusive bases from which to assail the castle-keeps of Oedipus, capitalism, heteronormativity, or artistic cliché.67 Thus, complementing work by other scholars who bring Deleuzian rigor to Hollywood blockbusters and to the most ephemeral, experimental, or openly dissident cinemas,

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I survey a zone of filmmaking that falls between mass-market and noncommercial registers.68 This work hails from such arthouse luminaries as David Cronenberg and Todd Haynes, financed by independent producers but distributed by huge Hollywood companies; from such European auteurs as Claire Denis; from festival darlings and syllabus fixtures like Cheryl Dunye, whose work has played to thousands of students and one-off audiences that standard “attendance tracking” would never catch; and by outsider upstarts like Rodney Evans and John Cameron Mitchell, who for different reasons reached their biggest audiences on DVD and, in Evans’s case, on public television. What does it mean, then, to approach early-1990s New Queer Cinema as this book does, not as a minor collective itself (though I believe it was one) but, two decades onward, as a discourse in need of minoring, revealing another queer cinema lurking both within and beyond it?

A Word on Orientations, or Around 1991 Before the availability of so much cinema on home formats, Deleuze builds his concepts of film as only a catholic, voracious film lover could. Despite his abiding theoretical convictions and auteur-centered proclivities, Deleuze circles each film with one eye on its unique features and the other on prosodies typifying a director’s career or an era of filmmaking. Cinema appears to have been for him what it still is for me: a locus of spontaneous, site-specific discovery, where desires connect, detach, and conjoin with limitless potential— allowed, always, their undiluted eccentricity. Upon discovering Rich’s New Queer dispatches, I sensed in them a comparable openness to disparate texts and aesthetics; like Deleuze, she invests ardor and hope in the cinema even while grasping its complicities with troubling structures in the world. These otherwise strange bedfellows both achieve nuanced elaborations of meaningful concepts that emerge across ecumenically chosen sets of movies, betraying as many dissimilarities as markers of affinity (itself a signal of strong minor potentials). I, too, am interested in assemblages of texts that may bear little outwardly in common but which echo one another’s orientations in idiosyncratic ways—producing new desires, or new thoughts about desire, amid shared historical parameters. In so often directing discourse about queer cinema to the most famous early1990s titles, and in our recurring reliance on queer-theoretical tropes from that era, we risk a disproportionate focus on one privileged constellation—at times perpetuating a Dream Team model of what queer cinema briefly, thrillingly meant rather than an open-ended view of its continual becomings. The Desiring-Image makes its own returns to that vaunted era, but in so doing, I have pursued the distinction Sara Ahmed draws between being “oriented toward” an object and being “oriented around something .  .  . such that one might even

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become what it is that is ‘around.’” She elaborates that “to be oriented around something means to make that thing central,” like a home base from which new perceptions or actions become possible: “I might be oriented around writing, for instance, which will orient me toward certain kinds of objects (the pen, the table, the keyboard).”69 Orienting ourselves around queer movies and methods from 1991 does not mean fixing these as origins, templates, or sites of overweening nostalgia. Rather, having accumulated so much wisdom and initial curiosity from mainstays of that period, we can now orient attention toward new objects, including undernourished seeds within the well-tilled ground on which we often stand, and also well beyond it. Jane Gallop attests that in “the fictive moment I call Around 1981,” feminist scholarship migrated from debates over deconstructing categories to those around the politics of institutionalization—not far from the story one could spin about the Homo Pomo fervor “around 1991” and, soon after, the corporate cooptation of New Queer Cinema.70 Her inquiry springs in part from avowedly personal motivations, taking stock of her discipline as it stood in the year she got tenure. I obviously did not get tenure in 1991, the year around which this book is initially oriented. Mindful, though, of Teresa de Lauretis’s admission that it is only by generic convention that academic books do not read like autobiography, 1991 was the year I began taking myself to the movies, which for the most incorrigible cinemagoers feels a bit like getting tenure.71 In cinemas or via video rentals on a U.S. Army post in Hanau, Germany, where stricter gender scripts might have been expected, I saw movies ranging from My Own Private Idaho to Naked Lunch to the crypto-lesbian Fried Green Tomatoes to the queer-baiting yet so very queer Silence of the Lambs. I detected in all of them, and coextensively in myself, a refusal of fixed truths about desire, attraction, and sexuality. The various ways they linked genre-bound story beats to clearly aberrant images and suggestions invigorated my sense of how relations might work, erotically, artistically, or intellectually (I wasn’t yet thinking about politics), and how they might bond elements that were not typically bonded. My own private response to a montage of eroticized photostills in Idaho or to a sudden effulgence of weird sexual protoplasm in Naked Lunch, even more than my reactions to “gayer” images in either film, activated what Eve Sedgwick called the “numinous pleasure” of “near-visceral identification,” with one key caveat.72 My fascination lay less in “identifying” with these images than in surmising through them that if these unexpected relations were possible, surely countless others were, too. Movies, like lovers, have always been more interesting as windows than as mirrors. Fixing this book’s scope and priorities has of course entailed tough choices of what to understate or omit. For example, and speaking of Gallop, The Desiring-Image does not privilege feminist analysis as another book on similar topics might have done. Given gender inequities that have persisted in queer cinema as well as notorious problems around Deleuze’s ideas about

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women, such an approach has much to recommend it and factors into another budding book project, still more virtual than actual. I can only say to readers who may ask or have asked about this choice that links among queerness and Deleuzian desiring-production strike me as scarcer in recent film scholarship than feminist inquiries into Deleuze.73 Moreover, the critical uptake of “queer” and its politics, plus the timing of the New Queer groundswell, allow this project to commence at more or less the exact moment when the Cinema books leave off. This enables me in turn to deduce and to feel where Deleuze’s trajectories might have led into new filmic contexts, rather than foregrounding my considerable irritation with how he already ignores feminist insights and filmmaking even amidst a period he otherwise surveys so catholically. This choice reflects Deleuzian encouragements to project forward along new lines of flight— though again, there will be time to join with other colleagues in redressing past omissions and speculating new futures for feminist Deleuzian analyses of cinema. For now, hopefully readers will note the critical eye this book already casts on molecular, machinic, or transitive gender categories, and on similar concepts of desire, in ways that echo and profit from the work of Deleuzian feminists.74 Meanwhile, as Gallop warns, such personal processes of discovery as this book has afforded me can soon feel outpaced by ensuing sea changes, once today’s conjectures become tomorrow’s status quos. She writes that her book “not only passes through two different theoretical formations but around 1989 begins to feel the pressure of a third and grows increasingly anxious as I push to get it done . . . before it enters a configuration different than the one for/in which it was written.”75 The Desiring-Image emerges from that third formation she does not name but which feels like a dead ringer for sexuality studies and queer theory. To write now from those vantages, especially regarding cinema, or about cinema at all, is to write about a medium whose hybridization, digitization, and completely restructured economies look ever more alien to the theatrically projected, celluloid-based enterprise through which most of the films in this project arose.76 For years I have imagined The Desiring-Image as leaping off from prior discursive promontories: after New Queer Cinema, in the wake of AIDS or the reclaiming of queer, moving forward from Cinema 2, et al. Perhaps, though, the book more pertinently precedes paradigm shifts related to digitality, downloading, and DIY platforms for making and consuming images, as well as comparable, machinic changes in gender and sexuality themselves. My undergraduates, whom I have overheard chastising peers for waiting until the wizened age of sixteen to come out of the closet, describe Poison in contemporary lingo as a “mash-up,” and Cheryl Dunye or Sadie Benning less as New Queer mavericks than as Australopithecine precursors to the dawn of YouTube, recording status updates with their crude tools, awaiting the era when Cheryl could type “Watermelon Woman” into Wikipedia or IMDb

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and call it a day.77 Obviously, for these students, 1990s-era queer cinema cannot be the open future or alluring Star Child it was for me. Happily, I think, these students startle less than I would have at their age to sexual and gendered comportments as changeable as in Velvet Goldmine, as uninhibited as in Shortbus, or as justifiably miffed as in Brother to Brother. If cinema as they know it has been heavily molecularized, their experiences of sex and gender—at least from their perspective, and pending the requisite financial and communal supports—can also be copied and pasted, Saved As, or completely rebooted. I have not written The Desiring-Image, though, as a threnody for vanishing models of cinema, even if its own crisis seems upon us, its structures mutating as I work. Rather than glancing fixedly backward at the 1990s, I revisit that vantage to reorient myself around it, assessing why that landscape typically feels different to me when I read about it than when I remember it. From there, as Ahmed recommends, I reach toward different tools, carrying me back to the future we already inhabit, by which time my most recent case studies have already premiered, and from which point I encourage still further speculations.

Preview of Coming Attractions To begin reframing the years around 1991, my opening chapters apply my theoretical grafting of the Cinema books, Deleuzian desire, minor art, New Queer tropes, and queer theory more broadly to the midcareer films of David Cronenberg, specifically the erotically challenging pair of Dead Ringers (1988) and Naked Lunch (1991). Cronenberg embodies an unexpected but remarkably apt bellwether for the desiring-image on three grounds. First, despite being contemporaries and stylistic complements to the New Queer flagships, these movies never appear in accounts of that movement—proof that broad shifts in cinematic desire around that era exceeded even Rich’s roomy and influential models. Second, Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch respectively exemplify key templates of Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, elucidating how their schemas operate and relate, while reading queer desire into each book. Third, these films deterritorialize sex, gender, and desire to extravagant degrees from typically gay or straight coordinates, fulfilling that edict of minor cinema even as they refute common misconceptions that deterritorialization always pays salutary dividends. As chapter 1 attests, Dead Ringers generates queer effects from innuendoladen dialogue and trace elements of the tabloid scandal that inspired the film. Even more productive of queer implication, however, are the peculiar objects and persons framed within the film’s shots, the evolving relations established among them, and the steadily aggravated tensions between visible images and their out-of-fields. Given the centrality of these principles in Cinema 1, this

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chapter reads Dead Ringers’s dismantling of sexed, gendered, and erotic idealisms through other terms crucial to that volume, including the perceptionimage and the impulse-image. In chapter 2, the temporalities and conflicting realities of Naked Lunch invite equally sustained engagements with Cinema 2, illustrating but also queering Deleuze’s formulations of sheets, peaks, and series as the units of modern montage, and of actual and virtual tensions within and between shots. Whereas Deleuze bases these concepts in cinema’s derationalizing of time, I marshal them as frameworks for discontinuous and mutable forms of desire. The film’s extreme representations of alien, “prepersonal” desires are impossible to take literally, yet they underscore positive virtualities of desire more generally, evoking it as an open and unruly plane of barely charted potentials. Cronenberg’s singular forms of eroticism—as distinctive yet mutually resonant as Deleuze’s theories of film in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2—merit the intensive treatment they receive across two chapters, fleshing out important ideas that impact later readings. Still, to avoid isolating his sensibility from comparable visions in more LGBT-targeted films, and to disrupt easy assumptions about where queerness abides, I end chapter 2 with a reading of John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus (2006). That film echoes Naked Lunch’s portrait of counterpublic aesthetics and politics among a thinly veiled coterie of real queer artists: the Beats in Cronenberg’s case, and the post-9/11 downtown New York scene in Mitchell’s. In these respects and in its infamous incorporation of unsimulated sex scenes, Shortbus also engages the rhetorics and dialectics of actual and virtual that pervade Cinema 2 and Naked Lunch. Despite this film’s warm reception among queers, however, I argue that Shortbus deterritorializes sex and gender less rigorously than Naked Lunch does, inviting more normative drifts than appear at first glance. Chapter 3 investigates Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996), a New Queer landmark that debuted just before skepticisms began to overtake that discourse. Where Cronenberg and Mitchell challenge parameters of cinematic perception, with particular attention to embodied eroticism, Dunye advances us to the next stage of Cinema 1’s perception-affection-action cycle with her creative deployments of the affection-image. The film’s structure as a fauxdocumentary about a forgotten black actress, brimming with talking-head shots, allows me to parse key differences between the affection-image, which Deleuze theorizes as producing subjects and faces, and its more colloquial cousin, the close-up, which simply depicts them. From there, I offer a queer reading of The Watermelon Woman’s deceptively “real” faces and of its characters’ claims to lesbian identification, however remote or ambiguous. I contend that the film yields a minor reading of “lesbian” as a shifting term for a fractious network of individuals, cohorts, spaces, and erotic behaviors, contesting what we think we know about “lesbian,” encouraging us to cruise faces and stories accordingly, and promoting new models of collective identity and politics.

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Together, these chapters argue that Cinema 1’s concepts of perception and affection remain pivotal to postwar film and to how we construct a queer Deleuzian cinema of desire. Cinema 2, however, jettisons formulations like the perception-image and affection-image, not because they have no role in later films, but because they no longer culminate in the actions that complete the initial cycle. Paola Marrati, among others, has asked whether to privilege the later volume so fully above Cinema 1 is to forfeit important potentials for change: “What happened to all of cinema’s revolutionary hopes? What happened to its faith in the transformation of the world and of humans? Was that hope also broken, like the thread linking humans’ actions to the world and to the universe?”78 Given the activist politics, revised historiographies, and collective artistic praxes that generate New Queer Cinema and related innovations in the 1990s, Marrati’s question seems apropos for theorizing a queer desiring-image, even if we cannot dismiss the concerns about action and representation that overtake Cinema 2. My final chapters, then, foreground movies that synthesize concepts from Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 as a means of addressing Marrati’s political questions and of stressing the complicities of desire with various schemas of continuity and discontinuity. If any figure from the Cinema books brings these elements together, it is the crystal-image of Cinema 2, encompassing multiple models by which images emit and make meaning from their unruly multiplicities: metaphysical, temporal, political, or, in my readings, gendered and sexual. Chapter 4 lays out key tenets of why the crystalline mode is so conducive to figuring queer desire, evoking specific artistic projects and historical scenarios while also suggesting mutabilities of desire in a broader, theoretical key. I update Deleuze’s auteurdriven list of four major types of the crystal-image, naming apt cases of each type as practiced in and occasionally beyond so-called queer cinema. From there, I offer a close reading of Rodney Evans’s Brother to Brother (2004), a dramatizing of queer bonds among Harlem Renaissance writers and artists whose legacy increasingly affects the life of a black, gay college student in our own era. Filmed with unavoidable but misleading modesty, Brother to Brother hails from that group of low-budget, identity-focused, nearly straight-to-DVD features that scholars often impugn as conformist heirs to a formerly spikier, flamboyantly dissident tradition. I denounce such dismissals by arguing that Brother to Brother, through its crystalline structure, negotiates painful frictions between actual living and virtual imagination, moving across past, present, and future temporalities and complicating desire’s slippery relations to racial, gendered, and activist discourses. Chapters 5 and 6 extend my queering of the crystal-image with readings of two celebrated titles by name-brand auteurs: Claire Denis’s Beau travail (1999), a tale of masculine rivalry and imperial twilight set amid the French Foreign Legion, and Todd Haynes’s glam-rock phantasmagoria Velvet Goldmine (1998). By ending with these two films, The Desiring-Image mirrors Anti-Oedipus’s

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trajectory from its inaugural theories of desire in itself, akin to what I emphasize in Cronenberg’s work, toward a gradual situating of those concepts within political, historical, and seemingly hope-starved economic frameworks. Queer desire is not the only circuit of exchange that seems both thwarted and circulated in these later films, in relation to changing ideas about what desires are, what bodies connote, what markets determine their value, and how their politics could or should develop. Chapter 5 considers the roles of capital in Beau travail, given the narrative’s interest in different exchange economies and also the terms by which Beau travail was promoted as queer. A decade after Eve Sedgwick’s brilliant uncloseting of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd as an allegory of multidirectional male longing, Denis’s loose adaptation of that novella acts as though its homoerotic secret is well out of the bag—hulking but vestigial, like a buffed-up soldier with no battle to fight. If Beau travail’s homoeroticism thus entails both a vital fact and a bit of old news, desire poses new, queer enigmas within the film. Denis places complex pressures on the sculpted Legionnaires and furtive African women as riddlesome archetypes of sex and gender; on the literally crystalline spaces of the prologue and coda; and on her film’s transitional states of gender, sexuality, economy, and postimperial sociality. I end this three-chapter exploration of the crystal-image, as well as this book, with Velvet Goldmine’s wild swings between grim actualities and resplendent virtualities, its cloud-covered 1980s and its kaleidoscopic 1970s. In these respects, the film shuffles the conceits of Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, staging a series of poignant swerves between two visions of queer desire in a changing world: on the one hand, a revue of exuberant ripostes to heteronormative rule, and on the other, a chastened skepticism regarding the efficacies of flagrant gender trouble, even at a broad collective level. Goldmine plays both sides of a rift in queer cultural history that exceeds but also explains its bifurcated tonalities, for without being mentioned, the advent of AIDS intercedes between the plotlines. The consequent devastation, not unlike the martial crises that cleave Cinema 1 from Cinema 2, limns the film’s pursuit of a new cinematic idiom, a desiring-image befitting such a chaos of pageantry and apocalypse. The movie buries but also celebrates our pasts, admits to feeling paralyzed in the present, yet plaintively conceives a future of border-crossing coalitions among unusual suspects. This final trio of chapters thus brings together the barely exhibited, unabashedly gay Brother to Brother, the intensely praised, chastely homoerotic Beau travail, and the ambivalently received, fluidly pansexual Velvet Goldmine. All three films call into question what did or did not count as queer cinema just as that scholarly and popular discourse entered an agnostic phase in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The disparities and complementarities among the films in this book hopefully suggest that queer cinema is collectively healthiest when every exemplar finds itself reflected in but also interrogated by its peers.

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Resonating with Deleuze and Guattari’s claims for minor artistry—even while they manifest this legacy in very different ways—all my case studies suggest collective potentials, crystalline deterritorializations, and incipient but potent politics regarding a filmic tradition that has neither solidified nor senesced. If The Desiring-Image does its job, the book affirms that new productivities will continue to proliferate in queer cinema, appearing unpredictably within our pasts and throughout our futures, posing new questions, and fostering new forms of ardent, attentive recognition.

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“Beyond Gay” Dead Ringers and Queer Perceptions “We’re Just Not Sure What Kind It Is” David Cronenberg constitutes an unnerving yet uniquely rewarding test case for theorizing queer cinema. To appreciate why this is so, we begin with a quick survey of his singular career, beginning in the early 1970s when he filmed a test scene for Cinépix, a new Canadian production company known for boosting their films’ commercial potential with soft-core eroticism. Cronenberg’s audition piece involved a man and woman making love in a swing, and, despite chuckles about his formalist approach to such low-bar material (“I was very interested in getting interesting angles and stuff ”), it earned a basically warm reception.1 Then, however, his prospective employers got a look at Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970), two hour-long films Cronenberg shot on glossy 35mm stock to mark his graduation from student projects. Stereo transpires at a facility called the Canadian Academy for Erotic Enquiry, where a dandyish doctor studies five nubile youths possessing “omnisexual” orientations as well as telepathic superpowers. Filmed with Kubrickian detachment in black and white, the subjects and researcher cruise each other throughout the Academy’s bucolic grounds and brutalist hallways. They fondle anatomical models; swap pacifiers and pop pills with sensual exaggeration; and enjoy sexual roundelays of men with women, men with men, or men with women and men. Mysterious, deadpan voice-overs on the otherwise empty soundtrack struggle to taxonomize these desires, such that the film defamiliarizes language as well as bodies, turning clinical discourse against itself and undermining gendered and sexual clichés. Crimes of the Future follows Adrian Tripod, a Kafkaesque figure pursuing his lost mentor, the “mad dermatologist” Antoine Rouge, who vanished upon discovering a plague whose victims emit a sexually arousing foam from their pores and orifices. Male sufferers of this syndrome sprout new external organs, and when they wrestle, stroke, or massage each other, as happens frequently, they express the malignant, erogenous froth in shots of livid, Godardian color.

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The only female character is a preteen girl, threatened in the finale by an armed band of “heterosexual pedophiles,” including Adrian. The edits obscure any temporal sequence or firm coordinates of reality. Stereo and Crimes secured enviable bookings and reviews in Canada, London, Paris, and New York, but Cinépix balked. Declining to hire Cronenberg, they demurred, “We know you have a strong sexual sensibility, we’re just not sure what kind it is.”2 This setback notwithstanding, Cronenberg’s story ends happily, without his “sexual sensibility” assuming any legible shape. Cinépix, later absorbed into the mighty Lionsgate Films Corporation (headquarters of Tyler Perry, Michael Moore, The Hunger Games, and Saw), eventually financed and distributed Cronenberg’s feature debut, Shivers (1975), released in the United States as They Came from Within and elsewhere as The Parasite Murders. That film, about a lethal outbreak of sluglike, aphrodisiacal parasites, played in forty countries and recouped its cost dozens of times over.3 The severe architecture, hubristic science, sexual panic, mutating bodies, and pessimistic finale of Shivers lingered as Cronenbergian hallmarks even as his work evolved.4 One recalls—indeed, one struggles to forget—the dwarves Samantha Eggar hatches from externally distended wombs in The Brood (1979); the heads exploded by ESP in Scanners (1981); the handguns and mind-controlling videotapes James Woods wrests into and out of his invaginated abdomen in Videodrome (1983); or Jeff Goldblum’s curio cabinet of his own leprous body parts in The Fly (1986).5 Cronenberg’s later movies yield traces of their predecessors’ grisly eruptions, enervated masculinities, and peculiar erotics but contain them within discrete sequences, amid more elegant mise-en-scène and among less monstrous characters. For this streamlined style, he has been handsomely rewarded: each of his last seven features, from Crash (1996) through Cosmopolis (2012), premiered in competition at one of the “big four” film festivals (Berlin, Cannes, Toronto, and Venice), earning prestigious prizes and nominations along the way.6 Cronenberg has presided over the competition jury at Cannes and been ordained a Chevalier of the French Order of Arts and Letters. As early as 1983, Robin Wood wrote, “After many years of critical neglect and disfavour, David Cronenberg is now ‘in.’”7 Thirty years onward, and not unlike the venereal slugs and rogue amino acids that wreak havoc across his early portfolio, he has worked his way even further “in.” To a degree unusual even for fellow arthouse darlings, the aesthetic and thematic shifts in Cronenberg’s work have dovetailed with contemporaneous evolutions in cinema scholarship, generating several book-length studies and countless articles. In one of these monographs, William Beard charts three major phases in the filmmaker’s corpus, coeval with academic trends: first, in the 1970s, a shared passion for deconstructing binaries such as mind/body, inner/outer, health/illness, and male/female; then, in the late 1970s and the 1980s, a joint swerve toward psychoanalytic tropes; and, most recently, for

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Cronenberg and for cinema studies, a focalizing of “the relationship between social and aesthetic values in controversial art.”8 One could spin the arc of Cronenberg’s career differently by noting the abrupt evanescence of homoerotics from his work for almost twenty years after Stereo and Crimes—surely among the elements that unsettled Cinépix, though likely not the only one. Indeed, many critics would consider “evanescence” an unduly polite term to characterize Cronenberg’s concerted refusal of homoeroticism even when, from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s, he continually adapts films from famous texts with strongly sexualized male-male relationships. These include the melds of literary work and real-life scandal that inspired Dead Ringers (1988), Naked Lunch (1991), and M Butterfly (1993), as well as J. G. Ballard’s cult novel Crash (1996). For many viewers, the celebrity of these appropriated texts makes all the more galling Cronenberg’s elisions of sexual acts between men, whether or not they identify as gay, or of climactic spectacles of male nudity, such as the one he excises from M Butterfly.9 On these and related grounds, feminist and queer scholars have generally proved the most outspoken challengers to the intensifying critical and academic embrace of Cronenberg’s work. I argue, though, that compared with frequent charges of homophobia and misogyny, Cinépix delivered a shrewder diagnosis of the sexual and gendered valences of Cronenberg’s films by pinpointing their very elusiveness. To watch Dead Ringers or Naked Lunch is to detect a strong sexual sensibility, but to remain unsure what kind it is. Given those films’ cross-textual derivations and baffling erotics, plus Cronenberg’s recurring synchronicity with scholarly trends, either movie might easily have resonated with enthusiasts of New Queer Cinema.10 Coinciding precisely with the New Queer launch years, Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch were also the films that garnered Cronenberg his newfound status as a lionized auteur; he received awards from some of the same groups that laureled B. Ruby Rich’s famous cohort.11 Most germanely of all, the strategies in these two films for producing new concepts of nonheterosexual desire are not just narrative- or character-based but inhere deeply in form and style. Despite these symmetries, however, Cronenberg has never held any standing as a New Queer artist and, if anything, remains more famous as a thorn in the side of queer filmgoers than as a contributor to that watershed movement.12 His earlier body of work and disingenuous statements about homosexuality warrant some blame for this, but so do scholars of New Queer Cinema. Despite articulating that movement in relation to theories of sex, gender, or desire as irrational, nonidentitarian, and irreducible to homosexuality, scholars often conflate queerness with analyses of unconventional lesbian and gay stories, as rendered by lesbian and gay filmmakers. Omitting artists like Cronenberg proved costly for New Queer scholarship and enthusiasm, enabling narrow conceptions and, hence, premature lamentations.

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My defense of the profound, productive queerness of Cronenberg’s cinema relies not just on New Queer tropes but also on his work’s remarkable resonance with yet another concurrent trend in film studies. Over the next two chapters, I posit Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch as helpful illustrations, historical sequels, and claim-testing provocations with regard to Gilles Deleuze’s notions of film.13 Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 coincide in their original French publications with Cronenberg’s first graduation to new critical acclaim, circa Videodrome and The Fly; the books first arrived in English translation during the late 1980s, as Cronenberg attained even greater global prestige. Deleuze’s analytical lexicons are barely less alien than Rouge’s Malady, the Brundlefly, or other Cronenbergian inventions. Beyond this shared passion for neologism and reinvention, Cronenberg ideally suits Deleuze’s taste for auteurs with clear stylistic and philosophical stamps; he surely would have appeared in the Cinema books had Deleuze written them but a few years later. Happily, Cronenberg’s motifs and Deleuze’s ideas complement each other so well that each illuminates what may otherwise prove impenetrably strange in the other. In recombining semidiscrete concepts and textual sources, Cronenberg’s films satisfy Deleuze’s edict not to repeat extant ideas but to produce new uses for them and new relations among them. In return, Deleuze helps us appreciate Cronenberg’s cinema as a factory that constantly generates new structures of gender, sexuality, and desire, even when these visions have been coolly received. Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch constitute an especially propitious pair for unpacking through Deleuze, based on affinities linking the earlier film to Cinema 1 and the later one to Cinema 2. Dead Ringers, with its reclusive sibling protagonists driven to sexual adventure, addiction, and death, echoes Cinema 1’s concerns with how determinedly closed or deceptively rational sets succumb to forces they cannot exclude. By contrast, Naked Lunch inhabits from its outset, as does Cinema 2, an entropic world of nomadic flights and constant breaks, both formal and thematic, in the wake of major catastrophe. Notwithstanding these distinctions, the films also highlight overlaps between the Cinema volumes, each of which theorizes the image in terms of production and concealment. Those dynamics are importantly formal in the ways Cronenberg and Deleuze approach them, yet they also gravitate powerfully around questions of desire, a subject on which both filmmaker and philosopher keep prevaricating, either through facetious reasoning or silence. If that seems unusual for Cronenberg, so infamous as a taboo-busting, body-obsessed provocateur, it is just as bizarre for the co-author of Anti-Oedipus. Still, this first chapter, introducing my notion of a desiring-image while charting Dead Ringers’s specific enactment of that concept, contends that both men germinate fresh, forceful ideas about desire even when they appear to avoid the topic or, in Cronenberg’s case, to constrain its figurations. In proposing that Dead Ringers echoes New Queer Cinema even as it challenges that discourse, I do not classify as “gay” its twin-brother protagonists

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Beverly and Elliot Mantle (played by Jeremy Irons). Granted, these cohabiting bachelors doth collude with Cronenberg’s script in protesting this allegation, perhaps too much—enough anyway, to prompt suspicions even among viewers with no other reason to harbor any. With the arrival of the actress and patient Claire Niveau (Geneviève Bujold), who dates both brothers unwittingly and then Beverly exclusively, the relations between the Mantles, whatever they are, break from decades of unarticulated habit. As Beverly’s bond to Claire intensifies, his attachment to Elliot simultaneously strengthens and shatters, neither proving nor quelling intuitions about the Mantles’ bond to each other, which appears ambiguously “sexual” but not only sexual, as does Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of desire. When homosexuality or any cognate category has permeated criticism of Dead Ringers, it has typically done so via psychoanalytic methods and vocabularies, and much of this work has been richly suggestive. Still, in its tendency to view anomalous character behaviors as symptoms of known structures, psychoanalytic approaches to Cronenberg’s work can minimize the very deterritorializations from erotic or conceptual convention that make these films so compelling. This caveat applies most strongly, perhaps, to Claire Niveau. Her relations to standing categories of sex and gender and her pragmatic embrace of profound aberration vary decisively from the Mantle brothers’ reactions, and just as decisively from the organizing tropes toward which Freudian analyses might lead her. Even without broaching sexuality as a topic, Cinema 1 furnishes a more apt theoretical foundation from which to ponder the problems and proliferations of desire in Dead Ringers. The film poses complex questions about what desire is and what it means to understand it as a principle of production and mutation rather than lack. The film heightens the intensity of these queries through its settings, framings, and character relations, disclosing how novelties erupt unbidden even within the most claustrophobic environments. The central question of Dead Ringers, as of Cinema 1, therefore concerns how closed sets, either sexual or perceptual, both resist and reveal their ties to larger, destabilizing forces of change. Grappling with these ideas will entail new understandings of perception, the out-of-field, and the impulse-image, principles of filmic signification in Cinema 1 that double as apropos mechanisms for contemplating problems of desire. In story, style, and structure, Dead Ringers also signals what Deleuze and Guattari would call a deterritorialized model of queer cinema, estranging sexuality from hetero or homo conceptions, much as Kafka’s minor literature, in their famous account, estranges language from the sense, sound, syntax, and ideologies of a mother tongue. Admittedly, Cronenberg’s estranging of desire mostly refrains from building collectives or from political work—the second and third anchors of the “minor” as a concept, which subsequent films in this book undertake more assiduously. The caveat, however, matters less than the

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contribution: the extraordinary value of Cronenberg’s movies for The DesiringImage, integrating their queer and Deleuzian aspects rather than treating these as parallel, inheres in how they defamiliarize sex, gender, embodiment, and sexuality as mutable and open-ended forces in their own right.14 Dead Ringers posits desire, like perception, as an ineluctable fact of life and of film, manifested differently in any image and inviting multiplicity and change. In this way, some of Cronenberg’s coy defenses of his films’ gender and sexual politics attain some credibility. As he asserted to Amy Taubin, “The sex in Naked Lunch is beyond gay.”15 I agree and would add that the unevenly visible, deterritorializing forms of gender and desire in Dead Ringers push this film, too, “beyond gay.” In a word, it’s queer.

Dissenting from “A Dissenting View” My argument breaks from prior feminist and queer readings in ways important to flag upfront, establishing variation and multiplicity as Cronenbergian tropes where other readings perceive antagonism or censorship. I oppose, then, denunciations of his films as sex-phobic or as granting privileges of transformation exclusively to straight men, in part by disputing that we always know in his cinema who is straight or gay, male or female. I therefore view Cronenberg’s cross-textual elisions of “gay” characters and scenes, however grating at times, as important elements in how he queers the erotics of his films, even as I contest that idée fixe of Cronenberg’s “determination to be unsparing and unflinching, his refusal to dilute what he creates with any considerations outside the demands of a particular narrative.”16 More than most directors, particularly those indicted as hostile toward sexual minorities, he signals the persistence of sexed, gendered, and desiring possibilities beyond those rendered manifest within his shots—and even there, heterosexuality as such hardly reigns supreme. If “analysis of Cronenberg has been dominated by certain key articles, which have tended to entrench critical positions,” then this phenomenon has been most conspicuous regarding sexual politics.17 Most famously, Robin Wood’s “Cronenberg: A Dissenting View,” targets him as a “perfect director for the eighties” insofar as his “movies tell us that we shouldn’t want to change society because we would only make it even worse.”18 For Wood, the films conspire with their crazed male protagonists in making female bodies the testing grounds for grisly biogenetic speculations. Diagnosing strains of sexism, puritanism, and homophobia that are not “anti-gay or anti-lesbian” so much as “anti-everything,” Wood only cedes value to Cronenberg’s output “precisely in that it crystallizes some of our society’s most negative attitudes—to sexuality, to women, to all ideas of progress.”19 Useful to progressives, then, only by helping them know their enemies, the films “seem unable to affirm anything,

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and unable, at the same time, to offer any very helpful analysis of the oppressiveness of our social institutions.”20 During what Beard calls the second, psychoanalytic phase of Cronenberg’s work, gender critiques shifted to foreground the narcissism, womb envies, and castration anxieties of male protagonists, again entailing high costs for female characters embroiled in men’s neuroses.21 Correspondingly, Mary Pharr alleged that “every woman is an Eve in Cronenberg’s canon, not a foolish or even sinful Eve, but one whose very nature is such that she becomes a locus of danger for the male. . . . [These women are] fixed objects, occasions of grace or of sin, distinct from men in the critical areas of growth and decay.”22 Cronenbergian logic informs Pharr’s concession that “decay” constitutes as vaunted a trajectory as “growth”—harmonizing, too, with Deleuze and Guattari’s premise that “desiring-machines work only when they break down, and by continually breaking down” (AO 8). More recently, and even more damningly, Christine Ramsay reiterates Wood’s claim of “a neo-conservative agenda concomitant with the crisis of straight white masculinity” and further alleges that “with his ‘dead queers’ Cronenberg makes it from the ‘B-list’ to the ‘A-list,’ flaunting in interview after interview what passes in androcentric art-house culture for radical sensibility, while blind to his own fear and hatred of radical queer lifestyles and sexual practices.”23 Ramsay’s litany of “dead queers,” however, collates the “incestuous Mantle brothers in Dead Ringers,” whose incest the film does not confirm; the “gay youth Kiki” in Naked Lunch, who is not clearly “cannibalized”; the debatably “closeted René Gallimard in M Butterfly”; and “the horrible homo Vaughan in Crash,” who seduces one man and many women but is most aroused by auto collisions. This “queer” congeries is surely more interesting in its variety than for the fact that all these characters end up dead.24 If anything, Ramsay idealizes all the dead characters in Cronenberg as queer (a.k.a., “gay,” “closeted,” and “homo”) rather than proving that all the queer characters die. She omits equally queer figures in the same films who survive, for better and for worse, to the ends of the narratives: Bill, Tom, Yves, and Benway in Naked Lunch; Song Liling in M Butterfly; James, Helen, and Gabrielle in Crash; and, as I will insist, Claire in Dead Ringers. Even where putative groundings of male, female, gay, or straight cohere sufficiently to signal misogyny or homophobia—tough to do without stable genders or sexualities to derogate—neither the most caustic nor the most affirming modes of desire prevail across Cronenberg’s work, corrosive as it is of dimorphic idealisms. Such idealisms emerge more often in gender-focused writing on Cronenberg’s cinema than in the films themselves, enforcing subject/other and center/ margin dichotomies on male and female characters rather than attending to those qualities that make Videodrome’s Nicki Brand, The Fly’s Veronica Quaife, Dead Ringers’s Claire Niveau, and Naked Lunch’s Joan Lee and Joan Frost such pivotal, compelling figures. Maleness and femaleness translate in Cronenberg

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not as distinctive bodily essences but as generic forces and signs uniting in very loose relation; they are habits of perception, reducing more complex assemblages. Accounts that endorse such idealisms therefore bypass the “specific nature of the libidinal investments” (AO 105), which accrue not just to sexed and gendered categories but also to alluring or sensuous intensities of any kind. These impart a strong desiring charge to the febrile colors and sounds, the thrilling states of excitation or suspension, and the transfixing, mutating objects in a film like Dead Ringers.25 In contrast to Wood’s prognosis, then, I find desire in Cronenberg’s films less “anti-everything” than very nearly pro-everything, or at least potentially so. Carnal, viral, autoerotic, ludic, prosthetic, fetishistic, narcotic, artistic, sadistic, and masochistic forms of desire all enter the repertoire—a dizzying riot of discourses, mocking attempts to delineate clear genealogies or to posit hierarchies of value. Tim Robey more persuasively christens Cronenberg’s career an “anthropology of the possible,” one that “has done fuller justice to the permutations—the options—of how and whom we fuck than any other living filmmaker, including such queer-cinema heroes as Haynes and Almodóvar.”26 In this context, Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on productions and potentialities of desire speak more coherently to erotic possibility in Cronenberg’s films than do the edicts of GLAAD-style image policing. His work presumes a queer, open-ended, often nonpersonal heterogeneity, refusing to take identity categories for granted or to bring anomalies in line with dominant structures. I do not discount targeted allegations about misogynous or homophobic inflections in his work, any more than I deny the power many Freudian critics have brought to their diagnoses of the Mantle twins’ hysteria and melancholia in Dead Ringers or of structures of disavowal in Naked Lunch and M Butterfly. The best of these manage to deflect directorial psychobiography, dimorphic gender and sexual categories, or rigid relations of “pretext” to enactment, whether in psychical or intertextual registers.27 I argue, though, that these accounts invariably turn out to be partial, mutable, or internally contested, given the machinic movements of sex, gender, and desire within Cronenberg’s dubiously “straight” movies.

Mutant Textuality This epistemology of desire implicates Cronenberg’s profound reshaping of the material he adapts for his projects. Sexuality and textuality operate co-constitutively as multipart assemblages rather than essentialized foundations, subject to new intensities and arrangements or even outright overhauls. In this sense, both the erotics and the textual structures of Cronenberg’s films grow queerer in important respects as he excises “gay” content— although frankly, neither the fictions nor the real-life figures Cronenberg

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allegedly “straightens” align easily with that term. The films’ marketing materials and the director’s famously literary bent in interviews constantly flag discrepancies between his movies and the works they purportedly reproduce. Even considered independently, however, his scripts denaturalize their own foundations—signaling to well-read or unfamiliar audiences alike that there is always more than meets the eye, or any other part of the body, in Cronenberg’s queer adaptations.28 Admittedly, the scale of erotic recoding in these films astonishes and occasionally rankles. Although rumored homosexuals populate the film of Naked Lunch, its main plot privileges William Burroughs surrogate Bill Lee and his affairs with two women, avoiding in story, tone, or spectacle the novel’s unbridled priapism and exuberant interpenetrations. While Crash finds time to linger on James Ballard having insertive sex with Gabrielle through a long, hideously scarred wound in her thigh, the film retreats from the narratively pivotal intercourse between James and the virile crash enthusiast Vaughan. To the extent gendered dichotomies survive in Cronenberg’s cosmos, eroticism between women proves especially foreclosed. Naked Lunch visually occludes rumored liaisons between Joan Frost and her Tunisian housekeeper-dominatrix Fadela, and the clothed backseat caresses between Helen and Gabrielle in Crash are even more demure than those between James and Vaughan. Less overtly marketed as an adaptation, Dead Ringers still aligns with this pattern. The film derives from the real-life scandal of Cyril and Stewart Marcus, twin gynecologists in high demand among Manhattan’s upper crust, whose fame turned to infamy in 1975 when a mutual descent into barbiturate addiction culminated in their mysterious deaths. Cyril, divorced, was found naked at the foot of his own bed; Stewart, never married, lay nearly nude across the mattress.29 Writing in Esquire, Ron Rosenbaum and Susan Edmiston detailed the Marcus brothers’ success and peculiar demise, nine months after their deaths. This article, titled “Dead Ringers,” reconstructs rumors and documented incidents that recur in Cronenberg’s film and are often misread as his inventions, including one brother’s panicky seizure of an anesthetized patient’s oxygen mask, and the same brother’s insinuation that one of his patients has corrupted her uterine environment by having sex with a dog.30 Despite the obvious influence of this article on Dead Ringers’s screenplay, the only pretext mentioned in the film’s opening credits or press materials is the novel Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland, published in 1977. Twins administered liberal changes to names and story points in the Marcus brothers’ saga, expanding the postmortem rumor of sexual ties between them into a full-blown incestuous union. Dead Ringers spins its own variations on these prior turns of the screw while adding distinctly Cronenbergian motifs and entirely new figures, such as Claire. The film thus hails from a triple womb of tabloid scandal, literary pretext, and whole-cloth invention. Linda Hutcheon describes such adaptations as “palimpsestuous,” borrowing from multiple intertexts, familiar to

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different degrees to various spectators, and robustly generative of new figures and relations.31 Within this rubric, which strongly echoes the steps in Deleuzian desiring-production, Cronenberg actually preserves most of the story elements he inherits but drops the sexual relationship between the brothers, as well as the fact that in Twins, one of the protagonists marries but takes several mistresses, while the other brother has a male lover for many years. Cronenberg avowed often that this asymmetry felt infelicitous for characters whose “sameness” is meant to be their fundamental hallmark. Even less credible was his plea that retaining the all-male eroticism of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch “was something that I just didn’t feel that I could delve into. . . . I myself am not homosexual and do not feel prepared to create a character as extreme in his homosexuality as in Naked Lunch.”32 This quaint theorem of radically limited self-mimesis raises eyebrows, of course, about Cronenberg’s tender characterization of the human/insect monster in The Fly or the pustulent, reptilian Mugwumps in Naked Lunch itself. Consistently, then, if for different reasons, Cronenberg’s films do risk preserving homosexual acts as a “radical elsewhere,” unbroachable even within sexual and intertextual systems that favor multiplicity and envelope pushing (C1 17). Still, effacing “homosexuality” in stories like those of the Marcus twins and of William Burroughs (none of which admit that term without a fight) does not automatically induce a correlative “heterosexualization,” particularly in the absence of any unreservedly heterosexual figure in either film. The same factors that impede the rigidifying of genders, sexual categories, or psychological reference-points within Cronenberg’s films should discourage, as well, any false absolutisms regarding the same aspects of the texts he adapts. What Cronenberg translates from those texts are virtual potentials for relation, which his films reorganize in multiple, shifting combinations. He tests assemblages, as Kafka and Anti-Oedipus do, for their potentials to leap outside current boundaries and attain new powers. Indeed, note the allure for Cronenberg of sources like Twins or M Butterfly, which already reworked details of factbased yet necessarily speculative scenarios, and his tilling of Naked Lunch as the same sort of fertile ground, planting seeds from Burroughs’s own life and from his other fictions, including Exterminator!, Interzone, and Queer. Films like Dead Ringers, then, do not reproduce a checklist of narrative, erotic, or characterizing traits from sacerdotally stabilized blueprints. The films instead comprise productive planes of transformation, as New Queer contemporaries often did, and as Deleuzian desire always does. As acts of Deleuzian “schizoanalysis,” they tunnel through some existing assemblage, treating it not as a fixed architecture but as a warren or ant colony, sealing doors and opening paths just by moving through it. These relations allow the erotic, aesthetic, and formal aspects of the assemblage to renegotiate themselves in ever more idiosyncratic directions, rather than gravitating toward a baseline we already know how to perceive.

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Perceptions of Perception: Movement, Time, Subtraction The textual makeup of Dead Ringers involves duplicating or reconfiguring some inherited structures while inventing others, and preserving active, differential relations among all these elements. The film’s erotic relations also entail a multiform assemblage, subject to constant reconstruction: paradigmatically, then, of the entire schema of machinic, productive relations Deleuze and Guattari designate as “desire” in all its forms. Such protocols, so typical of these theorists and of Cronenberg, prove abrasive to many spectators. They also confound Beverly and Elliot Mantle, with their empiricist ways of seeing and knowing, and their private, evidently unexamined ways of relating. The nature of desire’s movements, their ties to reading or perception, and the status of any assemblage as open or closed, fixed or malleable, thus transcend the problems Dead Ringers poses to viewers, doubling as self-conscious predicaments for the characters. The film’s scenario concerns how Beverly and Elliot, having long perceived themselves as a closed set, admit Claire into that relation and reckon with the forces of desire and difference she introduces; they handle this poorly. The Mantles then confront unperceived elements of desire and difference that have subsisted within their apparently sealed bond to each other, as virtual potentials if not actual practice; they handle this even worse. To begin grasping these conflicts, however, not just as the diegetic experiences of three people but as the formal argument of the film that produces them, we must pause a bit longer on Deleuze’s theories of perception. Absorbing these concepts is crucial to deriving a “desiring-image” as a coherent Deleuzian formulation and plausible line of flight from his principles of cinema. Deleuze’s key rule of perception, in life as in cinema, is that any given image entails a selective subtraction from wider fields of relation. The issue is not of being limited to a vantage point in space, such that we see one “side” of an image but not others, all of which would become available if only we could orbit the image successfully, or if we were more broad-minded. The issue concerns the image’s and the perceiver’s unstable situation in time, within prioritizing and value-laden contexts that encourage some perceptions over others, and amidst ongoing, overlapping forces of change. The predicament is worth a run-on: in any image, I see what I can see now, under situated pressures, which make these aspects legible, among all the things this image simultaneously comprises, and amidst all the forces operating on it, altering the image and relating it to still other forces, including all the pasts that reverberate in this image, as well as all the futures in which it could be implicated. At no place in time, much less in space, could all these facets be perceived. Moreover, these and other contingent variables equally affect the spectator, multiplying the standpoints from which one might subtract a perception. Hence, for Deleuze, we do the best we can, and/or as a situation requires, and/ or as pleases us: “We perceive the thing, minus that which does not interest us

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as a function of our needs. . . . Perceptions of things are incomplete and prejudiced, partial, subjective prehensions” (C1 63, 64). Cinematic shots, too, are “incomplete and prejudiced” regarding potentials they both signal and constrain, though the extents of prejudice and incompletion vary greatly under Deleuze’s two regimes of cinema. Within a mode of cinema that presents movement as its most important vector of change, as pre–World War II movies variously do (as escapist fables that move along “naturally,” for instance, or as ideological views of history that proceed by eliding alternatives), we emphatically do not see the whole image. We imagine, though, that we can speculate forward or backward with confidence from the image we do perceive, since linear chronology, continuity editing, Marxian pendulum-swings, and other principles of early cinematic movement all suggest rational processions, even when they differ profoundly from each other. In movement-image terms, even a basic shot of my beloved emerging through a doorway might signify any number of ideas and relations, but they emphasize his having not been here one second ago and, moments from now, his having fully entered the room. As an ideological tool, not just a formal one, the movementimage might favor this flat, unprovocative sense of relation among shots, effectively subduing other, riskier ways in which I might consider this image. When postwar cinema poses time as the signal factor of change, with its chaotic and “palimpsestuous” pasts, presents, and futures, such conjecture becomes impossible. In a time-image film, my beloved emerging through a doorway does not presuppose adjacent images that sustain this action in either direction. Sundered from such connections, this image instead relates to all the other occasions when he has or has not entered; to all future occasions when he will or will not reenter or leave; to all the places he currently is not because he is here, as is also true of me; to the values that prompt me to prioritize his arrival over events and ideas, however local or global, that I currently subordinate to this one; to all the possible futures that depend on how I receive him, and on whether we are interrupted; to all the things he may do or say upon entering; and so forth. Our actual encounter, as I perceive it, will subtract just one set among this dizzying infinitude of possible relations, according to some set of present exigencies or past relations that urge that subtraction. The other possibilities persist, though, as virtual facets of this perception, even if I do not for the moment perceive them or act in accordance with them. By freeing any image to follow any other, Cinema 2 releases us into a perception of time that in daily life we can achieve not through the eye, but only in thoughts. While laboring to articulate these temporal dynamics and associated metaphysics, the book barely pauses to restate the basic principles of perception that govern both the movement-image and the time-image. As reviewed in Cinema 1, however—the volume closer to Dead Ringers’s aesthetics—perception under either regime entails conscious and unconscious extractions from expansive, protean images one cannot regard in full.

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In fact, cinema doubles the functions of perception in ways Dead Ringers calls into relief, related on one hand to the available frame at a given moment, and on the other to larger schemas of relation in which that frame participates.33 In the more immediate sense, “perception” names that paradigm by which we extract and delimit visible images from vast fields of possibility and contingent meaning. To confirm via one more analogy, imagine a core sample extracted from one point on a beach. This one perception, akin to a cinematic frame, cannot comprehend the full nexus of erosion, sedimentation, biochemistry, climatology, and time that have produced this beach. Any vantage point a scientist or cinematographer adopts (what Deleuze calls a “center of indetermination”) imposes a frame around the image, proscribing what falls within and beyond it without divorcing relations between those realms. The researcher may elect upon a highly motivated core sample, in order to scrutinize a particular phenomenon (as intensive styles of cinematic framing do), or may prefer an example drawn at random, indicating some field of forces distributed evenly or unevenly across the beach (as other shots do, especially in relation to postwar montage, or via a moving camera, or by allowing objects to pass freely in or out of the frame). Perception, whether tilting toward either pole, entails this double act of examining what is visible in the “actual” image and assessing systems of virtual relation this image presupposes or makes possible. All images, however, involve the principle of subtractive framing, including some elements and relations and necessarily excluding others. Some cinematic images foreground the effects of framing—or of deframing, when a shot appears most notable for what it omits, as often transpires in Dead Ringers. Deleuze calls such metacritical framings perception-images, or “perceptions of perception” (C1 67), inviting scrutiny and stressing their own inevitable failures to be “total objective prehensions” (C1 64), on the impossible order of a full, constantly changing beach. This idea informs how Dead Ringers goads us to consider its images and its desiring-relations as delimited perceptions, in ways we will soon explore.

Perceptions and Desire: Types of Flows Within this dual schema of perception, individual images suggest varying scales of how indicative or eccentric they are vis-à-vis adjacent ones. From strictest to loosest, these manners and degrees of correspondence echo those that structure the three productive flows of desiring-production evoked early in Anti-Oedipus, although Deleuze never asks us to draw this link. Queer films such as Dead Ringers that deterritorialize sexuality from its customary “flows,” and that do so in essentially formal ways, invite this link between cinema’s choreographies of perception and Deleuze and Guattari’s typically aberrant flows of desire.34 Let’s explore how these work.

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In the first model, flows of desiring-production operate like a ham-slicing machine: each new figure is all but continuous with others, the intervals cut very finely, and the flow mechanistically regulated. Many people, particularly gay or straight ones, experience their flows of desire as comparably continuous, and the intimate or communal relations that grow from these desires as similarly continuous. Now imagine the orchestrated flows of cinematic images as not just similar to but coeval with those of desiring-production; observe in particular how romantic comedies, realist dramas, and other mainstream genres cut the intervals between shots very finely, with edits aspiring to invisibility. Not coincidentally, these genres tend most strongly to perpetuate normative illusions of sex, gender, and desire. In Deleuze and Guattari’s second model, desiring-production operates like an assemblage of bricks: the units compatible but not identical, possibly hailing from various sources; the joins close but visible; the series obeying patterns but not quite automated ones. By another cinematic analogy, a film like Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) yields emblematic images of desire that do not fit directly (a zaftig female bather, a Venus flytrap, an immaculate white suit, a horde of hungry teenagers), but the film eventually draws them together into an ordered flow, however outlandish. Working inductively, it is harder than in the first model to envision that overall flow on the basis of any one image, just as it is hard to envision a sidewalk or a castle-keep or a cathedral on the evidence of one brick. Still, watching these images as they assemble eventually reveals a logic that obeys certain rules, typically including dualistic gender categories and a belief in the individualized subject. In the third, most difficult model, desiring-production operates as a hieroglyphic series: the units barely assimilated; the relations between them unfathomable; the flow indecipherable except through complex, flexible, schizoanalytic systems of reading and thought, and even these remain intensely speculative. David Lynch’s career, especially with Mulholland Drive (2001) and inland empire (2006), gravitates ever further in this direction. Mulholland’s variously sensualized images of a cash-filled purse, a pink blouse, a blue key, a buxom amnesiac, and a disoriented singer resist any traction as a unified series, even, or especially, by the film’s end. Trying to induce a logic from one or even several cues is hopeless, especially when unabetted by stable codes of gender, sexuality, or subjectivity, which Mulholland brazenly erodes and inland never establishes. Venturing one more set of related metaphors, Cinema 1 jointly theorizes the relations within and between cinematic shots as yielding three modes of cinematic perception: solid perception, in which relations within the image seem most manifest, different shots most tightly joined, and casual perception most facilitated; liquid perception, in which movement and relation within and around the shot grow looser, as must relations between the images and the perceiver; and gaseous perception, in which relations inside the frame and

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those among the images grow loosest, fastest, and most agitated. Gaseous perception can build all the way toward a limit of “universal variation” (C1 40), as in Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), teeming with accelerated movements and edits, the camera attempting perception from the greatest array of angles, and stoking the spectator to do the same. Solid, liquid, and gaseous perception align closely with ham-slicing, brick-laying, and hieroglyphic flows of desiring-production, each spanning from the most automated to the most entropic, idiosyncratic cases. The very compatibility of perceptual and desiring modes, then, suggests a confluence among Deleuzian acts of perceiving and desiring. Still, like all Deleuzian systems and analogies, these are most revealing in cases where they break down. As quickly as Naked Lunch, Cronenberg will produce a formidably hieroglyphic film where desiring-productions unfold in irrational series, as he had previously done in Videodrome. Dead Ringers, however, stands uniquely in this book for hewing primarily to a movement-image regime, establishing clear relations between shots that more or less fit the ham-slicing model—although, as we shall see, in an unusual disjuncture between erotic and cinematographic registers, one could not say the same about its cryptic desiring-productions. The film’s “solid” mode of perception, relying on continuity edits and clear chronological lines, squares uneasily with its gaseous sense of universal variation at the level of desire, which somehow impresses itself despite the steady, continuous storytelling and montage. Given the role that not just manifest images but various out-of-fields play in mobilizing such variation, we turn now to this final element in Deleuze’s ontology of the cinematic image.

Out-of-Fields and the Desiring-Image Early in Cinema 1, Deleuze devotes attention to the principle of the out-offield—an aspect of any shot, relating to whatever the frame excludes. Dead Ringers will render the general concept especially important in its tense compositions, its pervasive but unattributed sense of unrest, and its intertextual suggestions of having obviated material that properly belongs “in” the frame. As ever with Deleuze, though, the concept takes multiple forms, in this case two. The first kind of out-of-field concerns a “relative aspect by means of which a closed system refers in space to a set which is not seen, and which can in turn be seen” (C1 17). Several genres and filmmaking styles make this relative outof-field very potent. We often know in horror or suspense films, though the characters often do not, that danger lurks just beyond some specific edge of the frame; in Jaws (1975) or Alien (1979), the threat is conjured but deframed so pervasively that it could intrude at any point from any side, effectively saturating the perceptible field.

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Even amplifying this relative out-of-field does not equate to the second aspect Deleuze names. This more abstract definition, although he would deny this, entails the invisible force of constant, qualitative change that the Cinema books align with Time, “an absolute aspect by which the closed system opens on to a duration which is immanent to the whole universe, which is no longer a set and does not belong to the order of the visible” (C1 17). Even though we obviously cannot see it, time always operates, simultaneously outside and within the image. Elaborating the distinction with eerier undertones, Deleuze continues, “In one case, the out-of-field designates that which exists elsewhere, to one side or around; in the other case, the out-of-field testifies to a more disturbing presence, one which cannot even be said to exist, but rather to ‘insist’ or ‘subsist,’ a more radical Elsewhere, outside homogeneous space and time” (C1 17). Some genres manage to focalize this inveterate out-of-field the way thrillers and horror films stress the relative aspect. The numinous charge suffusing the objects and events in a drama by Robert Bresson, Andrei Tarkovsky, or Terrence Malick, or the unwritten but omnipotent social laws in a Sirkian melodrama (where lovers often “run out of time”) evoke absolute out-of-fields, even as they encompass other “subsisting” or “disturbing” forces than just time alone: theology in the first three cases, which Deleuze acknowledges in his commentary on Dreyer, and desire in Sirk’s case, on which subject Cinema 1 demurs. As with most Deleuzian binaries, he concedes that these aspects intermingle in practice, prompting a Cronenbergian, arachnid metaphor: “The finer [the thread] is—the further duration descends into the system like a spider—the more effectively the out-of-field fulfills its other function which is that of introducing the transspatial and the spiritual into the system which is never more perfectly closed” (C1 17). Not only, then, are the two aspects of the out-of-field closely intertwined, the most “absolute” facets become paradoxically inseparable from what manifests in the frame, if that frame feels emphatically locked down: “A system which is closed—even one which is very closed up—only apparently suppresses the out-of-field, and in its own way gives it an even more decisive importance” (C1 16). The foundational claim behind this book is that desire is just as immanent as time within cinematic images, particularly if we agree with Anti-Oedipus that desire is the engine for all processes of assemblage and production, and the core principle of relation, attraction, intensity, and potential escape. These processes necessarily include those that yield cinematic shots and sequences, to say nothing of film characters’ erotic relations. Plus, as we have seen, isomorphic matches already inhere among the flows of desiring-production in Anti-Oedipus and flows of cinematic perception. If desire signifies anything to Deleuze and Guattari, it is what cinema also comprises for Deleuze: implacable, increasingly unpredictable dynamism and productive change. The inveterate activity of movement and, more ornately, of time prevent any image from visibly stabilizing these concepts—although eloquent arrangements

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of images, relations, and out-of-fields can conjure these notions with unusual directness. In the same way, and through many of the same strategies, images can allow desire to thread its way, spiderlike and rule-resistant, into those systems that appear most defended against its infiltrations and mutabilities. From this vantage point, even the most naturalized image of male-female affection must be understood as bearing additional potentials, albeit superficially excluded ones. In a film like the lesbian drama When Night Is Falling (1995), intensities of palette and lighting and aspects of camera placement, soundtrack, and editing rhythm can subtly defamiliarize a scene of heterosexual sex, such that the scene somehow puts the viewer in mind of desires the female protagonist is not currently entertaining but soon will. The potential threads its way in. Furthermore, what we refer to as a “subject” is itself, for Deleuze, a partial image of more complex relations, a contingent perception extracted from an excess of forces that produce, condition, and supersede it. This is the case even though for many reasons “the subject” remains, like normative sex and gender, a fixture of social perception as we habitually perform it. Any subject, no less than any cinematic shot, subsists on complex dynamics and out-of-fields that inform one another, fostering and constantly transforming that putative subject’s experience, including relations to desiring-production that she or he may mistake as innate: “Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject. . . . Desire is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it” (AO 26). The subject, then, does not name a “total objective prehension” of which we can only see a selective extraction. It is, in fact, the subject for Deleuze that is itself a partial perception, cut off from larger machinic forces and relations, such that we behold this subject in such naturalizing, personifying terms. With these crucial aspects of framing, perception, desiring-flows, and the out-of-field now in place, I can explain a queerly complicated enactment of these ideas. Just as Deleuze selects kinetically or temporally complicated films to illustrate the movement-image and the time-image—even though those concepts structure many, many films that trigger us less strongly to consider them—I offer Dead Ringers as a text that foregrounds desire in its relations to sexuality, perception, and other forms of production, profoundly defamiliarizing our concepts of all three.

The Desiring-Images of Dead Ringers Dead Ringers, without typifying the purposefully rangy concept of a desiringimage, demonstrates how a film that apparently disbars certain permutations of desire can at the same time feel suffused by them, evoking desire as both a gaseous out-of-field and an omnipresent immanence. Framing many of its

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shots as perception-images of one kind or another, the film manages in both its characterizations and its formal choices to reject any sense of idealized indexicality: that is, the coupling of one man with one woman does not establish any transcendent value like heterosexuality, and suggested intimacies between men may imply either homosexuality or something more singular than that.35 Indeed, to schizoanalyze the natures, the movements, and the derationalized careers of desire in Dead Ringers is to avoid thinking primarily in terms of the characters as subjects; to approach concepts like “Beverly Mantle” or “Claire Niveau” or “Marcus twins” or “homoeroticism” not as organized, personified signs but as active processes with unsteady contours. Within this tense and obstinately aberrant text, what is perceptible within an image repeatedly stands in mercurial tension with what is both relatively and absolutely outside that frame. As unusual, often unsettling perception-images, they invite our scrutiny of many of the same riddles that baffle the characters, despite how seldom we inhabit their points of view. This queer or mutant idea of desire “insists,” in Deleuze’s parlance, even amid the most closed set Beverly and Elliot can attain: exclusive togetherness, behind locked doors. Because, however, Claire confronts all the same propositions in such a different register than the twins do, and with such a profoundly divergent outcome, my reading avoids what I think the film also avoids: an emphasis on its profoundly disarticulated men at the expense of an impressively functional, erotically versatile complement. Learning from Beverly in her gynecological exam that she has “all the necessary parts” plus “a couple of extra ones,” Claire adds to a sum that does not establish her as a woman, even by her own math. Instead, she inhabits states of becoming and desiringproduction that we can view as desirable, nonpathological, and productive, contra Ramsay’s and Wood’s claims about Cronenberg’s reactionary sexual politics. The states of becoming that overtake the Mantle brothers augur less well for their immediate fates but resonate just as fully with Deleuzian theories of desiring-production and perception. In other words, we learn much from seeing them, even if we wouldn’t want to be them. Pivotal to our sense of what is afoot and at stake across Dead Ringers are its out-of-field enigmas, which intensify in import as the film continues, similarly to how the scope and force of irrationality slowly accrete across Cinema 1, ending in both cases with a collapse into crisis. Unsolvable puzzles within the film’s actual images relate to nonvisible forces to which they palpably respond, with increasingly grievous ramifications. Followers of the Marcus twins’ case or readers of Twins may conclude that Beverly and Elliot are overtaken by a destructive homoeroticism or a ruinous denial of homoeroticism, which Cronenberg all too typically declines to confront directly. I agree that homosexuality plays a key role in what goes wrong for the Mantle twins. However, I also believe that the case is much queerer than this summary makes it sound.

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To support these arguments, I track four distinct deployments of the outof-field in Dead Ringers, arranged in rough order of when they operate most strongly on the film, and, more important, on a scale from the most relative to the most absolute sense of what an out-of-field entails. These four cases encompass the Mantles’ jealous guarding of their bond, which banishes to the out-offield any other person; their vociferous refusal of homosexual intimations, which banishes a specific type of person or potential quality of personhood; their fascination turning to horror with regard to Claire’s trifurcate womb, refusing a specific object but also a new paradigm of personhood, abruptly encompassing sexed and gendered variation; and finally, the inchoate idea of “mutation” or full-scale ontological instability that implicates Beverly and Elliot themselves. This last example entails an undermining of personhood, unfolding in conjunction with experiences of desire that the Mantles attempt to repudiate, even as they attempt to track its chimerical sources somewhere within their own bodies.

First Out-of-Field: The Mantles vs. the World The aesthetics of Dead Ringers, favoring linear time and continuity editing for at least the first hour, depart from movement-based traditions Deleuze describes of American realism, Soviet dialectics, or French abstraction and amplification. Its stylistic precedent lies more with German Expressionism, which Cinema 1 cites less as a fourth genealogy of the movement-image than as a dark obverse of French dynamism: in early German film, movements exist in aggressive, stultified traction, a tense equilibrium. The largely static camera of Dead Ringers betrays this influence, as do the geometric framings and frequently limited depths of field, the bold lines and colors, the occult objects (the Mantle retractor, the gynecological tools for “mutant women”), and the Weimar-ish aspect of the twins themselves, as wan, dark-eyed, and stone-faced as Caligari’s sleepwalker (see figure 1.1). The flatness and the firm borders of these images perpetually remind us of the partiality of our vision, preventing fuller surveys of this world or even confident speculations. Even within this hermetic environment, the Mantles exist at notable removes from other people. The movie’s first shot is a long track, unusual for Dead Ringers, determined to keep young Beverly and Elliot in an otherwise depopulated frame as they walk down a sidewalk. Enthusing about newly acquired knowledge that fish have sex without touching each other, the Mantles share all their shots, even amidst an ensuing, disastrous exchange with a neighbor girl, whom they invite to test this piscine technique. The fish tank metaphor literalizes itself in their adult life, spent in a sleek, glassy apartment with blue-tinged lighting. Elliot cycles fickly through lovers, pawning some off on Beverly without telling them, adding to the sense of the Mantles as a “very

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Figure 1.1 Dead Ringers: Beverly Mantle, stranded in his Caligari-ish office. Dead Ringers, 1988, dir. David Cronenberg.

closed set” in multiple ways. (“If we didn’t share women,” Elliot maintains, “you’d still be a virgin!”) These early scenes, squarely focused on the brothers in tight two-shots or intimate shot/reverses, are both riddles and feats: as we learn to parse Beverly from Elliot, we marvel at Jeremy Irons’s seamless acting alongside himself, particularly by the standards of late-1980s digital compositing. In both of those senses, these shots qualify as perception-images: frames to be “read” and potent suggestions of larger, unseen relations and forces. In fact, all four of the deframed elements that organize my reading of the film (again: other people, embodied homosexuality, the triple womb, and desire as immanent force) link up to corresponding figures of fascination that cover for the lingering absences (Irons’s miraculous dual performance, Claire as proof against homosexuality per se, the mutant “tools” inspired by her womb, and the climactic but obscurely motivated violence). In this case, the miraculous interplay of Beverly and Elliot serves as its own hypnotic perception-image, disguising how few interactions they have with anyone else. Nearly every analysis of Dead Ringers reads the film in terms of Claire dividing this celebrated duo, a dynamic literalized in the movie’s sole flash of Cronenbergian grisliness: Beverly’s desperate pining for Elliot produces a nightmare of being physically joined to him through a rope of fleshy ligatures, which Claire separates by biting through them. Despite this popular interpretation, the film unfolds more consistently as a contest among various pairs in this triangle, where the sides are not always easy to call. In Beverly’s first scene with Claire, her blue, white-lapelled hospital robe is a subtle near-match for his

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blue, white-bibbed hospital scrubs, only the first of many tip-offs that these two share a natural affiliation on which Elliot intrudes. (The brothers’ childhood habit of dressing identically has been dis-Mantled by this point.) In a rigorous, formal coefficient to the ensuing drama, Dead Ringers avoids shooting the three in a shared frame; the single exception is, literally, a nightmare. Any shot of Claire with one Mantle thus invokes the deframed other, especially in early scenes when we least ably discern which brother we behold. By a similar token, two-shots of the Mantles increasingly invoke the deframed presence of Claire, as she becomes a sticking point between them. The test of this pattern, formal and narrative, arrives in the restaurant scene where she castigates them for the sordid arrangement into which they have dragooned her. Sticking to its guns, the film does not capture the trio in the same shot even as they sit at the same table. Dead Ringers thus renders any shot of Claire with Beverly or of Elliot with Beverly—or even the truce-making attempt between Elliot and Claire—into an image of the third character’s virtual presence in the out-of-field. This pattern suggests a quandary in which to choose a desiring-partner is necessarily to decline another—and yet to invite them all the more finely, like Deleuze’s spider, into the pairing that ostensibly excludes them. In quintessential Deleuzian logic, then, for Beverly to perceive either Elliot or Claire as his preferred compatriot is to “subtract” him or her from an image of desire that properly includes both of them, at least. The one nightmarish vision of the three together, which seems to concern a horror of having to select between them, may actually concern the terrifying prospect of not choosing—of desire existing queerly across them.

Second Out-of-Field: The Love that Keeps Almost Speaking Its Name The script of Dead Ringers, in sync with the film’s other doublings, inclines heavily toward the double entendre, starting with the dual allusions to exactitude and fatality in its title.36 Most often, this bent toward double meaning implies that the Mantles themselves are bent, even when the words spring unwittingly from their own mouths: suave Elliot counsels his jittery brother before a first date with Claire, “Just do me,” and Beverly insists to a female patient that he and Elliot “don’t do husbands.” Claire, however, is by far the most frequent and deliberate source of these puns about the Mantles’ rapport. “Why haven’t you told me that your brother isn’t just a brother?” she asks Beverly, after learning of his famous twin. Later, wounded by their sexual tricks and perplexed at the brothers’ extraordinary codependency, she asks, “Do you sleep in the same bed?” The audience is likely to hear the implication that Beverly surmises. “What are you trying to suggest, that I’m gay or something?” he

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retorts, after Claire presses him about why he has “a woman’s name,” conflating categories of gender and sexuality that the film similarly refuses to demarcate cleanly. The double act that Beverly here performs—answering a question with a question, and invoking that which he denies—embodies the film’s habit of making veiled but never very veiled references to homosexuality. If Claire registers with spectators—especially readers of Twins, where no parallel figure exists—as a device for heterosexualizing the Mantles, her insinuating feints at homosexualizing the Mantles seem all the more contradictory. Dead Ringers never does penetrate the Mantles’ bedroom(s) or settle whether they sleep together. Even so, this way of framing the mystery of their desires relegates a hypothetical answer to a relative out-of-field—one that Cronenberg, in his penchant for “unsparing” images, might be just the auteur to expose. Since his reputation for occluding gay material begins with Dead Ringers, the film’s initial viewers may have fairly anticipated some licentious mid-film epiphany. (In the novel Twins, the Mantles’ office assistant walks in on them in flagrante delicto on the exam table and quits in horror, a scene Cronenberg rewrites so that she catches Beverly shooting drugs into his arm.) Spectators retroactively convinced of Cronenberg’s narrow purview on sexual representation may regard homosexuality itself as, yet again, an absolute exclusion in this film. The fate of this particular out-of-field, however, falls complexly between these alternatives. Eventually, the film goes out of its way, in a scene variously marked as a formal and rhetorical departure, to introduce an iconographic “male homosexuality” into the frame, as if coaxing it from some barely offscreen zone. Yet even as Dead Ringers achieves this breakthrough, it confirms that the panic around sexual nonnormativity was and remains a more fundamental problematic, impossible to unveil. Having seldom left the side of the Mantles, we startle around the one-hour mark as Dead Ringers introduces a sudden cut to Claire, her back to the camera, engaged in a testy summit with crew members on the film that has taken her away from the faltering Beverly. We have never met these characters and never will again. Unusually for this film’s perpendicular compositions, Claire is blocked within the shot on a diagonal line from the left foreground to right background, in a room defined by pale yellows and dusty grays, wholly at odds with the reds, blues, chromes, and blacks that elsewhere dominate Cronenberg’s palette. The sense of breaking patterns extends to the scene’s saucily wicked tone, as Claire, childishly passing messages to the present company via her swish assistant Birchall (Dimar Andrei), upbraids her costume designer for being so “bloody literal-minded” as to festoon her emotionally needy character in blatantly whorish outfits. Eventually, Claire exits in a huff, stranding the viewer for the first time in the film without any of our three leads onscreen— a momentary rupture into that “out-of-field” which Cronenberg’s claustrophobic focus on his central trio usually omits.

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A beat later, Birchall answers the ringing phone. Crosscuts reveal Beverly as the caller, perspiring and clutching the receiver with both hands, hunched amidst Weimar-style diagonals of low light and heavy shadow. Meanwhile, Birchall’s campy hauteur, diva-devoted vocation, pinky ring, and conspiratorial murmur to a man he thinks he knows (“Is that you, Byron?”) situate him as a stock cliché of homosexuality in a film otherwise without stock clichés. Beverly, however, deranged by drugs and insecurity, mistakes Birchall for a sexual rival. To vanquish him, he describes in lubricious detail how Birchall might explore Claire’s bizarre trio of cervical openings for himself, sealing this terrorizing speech with the imprecation, “Basically this means that you have been fucking a mutant!” Birchall, gulping at even the mention of a cervix, cannot hang up quickly enough. Later, to dispel Beverly’s confusion, Claire will bemusedly attest that Birchall is “defiantly gay”; it seems no accident that he arises in the context of film-within-a-film disputes over “bloody literalminded” codes of representation, instantly grasped by everyone but Beverly as a placard or Platonic form of homosexuality.37 Given, though, how far Dead Ringers has to move from its diegetic, tonal, and visual baselines in order to produce Birchall, he proves just how formidable the relative deframing of male homosexuality has previously been. That Birchall’s appearance depends so intensely on a verbal but not a visual conjuring of Claire’s womb also feels like no accident. Homosexual desire and mutant femininity exist jointly in Dead Ringers as obstinate occlusions leading, we imagine, to some high-spectacle revelation. A chiastic tension governs this link, insofar as Beverly and Elliot observe the triple womb that remains, for us, a decisive out-of-field; by contrast, we perceive in Birchall a clear icon of homosexuality that the Mantles never see. Our inability to see the womb and Beverly’s escalating derangement at having seen it are the topics of the next subsection. For now, note that the linking of this figure with the deferred image of homosexuality in Birchall’s scene sustains a pattern in Dead Ringers whereby homoerotic conjectures about the Mantles’ bond are never self-contained charges but portals, always, into wider, queerer conceptions of desire. For Claire to ask, “Why haven’t you told me that your brother isn’t just a brother?” is to imply homosexuality and also fraternal incest as axioms of the Mantles’ relation. Intertextually, her question serves to ask why Dead Ringers itself, based on the stories that inspired the film, hasn’t told us that Beverly’s brother isn’t “just” a brother.38 Barbara Creed, arguing that Dead Ringers “can be read in Freudian terms as a ‘defense against a homosexual wish,’” also opts for a broadly ramifying view of that concept, positing as its effect a “barely concealed confusion about the limits of representability” that overtakes the film.39 If the Mantles, though, are neither “just” brothers nor “just” gay, then what are they? This “barely concealed” aspect of the confusion echoes the weird candor of the film’s faux-tacit allusions to “unspeakable” desire—and again links the issue of homosexuality to other aberrations of desire that are or are not

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rendered “representable” to the audience. By that logic, homosexuality manifests its gaseous potential, permeating codes of representation or behavior that otherwise seem distinct from itself. In his pioneering queer-theoretical study of male homosexuality as a quandary of cultural perception, in cinema and elsewhere, Lee Edelman argues that “‘gay’ designates the gap or incoherence that every discourse of ‘sexuality’ or ‘sexual identity’ would master,” and thus “comes to signify the potential permeability of every sexual signifier . . . by an ‘alien’ signification.”40 He thus extends Eve Sedgwick’s prior claims for homosexuality as an unruly crux within virtually all the structuralist binaries through which modern Western society defines itself, arguing that, in Beverly’s own words, to be gay is always to be “gay or something”—to be implicated not just in a specific assemblage of desire but also in the very principle of porous, non-normative desire, a tougher attribution from which to exonerate oneself.41 The result of this predicament for Edelman is a two-ply ideology of sexual policing he names “homographesis.” Although the methods by which he arrives at this concept are psychoanalytic, with one allusion to Deleuze on the book’s final page, the argument mirrors Cinema 1’s bicameral notion of the out-of-field. On the one hand, homographic logic requires gay men to make visible on the surface of their bodies an otherwise-invisible difference from other men: “graphing” their “homo,” as it were. Such displays segregate the Birchalls of the world from more self-naturalizing, gaze-resisting styles of masculinity that are its most ideologically preferred, heteronormative modes. At the same time, like a Deleuzian frame that is “very closed up” against homosexual suggestion, this masculine ideal becomes flooded with what it denies, obligated to flamboyant proofs of its own straightness, subject to the very theatrical mandate it means to refuse. Thus, for Edelman, homosexuality becomes an absolute out-of-field haunting and motivating every performance of any masculinity, drawing it into contagious cycles of paranoid exhibitionism, making of itself “a figure for the (un)decidability of sameness and difference.”42 The whole narrative of the Mantle twins, of course, pivots in every way on the “(un)decidability of sameness and difference.” Thus, mediating queer, Deleuzian, and Cronenbergian approaches to recurring conundrums, Dead Ringers positions homosexuality not as a firmly bordered out-of-field in itself—even before Birchall crashes the gates—but as a privileged avenue into larger, murkier crises of gender, sex, and desire involving twinness, incest, gayness, paranoias, and more intimate aberrations, harder to articulate.

Third Out-of-Field: The Triple Womb and the “Either . . . or . . . or . . .” Claire’s trifurcate womb transfixes the Mantles from the earliest scene of the narrative proper, yet modern cinema’s preeminent impresario of bodily abnormality never discloses it, not even at the level of an X-ray. Coming just after Jeff

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Goldblum’s spectacular molting and Geena Davis’s dreams of birthing their larval offspring in The Fly, the shock of this lacuna in Dead Ringers cannot be overstated, proving even less accessible than the long-deferred specter of a homosexual man. Indeed, Claire’s uterus emerges as the movie’s most structuring absence. Already I have signaled Deleuze’s enthusiasm for triadic concepts (solidliquid-gaseous perception, American-Soviet-French models of cinema, slicing-bricklaying-hieroglyphic flows of desire) and for three-stage cycles (the perception-affection-action base of the movement-image, the connectiondisjunction-conjunction sequence of desiring-production). Claire’s womb conjures another: the schizoid figure of the “either . . . or . . . or . . .” that Deleuze and Guattari oppose to idealizing binaries that undergird other philosophical systems: “In contrast to the alternative of the ‘either/or’ exclusions, there is the ‘either . . . or . . . or’ of the combinations and permutations where the differences amount to the same without ceasing to be differences” (AO 69–70). Beyond staking middle grounds between specious poles or deconstructing a spurious opposition, the “either . . . or . . . or . . .” facilitates open-ended multiplicities of thought, desire, or production. Claire’s womb, in its architecture and in its disordering of normative categories, aligns richly with this Deleuzian mode, in ways that become more obvious as Dead Ringers continues, inspiring an adventurous equanimity in her that the Mantles never attain. Though the discourse around the womb begins with Beverly consoling Claire about her infertility, she eroticizes her body within the very same exchange. She asks Beverly to “punish” her, reprising his salacious attentions from the previous evening, and she claims she is “still vibrating” from his probing touches, a Deleuzian keyword for desire detached from subject-based models (AO 292, 352, et al.). She does not yet know it was Elliot, not Beverly, who administered them. This sexualizing of her anomalous body reaches an even greater pitch in Claire’s next scene with Beverly, a bedroom encounter in which she refuses dimorphisms of sex and gender in the precise spirit of the “either . . . or . . . or . . .” Cast in a blue-filtered light that connotes mundane reality on some occasions (in the Mantles’ office, apartment, and operating room) and marked unreality at other times (in Beverly’s nightmares), Claire rues her bodily otherness. Her husky laments, however, feel all but continuous with her moans of sexual ecstasy: “I’ll never get pregnant. I’ll never have children. When I’m dead, I’ll just be dead. I will have—really never have been a woman at all.” Claire’s phrasing resonates with Rosi Braidotti’s claims about the future perfect as “the tense that best expresses the power of the imagination,” a crucial capacity for what she theorizes as a “sustainable nomadic subject.”43 This subject, recusing herself from individualist ideologies often associated with that term, opts instead for radical atomization, engaged in “breathing gender, as shifting pressure points, as molecular transformations of gender

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itself,” aiming toward “a vitalist, yet anti-essentialist theory of desire.”44 Braidotti glosses this model of the nomadic subject as essentially cinematic, “not elaborated by voluntaristic self-naming, but rather through processes of careful revisitations and retakes which can be compared to filmic shots.”45 Claire brings Braidotti’s platform to queer life, despite Geneviève Bujold’s wittily laconic playing of this extravagant character. Indeed, the “filmic shots” in this boudoir encounter feed into our nomadic perception of Claire’s body— and, for that matter, of Beverly’s. Replete with extreme close-ups of hands, necks, and fingers, lingering on surgical tubes and clamps the two employ as bondage devices, the scene discourages our perception of two integrated, bigendered subjects engaged in a legibly heterosexual act. What it delivers is a sonically heightened, visually compartmentalized assemblage of intensive details, first- and second-level bricks or hieroglyphs of Deleuzian desiringproduction, rendered equally through objects, textures, noises, tensions, and isolated erogenous zones (see figure 1.2). In other words, as Claire verbally distances herself from the category of “womanhood,” the filmmaking performs a similar act, disarticulating sensations and shots from the kinds of naturalized, third-level images familiar from most sex scenes: two people together, a woman with a man, and so on. Dead Ringers privileges instead what Anti-Oedipus often glosses as “prepersonal” desires and what Cinema 1 calls “pure audio and sound situations”: the audible tension of the clamped and rubbery tubes, the rough and slow gusts of breath, the purpling veins of ankles bound together, the fall of blue light on Claire’s dainty bed frame and matronly Victorian nightgown. Full

Figure 1.2 Dead Ringers: Desire produced through objects and textures, not just persons. Dead Ringers, 1988, dir. David Cronenberg.

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shots of the characters are avoided almost entirely, as are full views of their faces. In their absence, neither the conduits, objects, nor the expressions of sexuality in this scene emphasize Beverly’s ostensible maleness, Claire’s actively vitiated femaleness, or any heterosexuality per se. Claire’s immediately postcoital embrace of her status as a nonwoman amplifies the film’s stance in this regard, as does the correspondingly potent presence in the scene of the threechambered womb. “The schizoanalytic slogan of the desiring-revolution,” Deleuze and Guattari declaim, “will be first of all: to each its own sexes!” (AO 296), a call Claire initially answers with some shame, imploring Beverly not “to tell anyone about me,” but which she soon adopts as an implicit mantra, averring with equal candor her sadomasochistic, kinky, drug-assisted pleasures. As the film continues, she reconciles even more to her “either . . . or . . . or . . .” morphology and repudiates gendered types. Such desires, of course, do not necessitate a rejection of womanhood (much less does her infertility), but to Claire’s mind, with growing contentment, they do. As Claire ceases to selfidentify as a woman, the presumptive masculinities of “Bev” and “Elly” also diminish, although the Mantles increasingly quake, as Claire does not, at the possibility of discovering “their own sexes” within themselves. As we shall soon observe, this prospect will increasingly distinguish itself although never fully sever itself from a link to homosexuality—a link Beverly rejects so virulently in the first hour and vigorously tries to deframe. The deframed womb also signifies in excess of itself, serving as another relative out-of-field that achieves a greater claim on the twins’ thoughts and actions for being so firmly resisted. For them, the womb simultaneously connotes one baffling morphology and an entire force field of destabilizing relations, building a dangerous head of steam on the way to some unforeseeable change. Moreover, the trope of the double entendre resurfaces, linking the Mantles to the trifurcate womb as co-complicit figures of mutation. Beverly names this womb “fabulously rare,” evoking Claire’s wondrous singularity and also the womb’s status as a biological fable, undocumented in real-world science (though bifurcated cervixes are not unknown). This modifier repeats at the lunch where Claire denounces her gross exploitation at the hands of “the fabulous Mantle twins,” coding them with the same term that limns her own eccentricity. Other semantic bridges join the impossible womb to its fabulous examiners, evoking the unviewable, machinic factories of production that yield these and other figures of queerness and mutation in Dead Ringers. When Claire initially fancies incubating a triplet in each chamber of her uterus, Elliot replies, “That’s not how it works.” She fires back, “Really? How does it work?” The blunt cut to the next scene leaves her question open, only to be picked up several scenes later, when Beverly feels Claire probing for more information about how the relationship “works” between himself and Elliot. “I think you two have never come to terms with the way it really does ‘work’ between you,” she counters, again throwing the Mantles’ phrasing back at them, and coloring

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a bond Beverly has always taken for granted in the alien hue of rebellious desiring-production. The key difference between the Mantles and Claire, then, has not to do with male and female sex or gender; furthermore, if anyone has inoculated themselves against the kind of castration anxiety that occasionally crops up as a Freudian thesis about Dead Ringers, it is surely these two longtime, previously dispassionate gynecologists. Nor does the crucial division inhere between this heterosexual woman, a taxonomy Claire rejects anyway, and two homosexual men, whose desires also appear more complex than such terms allow. The film’s decisive contrast demarcates characters like Claire, who accepts with aplomb the queer unpredictability of bodies and desires, from those like Beverly and Elliot, who cannot grant such ineluctable dynamics of desire and change. They cannot organize their lives without the false foundations of their “fabulous” exceptionalism or minus the dualistic categories of male and female, or straight and gay (or something). The resulting panic pushes Beverly into a new, antagonistic relation to Claire’s extraordinary womb—conceiving her body, and then the bodies of other patients, and then his and Elliot’s bodies along a mutant continuum of uncontrollable auto-production, self-revision, and disconcerting abundance.46 Exciting but increasingly deranging in its profusion of parts, inextricably linked to Beverly’s newfound feelings of exogamous love, Claire’s womb thus upends the Mantles’ and possibly the viewer’s habits of perceiving things or persons as idealized forms. It forces a new epistemology of mutable relations inveterate to all objects and sets, even those that appear to refuse such change, such as the bi-gendered body or “natural” kinship. To restate the problem more fully, as Dead Ringers continues, Beverly appears panicked by the triple womb not as a symbol of femininity but as one avatar of idiosyncratically gendered, non-hetero, non-homo, non-personal flows beneath all embodiment, all apparent sex or gender or desires, including his own. This panic takes its most tangible shape in the “gynecological tools for operating on mutant woman” that Beverly designs and commissions from the artisanal metalworker Anders Wolleck. Though we never behold the actual womb, the alien contours of these tools operate as negative-space suggestions of how Beverly perceives it, reflecting his larger anxieties about sexed mutation and immanent difference. However, the fact that Beverly later describes these same implements as “tools for separating Siamese twins,” marshaling them fatally against Elliot’s body, suggests how the tools attach to a loose flux of ideas and desires, blending Beverly’s perceptions of himself, of Elliot, and of Claire, utterly confounding gendered or sexual categories, summoning impulses more cryptic than either “a homosexual wish” or a defense against such a wish. The womb wrecks the brothers’ sense of an ordered, part-whole universe, pulverizing their confident existence as a closed set—closely in sync with those crises of order and grammar that, for Deleuze, eventually overwhelm the unsustainable endeavor of movement-based cinema.

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Fourth Out-of-Field: Impulse and Immanence As dichotomies opposing normal to mutant femininity, maleness to femaleness, desire to fraternity, the Mantles to Claire, the Mantles to anything nonMantle, and brother to brother continue to erode, Beverly flees Claire one final time and reunites with Elliot. By this point, they regard each other less as persons than as destabilized molecular fields—partly since their bloodstreams have grown fully dependent on narcotics, but also as implied by their unraveling desires to look into each other and be looked into, to take each other apart. They are to us, to each other, and to themselves hieroglyphs detached from ever-more fathomless flows. These virtualities wrack the second hour of Dead Ringers with steadily seismographic force, producing an ever stranger series of objects, prompting more bewildering actions, and installing more uncertain intervals between the shots. In all these ways, the representation of the Mantles’ madness and collapse calls to mind the “impulse-image” Deleuze invokes in a late chapter of Cinema 1 as a bellwether of Cinema 2’s constitutive irrationalities. The impulse-image entails “both radical beginning and absolute end. . . . It is not opposed to realism, but on the contrary accentuates its features by extending them in an idiosyncratic surrealism” (C1 124). Cinematic impulses surge forth with a destabilizing energy that Deleuze aligns with the rioting, animalistic drives of literary naturalism, a comparison likely to flatter Cronenberg, who perennially opts for novelistic over cinematic referents in articulating his aesthetic influences. These impulse-images, heralding forces from an “originary world” that “rumble in the depths of all the milieux and run along beneath them” (C1 125), invoke an absolute out-of-field that “insists” with ever more palpable force within the shot. They recall as well Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machines, roiling beneath every milieu, “at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts” (AO 1), such that accounts of DeleuzoGuattarian schizoanalysis often sound like contacts with the adumbrated world of impulse: If we want to apprehend desire for itself we have to look on the reverse side of any representation we are confronted with. . . . to seek out dark precursors, those minute and myriad indices of connections, disjunctions, and conjunctions, in short, all the flows and their schizzes, which all but imperceptibly dot the surface of a text.47 This project of “apprehending desire for itself ” as a series of “dark precursors” is precisely what Beverly and Elliot Mantle undertake as Dead Ringers plays out. They are “confronted” early on by the dark precursor of Claire Niveau’s trifurcate cervix, a “reverse side” of the female body as they have thus far understood it—and flexibly so, as fertility specialists long reconciled to the

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potential anomalies in apparently normative bodies. But as with any gaseous out-of-field or homographic contagion, once an impulse wells up once, it quickly swamps the field. The impulse-image operates as both a type of sign and as a more abstract principle, a pluming of gaseous perception within otherwise solid montage. In the first case, Deleuze posits the impulse as interceding within the narrow gap between “affection” and “action” in the perception-affection-action cycle that constitutes the driving schema of progress in movement-image films. In this schema, perception frames a set of objects and their relations, generating what we have called perceptions of perception. Affection, as we will explore more fully in later chapters, employs a facial close-up or similar device to refigure this initial perception in particular terms. A shot of a wedding party, for instance, becomes a shot of different things based on the ensuing close-up: a proud family moment, when succeeded by a close-up of a beaming mother; a scene of detached, generic labor if framed by close-ups of hypertense photographers, as happens in The Watermelon Woman; or a scene of trapped, unwitting victims, regardless of the conjugal context, when joined to a shot of a skulking gunman, such as Quentin Tarantino morbidly conceives in Kill Bill, Vol. 2 (2004). Typically, an action-image advances the perceived objects through the terms of relation established in the affection stage: sealing the marriage, earning a paycheck, fleeing or causing a tragic desecration. As each action generates a revised system of relations (and often a new dramatic scenario), the cycle repeats, the narrative evolves, and the overall “image” of the wedding reveals new facets of itself, changing in kind as it unfolds. When impulse intercedes before action, however, the perceived objects and the affects they generate are often stalled, trapped in frozen or repetitive cycles. Relations within and among shots diminish or detach instead of multiplying, such that recuperating the image into any flow except that of “primordial” impulse becomes impossible. The impulse-image often culminates in “an entropy, a degradation” (C1 126), such that “the action-image remains powerless to represent it, and the affection-image powerless to make it felt” (C1 123). Either we cannot be sure what is happening, as in Buñuel’s circular tales of imprisoned dinner guests; or we have no guide to orient us affectively; or all signs point to ruin, as in Stroheim’s naturalistic epics of dark tendencies overtaking human character and social life. Toward the end of Dead Ringers, the brothers barricade themselves within a jealous togetherness in their steadily dilapidating office. Everything and everyone else gets shunted into a relative out-of-field, so much so that it begins to feel absolute. Creed’s “barely concealed confusion about the limits of representability” persists, too, as Elliot and Beverly become harder than ever to distinguish, though a “suppressed homosexual wish” seems less and less satisfying as a diagnosis of what is afoot. Despite all this, entropic impulses of mutation and desire keep manifesting the more they try to fortify themselves against

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Figure 1.3 Dead Ringers: A grisly impulse-image of Beverly’s tools. Dead Ringers, 1988, dir. David Cronenberg.

them—just as Deleuze’s theory of the out-of-field warns. More and more derationalized impulse-images accumulate. The final operating-room scene stalls in horror as soon as we perceive Beverly’s spindly, talon-like tools for operating on mutant women (see figure 1.3). Like any perception-image, the limited-depth still-life of these macabre objects prompts a question as to what flow, of desire or of images, it could possibly hail from. In this case, the spectator is hard-pressed to imagine even the most hieroglyphic chain to encompass these outgrowths of Beverly’s factory of desiring-production, accelerating and collapsing at the same time. In cinematic terms, the perception-affectionaction cycle of montage sputters and swells with awful potential. The movie cuts from these tools to a close-up of a terrorized surgical assistant. This shot cannot serve as an affection-image because it cannot place the grotesque firstlevel or second-level qualities of these objects (their sharpness, boniness, and spindliness, matched to medical tools, of all horrifying things) into any coherent relation that explains them or that is bearable to contemplate. This sequence anticipates some gruesome Cronenbergian action, but again, as so often in earlier sequences, this auteur-driven expectation short-circuits. Dead Ringers repeats similar perception-images and similar, half-masked affection-images, forestalling action in favor of fathomless, static impulse. Rather than narrativize the grisly power-qualities of these objects, the film swells the chromatic, sonic, and ambient aspects of the scene to obscurely potent levels, yielding a crimson-dressed frieze of total degeneration. Instead of operating, Beverly impulsively leaps for the patient’s oxygen tube; his orderlies wrestle him away from the table in a tableau of barely repulsed menace.

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As in the sex scene with Claire, any personifying or dramatic coordinates in the scene are wholly subordinated to rogue sensory qualities: the scarlet of the gowns, the gleam of the tools, the wildness of music and movement. They collide without achieving stable relations to one another. Still less do they advance action beyond the deluge of derationalized impulse. A similar though quieter centrifuge of impulses overtakes the end of Dead Ringers, in a sequence permeated with a wholly different sensorium: bare rather than draped flesh, blue-gray replacing cardinal red, brooding rather than screeching chords. Beverly accosts Elliot with the same set of creaturely tools, completing his conflation of Claire, Elliot, Chang, Eng (note the alliteration), “mutant women,” “Siamese twins,” and himself. These false equivalencies all emanate from some essentially disordered field of impulse and production that, no matter how horrifying, Deleuze and Guattari align with desire. This chaos of impulse presages the time-images of Cinema 2 and of Naked Lunch; temporality is all but impossible to map, as are all other axes of relation among these final shots. Flows of hieroglyphic perception persist, emphasizing those sensory qualities Deleuze associates with “firstness” and “secondness,” connoting their own retreat from more coherent fields of relation: the spills of melted ice cream all over the medical office; the caked candle wax; the hard sheen of the hypodermics; the swampy accumulation of garbage; the syrupy rivulet of blood as Beverly slices into his brother. Only with a cut to the following morning do we behold Elliot in the examination chair, blurry in the background of the shot, his abdomen a carnelian smear. The depth of focus is so shallow on Beverly in the foreground that Elliot, as befits the overall drift of Dead Ringers, appears simultaneously in the frame and out of it. Beverly rises, shaves, dresses, walks outside, and dials Claire from a payphone, though he finds it impossible to speak when she answers; the dialogue concludes on her staticky voice asking “Who is this?” No satisfactory response to this question is easily imaginable. Bev himself feels like a spidery presence within his own unreadable frame. Even after he returns to the apartment and lies glassy-eyed across his brother’s lap in the film’s final image, it seems reductive and incongruous to think of him as a “dead queer,” given the ineffable, bafflingly oriented impulses that produced Beverly’s current state and produced this ghostly final image. Dead Ringers has rendered itself not as the expression of some pre-given or closeted structure of desire but as a series of desiring-movements, on the brink of total deterritorialization, where the contents and omissions of any frame can barely be distinguished. Claire’s absence in the final scenes does not imply a diminution of the film’s interest in her or of her tremendous stake in how the movie unfolds, perceptually or conceptually. As though presciently of this film, Deleuze asserts that the impulse-image typically produces films that “enclose the men hermetically, delivering them up to a sort of male homosexual game from which they

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do not emerge,” and that if a potential for “salvation” survives in these films, “we would have to look for it in the women” (C1 138). It is the women “who trace a line of exit, and who win a freedom which is creative, artistic, or simply practical: they have neither shame, nor guilt, nor static violence which would reverse itself against them” (C1 138–39).48 Through Claire, who “will never really have been a woman,” but who still defies critical imprecations of Cronenberg axiomatically neglecting or short-changing women, Dead Ringers carries Deleuze’s account of the impulse a necessary step further. This film designates dimorphic categories of sex or gender and idealized categories of heterosexuality or homosexuality as milieus to be disrupted, sites of mutation and category-confusion. These need not, however, be taken as unpleasurable or unmanageable.

The Desiring-Image as Relation-Image The three-chambered womb, useless for childbearing, never stops producing concepts as Dead Ringers unfolds. This fabulously rare entity shifts the film’s imaginarium from a seeming obsession with dualisms to a field of multiple triplicities, novelties, and perplexing “either . . . or . . . or . . .” enigmas, even if some characters nimbly negotiate the disordered alterities to which others despondently succumb. As Dead Ringers builds to these crises, the movie also marks new, productive interchanges among perceptual and sexual categories. Through Beverly, Elliot, Claire, and their convoluted bonds to one another, the film assembles with remarkable force a Deleuzian series of apotheoses and breakdowns, linked to desires that resist designation as hetero or homo, masculine or feminine. All three characters feel unstably constituted by flows of desire and embodiment that keep shifting within and among them, yielding new, queer ideas of what “relation” can ultimately entail in these contexts. To the extent that Dead Ringers simultaneously charts paths of destruction and production, Cinema 1 traces similar arcs. Having devoted its early chapters to an ontological dissection of the image into parts, sets, out-of-fields, and evolving wholes, the book centers its later chapters around rebellious “impulses,” sociopolitical pressures, and disruptions of the viewer’s habit-trained responses. These trends displace cinema’s center of gravity away from direct perceptions of things and toward a constant, challenging immersion within manifold, evolving relations. This dual trajectory constitutes the much-invoked “crisis of the action-image,” with portentous overtones that are simultaneously aesthetic, historical, and political, culminating in Deleuze’s vehement testimonies on the final page of Cinema 1 of our collective need for new images. One such innovation Cinema 1 proposes is the “relation-image,” largely articulated by way of Hitchcock, through which the grammar of film and structures of spectatorship crack open in ways that necessitate the audience’s active,

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meaning-making involvement. As such, Hitchcock’s relation-image is fundamentally a mental-image, “making the mental the proper object of an image . . . an image which takes as its object, relations, symbolical acts, intellectual feelings” (C1 198, original emphasis). Such “relations” and “symbolical” figures prompt Hitchcock toward a schema that Cinema 1 calls the “demark.” This term can designate an exceptional departure from a uniform series, such as the single head that never swivels at the tennis match in Strangers on a Train (1951), or a concrete object variously defined within disparate series, like Joan Fontaine’s glowing glass of milk in Suspicion (1941), which both joins and estranges, maternal, marital, and murderous impulses. The demark can also name a figure that, by seeming to break from any rational series, unmasks the world as essentially discontinuous, as seems true of the inexplicable and aggressive crop duster in North by Northwest (1959) or the birds in The Birds (1963). A demark among demarks, Claire’s womb in Dead Ringers glories once more in fruitful triplicity, suiting each of Hitchcock’s models: first, it is introduced as an unusual departure from a presumptive series of “female” norms; second, it accumulates for the Mantles and the audience a hyper-abundance of erotic, medical, material, and conceptual resonances; third, via this figure’s irreconcilability to any one network, it casts every series of relation in the film into schizophrenic vibrations. Presented at first as a relative demark, an outlier from reproductive possibility, the three-chambered uterus thus becomes an absolute demark, reflecting universal variation as an implacable fact of the world, such that no sex, gender, or desire survives as “stable.” From a Deleuzian standpoint, the “gay or something” sexuality of the Mantles presents a similar kind of demark. What registers first in this direction is the bond between the Mantles: a break from presumptive heterosexuality, attracting loaded insinuations. Later, their bond becomes a querulously overdetermined site of too many questions and variables to count, related not just to sexual desire but to exaggerated kinship, childishness and maturity, privilege and recklessness, degrees of self-knowledge, openness and secrecy, humanity and pre-personality, and availability or inhospitality to any romantic partner of any-gender-whatever. Finally, the Mantles’ anxious, intimate relation stops looking like anything else around it, in a world whose rationality undergoes assault on all fronts. Their queer twinness serves, then, as a “steepest slope” (C1 124) into molecular uncertainties of being, becoming, and all desire, cast in terms of fathomless impulse. The Mantles seize this inchoate epiphany as a prompt toward even greater, more futile seclusion and toward a patently unworkable depth model; Beverly opens Elliot up, as if in search of his desiring-machines, which have lately caused them such perplexity and distress. Claire, however, who does have a fabulous machine inside of her, realizes that this molecular world does not operate along inside/outside or normative/aberrant axes. Imagining that baselines of reality lie inside the body, albeit in ways available to perception, is just

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as misconstrued as trying to banish insistent impulses or forces of change into an unprobed out-of-field. A more feasible strategy for life and pleasure involves a nomadic, choreographic balance of desires and self-modifications, invited and otherwise. Unlike Hitchcock’s biplanes and birds, however, Cronenberg’s trifurcate womb and queer desiring-machines operate as “relation-images” without being perceptible on screen, and very much despite the filmmaker’s established habits of obscene hyper-visualization. The only thing we can do is feel the impress of these desires emanating from various out-of-fields and read the text, as Buchanan has advised, with an eye on “all the flows and their schizzes.” These, however, exhort us not just toward a “mental-image,” emphasizing the viewer’s cognitive participation in working out relations among visual images. In addition to shouldering the tasks of a relation-image, a thought-image, a time-image, and other figures Deleuze introduces for an increasingly derationalized cinema, in an increasingly derationalized world, the desiring-image adopts tasks more specific to itself. It allows sexuality, sensation, feeling, and thought to inform one another in ways that the Cinema books and certain rubrics of queer cinema have not always invited. If Naked Lunch subsequently carries the deterritorializing of desire and the virtualizing of relations even further, Dead Ringers demonstrates that a more linear film—even, at times, an imposingly “solid” one—can still generate what Deleuze might call a “pure” or “direct” image of desire. These locutions, which become more prominent in Cinema 2, do not suggest that desire makes itself fully apparent at the actual surface of the image, a prospect no more conceivable than a fully apparent image of time. Rather, a pure or direct image of desire is one that provokes the viewer to consider the expansive, irreconcilable relations that subsist within all desire, whether explicitly eroticized or bound up with broader concepts of intensity, power, and production. The task of queer cinema, then, is not to express forms of sexuality that are readily classifiable as gay, nor to translate preexisting models of desire into corresponding visual images, nor to characterize only the most prosperous states of sexual morphology, activity, and identification. Claire’s open future, no more perceptible to us than her concealed mutation, is as queer as the Mantles’ evident instabilities, their inchoate needs and longings for each other, and their final, incontrovertible collapse. Both reward my understanding of queer cinema as dislodging automatic, idealized relations within or among sex, gender, and desire, marshaling cinematic form and structure as essential means toward those ends—including whatever a film does not or cannot show. By that logic, Dead Ringers is not just a queer film, but also a film that forces us to reconceive what queer cinema is, and what it remains capable of becoming.

{2}

Hard Bodies and Sex-Blobs Deterritorializing Desire in Naked Lunch and Shortbus Innaresting Sex Arrangements Naked Lunch (1991) suggests even more bonafides as queer cinema than Dead Ringers does. Men who imply or enact desires for other men populate the film, as do women rumored to be lovers, and the project hails from not just any queer text but the most famous text by the author of Queer. Specifically, Cronenberg’s homage to William S. Burroughs bears much in common with the New Queer milestones that were its near-exact contemporaries: Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1988), prismatically blending scenes from the life and work of another legendary author; Derek Jarman’s caustic and creatively anachronistic staging of Marlowe’s Edward II (1991); Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991), a male-hustler update of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, complete with interpolated verse passages; and Todd Haynes’s Poison (1991), a three-stranded film whose “Homo” storyline revisits scenes of violence and carceral lust from another queer icon and quasi-autobiographer, Jean Genet. All these films, including Naked Lunch, redraw erotic categories in tandem with molecular reworkings of renowned Western texts—part of that praxis of “Homo Pomo” touted by B. Ruby Rich, and in keeping with what Linda Hutcheon calls “palimpsestuous” adaptation, synthesizing elements of an eponymous work, of historical facts and conjectures, and of the filmmakers’ imaginations.1 The fact that Naked Lunch never finds itself under the New Queer umbrella has less to do, then, with categorical disparity than with familiar feminist, gay, and lesbian critiques of Cronenberg’s work, rehearsed in the previous chapter but goaded in this case toward an even higher pitch. Moreover, the film’s bold, Deleuzian minoring of an already minor author, via comparable tactics to those of Jarman or Julien, translated to many viewers as a willfully “straight” misreading of Burroughs or as a self-serving reification of the artist-as-genius. On the contrary, Naked Lunch deindividualizes the labors of authorship and atomizes erotic orientations throughout a sprawling, counterpublic collective— one inextricably defined by sexual variability, by the undermining of subjects

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and diegetic realities, and by an agnostic approach to myths of the revolutionary artist. Admittedly, Cronenberg’s script tempts the kinds of censure he received, even if the film demands more nuanced readings. Naked Lunch centralizes the figure of exterminator Bill Lee (Peter Weller), a mordant Burroughs doppelganger borrowed from his own writings, who works in fits and starts on the novel Naked Lunch. He composes in anguished, drug-addled response to having accidentally shot his own wife, Joan Lee (Judy Davis), as Burroughs himself notoriously did.2 Guilt and grief prompt Bill’s self-exile to a patently fake, Tangiers-style city called Interzone, full of labyrinthine casbahs, Western expatriates, malign cabals, and sexually pliable residents of all stripes: young and old, brown and pale, human and otherwise. This odd parable of the book’s genesis jettisons Burroughs’s characters, if such a term suits the barely personified figures who enact the novel’s rococo melee of erotic, narcotic, and violent impulses. Cronenberg also tempers the lascivious excesses that landed Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in the U.S. courts.3 Given such pronounced departures from Burroughs’s blueprint, William Beard opines that “even to call the film Naked Lunch is highly misleading and might have given rise to outraged objections if the filmmaker had not had the imprimatur of Burroughs himself.”4 Outraged objections did, however, ensue. The influential American film critic Amy Taubin, a frequent Cronenberg champion, regretted that Naked Lunch “never resolves the incompatibility between the heterosexual drive of its narrative and the remnants of Burroughs’s homoerotic fantasy,” even as she conceded that “the gay critics who’ve attacked the film would have a hard time recuperating much of Burroughs .  .  . within their politics of essentialism and positive imagery.”5 Richard Dellamora goes further, arraigning the film as “a heterosexual reading of Burroughs’s biography” guilty of aestheticizing all forms of politics, sexual or otherwise, and “abstracting homosexuality into a generalized linguistic transgression [and] a generic index of psychic unease.”6 Even Burroughs, who lent his image and approving voice to the film’s advertising, and who refused sexual-identity labels and their associated politics throughout his life, confessed some dismay over the film’s reformulated erotic universe. “For reasons best known to himself,” the novelist attests, “David chose to treat ‘Lee’s’ homosexuality as a somewhat unwelcome accident of circumstance and plot, rather than as an innate characteristic.”7 In truth, however, the film refuses to fix any desiring formation, homosexual, heterosexual, or otherwise, as an “innate characteristic” of anybody. Naked Lunch views Bill Lee’s ostensible homosexuality not as a premise one must reinvest with stable contours (which the book itself refuses) but as a contingent assemblage, shattered like Burroughsian prose into remixable parts, with varying effects and intensities. These elements are perhaps more abstracted when we superimpose on them a label like “homosexuality,” coined to

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comprise millions upon millions of cases but a poor fit for the queerer, more singular desires of many individuals and certainly for such unusual ones as Burroughs or Bill Lee. In this respect, Cronenberg’s film sustains that politics of difference that queer theory privileges above a politics of identity, whether the latter term connotes individual subjectivity or else connotes sameness as a value we enforce upon desires, their consistent enactments over time, and the erotic or political relations into which they draw us.8 Queer politics of difference bear strong implications for how the film imagines desire and how it stages its minor interventions into Burroughs’s legacy—infiltrating his figures and syntaxes with alien energies. Rather than professing slippages innate to all language, in line with Dellamora’s “generalized linguistic transgression,” Naked Lunch as a film sustains the more targeted projects that Deleuze and Guattari call “minor” artistry. The film essays that platform through its estranging grammars; through the conjoined idioms of writing, fleeing, fucking, drug taking, and imagemaking; and through the deterritorializing energies common to them all. This chapter thus advances two related arguments about the Deleuzeinflected queerness of Naked Lunch. One relates to the film’s formal, erotic, and narrative strategies of deterritorialization as a concept the whole movie orients around. The other pertains to Naked Lunch’s political dispositions, its images of capital, and important asymmetries between what Deleuze and Guattari name as “schizo” and “revolutionary” orientations—a distinction relevant, as well, to a movement like queer cinema that often proclaims its vigorously oppositional stances against prevailing ideology. In the first case, Naked Lunch’s forms of montage reprise those of Cinema 2: The Time-Image but flex them in new ways to produce desire, not just time, as a “plane of immanence”—a derationalized force at work within all images, and a kind of conceptual magma from which these images arise, perpetually erupting into new arrangements. In keeping with the stylistics of Cinema 2, Cronenberg’s movie shapes its images less as forward steps in a narrative than as a series of “pure optical and sound situations,” delinking scenes, shots, and even discrete audiovisual stimuli within a given frame from any stable relation to those that adjoin them. The resulting film dislodges story continuities and temporal chronologies despite vestigial traces of both—the bare minimum required, one presumes, to keep Naked Lunch remotely eligible for distribution by a mainstream Hollywood behemoth like 20th Century Fox.9 The story of Naked Lunch thus becomes difficult to follow, its timeframe impossible to fix, its images difficult to read and often to stomach. Meanwhile, the film engenders multiple, nongeneralizable, and what Deleuze would call “direct” images of desire. He defines these not as exhaustive distillations of an impossibly large category but as images staking no claim on ideal or prototypical representation. Despite its alleged “heterosexualizing” of the novel, no one assemblage of desire becomes iconic of Naked Lunch, nor is any consigned to the visual or

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verbal out-of-frame—which, in marked contrast to the case of Dead Ringers, barely exists as such in this film. As for the chapter’s second line of argument, Burroughs appears in Deleuze and Guattari’s work as a key practitioner of minor writing. The coagulated, commodified visions of Burroughs that arose by the early 1990s, however, invited some minoring of their own. Critiques that sharply denounced Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch and its central characterization resist, I think, the inevitability of reassemblage that Deleuze and Burroughs jointly espouse; they overstate an ideological divide between the novel as countercultural gesture and the film as polluted artifact of capital, strategically conceiving and gendering the ostensibly ideal viewer of this film as a heterosexual male. My rebuttal exposes the hypostatic versions of the film, the audience, and Burroughs himself on which these critiques depend. Moreover, I argue that Burroughs’s midcentury work as a minor artist and Cronenberg’s later aspirations to that mantle entail complicity with many structures they wish to alienate—and, in the film’s case, to fill with aliens. Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch therefore takes an inevitably qualified but wholly remarkable stab at what Burroughs calls “the sex that passes the censor, squeezes through between bureaus, because there’s always a space between.”10 The rigor and innovation of this palimpsestuous adaptation, where erotic possibilities “can be had in any order being tied up back and forth in and out fore and aft like an innaresting sex arrangement,” constitute a stunning, unfairly sidelined feat of 1990s-era queer cinema as minor cinema.11 Given the salutary and suspicious effects of any deterritorializing art—and in order to keep Cronenberg’s strange career from seeming like a case unto itself—I conclude this chapter with a parallel double reading of John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus (2006), again focalizing its formal negotiations at first, then shifting to an analysis of its collective and political orientations in relation to Deleuzian minor artistry. Like Naked Lunch, Shortbus concerns a polysexual urban counterpublic whose members seek each other out in an increasingly centrifugal series. New York serves as its own Interzone in Mitchell’s film, where elements of fantasy and reality conjoin amid a palpable aftermath of loss. The scale of that loss is gargantuan in Shortbus, which repeatedly marks itself as a post-9/11 story, and the film articulates a set of political ideals shaped as much by that legacy as by those of sexphobia, homophobia, and other erotic inhibitions. Partly due to its notorious (which is to say, well-marketed) deployment of scenes featuring real sex among its cast members, and partly in response to its outward intent to be pro-sex, anti-terror, and balming of a wounded city all at once, the film’s critical reception verged on the euphoric, especially but not only among queer audiences and certainly compared with Naked Lunch’s failures to connect with those audiences fifteen years earlier. In this and other ways, the erotic boisterousness and contemporary framing of Shortbus seem to contrast rather than complement the alien sexuality, ghastly acts of violence, and midcentury idioms of Cronenberg’s film.

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Despite those oppositions, both films self-consciously convey derationalized desire as a virtual plane linking their characters. Each makes bold, tremendous strides in these respects; at their different echelons of cost and production, I remain astonished they got made, much less released. However, Shortbus proclaims its stakes and reaped its critical and commercial profits from emphasizing the actual (real sex, on our shores, in the present), a discourse that ultimately reterritorializes old ideas about gender, genitality, embodiment, and counterpublic credentials. Naked Lunch, by contrast, precisely by emphasizing desiring-productions that could not look less like actual sex, conceives more virtual and molecular forms of eroticism in ways the more strenuously inclusive Shortbus sometimes struggles to do. Both films articulate a queer ethos in different ways, and neither fulfills its ambitious project without enforcing some caveats. Their juxtaposition showcases how “unreal” portraits of desire can attain the goals of minor art, sometimes out-queering more liberally expressed valentines to unrestricted eros.

Peaks, Sheets, and Series Naked Lunch’s quandaries of desire do not obey any clear boundary of visibility and invisibility, women and men, persons and nonpersons, or inclusion and exclusion; in all of these pairings, the “and” marks a membrane of ceaseless, two-way spillage. The film understands desiring-production, whether erotic or creative, as necessarily “falsifying”—a Nietzschean term Deleuze and Guattari apply to desire in Anti-Oedipus, and which Deleuze ascribes to the time-images of Cinema 2. This term suggests not that all enactments of desire are debunked or invalidated but that they signify highly mutable manifestations of an overall field that denies metrics of truth or falsehood. Naked Lunch mobilizes this theorization of desire via three modes of cinematic image-making and sequencing outlined in Cinema 2. We begin, then, by surveying the sheets of past, the peaks of present, and the discontinuous series through which Deleuze articulates temporality in postwar cinema. More thoroughly than all but a few New Queer titles, Naked Lunch recalibrates these concepts as models of derationalized genders and desires. Relations among actual and virtual facets of the image, as posed in Cinema 2, also play a crucial role in how Naked Lunch unfolds, concomitantly with tropes from late in Deleuze’s book, such as the fruitful conflicts between sound and image and the related conceit of the lectosign or “readable” image. In all respects, Naked Lunch produces new relations between the temporal fluxes of modern film and the gendered and erotic disarray on which queer desires depend, glinting in Kafka, though not at all in Cinema 2.12 Some background: according to Deleuze, cinema after World War II rejects schemas of continuous movement that organized earlier films. Instead,

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time-images bear unfixed relations to each other, posing perceptions and provoking responses in “real time,” emphasizing the pure duration of shots and also allowing the temporal loops, drifts, and stalls that prior films subdued. This mode opens cinema up to super-saturations of infinite pasts, to competing and concurrent presents, and to proliferations of possible futures, echoing revised senses of time we glean from modern philosophy, science, and noncinematic arts. If Deleuze no longer speaks of the perceptionaffection-action cycle subtending his theories of montage in Cinema 1, this is not because all films abandon that model—though he dismisses those that do as profit-mongering anachronisms. Not every sequence even in modern, vanguardist cinema abjures smooth, rationalized linkages. Still, the most potent of them militate against the kinds of spectatorial reflexes that naturalize and universalize certain grammars and encourage rote, inattentive, ideologically susceptible viewing. Hence, three new modes of montage in Cinema 2 torque the protocols of what Deleuze calls “sensory-motor” perception, coevally with three aspects of temporality he adapts from Bergson. First, modern films configure the past as a profusion of sheets, shuffled out of any linking movement or rational order. These sheets constitute erratic, partial extractions from a reservoir of multiple and expanding pasts, on which each new present now draws. Think here of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), in which the unseen journalist interviews different acquaintances of the protean publisher; their reminiscences are jumbled, inconsistent, and only partly retrievable. Some sheets, like the famous image of the sled tossed into the fire, detach from any character’s subjective awareness. From a Deleuzian standpoint, this sled implies no meaning but reflects the dishevelment of the “past-in-general,” recuperable only in flashes, as motivated by some present exigency. Modern cinema also generates peaks of present, contracting possible faces of the past into complexly signifying tableaus. Inevitably, these peaks clash with other ways of perceiving or inhabiting the same present—what Deleuze refers to as a predicament of “incompossibility.” Cinema 2 locates examples of the “peak” form in films by Luis Buñuel and Alain Resnais, but I find Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) to be an especially evocative case. Whatever transpires between Alma and Elisabeth on that Nordic isle remains irresolvably unclear, encompassing repeated dialogues, visits of strangers, possible hallucinations, scenes of injury, vampiric assaults, and characters swapping features and personalities, even before the celluloid shatters and burns in the projector. Each peak impresses itself as “true” while it transpires, yet each falsifies claims made by the others, sometimes in the previous or subsequent shot. Our impressions of the present in Persona are just as derationalized as the muddled pasts of Citizen Kane. The only model of truth that survives such montage is the creative synthesis of potentially false images—a Nietzschean “will to art” that serves as a refrain throughout Cinema 2.

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Third, and most heterogeneously, Deleuze describes both time itself and postwar cinema in terms of series or chains in which vectors of past, present, and future indivisibly merge. In this configuration, images signal a radical openness to fluctuating relations and change in all directions.13 Some postwar films persist fully in this mode, or nearly so. In Alain Resnais’s Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968), or increasingly toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), montage permits no distinctions among actual or fantasized elements, possible or impossible events, recaptured pasts, unfolding presents, or futures that may be concrete, cyclical, or conjectural. Each image “potentializes” qualities and powers of the others, drawing them into new orbits. Images in series thus constitute an “affirmative will to power” that results in new thoughts, new paths by which the image becomes something other than what is first apparent.14 Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch manifests all these time-image structures. The film implies temporal stases, dilations, overlaps, and aporia, amidst which its sequences float as disorganized sheets rather than tracing a clear succession. In egregiously dissonant images that nevertheless occupy the same instant or render the same events (is Bill injecting a drug, waving a gun, or proffering a ticket?), the film manifests incompossible peaks of present. These peaks sustain some narrative lines of action but none can possibly distill all of the alien, possibly hallucinated pasts that Naked Lunch contains. Hence, the unspooling chain of images equally suggests a cycle of endless repetitions, a trajectory into absolute novelty, or some scramble of the two. In traversing multiple, oneiric environments, in juxtaposing optical and sound elements that bear no patent relations to each other, and in resolutely leaving almost any image open to follow almost any other (though the local relations are always worth pondering), Naked Lunch takes shape as a series of images, perpetually inhabiting a threshold of possible transformation. Irrationality characterizes Naked Lunch from its earliest scenes, even before the accidental uxoricide that catalyzes Bill’s most delirious flights; we cannot, then, ascribe all of the film’s formal entropy to a traumatized consciousness. Granted, Bill’s ubiquitous presence, his privileged sight-lines, and his face in tight close-up imply his vantage within a huge share of the film’s scenes. The flat, sallow aesthetics of the lensing and production design also recall his laconic and retentive mien. Other images suggest the camera’s free-indirect perspective, which cannot easily be Bill’s, though none of these shots consequently imply an “objective” reality to counter his slant on events. When Bill, for example, is visited in Interzone by Hank (Nicholas Campbell) and Martin (Michael Zelniker), the movie’s stand-ins for Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, the mise-en-scène and soundtrack insinuate that, unbeknownst to Bill, he has never left New York. They find their friend lying on a dirt pile, clutching a pillowcase of typewriter parts; the camera and editing, briefly aligning with Hank’s perspective, suggest these are “actually” hypodermic needles

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and vials of pills. Then again, the ontological status of New York or Interzone, of Bill or Hank or Martin, to include all their perceptions and encounters, stay perpetually open to doubt.15 “As for the distinction between subjective and objective,” Deleuze warns very early in Cinema 2, “it also tends to lose its importance. . . . We run in fact into a principle of indeterminability, of indiscernibility: we no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, in the situation, not because they are confused, but because we do not have to know and there is no longer even a place from which to ask” (C2 7).16 The abstract models of sheets, peaks, and series take more or less correlative shape in three formal habits of Naked Lunch. The first entails frequently incompossible edits, as when the image of a typewriter reappears in a consecutive shot as a large, talking beetle, and the film ascribes comparable reality to both images. The second concerns incongruous qualities that attach to some common assemblage, building incompossibilities into mise-en-scène rather than just montage. Examples include those Interzone bug-writers, sporting keypads on their snouts, talking sphincters beneath their wings, and the voices of elderly exterminators we first encountered in the New York scenes. Thirdly, the film frequently heightens its optical and aural intensities to such an extent that they signify separately from the objects and images that emit them, and sometimes in contradictory ways. The beetle-writers’ raspy murmurs about lethal conspiracies, for example, saturate the film with Cold War paranoia and notes of spiritual fatigue, affects that signify as free-floating elements in themselves. Likewise, the machines’ ecstatic moans when stimulated with “bug powder” release a tremendous force of sexual excess, disproportionate to anything “in” the image. Their loud, crunching movements and dully gleaming exoskeletons convey physical and aural heft within a visual and tonal environment that otherwise feels muffled and abstract, endowing these literally unbelievable creatures with traces of actuality. This actual-virtual dialectic expands beyond tradeoffs within single motifs (the bug-writers, the Mugwumps, Interzone itself), influencing the broadest levels of how we perceive the film and of how we imagine the actual and virtual possibilities of queerness itself.

“Everything Is Permitted”: Incompossibilities of Desire Naked Lunch quickly establishes that everything on screen, whether objects or persons or their individual traits, potentially relates in unstable ways to any other image. Nowhere is this truer than in the way the film produces sexual desire. More than Dead Ringers, then, with its structuring occlusions of male homosexuality (for a while) and a pronouncedly invisible womb (throughout), Naked Lunch suggests that no figure falls absolutely outside of the film’s incompossible purview. In this context where every object, subject, attraction, or relation implies unpredictable alternatives and unseen potentials, Bill’s vacillating

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desires cannot be boiled down to a refused homosexuality or to an imposed heterosexuality. Disordered sheets and intense, contracted peaks of desire assert themselves across Naked Lunch, disclosing infinite capabilities for leaping into new arrangements. Desire, then, as both a Deleuzian principle of production and a specific plane of erotic energy, manifests across the film with ubiquitous force, yielding a schema in which multiplicity, flux, and difference displace linearity, continuity, and consolidation—for individual characters, among collectives, and in the relations among images.17 Consonant with this Deleuzo-Guattarian view of desire as a plane of conjoining and detaching particles—a plane in which, to quote the film’s epigraph, “everything is permitted”—Naked Lunch unfolds as a chain of highly eroticized unions, breakdowns, hostilities, reunions, ecstasies, surfeits, and losses. The same dynamics typify the film’s visions of literary artistry, narcotic experimentation, and paranoid expatriate sociality, treated not as phenomena distinct from deterritorialized sexuality but as conjunctions and reverse-faces of the same tumultuous elements. The incompossible, sensorily striking scenes that exert the strongest pull on Bill’s characterization refuse terms like gay or straight, especially since Deleuzian desire “does not take as its object persons or things, but the entire surroundings that it traverses, the vibrations and flows of every sort to which it is joined” (AO 292). For example, his seemingly accidental killing of his wife Joan unmistakably brings him anguish, and his attraction to her is presented as wholly earnest. Even so, the circumstances of her shooting, the troubling discourses of misogyny and conspiracy that surround it, and the shooting’s recurrence as a leitmotif across the film render not just the death enigmatic but the states of desire it reflects and engenders. Does the shooting territorialize the fictional Bill as the actual Burroughs, inviting projections of what we “know” about one onto the other, with the attendant sexual implications? Is the shooting an alibi for Bill’s extramarital, superficially homosexual, vaguely necrophiliac adventures that follow? Is the shooting most important as a pure, unpredictable peak of deterritorialized energies, especially in a film so clenched by Burroughsian nightmares of Control? In the discourses of Cinema 1, explored more fully in the last chapter, Bill’s unmotivated, sensorily intense shooting of Joan invites classification as an impulse-image, a “primordial act” deriving from some “originary world, which rumbles in the depths of all the milieux and runs along beneath them” (C1 125). One could even read the murder as a fusion of all three species of impulse that Deleuze describes: a cataclysmic worsening of circumstances; the spark for an entrapping cycle of Buñuelian repetitions; and the sour positing of a desecrated female body as Bill’s escape-hatch from what is otherwise “a sort of male homosexual game from which they do not emerge” (C1 138). Given, however, the collapse of any distinction between diegesis and out-of-field and the resulting bevy of incompossible figures, Naked Lunch can hardly be parsed into a “derived

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milieu” and an “originary world”; the upwellings of desire cannot be distinguished from some overlaid narrative in which they “intrude,” any more than the flashes of memory in Kane or the most inscrutable figures in Persona stand apart from any scaffold of rational continuity. The stubborn singularity of each image within Naked Lunch’s overall series, conjoining complex desires, reinforces itself in its heightened, distinctive audiovisual details. This is the effect in the assassination scene of the camera’s unexpected distance from Joan and even from Bill at a moment of dramatic crisis; of the etherized musical score, compared with its agitations elsewhere; and of the odd, arrhythmic cutaways to the bullet casing as it lands on a nearby dresser and to the undamaged glass audibly colliding with Bill’s shoe. These opaque but audiovisually arresting details preserve the scene from “revealing” anything of Bill’s mentality. They posit nothing except their own vividness, opening but refusing the question of how they “relate” to what happens, prompting viewers to construct arguable relations among signs, without suggesting concealed depths or explanations. Once Bill relocates to Interzone, the diegetic chaos, erotic pulls, sensory intensities, and perplexing chains of signification proliferate even further. Bill gets sexually entangled with Joan Frost (a lookalike of his dead wife, also played by Judy Davis) and with a soft-spoken, younger, light-skinned Moroccan man named Kiki (Joseph Scorsiani). He partakes in one-night stands with unseen local boys and possibly, based on an early breakfast full of ripe dialogue, with the European dandy Yves Cloquet (Julian Sands). Among these rifled sheets of sexual behavior, none are central or primary. As a carnal and creative motivator, Bill drinks the semen of the Mugwumps, spindly, reptilian bipeds who are indigenous residents of Interzone. Naked Lunch presents these lascivious degustations as actual events within a uniformly alien landscape, taken seriously on their own terms even when they imply more quotidian indulgences, whether erotic or narcotic. These scenes impart within Bill’s confusing network of desires a strong valence of deterritorialization (Where are we? What exactly are we looking at? What or whom does Bill want?) and of incompossibility (our perceptions suggest so many things at once). Importantly, the images in which Bill alternately refuses or gratifies his desires sport the same audiovisual traits, discounting any hydraulic opposition between “released” and “repressed” appetites in favor of machinic flows that generate polysexual movements in multiple directions.

Schizos and Counterpublics Bill is the main vessel and product of these polyphonic desiring-images, but his case is not unique. Joan Frost sustains her marriage to Tom Frost (Ian Holm) and her furtive liaison with Bill, while procuring additional pleasures from socalled boys of Interzone and from her Moroccan housekeeper Fadela (Monique

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Mercure). The latter affair thrives on sadomasochistic tensions of control and release, amplified by sound and image, and on strange drugs (ground centipedes, pulped insects, Mugwump juice) that Fadela mass-produces faster than Joan and the other addicts of Interzone can consume them, usually in suggestive poses of sucking and stroking, underlined by quasi-diegetic moans of ecstasy. In these scenes as in all others, desire comprises a queerly intense field of agitated forces, not an incarnated tie between two anthropomorphic subjects. Both women’s status as persons is in fact highly questionable: Joan’s because she is patently a double for a woman we understand to be dead, and Fadela’s because she may “actually” be the black-market kingpin Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider), a notorious hobgoblin drawn from the pages of Burroughs. In a late climax, Fadela bares and fondles her breasts, cackling over her conquest of Interzone, then rips away the flesh of her torso, only for Benway to reveal himself: a fey, smug assemblage of incompossible genderings, embodiments, and desires, just like the bug-writers, the Mugwumps, or indeed Bill or Joan. Relationships in Naked Lunch, then, multiply and overlap to such an extent it is hard to keep them straight, as it were. Individual participants refute binaries of male and female sex or of gay and straight sexuality, to include queer temporal confusions regarding whether, for instance, the butch Fadela is now or has always been Dr. Benway in disguise. This collapsing of sexed (and raced) distinctions does not, however, differ in kind or even in degree from other confusions of actual and virtual traits among Naked Lunch’s alien, polyamorous characters. Some, like Benway, carry “falsified” connotations as famous figures from Burroughs’s fictions. Others are virtual effigies of how actual Beat celebrities might have behaved, desired, or been desired: Hank and Martin as Kerouac and Ginsberg, Tom and Joan Frost as Paul and Jane Bowles, Bill Lee and his wife Joan as William Burroughs and his wife Joan. Other characters suggest people disguised or resuscitated as other people (Fadela as Benway, Joan Frost as Joan Lee), and still others suggest people disguised as insects or the reverse (Yves, the Joans, the FBI agents). A further group comprises such outrageously artificial archetypes that we cannot accept them as anything else: the swish and shady Hans, the hyperbolically imperious Fadela, the too-sweet-to-be-true Kiki. Together, these figures generate what Dead Ringers lacks and few New Queer Cinema titles achieve: a collective for whom sex and art serve deterritorializing functions, minoring desires in heteroglossic ways.18 These conundrums further disqualify subjectivity or psychological interiority as viable inroads into who or what these persons “actually” are, as if separable from their molecular mutabilities. This holds true even for Bill, whose circumstances sometimes approximate psychoanalytic tropes, as in the wouldbe traumatic repetitions of murdering Joan.19 However, his inconsistent behaviors, odd opacities, and uncertain movements align him more closely with Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoid subject, “with no fixed identity, wandering

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about over the body without organs, but always remaining peripheral to the desiring-machines” (AO 16). The characters in Naked Lunch also approximate other schizo subjects who inhabit Cinema 2 under a range of names, from the “new race of characters . . . kind of mutant” invoked in Deleuze’s preface to the English edition (C2 xi) to the driftless “zombies” in the movies of Alain Resnais (C2 208) to the “chain of forgers . . . investigators, witnesses, and innocent or guilty heroes [who] will participate in the same power of the false, the degrees of which they will embody” (C2 133). These locutions feel directly descriptive of Naked Lunch, where slain wives resurface as pale, erogenous “zombies”; where various texts, including Naked Lunch itself, are produced by jealous, discontinuous “chains of forgers”; where Interzone crawls with shady, officious “investigators”; and where Bill Lee is an undecidably “innocent or guilty hero” strewn amongst other “personalities which are independent, alienated, off-balance, in some sense embryonic, strangely active fossils, radioactive” (C2 113). Even better-suited to Cronenberg’s film is Deleuze and Guattari’s triadic roll call of the dramatis personae of Kafka’s minor literature: “proliferating bureaucratic doubles with all the marks of homosexuality. . . . remarkable series of young women, where each corresponds to a point that stands out from the ordinary series” and “the singular series of the artist, manifestly homosexual . . . which overflows all the segments and sweeps up all the connections” (K 69). As cause and effect of their “embryonic,” “alienated,” and permanently “offbalance” constitutions, these figures channel, frustrate, and construct desire in intense, discontinuous series, not as an “innate characteristic.” Only Kiki, the most naïve of the human figures, and Yves, the most cruelly mercenary, invoke “queer” as an adjective to designate a particular sort of person. Otherwise, even at their most openly lascivious, the forgers and zombies of Naked Lunch privilege sexual acts over identities, detached from any firm alignment with categories of gender or from any presumed correspondence with other past, present, or future acts. Tom Frost advises Bill, “You could probably get [Yves] into bed if you worked at it a little bit,” though he perceives no contradiction in also suspecting Bill of ardent designs on his own wife. Joan Frost, flirting with Bill while still in thrall to Tom and to Fadela, asks him point-blank, “And did you come to Interzone for the boys? Tom and I did.” Like other characters in Naked Lunch, Joan takes for granted that desire conjoins not just to qualities of sex or gender but to those of youth, race, culture, and complexion, or even to the sheer, polynomial thrill of “hot threesomes,” and to the prospects of creative lubrication that glint within various erotic encounters. All these factors stoke the film’s desiring-machines and multiply its orientations, reminding us how queer theorists from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to Sara Ahmed have questioned why a concept like sexual “orientation” should agglomerate exclusively or consistently around sexed or gendered object-choice.20 The molecules and sheets, series and peaks, virtualities and intensities of desire in Naked Lunch therefore ratify the account of desire in Anti-Oedipus, where “even our ‘object choice’ itself refers to

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a conjunction of flows of life and of society that this body and this person intercept, receive, and transmit, always within a biological, social, and historical field where we are equally immersed or with which we communicate” (AO 293). Meanwhile, forthrightly machinic desires, channeled through typewriters, syringes, and other objects, disorganize Bill the longer he stays in Interzone, traversing the incompossible realities in which he writes, shoots up, gets off with men or women, gets off with insects or aliens, or goes nowhere and does nothing.21 These scenes produce Bill as “a machine-man, and an experimentalman,” one for whom “to enter or leave the machine, to be in the machine, to walk around it, to approach it—these are all still components of the machine itself: these are states of desire, free of all interpretation” (K 7). Apotheosizing any of these irreconcilable states of desire, including those where Bill seduces or assassinates his wife, where he refuses or accedes to men’s allure, where he relishes or refuses the mucosal flows of Mugwump eroticism, or where he thrills to or cowers from the clacking, sighing, trembling productivities of his licentious typewriters, is to deny the film’s multifarious images of sexuality.

If on a Summer’s Night a Sex-Blob The pivotal sex scene between Bill Lee and Joan Frost crystallizes the berserk operations of desire in Naked Lunch, suggesting all of the following: an intense peak inassimilable to others in the film; a sheet quickly absorbed into the everexpanding reservoir of desires-in-general; and a link within a discontinuous series of desiring-productions, spiking in intensity without stabilizing any pattern. While this scene is just the sort that may imply a heterosexualizing of Burroughs’s novel, since its major participants are (ostensibly) a man and a woman, desire orients itself ambiguously around Bill and Joan as barely coherent assemblages, and not particularly around each other’s maleness or femaleness. One can hardly affirm anything about desire in this scene except its intense charge, its productivity of novel forms, and its “point of indiscernibility” between actual and virtual states (C2 82). This scene differs sharply, then, from Birchall’s comparably central “eruption” at the exact middle of Dead Ringers, actualizing an erotic type that film had previously, vehemently shunted to its out-of-field. The sex-blob episode in Naked Lunch calls forth a figure that is not categorically excluded from or opposed to any previous image, even if we have never seen desire actualized in such a cubistic way. As the scene begins, Bill has been instructed by his talking bug-writer to visit Joan Frost while her husband is “out with the boys.” Visual incompossibilities emerge as early as Bill’s arrival at her building, with its competing traces of a turn-of-the-century courtyard apartment and a water-damaged midcentury Manhattan walk-up, with Orientalist architectural flourishes: built-in friezes, filigreed lamps, spindly interior columns, peaked archways, Moroccan-inspired

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décor. Dryly sizing each other up, Bill and Joan both allude to the potency of the machines in their midst, in words Cronenberg scripts as literary foreplay but that Deleuze and Guattari could have easily written about desire. Joan composes in longhand because, she says, “I find machines intimidating.” Even more enigmatically, as Bill ogles her husband’s Arabic-script typewriter, the Mujahideen, he testifies, “I knew that writing could be dangerous [but] I didn’t know the danger came from the machinery.”22 This danger derives as much from the desiring-machines as from the typing instruments, marking one of several instances in Naked Lunch that urge this conflation. Bill makes good on his bugborne orders to seduce Joan, plying her with narcotics and goading her to type pornographic prose on the Mujahideen. His mumbled recitation of Joan’s prose reprises the same passage of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch that Martin read throughout the build-up to Joan Lee’s assassination: “Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized .  .  .”23 Not for the only time, then, Naked Lunch unsettles Bill’s claim to individual authorship of the eponymous novel, an issue that becomes more important later in this chapter. Furthermore, the reprised passage links the early shooting and the later seduction of the two Joans as virtual correlatives, complicating without psychologizing the desires at work. At every visual and sonic register, this sequence swells with voluptuous detail, those “vibrations and flows of every sort to which [desire] is joined” (AO 292). These encompass the dueling vocal tracks of Bill’s murmuring and Joan’s interjections; the light-catching tumble of Joan’s previously upswept hair; the heat and closeness of the key light on Judy Davis’s face in the exaggerated, wide-angled foreground; the amplification of Bill’s and Joan’s ecstatic groans; the increased density and rising pitch of Howard Shore’s ambient music, zested with staccato flourishes of Ornette Coleman’s saxophone; the tight, textured close-ups on the Mujahideen’s shale-colored impressions in the ivory paper and on the dark, denimy typewriter ribbon; the accelerated crosscuts between the instrument and its fervent manipulators; and the glistening, fibrous, beetcolored interior of the machine, which spontaneously tilts its keyboard forward to disclose a suppurating, organic environment within the metal shell. As stunning a development as this is, carrying to crescendo the kinds of pure sensory stimuli that Cinema 1 classifies as “firstness” (e.g., wetness, loudness, crimson, curl, and clack), the trajectory of the sequence deranges expectations regarding Deleuzian “secondness” (i.e., which objects “should” emit these qualities) and “thirdness” (what relations inhere among these forces and objects). As Cinema 2 maintains, derationalizing “intervals” accrue in post– World War II films not just through dissociative montage but via asymmetries within shots: “Interstices thus proliferate everywhere, in the visual image, in the sound image, between the sound image and the visual image” (C2 181). Thereby merging the irrationalities of Deleuzian time with the effusions of Deleuzian desire, even within single shots, Naked Lunch widens that gap

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between an ostensibly “heterosexual drive” and “homosexual fantasy” that Taubin, far from alone, arraigned as a flaw in the film—decimating the very pertinence of these modifiers.24 Forsaking such parameters with its moaning machinery and its impassioned but coglike humans, the scene generates “pure positive multiplicities where everything is possible, without exclusiveness or negation, syntheses operating without a plan .  .  . since this matter that serves them precisely as a support receives no specificity from any structural or personal unity” (AO 309). As one instance of such positive, unstructured “multiplicity,” a waxy and veined erection sprouts from an abruptly formed cervical hole in the back of the Mujahideen, while Joan continues to fondle the typewriter and Bill nibbles and fondles Joan. The pair falls to the floor in a spooning position, emitting pre-orgasmic gasps despite their placid expressions. Their hands clench each other’s clothed hips, forming an X in the overhead shot, as though traces of prohibition count toward that “pure positive multiplicity” of erotic affects suffusing the scene. Meanwhile, a cut back to the Mujahideen reveals it fully transformed into a rubbery, Caucasian-complected erogenous mass, receiving “no specificity from any structural or personal unity.” An ersatz vagina appears where one might expect a head, and the initial erection stretches backward from a now-shapely posterior. The main body comprises a ribcage, a pelvis and a welter of bony, flesh-colored fronds dotted with squid-like suckers. What Cronenberg has ubiquitously termed his “sex-blob” flips itself off the table with a sticky, smacking noise and quivers atop Joan and Bill, who finger its crannies and palm its surfaces without opening their eyes or adjusting their positions (see figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1 Naked Lunch: The sex-blob, in flight from Fadela’s riding crop. Naked Lunch, 1991, dir. David Cronenberg.

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Despite the descriptive necessity of anthropomorphic metaphors, the “sexblob” is less an amalgam of human organs than an instance of Deleuze and Guattari’s famous “body without organs,” composed of “signs of desire that compose a signifying chain but that are not themselves signifying” (AO 309). The barely separable elements in this assemblage have not been rationalized into parts or functions, much less sexed or gendered ones. Produced alongside Joan and Bill as a manifestation not of “their” desires, exactly, but of the same molecules of desire that generate and agitate them, the sex-blob suggests a queer parody of the Deleuzian subject: neither a wellspring nor a container of “innate” desires but a contingent byproduct of nonhuman or pre-personal movements and intensities. In these respects, the sex-blob is more like the skeletal, mumbling “forger” Bill Lee and the necrophiliac subject-objectzombie Joan Frost than it is different from them. Before long, Fadela arrives in equestrian clothes, snapping a riding crop to startle the adulterers out of their liaison and to chase the sex-blob out of the apartment and over the balcony rail. Capsizing at the feet of the just-returning Tom Frost and his Arabic consort Hafid (Yuval Daniel), the blob reveals itself as “actually” a typewriter. The scene thus appears to map an arc from its least to its most plausible figures: from the outlandish otherness of the blob through the blatantly orientalized Fadela to the mundanely jealous Tom and his wrecked instrument. Moreover, the inciting role of narcotics in the sequence, epitomized by a cut joining Bill’s inkwell of centipede meat to Joan’s escalating frenzy, tempts critics to rebuke Naked Lunch for having been “naturalized as the hallucinatory experiences of a drug-addicted writer, at the same time that whatever extra-textual significance they might have is suspended,” a charge that holds “particularly true of Cronenberg’s treatment of homosexuality.”25 Even, however, if some persons or objects in this sequence are less outwardly alien than the blob, and some edits less disjunctive than that linking this erotic amoeboid to the fractured Mujahideen, the logics of profuse discontinuity and becoming-other pervade every figure. In a different film that privileged heterosexist assumptions or consistent out-of-fields, the blob might suggest a reified figure of queer difference, banished as swiftly as it was summoned.26 Naked Lunch’s derationalized montage, however, already guarantees that any perceptible image, even the most bizarre, presents only one rotating peak from a limitless stable of queer potentials. “The cinema of the body is not a picturing of the literal body,” says D. N. Rodowick. “Rather, its goal is to give expression to forces of becoming that are immanent in bodies, as well as the body’s receptivity to external forces through which it can transform itself.”27 Treated as “literally” by Cronenberg’s unflappable camera as Joan’s or Bill’s or Fadela’s body, the blob works in tandem with every signifier in the scene, conveying immanent forces that generate all of them but are encapsulated by none of them. The blob’s arrival surely discombobulates more than it consolidates our view of Bill and Joan’s bond. Ironically, Fadela’s arrival works the same way,

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producing through her censorious guise still further desiring-productions and assemblages: the apparitional lesbian, the sadistic disciplinarian, the terrorist assemblage.28 The plane of desire keeps adopting new, unstable centers of indetermination, doing so again when it produces Tom and Hafid’s previously undisclosed couplehood—fleetingly casting these two nuts, of all people, as ambassadors of “actual” reality, until we recall the manifold reasons why they cannot occupy that role.

Sounds, Stutters, and Scatterplots Despite the remarkable, polymorphous intensity of this midpoint sequence, Naked Lunch is not shaped as a parabola, cresting at the sex-blob episode and subsiding from there into more normative or predictable desires. Any attempt to graph the film fails: for all its repetitions, including the early and late assassinations of the two Joans, the film does not trace a perfect circle, either. Nor, despite marketers’ shorthand, does the narrative steadily chart the composition of Naked Lunch in anything but the loosest way. The only mainstay across the film is the production of new desiring-flows and combinations. Late scenes generally feel fuller than earlier ones, conjuring more bodies and more alien effluvia, entailing more aggressive flourishes of sound and image (though not always in sync), and deterritorializing desiringproduction at ever-greater scales. Within the first hour, even relative peaks of eroticism are rather wan, such as a truncated scene where Bill, as requested, rubs aphrodisiacal bug-powder on his wife’s lips, or when he returns home to find Joan having drug-dampened sex with Hank on the couch, the camera racking focus as Bill passes to keep Hank’s bare backside out of view. Conversely, scenes in the second hour exacerbate the degrees of deterritorialized sound, spectacle, and desire. When Bill barters Kiki to the predatory Yves Cloquet in exchange for information about Benway, ostensibly human bodies and blob-like materialities conjoin in new, more frightful peaks—not only in the sequence’s grisly caricature of sodomy, but in the sudden profusion of discomfiting artifacts thronging the mise-en-scène. The soundtrack here achieves the film’s highest, harshest saxophone riffs and its loudest crowding of elements. At the same time, Yves’s and Kiki’s moans and groans refuse to ratify the horrific visual image, conveying ambiguously pleasurable or painful states of arousal.29 For sensational weirdness, unnerving sound/image ruptures, and sheer sensorial density, Naked Lunch pushes still further near the finale, when Bill rescues Joan Frost from what reads on screen as a factory-cum-opium den but sonically suggests an orgy of illicit pleasures. This rambling, low-lit warehouse of trussed and manacled Mugwumps stretches for the length and breadth of a football field, while largely anonymous men and women suckle the creatures’ cranial tubes, savoring their addictive, erotogenic fluids. This arc

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from stifled glimpses of the Lees at home to the excitations of a largely faceless collective constitutes less of a clean trajectory than an arrow drawn through a scatterplot; the pattern holds, but it omits, for example, what passes in this film for a tender aubade between Bill and a barely dressed Kiki, waking in bed with a typewriter dripping ejaculate in the foreground. This lack of pattern derives from how Naked Lunch exploits so many formal and technical windows for defamiliarizing its images and desiring-productions, without employing them all at the same time or in unchanging ways. The later chapters of Cinema 2 addend its rich accounts of temporality by specifying further tactics for derationalizing cinema, including audiovisual dissonance. As artists ranging from Hollywood titan Howard Hawks to experimental auteur Marguerite Duras discover, speech itself can serve deterritorializing purposes through odd phrasing, changes in velocity, or incongruous surges and lapses. Contrary, then, to film-historical mainstays about synchronized sound impinging on silent cinema’s freedom of movement, Cinema 2 maintains that dialogue and sound productively denaturalize the persuasive realism of filmed images. For Deleuze, the talkie even “perfects” the silent cinema by supplying new capacities for difference, in turn fostering new opportunities for the spectator’s thoughtful response (C2 241). Cinema 2 christens this self-estranging practice a “cinema of the speech-act,” predating the famous avidity that Judith Butler and other queer theorists would soon profess for Austin’s illocutionary and perlocutionary language as master tropes for sex and gender.30 Notably, the same chapters that encompass these tactics of deterritorialization are those in which Deleuze nests his commentary on the political potentials of independent and Third World cinemas, signaling a strong link between these formal techniques and cinema’s minoring potentials. Naked Lunch frequently migrates erotic intensity from image to sound, unsettling their relations more aggressively than any Cronenberg film since his hour-long apprentice features Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970), which also constitute his strongest prior rebukes to heteronormative assumptions.31 Unlike those films, Naked Lunch sports no voice-overs, but its characters frequently speak about different events than those we witness, adding to our sense of dislocation in time as well as erotic milieu. Yves and the Frosts all comment on Bill’s sexual extroversion with several Arab boys at an Interzone party transpiring “last night,” but we never behold such a party and cannot fix its temporal locus (if, indeed, it took place) or square it with the unremarkable traveling shots in which these salacious intervals get reported. More strangely still, as Tom confides to Bill that he has been poisoning his wife with Fadela’s help, the actor Ian Holm’s lips fail to match his character’s words, an incongruity that Tom flags in dialogue as an inexplicable mechanism of telepathic mind control: “I’m not actually telling you about the several ways in which I’m gradually murdering Joan.”32 Tom’s command that Bill attend (visually) to his lips rhymes with the pleas of Joan Lee and the bug-writers that Bill attend

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(erotically) to their lips, which also refuse to move in perfect sync with their own sexually loaded dialogue. The film, then, further conjoins writing, sexuality, addiction, and conspiracy as figures of desiring-production. Surges of activity in any of these areas not only suggest tidal swells in the others but comparably introduce new fissures into the audiovisual image. Pursuant to these and other aural strategies of estrangement (as when music portentously swells at moments that dramatic actions do not or vice versa), Bill’s language often undermines itself in flagrantly Deleuzian style, especially when he purports to voice his sexual desires. These moments take shape as stuttering chains—word-blobs, if you will, neither affirming nor denying any truth or falsehood of any erotic typecasting of Bill they might imply. “Are you a faggot?” Kiki asks upon encountering Bill in a Bowery bar populated only by men and Mugwumps, creatures who “specialize in sexual ambivalence.” Kiki’s candor departs from the film’s prevarications, but Bill’s response does not: “Not by nature, no, I’m not . . . I wouldn’t say ‘faggot,’ no. However, circumstances have forced me to—confront the possibility that .  .  .” The sentence, such as it is, ends there, open to a chain of unresolved connections. Bill’s Clark Nova typewriter, alternately sympathetic and antagonistic, employs deterritorialized syntaxes in relation to the same topic. Dispatching Bill on one of his espionage missions in Interzone, proffering homosexuality both as a virtual “cover” for Bill’s loitering in the medina and as a diagnosis of desires Bill may actually harbor, the beetle struggles to explain, “We appreciated that you might find the thought of engaging in . . . uh . . . homosexual acts morally and . . . uh . . . possibly even physically repulsive, and . . . uh . . . we are encouraged that you are able to—overcome these personal . . . uh . . . barriers to better serve the cause to which we . . . are all . . . so devoted.” Such utterances ought not to be grasped as circumlocutions around a perfectly obvious referent. Rather, the very alienness of sexuality makes itself felt through an alienness of language by which “the stuttering no longer affects preexisting words, but itself introduces the words it affects. . . . ceaselessly placing [language] in a state of disequilibrium, making it bifurcate and vary in each of its terms, following an incessant modulation.”33 Given the film’s ornate folds of ironization, its serial leaps into new erotic and diegetic orders, and its escalating refusals to show and tell the same information at once, these erratic statements are no less or more “innate” to Naked Lunch than is Bill’s plainspoken if shame-saturated recollection of the childhood moment when he realized, “I was a homosexual.” Indeed, this statement prefaces a tumble of memories that leave unresolved how Bill felt then or how he feels now. Although derived from the pages of Burroughs’s quasi-memoir Queer, the “I was a homosexual” speech refuses in context to land as a finally excavated truth. Instead Bill’s speech joins the film’s scatterplot of multidirectional falsifications, demanding to be read for its singularities rather than rounded to the nearest erotic integer. As with almost every passage of prose that the filmmaker

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lifts from his muse, Naked Lunch elects against direct visual illustration. Bill’s memory of his adolescent epiphany plays out almost entirely against a close-up of his affectless face, with occasional cuts to Julian Sands’s strenuously swish performance as Yves Cloquet. The litany of homophobic recollections Bill incorporates into this scene has been altered not one jot from the novel, reminding us that Burroughs’s work contains as much vitriol and squeamishness as Cronenberg’s films do. Later, Bill delivers the famous “talking asshole” routine from Naked Lunch against the equally flat backdrop of himself, Kiki, and Yves driving past midnight to the Swiss fop’s estate: a manifestly studio-bound sequence filmed in a static vehicle, vaporous with fake-looking fog, interspersed with a few bare inserts of Berber caravans at the thin mirage of a “roadside.” These choices reiterate Naked Lunch’s refusal to align sounds with images; the latter are plainly artificial here, and make no effort at illustrating what Bill “remembers,” despite his illocutionary performance of truth-telling. Cronenberg at last showcases a verbatim excerpt of a novel he has otherwise declined to closely reproduce; still, he refuses to construct a naturalizing envelope of corroborating spectacle or of sound-image confluence around this run of autobiographical text, just as he refuses to corroborate homosexuality as the erotic baseline of his film or protagonist. “The visual and the spoken enter into new relations” (C2 135) and create a new kind of estranging interval, “the interstice between two framings, the visual and the sound” (C2 251). Like the blossom and bee in Deleuze’s favorite model of mutual deterritorialization, sound and image function as linked machines—more productive together than separately, but still quite discrete, as is true as well of Cronenberg and Burroughs.34

A Kafka High or a New Low?: Quandaries of the Minor Given how almost every element of Naked Lunch casts others in unsteady, open-ended relations, the whole movie fosters what Joan Lee describes, in a narcotic context, as “a Kafka high,” a continual flight of Deleuze’s bumblebee. Nevertheless, however committed the film appears to pervasive deterritorializations, some critics accused Cronenberg of consolidating hidebound discourses of literary celebrity and market value, the very antonyms of Kafka’s minor literature. Notably, such critiques describe this pervasively disjointed film as, for example, a “seamless whole” and hypostasize conveniently gendered author-figures and spectators in order to do so. Richard Dellamora, cited earlier on this score, considers Bill Lee “a mythic figure of the artist-in-revolt with which [Cronenberg] and the young men who admire his films can identify,” and more specifically imagines a “young, heterosexual male Cronenberg fan . . . preoccupied with the technology of special effects” as Naked Lunch’s prototypical, isolated, depoliticized spectator.35 Leave aside that neither the

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film’s decisively upscale, nearly avant-garde marketing nor its low box-office imply any kind of investment from adolescent effects-junkies. The figure of male heterosexuality clearly works here to homogenize Naked Lunch’s eclectic desires and to imply that queer texts nullify their minoring potentials by appealing actively or fortuitously to even a hypothetical heterosexual viewer. I pause here because the similar readings of Naked Lunch by Dellamora and by Timothy S. Murphy rank among the most incisive and provocative essays the film attracted—and because they suggest alternative reasons why New Queer enthusiasts might have rejected Naked Lunch.36 More important, given my attributing of potent but qualified political potentials to various filmmakers in this book, I seize these essays as occasions to articulate the complex relations Deleuze and Guattari theorize between schizo or minor artists, the relations to politics they represent, and the regimes they critique. Dellamora and Murphy both make nuanced, compelling cases, but I still see residues in these arguments of a dichotomy opposing queer revolutionaries and straight capitalists, one that is difficult to map onto Burroughs and Cronenberg, respectively, or onto the book’s relation to the film. Deleuze’s measured statements about revolutionary art help us to see this, forcing a reestimation of what “Burroughs” means, and ramifying on how Naked Lunch and other films in The Desiring-Image negotiate their molecular or semiotic play with commodified forms. Whereas, then, I read the matching of ribald Burroughsian prose with blank, flimsy imagery as part of how Cronenberg productively desynchronizes sound and image, Dellamora and Murphy detect an opposite impulse. They evaluate the film as aggressively reterritorializing Burroughs and his virtuoso arias, which they accuse Cronenberg of reifying into freestanding, virtually product-placed blocs: “The object of the film is the novel as artifact or hermetic thing, not as readable matter that can enter into relations with readers or into assemblages with social situations,” says Murphy.37 For them, the film peddles Burroughs, and Cronenberg by extension, to the same market for “literary cinema” that drove such safe adaptations as Merchant Ivory’s A Room with a View (1985) or Maurice (1987), or even the eccentrically filmed but cynically titled Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994).38 Naked Lunch further registers in these critiques as a depoliticized abstraction of what Murphy calls “social situations” and Dellamora elaborates as “the sorts of analysis of race, class, and gender relations that Burroughs’s biography and fiction might prompt,” especially given the script’s importation of Burroughs’s own experience.39 For these writers, Naked Lunch appropriates legacies of gay history and politicized art to endow itself with postmodern cachet while deracinating its figures and kowtowing to capitalism: “Cronenberg describes Naked Lunch as a ‘coming out’ movie, but, as usually occurs when adapted by heterosexuals, the phrase is recontextualized: Cronenberg comes out—as a writer.”40 Hence these rebukes of the film’s political and economic

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cynicism directly implicate its seemingly bowdlerized erotics, markedly contrasting my claims for the movie’s formal and sexual deterritorializations. Ironically, Murphy marshals Deleuze and Guattari’s skepticisms about Burroughs’s own “cut-up” experiments to argue how postmodernist works often indulge deterritorialization as an end in itself, minus any attendant critiques of ideology. The cut-up practice, which Burroughs undertook nearly a decade after writing Naked Lunch, involves rearranging snippets of extant prose or footage, virtually at random, in pursuit of absolute atomizations of sense. Deleuze and Guattari consider such “adventitious” recompositing an avenue to superficially new but ultimately reproductive relations, endowing a whole with auratic mystique in excess but also because of its trendily disarticulated parts: “In this supplementary dimension of folding, unity continues its spiritual labor. That is why the most resolutely fragmented work can also be presented as the Total Work or Magnum Opus.”41 From here, Murphy’s article charts Burroughs’s most and least politicized periods, reaching a late summit with The Wild Boys (1969), “at once a sexual fantasy and a complex biological/phenomenological treatise on new collective subjectivity,” and ebbing again with the romanticized author figures in such late-career novels as Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983), and The Western Lands (1987).42 This mapping of perceived crests and valleys in Burroughs’s work aims, I think, to restore useful variation and dynamism into the increasingly commodified iconicity of the fedora’d, gravelly voiced writer—the very type of prefabricated image Murphy and Dellamora find abrasive in Cronenberg’s film. Even so, at his most politically compromised, Burroughs still “recognizes both the dangers and the opportunities that attend the construction of assemblages, both capitalist and collective ones,” whereas, for Murphy, Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch emerges as “already fully incorporated into capital, like the Romantic artist, just as it is always possible to sublate and subsume difference into identity.”43 As I have argued, despite critical and promotional truisms, Bill’s relation to writing in Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch is itself a stuttering chain. Introduced as a shadow against a wall, signaling his status as but one actualized reflection of Burroughs, he claims early on to have given up writing when he was ten years old. Once in Interzone, Bill is repeatedly hailed as a writer by the Frosts and by many others, and when Hank and Martin stage their visit-cum-intervention, they collate yellowed, blood-stained sheets of a desultory manuscript we have never seen Bill preparing—shuffled and full of errata, like the sheets of a postwar film. The only writings he visibly produces in Naked Lunch, save for one uncompleted sentence about homosexuality, are truncated spy reports and plaintive missives to friends back home. Ultimately he demonstrates his literary avocation to the border guards of Annexia via an act of violence, not of composition. Compared to Martin, who appears in the film to have written the “doodling in Etruscan” routine, or to Hank, who makes decisive suggestions

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for collating Bill’s prose-scraps, or even to Joan Frost, emitting her oratorio of Arabic pornography at the Mujahideen, Bill appears as one of many freeindirect conduits for the novel’s production of itself—at best, the most prominent figurehead for a producing collective. If, as William Beard suggests, Cronenberg has made a film not of Burroughs’s novel but of the impulses or “impetus” behind its writing—practically begging the Deleuzian sense of “impulse” as an erotic, molecular, nonpsychic energy— the impulses spark copious figures in the film but the text as an object generates very few. At no point, not even through one of its jarring match cuts, does the film proffer a parallel image to that tome Tilda Swinton drops on a publisher’s desk at the end of Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992), a queer film that more strongly codes its central character as the exclusive, knowing author of her own story. Instead of producing such a grand prop, Bill shoots a second Joan as (somehow) proof of authorship. This act yields no real “closure,” particularly since the gelid, Soviet-style realm of Annexia, at whose border the second killing takes place, bears nothing in common with the New York City to which a truly circular film would mandate a return. What is to become of Bill in Annexia, or what he has already become by assassinating the woman he “cannot write without,” remains unclear at the film’s end, though the spectator likely anticipates some frost-bitten release of similar cans of worms as those that infested New York and Interzone. I urge, then, a fairer hearing for the film’s serial deterritorializations, to include its repeated undermining of authorial autonomy, since Bill appears much more as a Deleuzian schizo or Kafkaesque “machine-man” than a modernist sage.44 That said, deterritorialization—which many critics vaunt in Burroughs but overlook or mischaracterize in Cronenberg—is not the inherently radicalizing vector we often imagine it to be. Burroughs himself, while lionized as a gay revolutionary in many retrospective encomiums, translates as more of a Deleuzian “schizo,” deterritorializing language and forms of assemblage but without necessarily achieving the kind of unimpeachable radicalism ascribed to him by his most vociferous partisans. Although Anti-Oedipus credits “revolutionaries, artists, and seers” (AO 27) with a particular facility for deterritorializing escapes—so much so that Deleuze and Guattari eventually worry that they themselves have overly romanticized the efficacious potentials of art—the book remains absolutely clear that “schizo” and “revolutionary” are not identical designations. Even the theorists’ own neologism, “schizorevolutionary,” names not a synonymous or settled relation but a tense contestation between these compounded but distinct terms. Schizo energies find chutes and portals out of an existing socius, forcing that assemblage to expand or relocate in order to reabsorb momentary aberrations. Rarer, revolutionary energies, by contrast, stake claims entirely outside a socius, from which vantage they either wage forceful opposition or doom themselves to sterile self-exile.45 Nonetheless, schizos and revolutionaries often reterritorialize back into the socius they formerly resisted.

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Even their initial acts of deterritorialization are never ideologically immaculate, whether or not their effects are absorbed back into prevailing formations. In that spirit, even the most derationalized images and desiring-productions in Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch—of which the dual annihilations of Joan Lee and Joan Frost are such cases—highlight an ambivalence at the heart of erotic, artistic, or ideological deterritorialization, a concept too easy to associate with radical release from prior constraint. The very commodity fetishism that accrued around Burroughs in his later years, to include Burroughs’s heavily promoted cameo in New Queer director Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy (1989), proves the difficulty in drawing lines between minoring figures or gestures and marketably “countercultural” images. As if allegorizing that very predicament, Naked Lunch constantly discloses how capital flows within and beneath the sexual, creative, and migratory movements that the film depicts; if the surface monstrosity of the film’s erotics were not sufficiently alienating to queer audiences in the early 1990s, these recurrent signals of commercial and ideological complicity surely would have been.46 As early as the pawn-shop sequence in which Bill secures passage to Interzone, bartering a typewriter, a fistful of bullets, and an additional eight dollars in exchange for his ticket-cum-narcotic stash—the camera frames all these objects except the dollar bills—it is clear that money remains a virtual coefficient for the drugs, machines, and other vehicles of escape that amass throughout the film. Yves’s assault on Kiki, an apparent act of homophobic violence that the movie transcodes into a gruesome becoming-animal, resonates additionally as a frightful condensation of how one white expatriate (Bill) cynically sacrifices a brown-skinned ally (Kiki) to a second white expatriate (Yves) in the interest of capitalist accumulations: not just of money but of knowledge, pleasure, and semiconsenting bodies. Earlier, I argued via the mismatch of image and sound that Kiki may find pleasure in this act; still, its status as a transaction negotiated without his input is hard to deny. The capitalist undercurrents of the film’s deterritorializations culminate in the monumentally perverse sequence in the Mugwump factory, brimming with jissom addicts and presided over by the mincing Dr. Benway, still disguised as the whip-cracking floor manager Fadela (see figure 2.2). This peak of unruly desire, as a derelict crowd delectates in a highly eroticized narcotic, equally indicates a boon in a multinational drug-trafficking racket, hooking old and new markets on costly, cutting-edge product. Bill, collecting Joan, seeks a line of flight out of Interzone and away from the Mugwump cartel: a generically “heroic” escape. However, beyond the grim affective toll this departure takes on Bill and the lethal one it exacts on Joan, the script codes his exodus to a distant land as a market-scouting errand on behalf of Benway Enterprises. Whether Bill will fulfill this corporate errand remains unclear, yet Naked Lunch assures its viewers over two hours—as Deleuze and Guattari do over two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia—that imperial structures

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Figure 2.2 Naked Lunch: Fadela/Benway, a collision of multiple forces, including desire/ money. Naked Lunch, 1991, dir. David Cronenberg.

of extraction and control always accompany the desiring-machines in their travels to any “far-off territoriality” (AO 315) or “new land” (AO 318). Deterritorialization of desire, then, does not entail an emancipatory gesture or a vector of unrepression. Deterritorialization can even reengender some of the same machineries of power that constrain desire in the first place.47 Conversely, adapting Burroughs’s novel under the mega-corporate aegis of 20th Century Fox does not itself comprise a corporatized travesty, caustically figured as a straight male filmmaker impounding a queer text so as to ingratiate himself (or it) exclusively with heterosexual adolescents. Given these tradeoffs, Deleuze and Guattari challenge minor authors to deterritorialize as much as possible without repeating existing forms or recolonizing old terrains. However, they acknowledge this task to be difficult even for the nimblest artists—especially, it seems, for those interested in schizophrenizing sex and desire: How would these decoded and deterritorialized flows of desiringproduction keep from being reduced to some representative territoriality, how would they keep from forming for themselves yet another such territory? . . . Even those who are best at “leaving,” those who make leaving into something as natural as being born or dying, those who set out in search of nonhuman sex—Lawrence, Miller—stake out a far-off territoriality that still forms an anthropomorphic and phallic representation: the Orient, Mexico, or Peru. (AO 315) Interzone’s economy of white expats, Moroccan boys, hot threesomes, and semen-spouting Mugwumps in Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch yields an example of

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a thrillingly deterritorialized space that also indubitably doubles as an orientalized, chauvinist, power-riven representation. Thankfully, the film’s arch, detached style marks the colonizing, orientalizing aspects of how Bill and his interlocutors construct this space as something simultaneously vanguardist and regressive, risky and hyper-privileged, replete with unchecked biases and fetishes, rather than an intoxicating idiom that Cronenberg’s audience is meant to enter uncritically. Furthermore, the “falsifying” images of time and desire in Naked Lunch open the film self-consciously as a series of problems to contemplate, rather than selling its clichés as a touristic, verisimilar portrait of “how this part of the world really looks,” a trap that Cronenberg’s M Butterfly had more trouble avoiding.48 The final move to Annexia, from which the film cuts away before Bill has fully entered, extends this series of ambivalently deterritorializing movements rather than confining them “to some representative territoriality.” They continually struggle to conceive a truly new space, uncoded in advance by money or culture or power, but at least these do not ossify into a fixed, idealized representation. Meanwhile, desire remains on the move, exploring new zones and routes, even as capitalist forces stay hot on its tail (and, most likely, outflank it entirely). The case of Naked Lunch helps to illustrate, then, that the Deleuzo-Guattarian platform of minor art does not unfold in unilaterally emancipatory terms— and discourages, as well, theorizations of minor movements that set impossibly high standards for their political innocence. Burroughs and his Beat cohorts fell short of such standards, as Deleuze and Guattari are all too aware. Before reproducing an excerpt of Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish,” to indicate the “line of escape” and “delirious content” associated with schizo artistry, Deleuze and Guattari inquire of Kerouac and the Beats, “Isn’t the destiny of American literature that of crossing limits and frontiers, causing deterritorialized flows of desire to circulate, but also always making these flows transport fascisizing, moralizing, Puritan, and familialist territorialities?” (AO 277–78). The theorists remain equally dubious of Kerouac’s “dreams of a Great America” despite his “revolutionary ‘flight’” (AO 277). Still, rather than slaking their enthusiasm for Kerouac, “these underground passages from one type of libidinal investment to the other—often the coexistence of the two—form one of the major objects of schizoanalysis” (AO 278). Even of Kafka, their polestar of minor artistry, Deleuze and Guattari find themselves forced to ask, “Isn’t it rather that the acts of becoming-animal cannot follow their principle all the way through—that they maintain a certain ambiguity that leads to their insufficiency and condemns them to defeat? . . . Doesn’t the whole of the becoming-animal oscillate between a schizo escape and an Oedipal impasse?” (K 15).49 By these standards, the queer becomings in Naked Lunch do not, of course, extirpate every cliché or political sticking point around desire—much less around capitalism, power, or the orientalizing imagination. Still, Cronenberg’s success in producing new intervals and orientations of desire is hardly to be discounted or held disapprovingly against some dubious image

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of Burroughs as a pure revolutionary, a minor beyond minoring, especially so late in his long career and so far along in his iconographic trajectory. However jarring this temperate tone may sound, in relation to such harddriving polemicists or even coming directly from their mouths, Deleuze and Guattari allude to the inseparability of rhizomatic and retrograde forces as though citing an axiomatic truth everyone already recognizes: “As if every great doctrine were not a combined formation, constructed from bits and pieces, various intermingled codes and flux, partial elements and derivatives, that constitute its very life or its becoming” (AO 117, original emphasis). This language of “intermingled codes” motivates, I think, one of Deleuze’s final conceptualizations in Cinema 2: the “lectosign,” an image that must be presumed as such a “combined formation” and read for its implied intervals and intramural tensions: “To read is to relink instead of link; it is to turn, and turn around, instead of to follow on the right side: a new Analytic of the image” (C2 245).50 Naked Lunch, then, itself a “combined formation” of textual borrowings, formal deterritorializations, and erotic variations, ventures away from Burroughs’s template and from the platform politics of gay representation in order to reprise Kafka’s famous paradox of “the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, the impossibility of writing otherwise” (K 16). In this case, the difficulty attaches to the impossibility of writing as Burroughs or of writing otherwise; to the consequent impossibility of making the film “gay” or of making it otherwise; and the impossibility of filming Naked Lunch within circumstances of overweening capitalist control or of filming it otherwise. Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch conjoins the production of dangerous art and the production of dangerous desire, each prone to politically ambivalent enactments but freed, at least, of metastatic idealisms.51 Robin Wood, that staunch detractor of Cronenberg, averred years before Naked Lunch was filmed that some films “dramatize and foreground the strains, tensions, and contradictions that our culture produces” and that “it is also from this viewpoint that a left-wing case might perhaps be argued for Cronenberg.” Wood saucily added, “I don’t wish to undertake such a case myself, but I would be very interested in reading it.”52 If expectations of continuity in cinema, of fidelity in adaptation, of consistency in sexual “orientation,” and of unreservedly dissident politics from our most iconoclastic artists rank among the “strains and tensions . . . our culture produces,” then I think the fugitive, provocative desiring-images of Naked Lunch invite just this kind of measured attention.

Shortbus: The Queer Politics of “Actual” Sex Like Naked Lunch, John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus (2006) explores boundarypushing desires among a queer artistic counterpublic, defined by artistic energies as well as unruly sexualities.53 Queer cinema, itself more of a counterpublic

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movement than a genre per se, gains by accommodating both films, compelling audiences to draw their own conclusions about the ways in which these films register as queer—particularly since each text, as Anti-Oedipus foresees, evinces radical and reactionary elements. That said, this pairing certifies that the terms by which I have reclaimed Naked Lunch as queer cinema (of actual/virtual relations, deterritorialization, and minor cinema) can help reconceptualize desire in films much more readily embraced by LGBT audiences and discourses. Unlike Cronenberg’s film, Shortbus flaunts a version of recognizably liberalleftist politics, specifically situated within post-9/11 New York City—a collectively resonant crisis, evoked as pervasively in this text as is the more personal catastrophe of Joan’s murder in Naked Lunch. Moreover, despite obvious differences in scale, tone, and context, Mitchell’s historical and topographic framework, established quickly through a high-angle shot of Ground Zero’s mangled wound, echoes the urban devastations that catalyzed those “pure optical and sound situations” Deleuze perceives in postwar Italian neorealism or German “rubble films.” These national and political reference points only augmented Shortbus’s reputation in and beyond the academy for revitalizing U.S. queer cinema, following so many charges of artistic and political dilution. (Indeed, note the perfect reversal from the disdain or neglect Naked Lunch incurred from LGBT audiences amid the peak years of New Queer Cinema’s pot-stirring political mischief.) D. Rita Alfonso, citing all the millennial autopsies of how New Queer Cinema “went wrong,” suggests Shortbus as an avatar of “what possibly may have gone right.” She credits the movie for furnishing viewers with an embodied “queer experience” and ventures that “in so far as Shortbus gives play to a displaced, communal memory, it very much inherits the mantle of the New Queer Cinema.”54 An effusive cover story in the U.S. gay and lesbian magazine the Advocate described the film as a “genius, romantic, unapologetically sexual new film” with “an unabashedly sex-positive message.”55 Linda Williams ruminated in Sight & Sound and later in her book Screening Sex that “what no American film had hazarded was a story predominantly about sex—not just one sex scene or two—in an idiom that did not constitute a poor imitation of European angst but proved distinctly American,” and that this is Shortbus’s “great accomplishment.”56 Part of the “queer experience” Alfonso describes involves reinterrogating actual and virtual aspects of the image. Unlike many New Queer films, Shortbus largely favors continuity edits and organized temporality, even when crosscuts suggest simultaneous action around the city. Frustrated sex therapist Sofia (Sook-yin Lee) pursues her first-ever orgasm as a much more linear trajectory than that by which Bill and his associates produce the novel Naked Lunch. The other primary narrative thread, involving a lifeguard named James (Paul Dawson) planning what turns out to be a suicide attempt, also has a clear beginning, middle, and end. Amid these strong narrative lines, Shortbus posits desire as a connecting plane among these and its many other characters—literalizing

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that plane as an electrical energy grid spanning New York City. Comparably to Naked Lunch, then, although its erotic metaphysic is very different, Shortbus seeks means for making visible an otherwise imperceptible field of molecular sexuality, one we observe mainly when it breaks down: as Jamie and James drift apart, as Sofia fails at orgasm and fights with her boyfriend Rob (Raphael Barker), or as the dominatrix Severin (Lindsay Beamish) grapples with escalating loneliness. Roger Ebert once cracked that Cronenberg “must be a thorn in the side of the MPAA ratings board [because] he’s always filming acts that look like sex but don’t employ any of the appurtenances associated with that pastime.”57 Mitchell, by contrast, popularized in the United States a global groundswell of movies produced across the 1990s and early 2000s that showcase all the appurtenances Ebert has in mind. In its images and marketing, Shortbus foregrounded acts of “real” or “unsimulated” sexual exchange among its cast. Such sequences attained notoriety from the moment the film debuted at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, where Sight & Sound praised it as “by far the most interesting Cannes film to use explicit sex.”58 The joyous liaison among three naked and erect male actors, one of whom sings “The Star-Spangled Banner” into the rectum of another, encapsulates the candor and kink of the film’s erotic images—although, revealingly, Williams demotes this episode as “actually more of an acrobatic feat than a sexual event” because “no one ever comes.”59 Reviewers equally privileged the seven-minute opening sequence of multifarious sexual activity unfolding at any-instant-whatever across New York. Scored to Anita O’Day’s jazz standard “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?”—a question the film wittily poses to the first woman on screen, the Statue of Liberty—this montage crosscuts among James filming himself amid autofellatio; Caleb spying on this exploit from across the street; Severin whipping and berating an obnoxious client until he ejaculates; and Sofia and Rob making love in every nook of their apartment, from the doorway to the top of the piano. Naked Lunch and Shortbus rival each other in their sheer number of sexual partnerships and in the separate but equal boldness of their visual spectacles: provocatively nonhuman in Cronenberg, unabashedly anthropomorphic for Mitchell. Without a doubt, this film’s body has organs, and furthermore, the “virtual energy” of desire has been animated for us in a form of crackling circuitry we can see for ourselves. However, this trope of “actual” sex that Shortbus promoted from its earliest inception (the working title was The Explicit Sex Project) invites more normative returns than Cronenberg does to major-culture definitions of male and female bodies, and correspondingly of gay and straight desires. Indeed, in almost all the films encompassed in reportage on the “real sex” phenomenon— even Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s Baise-moi (2000) or Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl (2001), with their pairs of female protagonists—erect penises, phallic penetration, and visible ejaculations operate as barometers of

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erotic “reality.” The intense lesbian consummations in such films as Go Fish (1994), When Night Is Falling (1995), or The Watermelon Woman (1996) somehow never appear alongside the tumescent spectacles of Shortbus, Romance (1999), Pola X (1999), Intimacy (2001), The Brown Bunny (2003), or 9 Songs (2004) as exemplary of real sex, a priapic bias that can easily territorialize sexuality back onto genitals and literally organ-ized bodies—and some more than others, at that.60 This, for a time, is the fate of Shortbus. Six out of nine key figures present unambiguously as men: James, Jamie, Ceth, Caleb, Rob, and Jesse. The remaining characters, more feminine or more ambiguous in their gendering, remain isolated to some extent from all the rampant “actual” romping. Cabaret star Justin Bond, who subsequently adopted “v” as a self-fashioned, gender-neutral pronoun, fills the role of the salon’s androgynous impresario. However, host(ess)ing duties apparently discourage Bond’s embodied participation, save for some farcically abortive foreplay with Sofia. Severin also engages in fully clothed, awkwardly truncated contact with Sofia, shortly after pleading within the facetious confines of a sensory-deprivation tank, “Maybe you can help me have, like, a real human interaction with someone.” The most dispiriting aspect of Severin’s arc is that Shortbus implies that her “human interactions,” including her investments in leather, vinyl, and light BDSM, fail even her own test of “reality.”61 She ends the film on the sidelines of the salon and the story, wracked with an inchoate scream while two alliterative pairs of boys, James and Jamie and Ceth and Caleb, release themselves into frisky foreplay. As for Sofia, her pursuit of orgasm reprises a cinematic code Williams describes as “pornotopian,” wherein “the solution to the problem of sex is more or better sex,” but not a transmutation of what sex might actually comprise, such as Naked Lunch undertakes.62 After a series of grim shortfalls, Sofia nearly carries herself to climax within a color-saturated interlude in a fantasy tideland, a diegetic and stylistic anomaly that contrastively endows the rest of the narrative with a greater veneer of reality. When Sofia at last comes in the salon, Mitchell frames her face separately from her body and lights it with exaggerated luminosity against a field of solid black, all of which makes the moment less “real” while nonetheless buttressing the association of orgasm with actual fulfillment. The only parallel in the film arrives when James assents to anal penetration for the first time, another dramatic climax (unavoidable phrase) rendered in a series of disembodied, shot/reverse facial close-ups of James and Caleb, from which James acquires his own preternaturally lambent halo. These scenes coax Shortbus toward more virtual registers, particularly given the unclear duration, diegetic status, and temporal sequence of Sofia’s outdoor masturbation scene, James and Caleb’s lovemaking, and even the carnivalesque finale inside the salon. Rather than fully deterritorialized sequences, however, they suggest Cinema 2’s “dream-images” or “passages among worlds” that serve as transitional stages between the continuities of the movement-image

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and the irrationalities of the mature time-image. Deleuze’s key examples of such “dream-images” include the musicals of Vincente Minnelli, where long ballets or fantasy sequences depart from diegetic baselines that eventually reinherit and reorganize the film. That so many critics likened Shortbus to a musical, with sex scenes serving as its “numbers,” suggests how strongly the film demarcates these intervals from other scenes—a comparison further warranted by the carnal activities that accompany “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and Justin Bond’s big, Lotte Lenya-style, eleven o’clock number “In the End.”63 Still, a compromised sense of “actuality” pervades many such “passages among worlds,” given their masculinist apotheosizing of penetrative orgasm as, in the end, the ecstatic telos and indeed the reality of sex. Unpredictably, the second hour of Shortbus rescinds its prior fascination with sexual organs and exertions, emphasizing close-ups over full shots and talk about sex over embodied enactments. The effect, however, is not to access more virtual, molecular, or unpredictable configurations of sex, nor to open fruitful gaps between nonsynchronized sounds and images, as Naked Lunch often does on its way toward queering erotic and nonerotic spectacles. Orgasm and penetration persist as hallmarks of “actual” sex, while nonetheless receding into relative out-of-fields. Oddly bifurcated, then, in tone and mise-enscène, Shortbus complements its surprising investments in polarities of male/ female, gay/straight, and top/bottom with an embrace of embodied/idealized dichotomies of sex: whatever is transformative about Sofia’s orgasm and James’s penetration requires, in the film’s terms, an occlusion of the body’s involvement (see figure 2.3).64

Figure 2.3 Shortbus: James’s poignant but unexpectedly bodiless erotic release. Shortbus, 2006, dir. John Cameron Mitchell.

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Such rigid epistemologies of actual and virtual desire resurface in the critical literature, as when Williams equates sex with coming or floats the hypothesis that “in an era of commodified sex toys, a real realm of the senses becomes unattainable”; she even poses the film as a necessary “corrective to the isolation and fixation on bodies and techniques that solitary porn can engender,” an equation of porn with isolation and unreality that is surprising from the author of Hard Core.65 If “fixations on bodies and techniques” require revision, a film that so privileges the genitals as synecdoches of erotic reality may not displace those values as much as a Deleuzian or Cronenbergian ethos by which, as cited previously, “the cinema of the body is not a picturing of the literal body. Rather, its goal is to give expression to forces of becoming that are immanent in bodies, as well as the body’s receptivity to external forces through which it can transform itself.”66 Otherwise, sexual binaries are reinvested, and the “pornotopian” figure of orgasm is recertified as the summit of erotic becoming. The power grid that symbolizes individual and collective (be)coming in Shortbus differs, then, from the alien plasticities and unresolved intervals that Naked Lunch challenges us to read or relate to, and from the positive virtualities of desire as production—not just recirculated energy—that Cronenberg’s film enacts without visualizing in one comprehensive figure.

Does This Bus Only Make One Stop? Shortbus distinguishes itself in admitting an eclectic typology of participants into its erotic circuit, but even this liberal-pluralist tent does not stretch to cover everyone. The sole elderly patron of the salon—a dead ringer for Ed Koch, the recently deceased and rumored-to-be-gay mayor of New York City throughout the AIDS-ravaged 1980s—is summarily abandoned by Ceth, the young, willowy object of his desires, in favor of those tuneful hardbodies James and Jamie. One abrupt shot, ostentatiously inviting plus-sized bodies into the film’s erotic party, frames its immobile subject so that her head is cropped out of the image—surely a harsh tax on her putative inclusion. The palette of complexions tips heavily toward Caucasian lightness, especially in the “Sex Not Bombs” room where the major orgies transpire, and at least on surface evidence, no one manifests any of the mental or physical disabilities that might secure one’s passage on an actual shortbus. Naked Lunch is not particularly diverse on these scores, either, overtly subordinating its brown-skinned characters to white expatriate leads and exposing even the Moroccan character Fadela as “really” Benway. Since Cronenberg, however, makes no claim to inclusivity and prioritizes an open-ended ontology of desire over a democratic survey of extant types, the limits these two films impose around sexual “community” ramify very differently.

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That said, despite implying unequal access to its titular salon, Shortbus stakes stronger claims than Naked Lunch does of satisfying that criterion by which minor art politicizes its figurations, laying a path toward new collective emergence. As Williams points out, Sofia’s orgasm “is not the result of better technique; rather, it is the result of better community,” nationalized and politicized in her view of Shortbus as “a uniquely American film of hard-core art.”67 Beyond the generous (though not boundless) multitude of participants in the film’s erotic plane, further collective principles emerge in how the film undoes the early barracking of New Yorkers within private apartments and enables their coming together in the semipublic salon. Mitchell often films in deep space and multiple planes of action, broadening the boundaries of his calico counterpublic in formal as well as sociological terms. Other collective inclinations manifest in the film’s multistranded plot structure; its open-call audition process and democratically developed script; its polychromatic production design, including lights and filters that divide several shots into color-blocked but complementary fields of action and hue; its shifting film stocks, from Super 8 to Super 16 to high-definition video to 35mm; and its constellation of sexual practices, at least for a while, among solos, duos, trios, and crowds. Almost the only monolith in the film is the Statue of Liberty, which Mitchell warms up with playful, swirly animation and compartmentalizes into a teasing bricolage of partial glimpses. Even the spatial articulation of the salon—a Deleuzian rhizome of doorways, corridors, and cul-de-sacs, like the casbahs of Naked Lunch—implies a shifting collective that is hard to map or to classify within strict zones of publicness or privacy. Bond refers to the sex club, which is also a cabaret, a screening venue, and a performance space, as “my house,” redolent of the deterritorialized House discourses of Paris Is Burning (1990). Of course, the perseverance of the space depends on private encounters of a public kind. As Justin tells Sofia, “I spend half my time blowing the NYPD to keep this place open; I hardly have any time for myself.” But then, time for and by oneself is exactly what the politics of the Shortbus Salon aspire to undermine. “Permeable,” then, in the film’s preferred vocabulary, to an influx and outflux of guests, friends, itinerants, and semistrangers, the salon echoes Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s notion that “urban space is always a host space,” resisting capitalism’s territorial segregation of owners from outsiders.68 A further Deleuzian aspect of this sexual and social ecology is the degree to which its members operate as engines and traders of their own images, across a machinic sprawl of what Anti-Oedipus calls producing, recording, and consuming desiring-productions. Shortbus implicates “actual” desiring-machines as overtly as Naked Lunch does, updated for a new era and tailored to a very different idiom: think of Caleb’s surveillance equipment; Sofia’s ill-fated vibrator and equally ill-fated sex toy; Severin’s loyalty to her vintage Polaroid, even amid intimate scenarios; Ceth’s Grindr-like phone app; Rob’s avidity for

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internet porn; or James’s digital camera and iMovie collaging of various sheets of his past with Jamie.69 These multiple centers of indetermination assemble into a conjoined but discontinuous semipublic that no longer imagines itself, for better and worse, as an integrated mass. Like the Beat surrogates and alien intercessors of Naked Lunch, then, albeit through different formal strategies and notions of the political, the denizens of the Shortbus Salon form what Warner theorizes as a counterpublic. Such collectives “are, by definition, formed by their conflict with the norms and contexts of their cultural environment, and this context of domination inevitably entails distortion. Mass publics and counterpublics, in other words, are both damaged forms of publicness, just as gender and sexuality are, in this culture, damaged forms of privacy.”70 Shortbus visualizes highly disparate, incommensurate, but ubiquitous traces of damaged publicness everywhere from the Koch figure’s plaintive self-acquittals to the conspicuously red, white, and blue pills with which James plans to kill himself to the scarred ground where the Twin Towers stood. Justin Bond says of the salon’s young passers-through that 9/11 is “the only real thing that’s ever happened to them.” This assertion, however, a colloquial parallel to the film’s discourse of “real” sex, raises questions about how permeable this counterpublic actually is, or whether it is already preterritorialized, as it were, around particular topographies and cultural experiences. Warner, credited on screen as part of the queer, New York-based collective of artists, funders, and allies that produced Shortbus, describes an inseparable relation between “the inventiveness of queer world making and of the queer world’s fragility.”71 This tension crystallizes in the closing sequence, as an exuberant multitude gathers in the salon while Bond sings “In the End”—a case where a eulogistic soundtrack uneasily abuts a utopian image of frolic and foreplay, catalyzing complex thoughts about what is being mourned or redeemed, and in what ratios, amid this merrily overloaded instant. The watts and joules that finally blaze forth in this finale do not so much transform bodies or desires as they ameliorate a damaged municipality, inhabited by wandering “zombies” for whom the Big Apple is a shell-shocked Interzone, if not the new Marienbad. Still, the bounty of iconic figures specific to New York—the Statue of Liberty, Ed Koch, the negative-space gestalt of Ground Zero, the queer subcultural luminaries who appear as themselves, including Bond—make it difficult to view the film’s New York City as an “any-placewhatever,” an unzoned and open-access site of deterritorialized desires.72 As we have seen, desire in Shortbus pushes representational boundaries while reestablishing some dubiously sexed and gendered truisms of who or what counts as “real.” Similarly, the film’s heavy emphasis on its exceptional New York-ness repeats the tradeoff by which “there is no deterritorialization of the flows of schizophrenic desire that is not accompanied by global or local reterritorializations” (AO 316). In this case, the proclaimed openness of the

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Shortbus Salon to all classes and castes of New Yorkers, hosts and guests alike, entails a reproscribing of New York itself—and hardly the widest cross-section thereof—as the locus of such possibilities, political, collective, or erotic. Naked Lunch, as we have seen, moves from one culturally pastiched and patently holographic environment to another, and then to another, rejecting any investment in the “real” and manifesting desire as a productive, mutable energy in virtually any milieu, with no indigenous residents or naturalized citizens to be found anywhere. (Even the “natives” of Interzone register as ironized figures of faux-indigeneity.) Shortbus compensates for its comparatively warmer, more welcome desiring-field and its more liberally utopian politics by implying that desire only achieves new becomings within a privileged and recognizable metropole, arrogating to itself a myth of “permeability,” implicitly and explicitly marking most other terrains as voided out-of-fields. Hence, The Advocate calls Shortbus “as much a tribute to New York City as it is a political or cultural declaration,” describing the film as hailing a “progressive audience” distinct from the unplumbed tastes and presumed sympathies of “most Americans.”73 For this critic, making a complementary gesture to Dellamora’s invocation of a “young, male, heterosexual fan” as an icon of Naked Lunch’s ideological failures, the progressivism of Shortbus aligns not just with erotic variability but with an emancipated queerness that cannot also be heterosexual. He describes Sofia and Rob in their opening sequence as “having sex in more positions than most straight people achieve in a lifetime,” as though taking for granted the moribund sexuality of male-female couples or the categorical adventurousness of all other couples, presumptions that the ethos of porosity in Shortbus should contest rather than promote. Shortbus’s heart is in a Deleuzian place, but its other organs don’t always get there, and its minoring of a new collective within New York reterritorializes the city and possibly 9/11, too, within similarly “actual” terms. Alfonso even reports where in New York and San Francisco cast members of Shortbus can be spotted hanging out. While she thereby complicates our view of Mitchell’s mise-enscène as in fact a grafting of two coastal metropoles, with some boost to its deterritorialized permeability, she also intensifies the sense that Shortbus is, in Deleuzian terms, about a people who already exist, variegated and vigorously anti-establishmentarian as they may be in many ways. This idea has the makings for a robust counterpublic but not quite a minor one, charging readers to track down real people and to learn what “anyone who has lived in New York” already knows.74 An ode to New York’s erotically and politically emancipating potentials hardly disqualifies itself as a queer enterprise, and Shortbus likely mobilizes many viewers into sexual and communal permeabilities, in ways that the eerie, aggressively off-putting Naked Lunch would not. At the same time, for all the city’s dangerous and distasteful features, Interzone’s maze of virtualities does not affiliate the essence of desire or the potentials of queer becoming with inhabiting an “actual” place. The costs of perennially reinvesting urban centers

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as exclusive domains of queer possibility have recently proved a growing concern of queer theorists. We can acknowledge that a character like Severin is wholly, even poignantly earnest in weeping at the prospect of being priced out of Manhattan and banished back to Fresno. Still, one hopes Fresno is not a metonymy for queer nonbeing, and that no “Skyscrapers or Bust” mentality will constrain the potentials and the ranges of motion that queer cinema envisions.75 D. N. Rodowick reminds us that the collective becomings achieved in modern political cinema—among which I include the queer becomings of the desiring-image—“must not be understood as an ideal image of unity.”76 The counterpublic of recent queer cinema, in which Naked Lunch and Shortbus both participate, yields not this “ideal image of unity” but an expansive multiplicity of incongruent cases.77 Within such a heterogeneous context, Deleuze’s cinematic sheets, peaks, and sound-image disjunctions, determinedly perceived as images, resonate with the structures and paradoxes of public discourse in Warner’s model, an enterprise that “is heard (or read) as heard, not just by oneself but by others”; every sign registers as a “prosthetic generality, a flexible instrument of interpellation but one that exiles its own positivity.”78 Shortbus and Naked Lunch both produce images of desire that are seen, heard, and “read” in a special sense as seen, heard, and read, in the tradition of Deleuzian lectosigns and perceptions of perception. Their desiring-images, mediated by hand-operated machines even within the images, are abundant and self-reflexive. Still, the hard bodies of Shortbus and their unsimulated conjunctions seem less inclined to relinquish their claims on positivity. The “prosthetic generalities” of Cronenberg’s sex-blob, however inscrutable or tantalizing or repulsing to anyone who beholds it, or of his shape-shifting zombies and globe-trotting forgers strike me as more exiling of perceptual and erotic cliché. This is not to deny the presence in Naked Lunch of alienating archetypes in every sense, however diacritically marked as such. In any case, both films help to produce a queer cinema in which bodies, sexual acts, and new collective formations emit their own minoring potentials, prompting valuable arguments and reinterrogated habits of perception. So, too, as we discover in our next case study, do the human face, the cinematic past, and a different sort of urban populace.

{3}

“Something in Her Face” Queering the Affection-Image in The Watermelon Woman Who Is She, and What Is She to You? After spending time with David Cronenberg, an outlier from New Queer Cinema, and Shortbus, an heir to that tradition, we turn now to a landmark of the movement: Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996), the first film by an African American lesbian to achieve commercial distribution in the United States, and among the last films promoted under the New Queer rubric before critics began to question its stamina.1 From the moment it debuted, The Watermelon Woman incited scholarly responses in queer film studies and other fields, although its claims as lesbian cinema often invoked identity frameworks rather than outwardly queering them. After all, the film ends with its writerdirector-protagonist declaiming into her camera with identitarian gusto, “I’m gonna be the one who says I am a black lesbian filmmaker.” For many viewers, even after uncovering the now-famous ruse on which this faux-documentary operates, Cheryl’s statement is not in itself complicated. As the film toured festivals and campuses, however, scholar and co-producer Alexandra Juhasz posed a complex question about its textual orientations: “Because the first African American lesbian feature film was funded and crewed by a great many men, whites, and straights, is it not the first African American lesbian feature film?”2 Juhasz partly intends a rhetorical query, but The Watermelon Woman manages to be both emphatically and ambiguously an African American lesbian feature film, assembled in ways that defy critical and sociopolitical tendencies either to ignore black lesbians entirely or to consign them to triply “marked” status with respect to gender, race, and sexuality. Whereas straight, white masculinity continually enjoys a “prosthetic generality,” such that this privileged minority poses itself as a tabula rasa for diverse viewers’ self-projections, black lesbians onscreen invariably connote a specific group identity, in tandem with their offscreen marginalization.3 Given how anomalous Dunye’s success remained for quite some time, even queer cinema has failed to supply black lesbians a vantage from which to serve as neutral

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surrogates for audience identification or as metonymic stand-ins for more variegated groups.4 Against these heavy odds, The Watermelon Woman orients a vision of heterogeneous, incipient community around its black lesbian protagonist—albeit not the vision many viewers are likely to expect.5 Dunye stars as her own quasi-fictional alter ego, whom I designate as “Cheryl” to avoid confusion with her work as director; I also adopt Mark Winokur’s helpful nomenclature “Cheryl/Dunye” when her aspects as character and creator prove least separable.6 Cheryl toils to make a documentary about Fae “The Watermelon Woman” Richards, a black actress she spots playing mammy roles in 1930s Hollywood films. Because The Watermelon Woman presents itself as a video diary, many audiences understand Cheryl’s mission as Dunye’s earnest undertaking. The movie ends, however, amidst a series of short-circuits and shattered conceits, starting with the collapse of Cheryl’s friendship with Tamara (Valarie Walker), the failure of her romance with Diana (Guinevere Turner), and her unexpected censure by June Walker, Fae’s longtime lover, whom Cheryl never meets and who now lies dying in a hospital. In the closing moments, Cheryl unveils her film-within-a-film, heralding its premiere as “what you’ve all been waiting for.”7 In formal and rhetorical terms, however, this document is compromised at best. Images emerge in desultory, potentially abrasive order—opening, for example, on Fae consorting with white lover-Svengali Martha Page, an association June Walker forcefully disavows, as do Martha’s descendants. Cheryl’s choice to begin her film here evokes her bent toward exhibiting what others suppress, plus her own predilection for crossrace sexuality. From there, images in this would-be documentary often defy narrated assertions, or ascribe themselves to sources other than those where we watched Cheryl glean them.8 They even give way regularly to shots of Cheryl or of The Watermelon Woman’s own credit roll. For viewers who have missed earlier, subtler signals, these credits expose Dunye’s film, Cheryl’s project, and even Fae as wholesale inventions. “Sometimes,” Dunye’s final title card reads, “you have to create your own history. The Watermelon Woman is fiction.” These setbacks and disclosures draw Cheryl/Dunye into a perplexing affect, merging triumph with defeat. “You know, I thought it would be easy,” she sighs in close-up, before rallying to aver, “I’m gonna say a lot more and have a lot more work to do.” This finale, then, produces a dubiously “empowered” image of the self-proclaimed black lesbian filmmaker, lamenting, winking, and apostrophizing amid the ashes of a project that was always a put-on. The testimonial encompasses but exceeds “bad affects” of loss or anger, instead favoring admixture and contradiction—perhaps even theorizing affect as admixture and contradiction—while nevertheless paying lip service to bravura self-fulfillment.9 Here is Cheryl/Dunye, a black lesbian, proclaiming her new vocation, even if success on this maiden journey has eluded her. Depending, of course, on who she “actually” is and what she “really” intended to achieve.

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Cheryl/Dunye’s final close-up thus departs from that device’s usual role of conveying feeling in clear terms, a task to which women’s faces are especially indentured. Her expression is hard to read: is she exultant, fatigued, disappointed, or newly freed to pursue her calling? Is she laughing at us? Is Cheryl making the best of an undesired outcome? Is Dunye? Upon first viewing The Watermelon Woman, I rewatched it immediately, not out of surprise at its generic revelation but to see how Cheryl/Dunye’s face had countenanced this conceit all along, and to ascertain who else in the film seemed patently “in” on the deception. This question remains perplexing—to comic but unnerving effect in Camille Paglia’s famous cameo as “herself,” that is, a fire-starting cultural theorist eager to reclaim the trope of melon-eating African Americans. More quietly, however, we may wonder what Dunye has told her (alleged) mother, who attests she may have known Fae but then cannot recall for sure.10 And what about the folks Cheryl interviews on the street? How scripted are their talkinghead interviews? Were they talking to “Cheryl,” an earnest videographer, or to Dunye, an admitted prankster? Who among them thought of themselves as participating in an “African American lesbian feature film,” and why so? In posing these questions, I begin diverging from two major lines in prior scholarship on the film. One hails Dunye’s portraiture of African American lesbians as an authenticating gesture within an otherwise neglectful medium, thus constituting a mimetic and political coup regardless of The Watermelon Woman’s falsified story and genre. Another critiques the film for myopically valorizing visibility as an inherent boon, since any collective representation invariably conceals wide swaths of its putative membership while enshrining others as iconographic stand-ins. I argue, by contrast, that Dunye depicts individuals and collectives in rich but crucially qualified ways; neither mirrors the other precisely, and each invites and resists visibility at the same time. These projects depend on formal and stylistic tactics, of which the most important are the film’s facial close-ups and its flaunting of limited resources, both of which invoke traditions of ethnographic realism even as The Watermelon Woman lampoons that framework and its values. These tropes signify very differently if read through Gilles Deleuze’s transformative theorizations of the close-up as what he calls the affection-image; of the face in or out of cinema as both a produced object and a figure for thought; and of politicized, often low-budget filmmaking as minor cinema. These propositions revise our sense of how Dunye’s film relates to questions of identity, history, desire, and a more catholic, porous model of collective representation. To state the case more fully: Dunye’s film shares Deleuze’s belief that if cinematic acts of memory or historiography are to inspire reflection, resisting the medium’s anesthetizing potentials, they must eschew either the rigged coherence typical of flashbacks or any systematized relations among shots.11 Furthermore, the mode of “attentive recognition” that Deleuze valorizes as an

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ethical alternative to reflex perceptions “informs us to a much greater degree when it fails than when it succeeds” (C2 54). While mitigating clichés and forcing renewed thoughts and perceptions, such failures can also interpolate a viewer’s desires in complex ways. Thus, attentive recognition dovetails with Deleuzian notions of desiring-machines, which “work only when they break down” (AO 8). Cheryl’s falsely presented, variously foiled attempt at historical retrieval calls richer attention to the modes and stakes of such projects than a better-oiled, better-rewarded execution likely would have done. The lack of surface style or polish, in the tradition of minor cinema, lays bare the fundamental structures in the film, buttressing a complex argument about all representation as both lure and danger, achievement and compromise. Close-ups are not just vital because they showcase Cheryl’s inevitably mixed feelings about the events befalling her (of which she is also, of course, the instigator and puppet master). Rather, they emerge as both emblem and vehicle of how The Watermelon Woman interrogates visibility, especially as a goal for black lesbians. The framing and timing of these close-ups, plus the manifold significations they absorb from their surroundings (objects in the shot, stylistic accents, details in adjoining images, etc.), manage to unsettle rather than confirm our sense of when we are or are not seeing a black lesbian. Meanwhile, Cheryl gains ever-greater credentials as a Deleuzian “intercessor,” giving onto an unlikely congeries of allies, intimates, and ambiguous co-conspirators, so the film’s testing of “lesbian” definition becomes not just individual but collective. On five important grounds, then, my reading of Dunye’s film opens new ways of seeing how queer cinema can function as minor art, deterritorializing its bases and promulgating new collectives. These approaches differ from other critiques of the film, even those that enlist Deleuze’s theories of cinema, which predictably emphasize Cinema 2. My premises are as follows: 1. The Watermelon Woman combats a grievous paucity of black lesbian images but does so by producing rather than simply documenting these images or subjects. 2. Tensions Deleuze posits between the amalgamated whole and the separately striking features of the face complicate our approach to perceiving black lesbians, who never quite cohere as what he calls a “reflective unity” but constitute a distinctly “intensive series.” 3. The affection-image subsists on the same protocols as Deleuzian desiring-production, crucially linking these concepts. 4. The aesthetic modesty of Dunye’s film connects ideas of semi-visibility in lesbian film theory with the oblique figure of the “intercessor” in Deleuzian minor cinema. 5. The heterogeneous cast, refusing coalition in some ways but inviting it in others, attains new potentials for political and collective enunciation, as per the goals of minor art.

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For reasons influenced equally, then, by the film’s formal approaches and by the histories into which it intervenes, The Watermelon Woman draws surprising allies, opponents, potentials, politics, and acts of collective storytelling under the ambiguous sign of the “lesbian” and even the “black lesbian.” Amidst a recent, tremendously welcome uptick in such image-making, Dunye’s movie retains its critical salience even after fifteen years of devoted commentary, positioning images of black women as key agents within an expanding queer cinema. Cheryl traces the genesis of her project to having seen Fae in a throwaway role in a (fake) film titled Plantation Memories, where she noted that “something in her face, something in the way she looks and moves, is serious, is interesting.” Like The Watermelon Woman, Deleuzian theory posits something ineffably “interesting” in the face. Each makes various attempts to frame what that “something” is, balancing simultaneous drifts toward unity and dispersal. In Dunye’s film, the same faces sometimes emerge in disparate contexts, revising how we initially perceived them or inviting conjunctions among characters who intuitively refuse them. Thus, I encourage a reversed reading of The Watermelon Woman’s final beats. Rather than taking Cheryl’s valedictory close-up as a mundane lead-in to the film we “have all been waiting for,” I view that unstable text as a functional alibi for one more round at reading what is serious and interesting in Cheryl’s face; in that of her obscure object of affection, Fae Richards; and in “the” face itself as a queerly compelling field of force and suggestion. As they do throughout the film, both faces provoke reassessments of the images that have preceded them, in the way Deleuzian affectionimages always reconfigure some preceding set of framed impressions.

The Riddle of the Lesbian Affection-Image The Watermelon Woman resonates with varying models of the face Deleuze posits in Cinema 1 and, with Félix Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus and What Is Philosophy? We begin, then, by reviewing these conceptual structures, noting how they ramify overtly on figurations of the black lesbian or on broader questions of representation (without, however, presuming that black lesbians signify a special case rather than a rule). After testing all three models against an early scene where Cheryl introduces us to Fae’s onscreen persona, we will examine multiple formal and narrative threads in the film, each privileging different characters and temporal frames, deploying aspects of facialization toward various thematic, stylistic, and political ends. To start, the affection-image of Cinema 1 complicates how we usually conceive the close-up. Imagine a shot of a loaf, a knife, and a plate of cheeses and meats on a table, which then cuts to a shot of a human face. The features of that face, bonded into active, signifying relations, in turn mobilize the features

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of the still life as elements within some imminent action; this is Cinema 1’s perception-affection-action cycle. An affection-image linking moist eye, sallow skin, and dry mouth translates the previous shot as a perception of food, via a mediating image of one who hungers, and preceding a likely action of feeding. Contrastingly, an affection-image linking heavy lids, hard eyes, and dull grimace might reframe the same image of the table as a site of raw material rather than nourishment, presaging an action we will construe as alienated labor (preparing food for others to savor) even if the initial perception and the ensuing shot of slicing the cheese and bread are identical to those in my previous scenario. The possibilities continue: an affection-image comprising blazing eyes and twisted mouth may highlight the knife over the food, producing the same shot of the table as a perception-image of a weapon hiding in plain sight, forecasting not a meal but an assault. Essential in each instance is that affection-images do not just “express” emotion but actualize one version of unfolding relations among some set of objects that might well have prompted others (and may still do so).12 Moreover, while lubricating a path to action, the affection-image constructs an idea of a person: in my crude examples, a starveling, a servant, or an assailant. Actors can play a feeling like fatigue but not an idea like subjugated labor; two shots at least are required to situate a face within a field of relations, yielding a complex concept and/or a provisional subject. “The close-up,” says Deleuze, “endows the objective set with a subjectivity which equals or even surpasses it,” although “the parts must necessarily act and react on each other in order to show how they simultaneously enter into conflict and threaten the unity of the organic set” (C1 30). The affect itself is both integral to this translation of perception into action and excessive of those forces. In the context of an otherwise unremarkable kitchen, a close-up of a fearful face might “endow the objective set” with the idea of a terrorized wife: panicked for unclear reasons about the knife, and thus infusing the scene with malign potentials even if the filmmaking otherwise demurs from this suggestion. Indeed, if this affection-image of terror precipitates not an attack but a mundane meal, it will prompt unanswered questions about the woman’s character and her circumstances, beyond or even despite narrative flow—conjuring a “suffering wife” even if we witness no suffering or a “paranoid martyr” even if the danger later appears legitimate. A version of Deleuzian temporal flux emerges here, as equally plausible yet contradictory presents accumulate: one in which a scared woman correctly perceives a threat, one in which a justifiably scared woman sees a threat where currently there is none, and one in which an ill woman accedes to ruinous fantasy. Our perceptions of “the present” are multiple, and the one we favor now may not match our subsequent but still contingent sense of the current moment’s truth, pregnant as it seems with incompossible potentials.

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Thus, even rudimentary close-ups can serve as portals into enigmas of character, circumstance, and time—capacities The Watermelon Woman deftly exploits and from which it mines distinctive questions. First, compared with strategies we traced for producing the idea of a cook, a killer, a hungry woman, or a frightened wife, what objects would one have to regard—and juxtaposed to what face—for a spectator to perceive a lesbian? Amy Villarejo describes relations among objects, persons, and perceptions as especially complex with regard to the lesbian, a term she theorizes as a catachresis: a signifier or metaphor with no clear referent. All that “lesbian murderers, lesbian chic, lesbian books, lesbian videos, lesbian cruises . . . lesbian photographs, and lesbian jewelry” bear in common for Villarejo is the hive of questions they raise about how, precisely, they have come to signify as such.13 In a perception-image, would these objects register as lesbian, or does that ascription require a woman we already recognize this way? Is it necessarily clearer how a person invites that tag than a photograph or a pulp novel or a cruise? Once a chain of lesbian perception commences, when or how does it stop? Problems of lesbian definition can thus infiltrate basic dynamics of cinematic relation, such that “lesbian” is neither self-evident nor foreclosed as a freestanding quality of certain objects, a sign under which they interact, or an affective dimension of faces or subjects—hovering instead among all three. Given Cinema 2’s diagnosis of modern cinema as splintering the perceptionaffection-action cycle—marooning us among perceptions that sustain no continuities and barely illuminate each other—the image of a face is as likely to precede or follow another face as to “affect” different objects or to provoke coherent actions. Hence, how might a series of persons or faces affect each other as “lesbian,” and what new collectivities might thereby become possible? As it is, in many postwar films, linking women’s faces in close, unmotivated succession tropologically implies a kind of lesbian narrative or antinarrative.14 Ingmar Bergman’s dense, vaguely Sapphic Persona (1966) remains a touchstone for this kind of cinema, serving Cinema 1 as Deleuze’s paragon example of how the affection-image functions as something more than a way of translating perceptions into actions. This tradition, extending to recent films such as Mulholland Drive (2001), Swimming Pool (2003), Black Swan (2010), or Dunye’s own experimental murder-mystery The Owls (2010), presents sexuality among women as fertile grounds for paranoia, feminine rivalry, or boundary disruption, as though lesbians onscreen forever risk sensationalistic hyperbole and/or failed self-differentiation. The Watermelon Woman’s scenario is less anxious than those I have just described—and yet Cheryl’s self-conception is not wholly serene, especially among fellow lesbians. Moreover, as the film continues, the shots and edits— including those surrounding June’s climactic rebuke and abandonment of Cheryl—grow especially irrational. Within these formal and narrative contexts, Dunye’s face serves as a lesbian peak of present. That is, her close-ups

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distill a huge reservoir of unruly lesbian histories, contested in her own era by the different styles of being lesbian that Tamara, Diana, Stacey, June, and others enact or even insist upon as the way to be a lesbian. Her face also serves, however, as a recurring “sheet” or a “series” unto itself, appearing at frequent, arbitrary intervals in The Watermelon Woman’s loose montage. Even in the absence, then, of perception-affection-action cycles to organize the film—an absence all the more emphatic since Cheryl’s “action” of producing her documentary is so profoundly thwarted—her face often absorbs traces, intensities, or significations from preceding shots or sequences, as a more typical affection-image might. The consequent relations among images feed an impression of Cheryl not just as a lesbian but as a singular lesbian, even as she occasionally speaks or stands in for the group as a whole. She is not the only character whose lesbian connotations arise or accrue through dynamic interplays among her face and the objects, images, or additional faces around it, nor the only one who reciprocally endows objects, images, and faces with an otherwise elusive lesbian resonance. The whole project of researching “The Watermelon Woman” follows this protocol entirely, as Cheryl collates photos, clippings, spoken testimonies, and other archival effluvia. The more we relate to Cheryl (early) and to Fae (eventually) as lesbians, the more we read these materials through that lens. At the same time, the idiosyncrasies of these artifacts and of the film’s strategies for showcasing them make Cheryl, Fae, and other women increasingly specific in our eyes, and “lesbian” itself less generic—indeed, at times, all but unfixable as a term. Cinema 2 drops the affection-image, tossing it out with the bathwater of the discredited perception-affection-action cycle. Cheryl’s serial matching of faces to objects, however, often in pursuit of lesbian histories and biographies she cannot otherwise substantiate, shows how a disordering of perceptions may intensify the value of perception and affection rather than abandoning them as relics of some prior image-regime. In any case, not just in Cheryl’s actions but in the images by which The Watermelon Woman conveys them, we see how the face can sustain the work of affection (absorbing and translating perceptions, or trying to) while adopting paradigms of modern cinema (appearing at random, abjuring clear relations with other images).

Like Clockwork, or How to Make a Face Beyond bridging concepts from the Cinema books, The Watermelon Woman provides an occasion for linking “affection” to other Deleuzian ideas about the face. These feel distinct at times and interblended at others, given the ways that faces, objects, and narratives continually challenge one another in Dunye’s film. Ironically, these complex dynamics accumulate around close-ups that appear spontaneous and unsophisticated. We typically confront Cheryl in harsh

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light, rendered on low-grade, choppily edited video; in no sense of the phrase does Cheryl’s face appear “made up.” She often peers into her camera and addresses us offhandedly, abetting an impression of self-evidence that The Watermelon Woman steadily queers. Indeed, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, “concrete faces cannot be assumed to come ready-made” but rather “are engendered by an abstract machine of faciality, which produces them at the same time as it gives the signifier its white wall and subjectivity its black hole.”15 This thesis powers several of their observations in their chapter on facialization in A Thousand Plateaus. Note first the racialized asymmetry of the conception, ceding generality to a “white wall” and aligning blackness with isolated, subjectively expressive features.16 With similarly racialized if not racist inflections, the chapter holds that legible faces must be created through socialization and convention, as Deleuze and Guattari illustrate through the case of “primitive” people whose faces remain inscrutable to outsiders (TP 178). Still, the fundamental state of the face is not whiteness per se but “something absolutely inhuman about the face” (TP 170), a field of forces rather than meanings, deduced through perceptual rather than personified aspects of how features either assert themselves or recede into blankness. Cinema 1 echoes this idea that faces must be made but argues the point through more formal, less racialized terms. For Deleuze, that is, affectionimages achieve an odd cohesion even as they betray and even exacerbate discontinuities among those elements they ostensibly pull together; in this way, they approximate that tug-of-war among insuperable difference and ostensibly common cause within so many queer collectives. This tension or double movement between consolidation and diffusion, plus the sense that such tension is productive, are what signally qualify a close-up (or, occasionally, another type of shot) as a Deleuzian affection-image.17 On the one hand, any face or facialized image conjoins disparate elements into a reflective unity, a delimited field in which they express new relations or “powers” (C1 87). On the other, those powers conduct themselves through an intensive series of features, subject to movements and changes over time, and relating this provisional field to systems outside itself. What does this mean? Deleuze furnishes the example of a clock to illustrate this relation between a reflective surface (the flat plane, Time as aggregate power or force) and the subdividing, meaning-making, intensive series (the moving hands, the marked seconds and minutes, time’s passage as qualitative change). For any sign to work as an affection-image, we must similarly relate to it as a face: “Each time we discover these two poles in something—reflecting surface and intensive micro-movements—we can say that this thing has been treated as a face [visage]: it has been ‘envisaged’ or rather ‘faceified’ [visagéifiée], and in turn it stares at us [dévisage], it looks at us . . . even if it does not resemble a face” (C1 88). Cinema 1 names D. W. Griffith’s luminous close-ups

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as typical of faces in their reflective dimension, linked to characters that the films naturalize as individuals or types. By contrast, Eisenstein’s close-ups prioritize striking features over smooth wholes, abutting images on either side and imbuing their own discrete features with stark, thought-provoking tensions. Such deployment of close-ups “marks this dialectical yearning of the image to gain new dimensions, that is, to leap formally from one power into another” (C1 36). With his characteristic refusal of strict binaries, despite these seemingly antonymic cases, Deleuze describes reflective and intensive capacities of the face as “a matter of two poles, sometimes one prevailing over the other and appearing almost pure, sometimes the two being mixed in one direction or the other” (C1 88).

Facing Elsie, and the Mystery of the Other Person Dunye demonstrates such admixtures in the pre-credits scene when Cheryl first discloses her fascination with Fae Richards, then known to her only as the actress playing Elsie in Plantation Memories. Before Cheryl enters this scene, a lateral pan that will end with her close-up surveys a range of props in her apartment, as though gleaning them as intensive features of the late-arriving face that it seeks. These objects, thereby facialized without being “on” or “of ” Cheryl’s face, inform our impression of the woman we soon behold, particularly given the continuous camera movement linking them to her: stacks of journals and notes; a paperback about Philadelphia; a winsome plastic figure with a yellow smiley face; the VHS tape of Plantation Memories lying canted across the top of another video; and an array of papers tacked to the wall, including pages from a fashion spread of mostly black celebrities. In a film full of characters who keep huge, disorderly archives to which they stay passionately attached (Lee’s memorabilia, Irene’s heaps of “junk,” Miss Shirley’s photographs, Bob’s carefully cataloged videos, Camille Paglia’s towers of paper, the entropic holdings of the C.L.I.T. Archive, etc.), this shot, ending on a face, indicates another woman for whom objects signify intensely, even as elements of herself. Our provisional impression is of a plucky, black, female Philadelphian with a bookworm bent, a devoted collector with no clear archiving system, an assiduous researcher, and a beautiful woman disinclined to fuss over clothing or cosmetics. “Hi, I’m Cheryl,” she begins, utterly if deceptively casual in her “reflective unity.” She sits under splotchy lighting, fidgets with a clip-on microphone, and tinkers with the camera angle before settling into place as its object, thus giving a meticulous performance of spontaneity. The face holds together even as Cheryl’s account of herself begins to quake. “I’m Cheryl, and I’m a filllmmmmaker . . .” she drawls, but amends her statement with rapid qualifications: “. . . um, no, I’m not really a filmmaker, but I have a video-taping business with my

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friend Tamara, and I work at a video store, so I’m working on being a filmmaker.” Prevarications ripple outward from Cheryl’s attempt at “just telling us all about” herself, signaling surely greater obstacles against “just telling us all about” Fae. Her affect amasses further disquiet once she starts the clip of Plantation Memories—contagiously activating our own search for whatever in Elsie’s face has motivated Cheryl to unearth “everything I can find out about her.” We cannot know if this “something interesting” comprises some ineffable quality suffusing the whole field of that face or some intensive feature. Reprising those Deleuzian stutters that overtake Bill Lee in Naked Lunch, desire begins to decimate Cheryl’s language: “I saw the most beautiful black mammy, named Elsie,” she attests, holding the VHS case of Plantation Memories over the bottom half of her close-up, as though making it, too, an intensive feature within the field of her own face. “And I just had to—show this—” she sputters, hands waving and head shaking, her face swiveling to the right as she gazes at the TV and VCR. Fae’s close-up flickers on a cheap TV whose signal appears cruder as filmed by Cheryl’s camera, intensifying our need to read closely. Within Plantation Memories, Elsie’s doting gaze on her mistress constitutes a unity, all the more “reflective” for its coerced servility, bound up in racist nostalgia. Because this typology has grown more visible as a semiotic construct, and because we have accepted Cheryl’s invitation to scrutinize this face, we “intensify” its features through our own compartmentalizing scan. We clock Elsie’s slender frame, atypical for a stock “mammy”; her large eyes and cheekbones, resembling Cheryl’s own; the hokey Old South set; and the coarse resolution and tinny reverb of VHS on an old TV. The low-quality video transfer implies both the object’s awful backwardness (a worthier movie might have been safeguarded by a better distributor) and also someone’s fond but unrecorded labor in keeping this artifact circulating (or else it surely would have evanesced). These traces increasingly undo the unities of Elsie or of her face, flaunting unstable significations, conjoining not just Cheryl’s but several people’s actual and potential desiring-investments in Plantation Memories, including the dubious sentiments that prompted its production.18 Making matters more complex, images like these have helped to produce Cheryl as, among other things, a surprise devotee of this brand of film. Thus, each face affects and intensifies the other: Cheryl’s vehement attention salvages the noxious stereotyping of Elsie into a set of “interesting” relations, while Fae’s image alters our perception of Cheryl. As we zoom back out, Cheryl’s sudden enervation signals the release of her desiring-machines: her hands saw back and forth, and her eyes sarcastically roll at Fae’s demeaning onscreen credit as “the Watermelon Woman,” yet her gaze and brow still radiate intense interest. With the dilation to medium-shot, those stacks of videos, documents, and supplies no longer convey a still life of the amateur scholar. We now perceive agitated desires to learn “all about” an obscure figure, disclosed in part by how

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much ephemera Cheryl has already compiled, which itself frames and intensifies her face. As Cheryl “affects” a clichéd image of Elsie, then, into an unsettled and unsettling object of inquiry, the close-up of this “beautiful black mammy” in turn affects Cheryl as a woman on the verge of new actions, insights, and desires. Both faces “break free of the outline, begin to work on their own account, and form an autonomous series which tends toward a limit or crosses a threshold” (C1 89). Speaking of thresholds, the next cut introduces the main title, as though the meeting of Fae/Elsie’s and Cheryl/Dunye’s affection-images has prompted the action of the film itself. Do we, however, cross a threshold here into recognizing either woman as a lesbian, or The Watermelon Woman as a lesbian film? Unless we read “lesbian” catachrestically into the features of Cheryl’s appearance or environment, or group the humble stylistics and generic tropes as prototypical of lesbian filmmaking and video-making in the mid-1990s, the only stimuli in the scene toward reading Cheryl’s desires in this scene as lesbian arrive in her fervent, tongue-tied declaration that “girlfriend has got it goin’ on,” a phrase indicating attraction but also platonic respect. Even if “something interesting” in Fae’s or Cheryl’s face motivates a term like “lesbian,” and it may well not, it remains unclear which among their intensive traces or affective exchanges deserve credit for our impulse to read that way. To reprise Deleuze’s ideas about the face, the demeaning countenance of Fae-as-Elsie speaks to the idea in A Thousand Plateaus that faces are indeed created—sometimes by clichéd or even coercive convention. Yet the scene’s overall logic makes such made-not-born facialization a conceptual rule, not a racist exception. The orchestrated “candor” of Cheryl’s spontaneous, ill-lit close-up translates as equally fabricated, especially if we know how thoroughly devised this ostensible documentary actually is. Meanwhile, if we feel unsure whether we have seen in Elsie’s face whatever so interests Cheryl, or unclear as to the nature of that investment, these constitute additional signs that their faces have not yet been fully “created” for us. Faces’ dynamic relations to other images, including other faces, persist across The Watermelon Woman as a key tactic by which they become readable. Some become “interesting” precisely because we cannot read them. Sometimes our readings of faces contest “the facts” as we hear or infer them. Many faces hold competing ideas in intensive balance, even rendering their semiscrutability into an intensive feature of its own. All this impacts our constantly revising sense of the lesbian, especially as against some strict policing of that category in some quarters of the film—often amid peer-groups and collectives from whom rangier viewpoints might be expected. By contrast, older and less readily identifiable lesbians in the film pose bigger reading challenges but, in so doing, emerge as some of the most “interesting” figures in the film, in the usual but also in Cheryl’s saucier sense of that term. They bevel the film with unexpected possibilities of where “lesbian”

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might arise and whom it might encompass, individually and collectively, prompting something close to a cruisy spectatorship: we create faces with newly motivated interest, seeking to learn “all about” some ladies who may not be telling everything they know. In any case, the work of “making faces” remains conjectural in The Watermelon Woman, particularly regarding Cheryl’s serial spelunking into Fae’s life, but in other contexts, too. These processes confront both a scarcity of hard evidence and a lingering danger of alchemizing tenuous deductions into gospel truth. Such dangers are ameliorated, though, by the third of Deleuze’s major conceptualizations of the face, which confines itself neither to the formal diagrammatics of the affection-image nor to the queasily racialized politics of facialization in A Thousand Plateaus. In What Is Philosophy?, the last of their joint volumes, Deleuze and Guattari offer a more abstracted yet implicitly cinematic idea of the face. Moreover, they pose facialization less as an emblem of how we perceive than as an engine for how we learn to think, as a rejuvenator of our desires, and as a reminder of our responsibilities to be inquisitive: There is, at some moment, a calm and restful world. Suddenly a frightened face looms up that looks at something out of the field. The other person appears here as neither subject nor object but as something that is very different: a possible world. . . . This possible world is not real, or not yet, but it exists nonetheless: it is an expressed that exists only in its expression—the face, or an equivalent of the face. To begin with, the other person is this existence of a possible world.19 Among these models of the face as a crucible of signifying relations in Cinema 1, as an assembled product in A Thousand Plateaus, and as a figure for interpersonal encounters and imagination in What Is Philosophy?, one axiom recurs: “the face renders thinking problematic” and “is both an expression of the possible as such and the surface on which determinations will be mapped.”20 The face, then, remains perpetually bound up in its own production, in the production of thoughts and concepts, and in thinkable relations among people; to wit, the essay that yields the passage quoted above is titled “What Is a Concept?” The face even typifies for Deleuze and Guattari the wisdom that “there is no concept with only one component” (WIP 15), a salutary reminder with regard to a group like black lesbians, so frequently dismissed and yet characterized through that very marginalization as uniform in their constitution and their putatively shared politics. The Watermelon Woman’s outrageous rarity as a black lesbian feature risks making it iconographic of a group already misperceived as monolithic.21 Dunye’s mimicry of documentary convention further tempts us to view faces as transparently “actual” when her spry, somewhat veiled achievement is to pose the black lesbian, playfully but rigorously, as a problem we barely know how to face (as it were), raising but surpassing the “largely unbroached subject,” in Patricia White’s terms, of “what goes on

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‘between women.’”22 These questions bear no obvious answers even for spectators who identify as black lesbians—a fact dramatized by disagreements in the critical literature and by internecine strife within the film. Whoever we are or however we identify, the film encourages us to view Cheryl/Dunye as a Deleuzian “other person” and to watch as she confronts other characters as well as herself in close-up, multiplying questions about their possible worlds, past and present, sexual and otherwise. “The Other Person designates neither a special object, not an other subject, nor a self, but the position that all three may occupy,” write Gregory Flaxman and Elena Oxman in their reading of What Is Philosophy?, a book that barely takes up the figure of the face after its early pages.23 All these positions and the swerves among them reverberate across The Watermelon Woman, subtending its humor, its friskiness, its frustration, and its conceptual interest. The multifaceted riddles posed by the face and by specifically lesbian theories of the image pervade the filmmaker’s fluctuating status as her own subject, object, self, and “other person”; the uncertain ties linking Cheryl/Dunye to Elsie/Fae as a “special object”; and the affective bonds Dunye establishes with the audience she often addresses directly, such that we become an “other person,” something “out of the field” that her face surveys. Ultimately, among other things, the film thus interrogates the place of black lesbian images within queer collectives, a question as pressing now as when this impressively layered jape premiered. The Watermelon Woman thus also balances my earlier readings of Cronenberg in unexpected ways. Dunye complicates New Queer tropes from within that movement rather than without, focalizing faces rather than bodies as sites of actuality and virtuality. Most specifically, she unearths virtual problematics within seemingly actual faces, as distinct from how Cronenberg exhumes actual queer stakes from flagrantly fantastical spectacles.

Black Lesbians and Their Others These approaches to the face help to mediate existing debates about Dunye’s film and about the politics of visibility more broadly. Representing one camp, Laura L. Sullivan highlights the “Watermelon Woman” film-within-a-film, with its literal sheets of past (studio stills, personal snapshots, article clippings, all shuffled out of any order), as an epitome of how the film works concurrently “to represent and to decenter the identity and history of a figure most invisible in the textual production of the dominant culture—the black lesbian.”24 Still, in her view, the film “serves first to document the existence” of black lesbians, via a practice Andrea Braidt calls “queer ethnography.”25 Proponents of The Watermelon Woman often endorse this platform of democratized visibility, occasionally joined to some unverifiable econometric by which black lesbians register for them as “the least visible group not only in the fine arts but

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in the popular media.”26 Such responses often struggle, however, with a paradox that troubles Sullivan, balancing pleasure at how The Watermelon Woman cracks a tinted-glass ceiling on black lesbian self-representation with a belief that queer cinema ought to disrupt essentialist or even eccentrically “ethnographic” constructions of all subjects, including those who (as racial others, as women) shoulder a disproportionate “burden of representation.”27 Kara Keeling speaks for other scholars and viewers who identify more aporia than eclecticism in Dunye’s set of black lesbians; she does not, however, advocate necessarily for more inclusion. Keeling questions the foundations by which “black lesbian” comes to connote “that which has been rendered invisible,” with the inapposite consequence that this category somehow becomes “itself a guarantor of radical or at least progressive politics.”28 Such distortions abet other, persistent elisions within black lesbian texts, frequently subscribing to a project of empowerment-through-visibility that nonetheless “might be troubled by the appearance of images that reveal an alternate past for ‘black lesbian’”; such pasts correspond to a range of African American butches, bulldaggers, woman-lovers, aggressives, and others who somehow rarely serve as figureheads for “the black lesbian,” a minor group Keeling designates, with identificatory aplomb, as “a multifarious ‘we.’”29 This “we” recedes, for example, when Cheryl opts for the euphemism “special friend” when invoking June Walker, Fae’s longtime lover and partner. (Then again, June indulges her own border patrolling, refusing Cheryl any standing “in the family” if she acknowledges Fae’s liaison with Martha Page; and, to be fair to Cheryl, the C.L.I.T. Archive scene shows this locution to originate with Fae, on the back of a glossy photo she signed to June.) Keeling lists other symptoms of The Watermelon Woman consolidating “black lesbian” around limited axes of inclusion, such as Cheryl/Dunye’s disproportionate fixation on interracial relationships and her downplaying of same-sex-loving communities, mostly among the working class, who cultivate their own lexicons of self-naming along with their own regional, erotic, and sociological specificities.30 As we have seen, the affection-image premises itself upon the very tensions Keeling describes, pulled between reflective fields that incline toward holism and intensive singularities that bespeak instability and change. If, then, we theorize visibility through the lens of dynamic affection over flat depiction, especially as freed from standardized perception-affection-action grammars, then a useful politics of visibility could be substituted for the equally unsatisfying positions of ceding representation only to certain subsets of black lesbians or of eschewing representation altogether. Dunye’s queer response to these dilemmas involves emphasizing intensive aspects of faces within her actor-driven, talking-head semi-documentary. The multiplicity of characters, as Sullivan implies, already underscores black lesbian differences rather than posing the group as a reflective unity. This

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plurality helps, since, as Cinema 1 argues, the intensive aspect of faces “is best embodied by several simultaneous or successive faces, although a single face can suffice if it puts its different organs or features into series” (C1 89). In some ways, Cheryl’s face, to which we are most frequently though not consistently exposed, will serve as such a single face impressively keeping paradox in play. Meanwhile, to achieve this serial aspect among the group rather than a mere pluralism that passes as comprehensive, Dunye utilizes subtleties of framing, montage, and verbal testimony to ensure that black lesbian potentials accrue even to women and groups that do not overtly solicit them. The effect is not to stabilize but to explode the category, making the film excitingly rereadable for more reasons than its generic high jinks and providing fewer “answers” in the offing. By the end of the film, the varying, piebald collectives the film has oriented around Cheryl/Dunye’s face may not fully cohere as collectives or even desire to do so, but exciting fissures in the politics of visibility emerge from these enigmas. Importantly, these complex and ambiguous vectors of facialization do not de-eroticize the lesbian as a category. Like Cheryl, forever scouring headshots, glamour photos, and old film clips, we pore over faces as interested readers, feeling our way through constructed truths about and between persons that suit our evolving interests. “What is called desire [is] inseparable from the little solicitations or impulsions which make up an intensive series expressed by the face” (C1 88, original emphasis), Deleuze reports, on one of the very few occasions when that concept appears in either Cinema volume. Without attracting anything like an objectifying gaze, then, these “impulsions” allow spectators to flit and flirt over faces whose orientations, back stories, and internal relations refuse to take a firm shape, thereby stoking nuanced and cliché-resistant acts of reading. Across these faces, then, the lesbian—usually but not always the black lesbian, given the film’s attention to interracial desire—emerges as the kind of loose scatterplot I claimed as the graph of desire of Naked Lunch. Within a variously facialized field, different women serve as unfixed and intensive points, comprising loosely proximate cases or hints of lesbian desire, without domesticating or disguising their evident differences. Those differences seem tensest among Cheryl’s peer group, whose faces often emerge as incompossible peaks of desire, a connotation enforced by the formal grammar of their scenes. Cheryl, Tamara, Stacey, Diana, and others invoke the same term of identification and inhabit the same moment but often contest one another’s orientations, forming a collective only in a hostility-prone and internally policing way. By contrast, as Cheryl interviews the older women who knew Fae or may have, constructing their faces as well as their scenes as sheets of a broadly lesbian past, she locates unexpected bonds that link her experience to their own collective and erotic histories; these bonds break the frame of “black lesbian” to allow for more permeable memberships and selfstylings. On the one hand, then, even to invoke the lesbian in the present often

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works to flatten or rebut difference, not because that term inevitably operates that way but because in Cheryl’s experience this often happens.31 On the other hand, the more implicit, affective versions of the lesbian that arise through the facializing of shuffled images work very differently. Especially, if my experience is anything to go by, they implicate an open-ended range of spectators within pleasurable economies of cruising and conjecture—of desire-based looking— as “possible worlds” of lesbian pasts and presents continue to shift shapes and to admit surprising subscribers. Deleuze’s overlapping strategies of facialization, then—affecting resonant perceptions, creating faces through repeated disclosure and attentive recognition, and speculating on other people’s experiences without resolving their mysteries—thus open the movie to multiplicity at more levels than Sullivan describes. In my viewing, they also admit more multifarious “we”s into the film, not just among its variegated spectators but through the strong virtual presence that heterogeneous collectives achieve within the images and the diegesis. What Dunye’s film also unveils, then, is how Deleuze’s peaks of present and sheets of past, as alternative forms of the time-image and the desiring-image, allow for different freedoms and spectrums regarding visibility and collectivity.

Peaks of Present, or What Ever Happened to Lesbian Community? Like so many films in the time-image and minor-cinema traditions, The Watermelon Woman allows scenes to float in loose relations to one another. This disposition reveals itself especially when Cheryl/Dunye spends random interludes flipping through photos of favorite actresses, or when she jams on a rooftop with Tamara/Valarie for a few incongruous seconds. These intervals, plus others slightly more assimilable to the film’s narrative, imply free and easy bonds among the actors, and between the performers and the roles they play. Despite this casual air, however, Dunye’s film often confronts major sticking points among its nascent black lesbian population, even among its ostensibly tightest members. These intramural tensions may not be coincidental to the Deleuzian “peaks of present” through which The Watermelon Woman realizes these scenes. After all, that notion of cinematic temporality always entails the distilling of vast, incongruent, even inimical pasts into contracted points that inevitably contest each other. Still, the frequently resulting failures of community are all the more disheartening because the film’s loosey-goosey poetics appear to welcome—and often achieve— the kind of permeable, host-space sociality we just observed in Shortbus. Dunye’s mise-en-scène brims with images of self-identified or, at least, strongly suspected black lesbians; the roomy montage allows virtually any image to adjoin any other; and the casual framing invites any-characterwhatever to walk into or out of a shot at any given moment. Nonetheless,

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group scenes almost always produce failures of collective feeling, if not outright discord. We see this early on at the lesbian karaoke club, where a white singer (Go Fish’s V. S. Brodie) fails to charm the crowd and where Cheryl’s blind date Yvette (Kat Robertson) presents a face and voice of the black lesbian that horrifies her, much to the amusement of Tamara and her girlfriend Stacey (Jocelyn Taylor). In a later scene, even more corrosive of collective ease, Cheryl invites Tamara and Stacey to dinner, where they grow flamboyantly annoyed by Diana’s tone-deaf, white-liberal conviction that her Jamaican birthplace makes for perfect dinner-table badinage with black people (“I love talking about where I was born!”). As conversation shifts to Diana’s announcement of a breakthrough interview opportunity for Cheryl, the film does not settle whether Tamara’s and Stacey’s continued crankiness signals their rejection of Diana, or their rejection of Cheryl’s “Watermelon Woman” project, or both. Notably, then, from her embarking manifesto as a black woman to her climactic self-hailing as a black lesbian filmmaker, the increasingly alienated Cheryl migrates from a collective to a singular voice (i.e., from “our stories have never been told” to “I’m going to be the one to say . . .”). This is catachresis at its apex: “black lesbian filmmaker” names an apt category for Cheryl, except insofar as she stands alone inside it, abandoned and chastised by her ostensible cohort. Worse, her would-be communities doubt her credentials in all three regards. Whenever Cheryl runs afoul of what Tamara perceives as black lesbian criteria, she subjects Cheryl to ornery rejoinders: “We’re lesbians, remember?” or “What’s up with you, Cheryl, you don’t like the color of your skin nowadays?” As for Cheryl’s claims as a filmmaker, not only does the “Watermelon Woman” short bear clear signs of production trouble and premature delivery, it too is subjected to censure and skepticism by “fellow” black lesbians, either because they are intent upon suppressing it (in June Walker’s case) or because they cannot tolerate, even as a matter of historical interest, what Tamara castigates as “all that nigga-mammy shit from the thirties.” Cheryl faces the obverse of the old Groucho Marx problem: she only wants to belong to clubs that won’t have her as a member. Given the paucity of black lesbian cineastes in or outside the movie, they barely exist as clubs. The Watermelon Woman’s claim as what Juhasz calls “the first African American lesbian feature film” may inhere, then, despite or even against the identity-policing habits of its own characters. Indeed, there is hardly any preparing for the sheer scale of present-day disjuncture in The Watermelon Woman: all the romantic unions dissolve, dates always go badly, workplace tensions escalate, clerks squabble with patrons, mothers and daughters bicker, subjects scold their interviewers (and vice versa), and black female friends, regarding each other eye to eye, increasingly dislike what they see.32 Even the term “lesbian,” when most overtly invoked, tends to carry a hostile or surveilling charge, as in Tamara’s tirades or in the title of the epically disorganized yet caustically obstructionist Center for Lesbian Information and Technology

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(a.k.a., the C.L.I.T. Archive). Keeling has reason to lament the way “lesbian” accrues rigid associations as the movie unfolds, but I think Dunye self-consciously marks this trend: insalubrious to fellow feeling, however refreshingly free of the mythos that all black lesbians share the same investments or politics. Nimbler possibilities of how, where, and with whom to be lesbian arise within the film, but notably in these contexts, the actual term usually goes unvoiced. The Watermelon Woman also locates unsettling tensions within images of lesbian erotic behavior. Dunye’s subtle manipulations of form and her tactics of facialization again complicate such scenes, including one that builds to a tight two-shot in which Cheryl and Diana exchange their first kiss, leading to a memorably frank sex scene, replete with extreme close-ups of skin-on-skin contact.33 The camera begins this scene by framing a television monitor broadcasting another of Fae’s movies, Souls of Deceit, in which her character upbraids a fellow African American woman for passing as white. Both characters stand before a mirror at that moment, thus “reflecting” in multiple ways the pair of lighter- and darker-skinned women who are watching this film from Diana’s zebra-print futon. The next shot starts from a conspicuous close-up on the Souls of Deceit VHS case, then pans and tracks slowly from behind the television until we are watching Cheryl and Diana watch. The camera movement thus mimics others in The Watermelon Woman that attach resonant objects to the characters’ faces as “intensive features” in themselves. The ensuing foreplay and sex between Cheryl and Diana surpass any other spectacles in The Watermelon Woman in visualizing carnal desire between women, and yet the bodies and desires do not strictly speak for themselves. As the women begin kissing, dialogue from Souls of Deceit bleeds into our closeup impression of these women and their desires: “You’re a no-good lying tramp, that’s what you are!” we hear, and “Why can’t I be happy fitting into their world? God made me this color, and he did it for a reason!” Fae’s dialogue about racial anxieties, sexual heedlessness, and jockeying for position in someone else’s “world,” which either Diana or Cheryl could at this moment be uncharitably accused of doing, register uncomfortably as facializing dimensions of this steamy but highly fraught peak of the lesbian present, even if lovemaking itself appears to assuage some accumulated tensions. Several critics have argued that within the context of lesbian cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, “lesbian” encompassed not just an erotic category of desire among women but a plane of highly politicized contestations among race, class, and sexuality. Ann Pellegrini, surveying the field of lesbian-themed popular films in this era, argues that the “interracial couple has become virtually the cinematic face of lesbianism,” sometimes implying utopian identifications across difference, but more often as a trope for frictions, undue fixations, and hypocrisies dividing the ostensible “community.”34 In other words, these were not just anecdotal aspects of how some lesbians experienced desire, collectivity,

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and politics but had become part of the connotative cargo of “lesbian” itself. Certainly these fault lines announce themselves between white, affluent Diana and black, precariously employed Cheryl, and in the different ways cinema both facilitates and prohibits the circulation of pleasures between them, even amid sensuous, extreme close-ups of skin and of body parts unlike anything else in the movie. Earnest but ambivalent Cheryl, spunky and censorious Tamara, scholarly Stacey, saucy but spoiled Diana, the solicitous but imperious staff of the C.L.I.T. Archive—these are not just “different” lesbians within the schema of The Watermelon Woman. They present contracted peaks of a complex lesbian history that implicates Fae’s stormy biography in all their lives, sexually and otherwise, and which struggles even today to negotiate conflictual versions of what “lesbian” might mean. Dunye avoids that blanket utopianizing of “black lesbian” communities and politics that Keeling and others denounce, yet no other version of a collective, much less any politics or potential for group becoming, arises in these scenes.

Sheets of Past and Centers of Indetermination Although avoiding such a disputatious present may come as a relief, Cheryl’s explorations of the past do not entail a simple retreat. Unsettling for different reasons, and bearing different relations to form and montage, historical images and narratives in The Watermelon Woman take the form of Deleuzian “sheets.” Multifarious and disordered, they imply still broader purviews of difference beyond what Cheryl’s interview subjects recall or admit—and beyond what we can perceive, even when Dunye’s montage nudges the movie past what anyone in the scene could plausibly know or remember. These sheets enfold Cheryl and us, too, into new relations with other black lesbians, or with potential black lesbians, since Cheryl’s interlocutors rarely use that word and for various reasons may feel no connection to it. Even so, the seeds of a minor lesbian collective take hold in these exchanges in ways they do not in the contemporary timeframe. These scenes also differ from the present-day 16mm sequences by being shot on the same low-quality video as Cheryl’s private testimonials, an important detail for later in my argument. Most important, characterization plays out quite differently in these interview scenes, privileging the subjects’ faces in complex ways. The evaporation of “lesbian” as a spoken or even presumed term of collective identification catalyzes more non-prescriptive, indirect stabs at seeing where, whether, and how confidently “lesbian” attaches to any of these women. Cheryl also removes her own image from most of these scenes, despite its prominence everywhere else in the movie. Thus, the women she interviews “facialize” all the more intensely on their own terms, following all three routes Deleuze lays out: they

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produce semilegible visages we learn to read in graduated stages, as in A Thousand Plateaus; they affect reflective and intensive relations to objects and images around them, with transformative effects in both directions, as in Cinema 1; and they loom before us frequently, looking out of the frame, inviting us to imagine “possible worlds” to which they belong, or formerly did, as in What Is Philosophy? These more elliptical, more creative conjurations of lesbian pasts thereby revitalize a discourse that seems so policed and conflict-ridden in the present. Unlike the scenes of present-day drama in The Watermelon Woman, then, where Tamara and Diana play satellite roles respective to Cheryl’s, these sequences privilege her interview subjects as “centers of indetermination.” They activate complex fields of perception among changing vantages where none, even the documentarian’s, attain any “objective” position. The resulting “free-indirect” or “semi-subjective” orientation comprises one of many principles that Deleuze introduces with regard to Cinema 1’s affection-image but later reprises within his theories of modern cinema. As he categorically attests in the first book but does not actually repeat in the second, “This is true of the affection-image: it is both a type of image and a component of all images” (C1 87). We as viewers always constitute centers of indetermination, reading images from decentered perspectives, altered and implicated by the impressions and relations they produce—including, I would add, the desires they generate. In the context of this film, neither the spectator nor Cheryl ever stops performing what Keeling calls “affective labor,” forging links among dissimilar images or concepts while attending to their disparities and refusing clichéd perceptions from our own standpoints. In other words, our perceptions of any image or sequence corresponds to that same dual function faces perform in Cinema 1, establishing coherent relations across a delimited field while tracking intensive anomalies and responding to potential changes over time.35 Lesbian artists, filmgoers, and theorists have a long, specific history of performing such affective labors, constructing alternative perceptions and relations among whatever partial or dispersed representations they can retrieve from their own pasts or presents. This practice constantly challenges more straightforward politics of visibility, historiography, or lesbian definition; such quandaries yield in turn lesbian cinema’s frequent disposition toward mythmaking on limited budgets, often privileging popular and collective memory over institutionally sanctified stories and evidence.36 Such ideas informed theorizations of 1990s-era queer cinema from the moment B. Ruby Rich opined that, compared to gay men, lesbian auteurs had smaller historical and cultural troves from which to launch creative resignifications. “Where the boys are archaeologists,” Rich declaims, citing emblems of New Queer pastiche from Poison to Swoon to Edward II, “the girls have to be alchemists,” frequently inventing pasts and doing so at short-film scale and on video rather than film.37

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Dunye reprises this idea in The Watermelon Woman’s epigraph, avowing that “Sometimes you have to create your own history.” Lesbian theories of the apparitional and the virtual therefore dovetail closely, as Patricia White argues most directly, with Deleuze’s notions of minor cinema.38 Both traditions entail free-indirect or semivisible intercessors, generating incipient collectives, and making political and aesthetic virtues of their so-called aesthetic poverty. Lesbian cinema and video-making thereby capitalize, resourcefully if also ambivalently, on the transparently gendered inequities of film patronage and distribution. Such image-making emerged not as an underfinanced mirror-image of gay male cinema’s tropes, genres, and ideologies but as a minoring enterprise within queer cinema, exploring semivisibility and precarious collectivity in formal, historical, and even material registers. Lesbian cinema consequently joins Deleuze, albeit from very different directions, in considering what becomes actual and what remains necessarily virtual within any image.39 Amid this context, The Watermelon Woman allows actual and virtual lesbians to comingle in a Deleuzian project of historical production rather than recovery per se. Cheryl, as faux-documentarian, and many of her subjects constitute Deleuzian “forgers” (C2 132) who forsake “the identity of a character, whether real or fictional, through his objective and subjective aspects . . . when he enters into ‘the flagrant offense of making up legends’ and so contributes to the invention of his people” (C2 150). These forgers “cease to be real or fictional” (C2 151) as does “the film-maker himself ” who—with masculine bias exacerbated by French-to-English translation—“takes real characters as intercessors and replaces his fictions by their own story-telling, but, conversely, gives these story-tellings the shape of legends, carrying out their ‘making into legend’” (C2 152). These alliances among filmmaker-as-relay-point and character-as-fabulist revitalize cinema despite and often through the dearth of material resources.40 Cheryl’s research does not convey her, then, toward sites of incontestable lesbian knowledge or toward demonstrably lesbian interlocutors but to fellow intercessors, playing equivocally loose or close variations on themselves, furnishing new sheets to a broadly lesbian past. Her labor requires wading into mythographic “archives of feeling,” in the context of which Cheryl and her spectators must debate the pros and cons of classifying various sources or interlocutors as lesbian—a form of affective labor entailing concomitant processes of facialization.41 To illustrate these complicated dynamics, I highlight two of Cheryl’s interviews: one with her mother Irene, and another with Irene’s friend Shirley. Both exchanges displace our certainty regarding what “lesbian” might connote as applied to a person, a group of people, or a social space, and they do so in direct conjunction with each other, overlapping in ways we only retroactively appreciate. Thus, in an act of what White calls “lesbian retrospectatorship,” I start with the latter of these two scenes, which ends when Cheryl returns

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home from her sit-down with Shirley, exuberant with belatedly affirmed intuition: “Fae’s a Sapphic sister, a bull-dagger, a lesbian! I knew something was up when I saw Plantation Memories!” Given, however, the verbal and visual evidence Shirley has presented, and as a measure of how scrupulously Cheryl has peered into Shirley’s possible world, this eager expostulation leaves, in every sense, a few things to be desired. Cheryl’s slides among nuanced terminologies are especially risky because Shirley herself relates so differently to these appellations. Before their interview has even begun, the documentary image proves unusually empiricizing: we behold this middle-aged woman with close-cropped hair squinting and smoking in her bare kitchen, tagged by the caption “Shirley Hamilton, Factory Worker.” Cheryl, augmenting this euphemistic sexual profiling, relates in voice-over, “Miss Shirley, never married, worked in a factory most of her life— I think she’s in the family.” Even so, despite these confident surmises, at the moment Shirley confides that Fae “used to sing for all us stone butches,” Cheryl’s desiring-machines go berserk. Her camera executes a wobbly zoom from medium shot into close-up, as though elatedly stumbling on a rare bird. This comically vociferous push-in serves as an intensive element in how The Watermelon Woman produces Shirley’s face, marking a “qualitative leap” from suspected to apparently confirmed inclusion “in the family.” However, given each term’s specific connotations, especially regarding class and gender, Shirley’s apparent outing of herself as a stone butch is not the same as identifying specifically as a lesbian. Different viewers, meanwhile, are likely to react unequally, either perceiving Shirley as a “reflective unity” of stone butchness, or presuming that term’s congruence with “lesbian,” or else scrutinizing Shirley’s features via the now-intimate camera as intensively registering an identity claim whose distance from “lesbian” we are still measuring. If we accept Shirley’s face as unifying a concept of “stone butch,” then the images that accompany her memories may also get inattentively facialized under that heading. If, however, we receive Cheryl’s later concatenation of “a Sapphic sister, a bull-dagger, a lesbian!” as a serial chain of potential differences rather than a chain of loose equivalences, both the story and its possible world appear quite different. The more closely we read the montage accompanying Shirley’s conversation with Cheryl, the more “lesbian” seems either an excitingly labile or a plainly insufficient category—encompassing individuals who do not overtly present that way, or as stone butches, or even as women. At the very least, these images—contextualized as Shirley’s personal photos or flashbacks, some obviously faked, others not—suggest a wide range of butch/ femme types, though many remain illegible within that spectrum, too. Shirley describes the crowds as “mixed,” a broad term edging onto Keeling’s “multifarious ‘we.’” Of these venues, she reports, “White folks owned ‘em, black folks attended ‘em, and the ofays,” meaning white people, “came to socialize.” Discontinuous flashes of stock footage bear this out, as do Shirley’s snapshots,

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delivering incommensurable visions of working-class lounges and ritzier dinner clubs, accommodating racially and sexually diverse patrons. Affecting these enclaves as stone-butch spaces would be a stretch, even as Shirley describes herself and her friends as sufficiently emboldened within them to publicly exchange blows in the front rows while competing for glances from Fae while she sang. These memories are so pivotal to Shirley’s sense of the past that she holds a glamour photo of Fae in mustachioed “crooner” drag against her face, echoing Cheryl’s habit of interpolating images of her favorite stars as intensive features of her own face (see figure 3.1). By no means does Fae appear stone butch, yet her performances of femme-ness clearly varied, and these terms, like all desiring-machines, appear on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Even as a flexible rubric, then, “black lesbian” seems like a problematic term for Shirley, her cohort, and their haunts, which also appear to have hosted male-female couples, white and interracial couples, and otherwise “mixed” patrons. Then again, designating these clubs black lesbian or stone butch can flex these discourses in new ways, allowing them some of that metonymic liberty that accrues today around, say, gay clubs, frequently understood to hail crowds of multiple sexualities, classes, genders, and raced identities, with looser expectations of identitarian alignment. Despite the almost anthropological frames in which Cheryl first introduces her, Shirley’s face and testimony thus give onto a “possible world” of Philadelphia nightlife from decades in the past that brims with unexpected virtual

Figure 3.1 The Watermelon Woman: Miss Shirley holds up her facializing picture of Fae. The Watermelon Woman, 1996, dir. Cheryl Dunye.

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potentials—where going to a lesbian or a stone butch club may not establish anything concretely about the individual patron or the assembled collective. The black stone butch neither “equals” a lesbian, nor does she typify every participant in these social and sexual ecologies, nor is she refused a “prosthetic generality” by which she can speak and appear on behalf of a wider spectrum, quite out of keeping with the guarded taxonomies in the film’s present-day scenes. We, like Cheryl, leave Shirley’s interview with a sense that Fae’s lesbianism may have been confirmed, yet we also recognize that “lesbian” and its most proximate categories have assumed porous parameters, without making every discourse synonymous. How little we may know a black lesbian when we see one, or how capaciously we are willing to test what black lesbian might mean (or once have meant) are questions that ramify, too, upon Cheryl’s earlier interview with her mother, especially if we revisit or refacialize that encounter from the standpoint of Shirley’s reports. Quickly enough, Irene Dunye frustrates her daughter by professing ignorance about “the Watermelon Woman,” notwithstanding some off-screen intimation of having known who she was. Irene, like Shirley, arrives to the viewer in graduated stages of intimacy, first in a medium shot of a middle-class sitting room, then cutting to close-up as Cheryl submits a VHS tape of Fae Richards’s movie Jersey Girl for her mother’s inspection. The film then zooms back out to the original vantage, as Irene realizes she does recognize Fae, not as a movie star but as a performer in downtown Philadelphia clubs, like the Blue Note and Show Boat. “Who was at the clubs with you?” her daughter inquires, as the camera tilts up from a close-up on the Jersey Girl box to our closest shot yet on Irene’s face; again, camera movement enlists an image of Fae as an intensive detail within someone else’s facialization. “Oh, there was um, Hattie and Shirley—Mae— Jeannie, just the regular old gang, you know, we’d go there—but um—I don’t know,” Irene answers. Her syntax breaks down in remembering Fae, just as Cheryl’s did in recounting her first memory of the actress-performer. Meanwhile, questions arise as to Irene invoking Shirley’s name so early in a list of a “regular old gang” who attended clubs together, clubs that Shirley will later describe as full of “us stone butches.” Irene’s subsequent account of euphemistically “weird people” always hanging around at these clubs, “weird people” whom Cheryl intuits as “my kind of people,” would seem to distance Irene from this collective we presume to be lesbian, or stone butch, or somehow non-normative in their gender or sexuality. Irene hints to Cheryl, “You would have loved it.” But did she love it? The regular gang with whom Irene attended these clubs includes Shirley, and maybe that queer, multifarious “we” that informs Keeling’s discourse and Shirley’s diaphanous recollections. Unlike that interview with her stone-butch friend, Irene’s scene includes no stock-footage inserts. As viewers, we have nothing but her words and face on which to base our speculations into her

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possible world—though Deleuze and Guattari suggest this should be enough to generate a complex impression. Parochial logic might suggest that, in her very capacity as Cheryl’s mother, she is a less likely lesbian than are other intercessors in The Watermelon Woman, but as we know, this reasoning is very far from definitive. Again, we note how many avenues The Watermelon Woman opens toward catachrestically imagining a lesbian face, a lesbian collective, or a lesbian past, in increasingly flexible but hardly abstract definitions of that term. If we synthesize Irene’s and Shirley’s stories, down to the shiftiest pronouns and semilegible flickers of expression, either Irene often hit the town among a “regular gang” of butches, lesbians, and woman-lovers (which is surprising and intriguing) or else the “everybody” who frequented these social spots is a very flexible, unjealous everybody (which is also surprising, and also intriguing).

A Single Face, Implying Multitudes Within the jointly “archaeological” and “alchemical” project of researching her film, Cheryl becomes the nexus through which lesbian, stone butch, special friend, and adjacent but hardly equivalent signs pass, as do various sheets of corresponding past, each bearing unclear relations to the others and uncertain degrees of categorical integrity. Meanwhile, Cheryl’s own life keeps contracting around narrow definitions of the same ideas, eroding support for her filmmaking project, among other things. Struggling with the tensions of work, sex, and friendship, hard-pressed to sort the dynamics emerging in all of them, Cheryl repeatedly does what David Holzman, Woody Allen, and Sadie Benning did before her, and what a world of YouTubers have done afterward: she poses her face to the camera and addresses her audience.42 One way to approach the recurrence of Cheryl’s face throughout the movie is to conduct “an affective reading of the whole film” (C1 87), by which all of The Watermelon Woman’s accumulating images, up through any point in the film where her face reappears, register as a set of perceived objects that her face conjoins into new relations. In other words, with each new close-up, she must facialize an increasingly fractious set of impressions into some loosely reflective unity, even as intensive traits of every image defy such an embrace. Meanwhile, the action that should culminate from such affective toil—the production of a film about Fae’s life—seems, not unusually in post–World War II cinema, like a dream deferred. Quite plausibly, the evolving facialization of Cheryl is itself the key “action” that The Watermelon Woman achieves, somehow eluding any unilateral signification amidst a film that so frequently showcases it. Cheryl’s affective absorption of diversely lesbian impressions is crucial to how the film creates her face,

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as both a loose unity and a battleground of unresolved tensions. To appreciate this achievement, consider all the things Cheryl does not become in The Watermelon Woman: a simplistically psychologized character, a bearer of limpidly readable emotions, an unambiguous stand-in for her “actual” self, an alter ego clearly divorced from that self, or a confident interpreter of her bedeviled research project and personal relationships. Cheryl resists the most limiting valences of “visibility” or “representation,” enduring as a Deleuzian minor intercessor, an elliptical stand-in for an even more elliptical group, despite blunt acquaintances or isolated moments that assert what any black lesbian should look like. Deleuze insists that the free-indirect griots and fabulists of minor cinema cannot subscribe to any vision of a “united or unified” people without risking the prescriptive, easily co-optable politics he perceives in Marxism and in “Rocha’s Guevarism, Chahine’s Nasserism, [or] black American cinema’s black-powerism” (C2 220). The intercessor cannot pretend to typify the whole group nor stand self-recusingly outside it, and “must not, then, make himself [sic] into the ethnologist of his people” (C2 222), whose asymmetries and frictions protect against their fascist or market-driven homogenization. What is needed is a refractive spokesperson, facialized but self-effacing, extracted from a hoi polloi so variegated it remains barely visible as a collective. The griot’s affective labor therefore lies not in “addressing a people, which is presupposed already there, but of contributing to the invention of a people” (C2 217). Via stylistic as well as rhetorical strategies, this is how Cheryl operates and appears. In these ways, Cheryl’s close-ups continually approximate Deleuze and Guattari’s face of the Other Person, a specific individual but also a paradigm for thought in general, which entails curiosity about other communities, conjecture about political arrangements, and embrace of multiplicities: There is no concept with only one component. . . . Every concept has an irregular contour defined by the sum of its components. . . . The concept is a whole because it totalizes its components, but it is a fragmentary whole. Only on this condition can it escape the mental chaos constantly threatening it, stalking it, trying to reabsorb it. (WIP 15–16) In terms applicable to Cheryl’s experience and to lingering concerns about visibility as an idealizing and exclusionary ideology, this facialized notion of thought fosters conditions wherein to expound, “I’m gonna be the one who says I am a black lesbian filmmaker” is to name a position that is inherently multiple, not self-consolidating. Furthermore, the politics of that performative remain vexed and open-ended, not automatically or monolithically “radical,” in that sense Keeling highlights as a frequent, clichéd imposition on black lesbian discourse. As we conclude our inquiries into The Watermelon Woman, we realize just how eclectic are the possible worlds, audiences, faces, and politics of the black lesbian and how queerly undetermined by standard axes of identity.

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If the minor intercessor must conjoin disparate elements from a diverse field, avoid eliding their singular features, and produce something out of this dynamic aggregation, then her labors differ in no important respect from those of either desiring-production, as outlined in Anti-Oedipus and in the introduction of this book, or the affection-image, which produces new relations as well as incipient actions. The intercessor harbors the same goals. Granted, in the postwar world of Cinema 2, and given the heterogeneity of the crowd for whom she advocates, it is less clear what that action could be—unless the action is itself, as in The Watermelon Woman, and in all minor initiatives, the invention of a people and of their possible world.43

Deflective Unities and Oracular Chores Cinema 1 maintains that “the facial close-up is both the face and its effacement” and that “the close-up has merely pushed the face to those regions where the principle of individuation ceases to hold sway” (100). In its very enlargement and abstract isolation, it “denudes” the face of its three customary duties: to individuate a person, to translate that person’s thoughts and affects, and thus to knit that person into social life. For reasons I just reviewed, Cheryl’s status as intercessor profits from all three of these denudings, no matter how many political projects would seem to suffer for them, especially those linked to visibility. Indeed, not only but especially in relation to Cheryl, The Watermelon Woman activates multiple strategies to impede “the principle of individuation,” even as her face remains so paradoxically available to her audience. Rather than domesticate that face into a Griffith-style “reflective unity,” what she achieves is a kind of deflective unity, privileging herself as speaking subject and visual leitmotif without becoming properly perceptible or falsely iconographic.44 The simplest deflective effects arise when Cheryl hides in the background of group shots, as in the workroom of Bob’s Video Store, or when she sports sunglasses during key dialogue scenes, as when she describes to Tamara over the phone her thwarted appointment with June. In this latter respect, even she gets trumped by her mother, whose dark, heavy glasses throughout her interview only make her face and the seeping ambiguities in her story harder to parse. In such scenes, Cheryl and her interlocutors undo Deleuze’s “white wall/black hole” system of the face in A Thousand Plateaus, not by being black in a racialized sense he does not primarily intend (yet inevitably evokes), but by obscuring intensive features and dialing down their typical levels of contrast with the contextualizing field, until the latter and the former can barely be distinguished. Comparable tactics involve Cheryl turning her head from the camera or closing her eyes while speaking before it, as in one episode when she recites dialogue from Plantation Memories with a weirdly ecstatic smile, then swipes

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the do-rag from her head and blows her nose into it. These habits attenuate our ability to “facialize” what Cheryl thinks or feels, even in short inserts that seemingly harbor that very goal.45 In similarly random cutaways, but also in dramatic contexts like the visit to the C.L.I.T. Archive, Cheryl indulges a habit of holding snapshots of famous black actresses over her own face, “affecting” them as part of a facialized history she coaxes us to perceive in relation to her own face. These shots obstruct our view of her, indicating unspecified principles of relation: are we meant to perceive a “reflective unity” of African American femininity that links Cheryl to Louise Beavers, Lena Horne, Ethel Waters, Juanita Moore, Hattie McDaniel, and others, or even to Fae? Or do these shuffled “sheets of past” aim to highlight these women’s intensive differences, either in aspect, historical context, or lesbian implication, which attaches more to some of these figures than to others? The most consistent choice by which The Watermelon Woman mitigates Cheryl/Dunye’s visibility involves its rendering of her direct-to-camera closeups on that cruddy video stock she uses for her interviews and for filming as best she can the images of Fae in Plantation Memories and other films. The harsh lighting and rough texture of these shots already make Cheryl’s face hard to “read,” limiting nuances in her expressions as she articulates complex, creative, interpretive, and interpersonal dilemmas. Then again, a clearer image, precisely by invoking her face in finer detail, might individualize her reactions—rendering them personal and transparent, and thus mitigating her status as a translucent conduit by which larger, communal questions and problems get communicated. I doubt, of course, that The Watermelon Woman’s budget would have made it possible to shoot the whole movie on crisper 16mm, used in the finished film only for the Cheryl/Diana and Cheryl/Tamara scenes (and not even all of those). In any case, Cheryl’s shadowed and granulated image is barely more secure on its material base, even at the moment she films it, than Fae’s image is on those cheap video transfers of sixty-year-old, shoestring-budgeted movies whose very ephemerality is a plot point in The Watermelon Woman. Dunye hereby attains minor effects by establishing a graphic match between Cheryl’s likeness and those of the other characters with the least certain sexualities, either because they do not or will not state them or because they contest present-day labels. These alignments situate Fae, too, among the same, widest, queerest, most porous conjunctions in the film. Here is a people not yet recognizable as a collective, with no one center of indetermination—a multifarious “we,” oriented around an idea of the black lesbian, if not always oriented toward it or identifying with it. These faces simultaneously construct and deterritorialize a black lesbian series, against those figures in the film or the audience who might constrain this lexicon around a narrower set of signifiers. In these scenes, and on behalf of these characters, Cheryl serves as a kind of Invisible Face. Hortense Spillers states about Ralph Ellison’s nameless protagonist that “paradoxically, history is both given to him and constructed by him,”

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and so, as a minor intercessor, though Spillers does not employ that vocabulary, he “must assume all, must take upon himself the haunted, questioning, troubled, even self-subversive stance of one who insists on telling others.”46 Cheryl commits to such an “oracular chore” as a proudly proclaimed black lesbian filmmaker captured in tight close-up inside a barely glimpsed apartment, an oddly hermitic space within a city Dunye otherwise charts in vivid, parti-colored detail. In her apartment, Cheryl sits illuminated not by Ellison’s 1,369 bulbs’ worth of pilfered municipal power but by the cathode glow of Plantation Memories, with Fae endlessly looping her bathetic reassurances to a pale, antebellum mistress. From this site, Cheryl/Dunye “asserts . . . [her] own countermyth,” in “the form of a language that nobody recognizes at first,” a phrase redolent of Kafka.47 The crux of her project within this visual medium, amounts not to Ellison’s anonymous oratory but to a serial, evolving facialization, entailing what Cinema 1 calls a simultaneous effacement, indicating virtual communities around her rather than favoring herself, and thus opening up to multiplicity.

Faces in the Crowd If Cheryl is eager to anoint herself as a cinematic intercessor on behalf of black lesbians, even though virtually all her peers have disavowed her and her project by the end of The Watermelon Woman (as have a few other people), then her oath of office must be oriented toward some other collective. But who is that, and how far can black lesbian be stretched to denominate a “multifarious ‘we,’” one that encompasses various pasts without staying stuck there, much less remaining mired in a present full of obstacles and unclear communities? This question returns us to Juhasz’s question at the outset of this chapter about whether The Watermelon Woman remains the “first African American lesbian feature film” even if an outwardly rangier group of subjects contributed their creative stewardship or specialized labor. Even onscreen, The Watermelon Woman, not unlike Shortbus in the previous chapter, bears telltale signs of that heterogeneous counterpublic who helped midwife the film: semi-actual, semivirtual, semi-playing “themselves.” These artists and scholars include writers Cheryl Clarke (cast as June, seen only in photos), Ira Jeffries (as Shirley), David Rakoff (as a snide librarian), and Sarah Schulman (as the hysterical C.L.I.T. librarian); actor Brian Freeman of the famous troupe the Pomo Afro Homos (playing Lee Edwards, an effeminate collector of old-Hollywood memorabilia); singer Toshi Reagon, of the legendary African American a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock (as a street busker Cheryl encounters while trudging home from June’s doorstep); well-known scholars Paglia (as “herself ”) and Juhasz (as Martha Page); and, from Go Fish, not just the game and glamorous Turner (as Diana) but, more briefly, her former co-star V. S. Brodie

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(as a karaoke performer).48 The identities of these figures, rarely flagged in the text, require our attentive recognition. Their casting, however, serves not primarily to elevate “insider” viewers of Dunye’s film over others. Rather, without constituting a recognizably lesbian collective, this group corroborates the film’s notion that a black lesbian cooperative might merit that name without disbarring members who lack the usual bonafides. Inhabiting a range of African American, feminist, queer, academic, arts-based, and Philly-specific positions (with many members inviting more than one of those tags), this coalition suggests a queer molecule oriented or constructed around a black lesbian nucleus. Their loose, fruitful conjunctions prove, too, that the idea of a blended sociality that prioritizes but does not reify the black lesbian did not die out with the midcentury closing of Shirley’s excitingly “mixed” speakeasies. Similar to these semifamous players in their outward diversity—but quite opposed in their actual anonymity and their total lack of diegetic incorporation, even by the standards of this loosely joined film—is the final, most mercurial collective that The Watermelon Woman coaxes into being. Across the film, in a series of offhanded, street-side interviews, “everyday” Philadelphians take errant stabs at Cheryl/Dunye’s offscreen queries about Fae’s identity. They mull the options, glance nervously at each other before Dunye’s camera, throw shade at major-culture celebrities, and take potshots at elite cultural institutions: “If she’s in anything after 1960, don’t ask us,” says an androgynous Swarthmore student, “we haven’t covered women and the Blaxploitation movement yet.” Like Cheryl herself, these figures stride a line between actual person and virtual character, although we have even less idea of where they fall along that perimeter. They wander the any-spaces-whatever of downtown Philly—worn and torn, not unlike De Sica’s Rome or Sembene’s Dakar— although these wandering subjects occasionally find a berth in a professorial carrel or an upscale boutique. Of all the past, present, or incipient collectives in The Watermelon Woman, this urban “we” most strongly invites Cheryl/Dunye’s inclusion. Others keep expelling her for various infractions: the lesbian social scene, the workplace conclave, the C.L.I.T. Archive, the friendship circle, even a natal bond in which the mother views her daughter as one of “the weird people,” regardless of whether Irene is also one of the weird people. Cheryl goes out of her way through determinedly casual dress, speech, and other means to exhibit credentials as workaday folk—a project she began in She Don’t Fade (1991), where her alter ego Shae works as a Philadelphia sidewalk vendor. In The Watermelon Woman, whether buying fresh produce from the back of a truck (a shot held long enough to accommodate, for no diegetic reason, the next woman’s order), or standing in line for assistance at the public library (in shots of sufficient depth to track the patrons waiting to succeed her), Cheryl places herself into series with this calico populace, blending into a polychromatic body that is

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certainly not a white wall. All of them, meanwhile, are filmed with the same rough lighting and texture as the other minors in the film. Again we have trouble deducing which, if any, are “in” on Dunye’s ruse. We therefore study their faces (or try to) as we do those of Cheryl and Shirley and Fae and Irene. We read for signs of complicity in Dunye’s agenda, but perhaps we are also motivated—why not admit it?—by impulsions and solicitations of desire. If the assembled troupe of subcultural celebrities suggests that a film can orient itself around black lesbianism without uniformly reproducing it, these any-citizens-whatever imply that The Watermelon Woman can also orient itself toward an even vaguer community without forsaking specific investments in black lesbian pasts, presents, and futures. Facializing the images as well as we can, despite a total lack of context for these encounters, we note that several subjects exhibit intensive features that we also observe among Cheryl’s avowedly lesbian circle. I spot at least one light-complected African American butch with short curls, and a pair of brown-skinned women, one sporting long dreadlocks, both wearing clothes that catachrestically invoke “lesbian style,” the way Cheryl’s cotton tees, work shirts, baggy pants, and denim vests often do. Nonetheless, in no other way does the camera or the editing set these women apart from the rest of the urban flock. Certainly they are not repositories of any specialized black lesbian knowledge. When asked, as so many of these individuals are, “Do you know who the Watermelon Woman is?” the duo with the outwardly likeliest claim on black lesbian positioning give the simplest answer: “No.” For Cheryl to target her camera, her film, or the “lot more work” she will do in the future toward this ambiguous populace, will not require her to leave black lesbians in any way behind. After all, and from the looks of things, black lesbians already live in that world, as one would expect them to, no matter how many films have expunged them from view or treated them as anomalies. Under Cheryl’s eye, they exercise as much right as anyone to occupy and even embody the proverbial streets of Philadelphia. My goal, then, is not to deeroticize or deracinate what or whom a black lesbian film might entail, but to state that black lesbian collectives, in cinema as elsewhere, are not necessarily populated solely by black lesbians. Furthermore, Cheryl’s self-appointed task of making movies as a black lesbian does not equate to making movies exclusively for or about or even from amongst black lesbians (see figure 3.2). Lesbian film theory’s tropes of the “apparitional,” the “always-hanging-around,” and the potentially misrecognized link Dunye to the loosest, most multifarious “we” in her movie, not as a diversion from reading The Watermelon Woman as a lesbian text but, if anything, as a provocative renovation of what “lesbian” might involve as a cinematic and a collective-building praxis. One might have expected that to dilate the black lesbian from its narrowest to its broadest sphere of application would require a wide-angle lens and a series of long shots, but The Watermelon Woman proves how much multiplicity and suggestive power can be marshaled from a close-up, or a subtly

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Figure 3.2 The Watermelon Woman: Cheryl shuffling treasured sheets of past within the last shot of her face. The Watermelon Woman, 1996, dir. Cheryl Dunye.

choreographed series of close-ups, even when they are often of the same person. We look at a face and conceptualize a possible world, imagining who or what else we might find there. Dunye, in failing to find the one woman she ostensibly went looking for, finds an entire orientation toward the world that makes Fae central, even if Fae herself will never be recovered. Meanwhile, Cheryl looks through her own frame and back at us—as if ours are the faces “looming” before hers, and ours the possible worlds into which she speculates. Possibly she hopes for audiences whose sense of collective orientation is as ecumenical and queerly open-ended as The Watermelon Woman’s is.

Facing Forward Cinematic images of black lesbians have recently proliferated, at least compared with where they had plateaued, slaking the pressure on The Watermelon Woman or any other text to furnish a representative face for an entire body of film or an eclectic group of people. The award-winning Sundance premiere and critically hailed commercial release of Dee Rees’s feature Pariah (2011) was major news by itself, without its glorious codicil: distributor Focus Features, the queer-friendly mother ship of Milk, Brokeback Mountain, and The Kids Are

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All Right, paid upfront for Rees’s second, then-unwritten screenplay. Tina Mabry’s dramatic feature Mississippi Damned (2009), loosely based on her family’s story and her coming to grips with lesbian desires in her teenage years, ought to have parlayed its top prizes at the Chicago International Film Festival, LA Outfest, the New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and the American Black Film Festival into at least an arthouse distribution deal. As too often happens, such remarkable success on the festival circuit could not override lingering imbalances in the popular market. Still, Mabry and her collaborators got the film onto DVD through their own production company, and prospects for additional features will hopefully unfold for her, too.49 Lee Daniels’s Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire (2009) elicited a huge range of responses to its story, style, and characterizations, from ecstatic embrace to incensed condemnation. Still, to watch a black-cast, black-directed movie with a black lesbian heroine, the teacher Blu Rain, was exciting even before Precious broke box-office records relative to its screen count, brought Sapphire back to the best-seller lists, and scooped the first-ever Academy Award for a black screenwriter. One of the most encouraging signs in this stream of production is the emergence of cinematographer Bradford Young, who shot both Pariah and Mississippi Damned and takes more care with African American skin tones than any director of photography since Arthur Jafa, who lensed Julie Dash’s landmark feature Daughters of the Dust (1991) under mostly natural light. Anyone who noticed the top-lighted and over-bright flattening of Viola Davis’s sublimely nuanced performance in The Help (2011) knows that putting even the most virtuosic black face in front of a camera wins only part of the battle; facializing black women necessitates a crew that will not, by reflex, key every light source and lens to Caucasian complexions and performers. In a chapter where I have argued for aesthetic poverty as a fertile tool within lesbian minor cinema, we should not undersell the potential thrill of Hollywood studios making wellfinanced movies for a range of audiences, including black lesbian films that millions of spectators are yearning to see —including many multifarious “we”s. It is well past time for Tinseltown to “discover” black faces and to dig its way further out of its own white hole. Meanwhile, Dunye continues her cross- and counter-generic forays; The Watermelon Woman, for all its celebrity, stands in less and less well for the wonderfully open whole of her varied career. With her tense prison drama Stranger Inside (2001), the jocular parenthood farce My Baby’s Daddy (2004), the experimental lesbian thriller The Owls (2010), and the sexually explicit, Berlin-set S&M comedy Mommy Is Coming (2012), Dunye has generated more features than any other African American female director in history. The Owls, in particular, explores the face as a unique cinematic vehicle, producing and dismantling itself in different ways than The Watermelon Woman does, attracting and repulsing community, and raising tough political questions.

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Developed by a producing collective of “Older, Wiser Lesbians,” though Dunye still takes sole directorial credit, The Owls stars Watermelon Woman cast mates Dunye, Turner, and Brodie plus Deak Evgenikos and Lisa Gornick as five women sharing a house who attempt to cover up an accidental murder. Their misdeed may or may not be known by Skye (Skyler Cooper), a tall, charismatic, muscular drifter who needs refuge for a few days. The women’s suspicions of Skye as a possible blackmailer or righteous avenger are rendered indistinguishable from their affective disarray over Skye’s desirability and ambiguous gendering. The jealousies, arousals, and breakdowns of trust within this otherwise all-lesbian community make the riddles around Skye’s sex, singleness, and erotic orientations all the more loaded. The Owls again counted Juhasz as a co-producer and was co-written by Dunye and Sarah Schulman, who plays the C.L.I.T. librarian in The Watermelon Woman. The actors not only had input into the script, but The Owls structures itself such that, at regular intervals, every performer steps out of character and comments directly to the camera about her character, her concerns about the story, and even her interests or misgivings about the gendered and sexual politics of what they are collectively making. Juhasz, Schulman, and queer theorist Judith Jack Halberstam offer their own ambivalent confessionals, further demystifying old saws about lesbian community at every turn. Certainly the movie conjures excitement around so many lesbian film artists devising a new way to work and push envelopes together. Still, this work often explores breakdowns of collective feeling with a rare and, for that reason, an invigorating sourness. In its formal enigmas and often acidic tone, The Owls relates to The Watermelon Woman the way Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education (2004), another recent experiment in queer facialization and transgendered gazing, relates to that filmmaker’s brighter, looser entertainments, such as Law of Desire (1987) or even All About My Mother (1999).50 The other ramification of The Owls’s innovative structure is that its knotty bramble of good and mostly bad affects emerges about half the time from a winching structure of murder-mystery suspense. The other half of the time these thoughts and feelings convey themselves through diegetically tenuous close-ups and unresolved processes of Deleuzian facialization. Again, close-ups in The Owls forsake “individuality”: not only can we not draw easy lines between performers and characters, but also the faces compose themselves (as independent spectacles and in Dunye’s montage) in relations of considerable tension. They are unadorned but semilegible, bound together but pulling apart through a series of uneasy, intensive significations. The Owls, in one sense, limits the participation of a “multifarious ‘we’” even more than Dunye’s first feature, given its generic framing as a single-location thriller and its genesis among a stabilizing repertory of Dunye’s closest associates. But the “we” remains multifarious in other ways, especially in close-up,

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affecting the movie’s disturbing images in nervy, nasty-edged ways. The “possible world” surrounding these close-ups is clearly our own. Dunye’s intercessors, once again staring straight at us (when they are not busy provoking each other) no longer want to know the identity of a character they have made up. Querying each other, their spectators, and even themselves about violence, community, exclusion, gender splits, sexual manipulation, generational transphobia, and evolving media codes for representing all of the above, The Owls wants to know what we really think. Programmed at dozens of LGBT film festivals in the United States and Europe before arriving on DVD via queerfriendly distributor First Run Features, the film asks its anticipated queer audience: What are we, as a “community,” willing to face? And for what, or for whom, will we stand?

{4}

Brother to Brother and Adventures in Queer Crystallography Queer Crystallography Following my readings of queer perception-images in Cronenberg and Mitchell and queer affection-images in Dunye, my final chapters, which work best as an integrated trio, apply comparably queer pressures to Cinema 2’s crystalimage, a formal and conceptual paradigm through which several recent films challenge assumptions about desire. In each of four subvarieties Deleuze specifies for this figure, the crystal-image energizes the links between an actual shot as we perceive it, the temporal multiplicities subsisting within it, and the virtual potentials it bears for signifying otherwise. Furthermore, extending earlier arguments about the proliferating erotics in Naked Lunch and the problematic discourses of “actual” sex in Shortbus, queer crystal-images construe representations of sex, gender, or sexuality as selective extractions from an endless web of desiring possibilities. They also ask us to grasp the unstable relations between and among shots as themselves active productions of desire, unwed to normative systems. As privileged avatars of time-image cinema, crystal-images frequently abjure rational links even to adjacent shots and scenes, embodying multiple temporal dispositions at once. They convey how time perpetually contracts the vastness of the past toward a tipping point in the present image, but also how pasts and presents expand toward open futures of ever-greater possibility. The past inexorably absorbs every present moment or image, even as “the” socalled present comprises a series of possible presents, only one of which a spectator perceives within any given instant. Most counter-intuitively of all, Deleuze asserts that those virtual pasts, presents, and futures we do not recognize in a given moment nonetheless exist elsewhere in time, just as objects we do not presently perceive continue to exist elsewhere in space (C2 79–80). These barely fathomable aspects of time compound and reflect each other— similar to the fractal growths and endlessly mirroring faces of a crystal. Deleuze borrows from Borges an illustrative metaphor in which a stranger appears on one’s doorstep (C2 131). The possibility that this stranger may turn

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out to be an unrecognized acquaintance subsists as one virtual potential within this encounter. If we discover that we know this person, not only the present we now occupy but also the chain of past events we belatedly reassess assume new statuses and relations. These multiple presents also incubate multiple future trajectories (toward an embrace, a disclosure, an argument, an admission of error .  .  .), each prompted by different chains of past history, remembered or otherwise. Kaleidoscopic pasts, contingent presents, and possible futures thus coexist; they prove concurrent even where they are irreconcilable, passing back and forth between actual and virtual aspects. This metaphysics of cinematic time captures the world less as it is, in the tradition of Bazinian realism, than as it glimmers along the edges of multiple, changing possibilities. As such, a crystalline cinema entails inevitable redactions and paradoxes, serially rearranged impressions, and inassimilable realities that still exist together in time. These same constructions enable films to render desire, too, as a crystalline flux—a shifting plurality of forces rather than a stable essence, coevally maintaining multiple truths or falsehoods as well as perpetual capacities for change. Moreover, such images reproduce three circuits of relation that Deleuze locates within the crystalline model: (1) The exchanges I have just described among actual and virtual states, but keyed to flows of desire rather than time; (2) those between limpid and opaque degrees of perceptibility, gauging how easily or not we can read each image; and (3) those among socalled seeds of the image and the complex environments that nourish and surround them. The final seed-environment locution reprises in different language Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic mode of determining what desiring-machines, or seeds in this case, catalyze a given assemblage or representation. Insofar as crystal-images of time and desire are not simply analogous but coextensive, these images can posit pasts, presents, and futures of queer desire or queer experience that permeate one another in complex ways. Given the capacities that hereby arise for decentered, politicized, and collectively invested storytelling, the crystal-image has abounded in queer cinema as in other minor traditions, proving highly portable across genres, styles, and scales of production. As I indicated, Cinema 2 distinguishes four subvarieties of the temporal crystal: one that involutes itself into a closed, repetitive present; one that approximates this encapsulated present but permits isolated pathways outward; one that accommodates multiple pasts and presents but has trouble presaging a future; and one that, however grand in bygone eras, now decomposes into a series of dispersed fragments and foreclosed possibilities. By surveying over the first half of this chapter queer films from the last two decades that deterritorialize desire according to these conceptual templates, I avow once again that queer cinema remains a stylistically heterogeneous and intellectually rich field. Oddly, Deleuze matches these taxonomies of the crystal-image

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exclusively to elite continental auteurs, even as the book soon afterward emphasizes politically dissident and transnationally emergent cinemas. Hence, detailing crystalline poetics among “minor” artists itself marks a fruitful intervention into Deleuze’s thought, as does my novel proposition that desire can furnish both the mineral seeds and the tectonic environments that produce a crystal-image. Furthermore, each of the four submodes resonates with major tropes of queer theory, augmenting the rich potential relations among Deleuzian film concepts and new epistemologies of sexuality that have emerged since the late 1980s. This chapter and the two following argue for more than fortuitous homologies among Cinema 2’s time-images and queer cinema’s constructions of desire—in part because the most interesting desiring-images do not just reproduce but recombine Deleuze’s four crystalline types in suggestive ways. These innovations proliferate amidst a period when even queer cinema’s most predisposed audiences often lament its slide into conservative boilerplates, especially in comparison with the inventive aesthetics and gutsy contentions of the New Queer flagships. Meanwhile, Paola Marrati and other readers of Cinema 2 worry that the book’s axiomatic turn away from continuities and action yields a cinema in which linkages are always severed, temporalities strictly virtual, and practical changes in the world hard to conceive.1 Such a cinema often stymies spectators’ desires for collective initiatives or efficacious politics, however revised from pre–World War II paradigms of cinema—and this despite Cinema 2’s ardent championing of protest cinemas, fomented by minor groups throughout the First World and by postcolonial populations. In response to these concerns, following a global survey of crystalline desiring-images from the last twenty years, I devote the remainder of this chapter and of the book to close readings of three recent movies that employ crystalline dialectics not only to convey desire as limitless and malleable but also to feed this model of desire into coeval meditations on gender, race, history, and politics within specific cultural frames. I have deliberately chosen three test cases that not only attempt such projects through divergent styles but which correspond, as well, to three recurrent bête noires within turn-ofthe-century eulogies for New Queer image-making and politics. Rodney Evans’s Brother to Brother (2004) belongs to a vein of low-budget, stylistically modest dramas that direct their inquiries toward issues of personal identity, barely pausing in cinemas before circulating on home formats. Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine (1998) represents an ambitious critical misfire by a New Queer darling, some of whose early advocates voiced skepticism in the wake of its premiere. Claire Denis’s Beau travail (1999) is a critically lionized French film that ostensibly exposes the enfeebled style and stakes among English-language queer cinema.2 In all three texts, despite their disparate forms, origins, and reception histories, I detect fertile queerings of the crystal-image, deploying that structure to illuminate relations between desire and perception, desire

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and collective fate, desire and history, and desire and capital, and to explore overlapping legacies of the movement-image and time-image. Each film constructs itself around a double helix, such that storylines and visual motifs ceaselessly swap actual and virtual connotations. Brother to Brother is the most tempting film to dismiss on stylistic grounds, since both plot-strands are filmed so humbly as to disguise the film’s virtual intricacies from many viewers. Thus, as I did earlier in this book by partitioning the related but importantly disparate treatments of desire in Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch, I pause to underscore the crystalline ramifications of a relatively naturalistic film before confronting more conspicuously derationalized texts in subsequent chapters. A prize winner at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, Brother to Brother became, at a shockingly late date, the first Americanmade narrative feature to be squarely focused on the literary and artistic luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance. Despite the film’s valuable foray into such outrageously underexplored terrain—so universally relevant, yet also so specifically black—its odd production sources, minuscule budget, and occasionally stiff technique blunted its popular and critical reputation. Indeed, these factors have evidently consigned the film into contaminating kinship with those niche-appeal LGBT movies, presold to gay-targeted cable TV and/ or shunted directly to DVD, that queer media critics habitually ignore or outwardly lambast.3 Despite a concurrent reflowering of interest in the work of its famous co-protagonist Richard Bruce Nugent, Brother to Brother has attracted almost no academic commentary, as though cast aside as a minor among minors within U.S. queer filmmaking.4 I argue that despite Deleuze’s Eurocentric and highbrow biases in outlining the crystal-image, Evans’s movie demonstrates how even an inauspiciously budgeted, stylistically subdued film can fulfill that complex model while simultaneously operating as minor cinema. Brother to Brother thus signals nascent becomings, fostering new alliances on the screen and in the audience, and urging spectators toward attentive recognitions rather than clichéd perceptions.5 The crystalline seam bonding its twentieth- and early twenty-first-century narratives constitutes both a mirror and a gap at the heart of the film. Indeed, despite the movie’s seemingly straightforward narrative and mise-en-scène, its dueling plotlines braid into each other in ways that violate simple realism. The tensions between these stories surge to an important peak within one formally incongruous midfilm sequence, a staged war of words between actors impersonating James Baldwin and Eldridge Cleaver. Not just rhetorically but also in its formal construction, this scene addresses several crucibles of gendered, sexual, and racial conflict that haunt the film’s African American men, making collective formations among them so rare and valuable that the very prospect becomes, in Marlon Riggs’s famous phrase, a “revolutionary act,” especially where queer desire and cultural memory are concerned.6

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Crystals, Then and Now In order to situate the ensuing close readings within a spectrum of comparable cases, and also to rearticulate what “actual” and “virtual” mean in this context, I will first reframe in terms of recent queer cinema those four subspecies of the crystal-image that Cinema 2 aligns with different European auteurs. That project in turn exposes the odd conceptual stress marks within the fourth model, which approaches but finally avoids denoting desire as a potential engine of crystalline effects. Already, Cinema 2’s example-filled dossier of the crystal-image is a bit of an anomaly given that the book is stingier than Cinema 1 about concretely illustrating its ideas—an asymmetry reflecting key disparities in the books’ overall arguments. Cinema 1 emphasizes how forms of movement sustain themselves through perceptible linkages in earlier filmmaking; the second book confronts the severing of such bonds and the dilemma of discerning whatever is potentially “in” an image without being directly visible. This philosophical divergence bears political traces, since the breakdown of the movement-image partly derives from Deleuze’s qualms about its smooth, self-naturalizing spectacles, prone to cliché-mongering at best and to fascist ideals of eugenic conformity at worst. Cinema 2’s reluctance to supply as many examples for its densest concepts thus derives from Deleuze’s anxieties about representation as a mechanism for quelling difference—a key dimension of his thought, albeit one that some readers believe he carried too far.7 Certainly it is striking that neither Cinema 1 nor Cinema 2 includes a single photo-still, whether out of philosophical necessity (since a static frame cannot convey movement or time) or out of political scruple (to avoid arbitrarily valorizing chosen examples, or valuing isolated images over their active relations). Despite these caveats, Cinema 1 drenches itself with descriptions of particular action-images and affection-images, of organic-narrative and dialecticalmaterialist editing strategies, and so-called SASc and ASAc films.8 This volume could never admit any corollary to this astounding claim from Cinema 2: “In the cinema, there are perhaps three films which show how we inhabit time, how we move in it, in this form which carries us away, picks us up and enlarges us: Dovzhenko’s Zvenigora, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and Resnais’ Je t’aime, je t’aime” (C2 82). Falling within the same paragraph as a veritable distillation of the book’s major argument—“The only subjectivity is time, and it is we who are internal to time, not the other way around” (C2 82)—this protestation is all the more stunning, as if film history yields only three unqualified cases of the very innovation Cinema 2 heralds as a quantum leap for the art form as a whole.9 This oddly astringent claim, hardly atypical for a theorist so wedded to counter-intuition and provocative phrasing, arises within the crystal-image chapter of Cinema 2—that is, the chapter that in every way worries the border between what is actual and what is virtual, what is perceptible and what is

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not. Even the chapter’s placement within the book affirms this implication, following others that address nascent forms of the time-image still invested in rational narratives, movements, and temporalities. These include such flashback-based films as Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950) or Suddenly Last Summer (1959), which repeatedly launch backward into confusing but ultimately recuperable pasts, reaffirming a firm basis in the narrating present. Further examples include MGM’s Freed Unit musicals (An American in Paris, The Band Wagon), dipping in and out of abstract, nondiegetic performances; and the comic universes of Jerry Lewis and Jacques Tati. By contrast, later chapters in Cinema 2 approach time in its decentered, irrational fluxes, stressing the destabilizing montage in Alain Resnais’s or Alain Robbe-Grillet’s films but often demoting specific analysis of particular films to explanations of general principles. Unlike these cases, the arcs and edits of a crystalline film still allow “a means of creation for certain special images” (C2 76) that signify in specific ways, with heavy ramifications on the film’s story and its theoretical argument. That these films typically aggregate around four distinct modes, simultaneously formal and thematic, further confirms the possibility of differentiating among them, and the value of illustrating those differences. Nonetheless, the roles of actual and virtual are not fixed within any crystal-image, serving instead as endlessly reversible reflections of each other: In Bergsonian terms, the real object is reflected in a mirror-image as in the virtual object which, from its side and simultaneously, envelops or reflects the real: there is a “coalescence” between the two. There is a formation of an image with two sides, actual and virtual. It is as if an image in a mirror, a photo, or postcard came to life, assumed independence, and passed into the actual, even if this meant that the actual image returned into the mirror and resumed its place in the postcard or photo, following a double-movement of liberation and capture. (C2 68) The impression that an actual person or object makes in a mirror registers, then, as a virtual reflection. However, this reflection also bears some claim as an actual guise—that which prevails in a present moment, “coming to life” from among the virtual plethora of aspects this person or object might assume at prior or future moments, or from some different vantage within the same moment. Finally, neither the person at the mirror nor the reflection is more actual or more virtual than the other. Rather, “each side take[s] the other’s role in a relation which we must describe as reciprocal presupposition, or reversibility” (C2 69). Within Cinema 2’s notion of time, the present itself operates like this mirror, reducing the virtual bounty of multidimensional pasts into an actual, temporary reflection. Simultaneously, though, as this tremendous abundance of actual pasts converge on the present moment, they empower it with virtual

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potentials to generate any number of possible futures. Deleuze thus describes virtuality as a fertile “pastness” within the present, multiplying and inducing change in several directions at once (C2 79). How do these aspects of time render themselves perceptible in cinematic images? To unpack Deleuze’s example, the “postcard-come-to-life” in the above excerpt surely designates that famous moment in Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession (1954) when Rock Hudson’s Robbie receives a postcard from Jane Wyman’s Helen, for whom he amorously but guiltily pines.10 After he reads her note and turns it over, the tranquil Swiss scene immortalized on her card spontaneously springs to life, retroactively revealing itself as a freezeframe from Helen’s travels in Lucerne, into which the film now enters. This “special image” is poignant because Robbie’s actual memento offers slim compensation for the absence of Helen, whom the card virtually figures, or for the romantic European world in which he imagines her to move. Simultaneously, though, the postcard-cum-freeze-frame connotes endless, virtual associations of continental beauty and culture—a charming bouquet of possibilities, distinct from what we know to be Helen’s actual, frustrated quest for a miracleworking doctor. One cannot separate the double faces of this image. Moreover, nothing in the scene’s construction locates it firmly within the stalled, virtual time of Robbie’s imagination or the actual, narrativized time of Helen’s trip. Our impressions of her riding a coach or entering a consultation room may transpire at the moment Robbie contemplates the card, or may already have transpired, or may not actually happen at all, though they certainly appear plausible. The postcard image suggests several possible presents and augurs various potential futures: one in which Robbie remains in America as he has been instructed, one in which he follows Helen to Europe, one in which he seeks her but may not find her, and so on. The only constant is the heterosexual pull Wyman’s Helen exerts on Hudson’s Robbie in all these scenarios—notwithstanding “actual” knowledge that has subsequently revised our image of Rock Hudson.11 The more a film incorporates such slippery images and intervals, the more it emanates crystalline significations, extrapolating a “special image” or “little crystalline seed” like the postcard to a greater scale of competing pasts, presents, and futures (a “vast crystallizable universe”), which spectators organize differently. Deleuze adds that a crystal-image upends relations between what he calls the seed and the environment of an image or film and also between its limpid and opaque qualities. Consider how a geological crystal resplendently catches light, yet confounds one’s ability to peer into its depths; and how the polygonal planes of such a crystal indicate dynamic junctures at which some organic kernel and a surrounding biome of heat and force interact over time. These forces yield a lapidary artifact, testifying to the obstinacy of both the seed and its environment. Similarly, in a film, “the seed is on the one hand the virtual image

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which will crystallize an environment which is at present [actuellement] amorphous; but on the other hand the latter must have a structure which is virtually crystallizable, in relation to which the seed now plays the role of actual image” (C2 74). To again reprise Deleuze’s example, the Rosebud sled in Citizen Kane constitutes an actual, late-breaking touchstone that reconfigures the vast, virtual sprawl of Kane’s biography into one of many plausible shapes—the unhappy destiny of a child divorced from childish things. At the same time, the sled, a childhood relic suffused with “pastness,” now becomes the virtual pivot at which the actual remains of Kane’s life, consigned into a fathomless warehouse, abut the opaque, contradictory attempts to reconstruct that life for a future he no longer occupies. To witness this seed (as the film’s characters do not) is to behold everything and yet nothing about this protean figure. Contemporary cinema offers no shortage of crystal-image films, including a crop of auspicious, auteur-driven premieres at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Lars von Trier’s Melancholia sports bicameral narratives of two sisters, obscure doubles for each other, respectively depressed and hypertense, who concurrently inhabit oneiric dream time, stagnant ceremonial time, and implacably apocalyptic time. Depending on which sister the viewer anoints as the polestar of “actuality,” the rest of the characters and images become virtual reflections of her affects, desires, and epistemologies. Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life offers its own triple coalescence of epochal, evolutionary time; of an individualized, backward-turning temporality of grief, as a grown man mourns his deceased brother; and of collective, spiritual, or what Deleuze and Guattari call “trans-alivedead” time within a sandy, scintillating afterlife. The film’s crystalline seeds, all the way down to the tiniest bacteria, inhabit vast molecular environments; its coup de grace is its archetypal vision of the Oedipal family, sometimes figured as a seed (a vestigial speck amid intergalactic physical laws) and sometimes as a transcendent environment (positing a kind of divine paternity governing even the most irrational of these forces). At this same festival, queer icon Pedro Almodóvar debuted The Skin I Live In, a typically rococo and less typically black-hearted mystery in which the end-focused yet retrospective temporalities of personal revenge and melodramatic disclosure bleed across a bewildering montage informed by gender ambiguity, by slow convalescence from unspecified surgeries, and by the frozen doldrums of panoptical captivity. The shots and edits of all three movies, then, multiply virtual connections among images that evade organization at the levels of actuality or chronology, whether because they suture and swap contradictory views of the same events (Melancholia), or simultaneously cellular and theological registers of the same phenomena (Tree of Life), or the differently violent origins and aftershocks of a shrouded act of gender reassignment (The Skin I Live In). These examples from Sirk, Welles, and more recent auteurs reflect two key tenets within my subsequent queerings of the crystal-image. One is that certain

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“special” images (the postcard, the sled) or even special gaps can invite particular stress within their films, even amid ubiquitous decenterings of time and perception. Crystalline forces do yield differentiable assemblages, just as the desiring-machines of Anti-Oedipus congregate into specific assemblages, and just as deterritorializing figures of minor art coalesce into distinctive literary machines in Kafka. It is the job of the Deleuzian “schizoanalyst” or the reader of minor texts to assess the molecules and the modes of conjunction that produces such assemblages, implying their possible futures and effects. My second claim arises from these homologies among the crystal-image, the desiring-machine, and the minor utterance—“seeds,” all of them, that generate and perpetually transform increasingly complex formations. As Almodóvar’s chaos of queer genders and bodies most flagrantly indicates, but as the evolutionary accident of the nuclear family in The Tree of Life and the ambivalent sexual impulses in Melancholia also testify, the crystalline seam between actual and virtual temporalities can just as fully mediate actual and virtual relations of desire. This holds true at the level of specifically sexual feeling, multiple flows of which can switch off, slip around, or coexist at once, but also in the Deleuzian sense of desire as the atomic basis of all objects and bodies, all productive activity, all ruptures and convergences. Queer desire, perpetually refusing firm definitions or criteria, and Deleuzian desire, inclined toward deterritorialization and nonidealized productions, manifest in observable ways within a given textual or historical context, but they always retain indefatigable potentials for further transformation and unpredictable revelation.

The Four Types The grounding claim for Deleuze’s model of the crystal-image proclaims that through this figure, “the cinema does not just present images, it surrounds them with a world” (C2 68). By extension, the desiring-machines within images also generate and surround themselves with a “world,” an assemblage that testifies to their fecundity and heterogeneity. Furthermore, the conceptual sympathies between Deleuzian time and desire allow us to translate his four models of crystalline world-making into comparable structures of cinematic desire, all queerly resistant to identity-based essentialisms or standard movements of desire. Such queer crystallographies also call to mind the praxes of particular queer filmmakers and at least one influential discourse within queer theory. To wit: 1. The closed crystal: Deleuze singles out Max Ophüls’s jewel- and mirrorfilled melodramas of the 1950s as privileged cases of “an ideal state which would be the perfect, completed crystal,” where “the mirrors are not content with reflecting the actual image but constitute the prism, the lens where the split image constantly runs after itself to connect up with itself ” (C2 83). Via

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circular motifs in his frames, like the three-ring circus in Lola Montès (1955), and through circular structures in the plots, such as the looping chain of lovers in La Ronde (1950) or the repeated waltzes and reinherited jewelry in The Earrings of Madame de . . . (1953), Ophüls’s characters seem to inhabit “the heart of a diamond or a glass cage,” an environment that “lets no outside subsist” (C2 83). Within these “frozen and iced images” of luxury we behold “time, but time which has already rolled up, rounded itself, at the same time as it was splitting” (C2 84). Every present moment passes backward into a glass vitrine of preserved pasts, simultaneously advancing toward no future but that of cyclical repetitions. These cages, accentuated by long sequence shots that explore spaces without exiting them, goad their inhabitants into theatricalized selfperformances: “it is the whole of the real, life in its entirety, which has become spectacle” (C2 84), and so “there is no outside of the mirror or the film set, but only an obverse where the characters who disappear or die go” (C2 83). No character breaks the cycles of repetition, but some at least manage to repeat themselves with small but decisive differences. Madame de . . ., for example, seemingly consigned to spoiled, aristocratic inertia, achieves an unexpected beatification, twice renouncing her worldly possessions, but the second time on a church altar—no longer to cover her debts but to save her lover and her own soul. By these criteria, the queer auteur of the glass cage, the long take, the luminous surface, and the thwarting of desire is Gus Van Sant, whose protagonist in My Own Private Idaho (1991) ends a transcontinental picaresque beside the same road where he opens the film. Van Sant’s tiny casts, rotating pans, and lengthy sequence shots in films like Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003), and Last Days (2005) chart a circular universe with “no outside.” These movies have, by rigorous design, nowhere to go once the main characters die, whether that death is social, like Mike’s in Idaho, or literal, even historical, as with the Kurt Cobain surrogate in Last Days or the martyred mayor in Milk (2008), with its crystalline interplays among actual footage and virtual dramatizations of San Francisco in the 1970s. Even the exaggerated punctiliousness of Van Sant’s remake of Psycho (1998) suggests a world of minutely differentiated repetitions with zero outsides. Taciturn characters, repetitive montage, and long, actionless shots in Van Sant tend to frustrate narrative momentum as Deleuze’s timeimages do, and as queerness itself tends to do, according to queer narratologists like Judith Roof.12 Normative heterosexuality can in no way be presumed in Van Sant’s movies, limpid in their cinematography and pared-down structures but often opaque in characterization and thematic drift. Then again, the famously exuberant Harvey Milk notwithstanding, “homosexuality” is an equally problematic label for Psycho’s Norman Bates, Idaho’s gay-for-pay hustlers, Gerry’s libidoless clones, the androgynous layabouts in Last Days and Paranoid Park (2007), or Elephant’s teenaged assassins, who share a controversial kiss in the shower

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before gunning down their schoolmates in that film’s gloss on the Columbine massacre. Given how all roads in Psycho lead to the Bates motel, Gerry’s nature paths lead nowhere, and Cobain is practically an agoraphobe, Van Sant deterritorializes desire as much by radically constraining its movements as other filmmakers do by extravagantly releasing them. His films force desire into a kind of inchoate antiproduction, abjuring the forward, reproduction-based temporality that Roof, Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam and others ascribe to heteronormative ideology—but abjuring homonorms just as steadily.13 This stratagem for crystallizing desire as circular, indolent, and obscurely ceremonial bears similar effects in other films that stake consequent claims as queer cinema, regardless of their makers’ self-identifications. Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), for example, situates Tom Cruise’s and Nicole Kidman’s characters as inhabitants of a New York City whose heightened design, flat sound, and depopulated streets mark an uneasy meeting ground of the actual and the virtual. In classic Ophüls fashion, they repeat the same movements and the same stories, forever reencountering the same small set of characters.14 Their speeches and behaviors, often quite theatrical (the late-night monologue, the baroque orgy), are attributed to sexual urges, yet these, too, are lacquered by the macabre, ritualistic mise-en-scène and the undead miens of the actors. When the film ends on the single word “Fuck,” even as exchanged between two child-rearing parents, the desire being expressed has fully deterritorialized itself away from what Edelman calls “reproductive futurism.” Amid this sealed world and its obscure channels of desire, Cruise is equally likely to be picked up by a cheerful female prostitute or hit on by a puckish male hotel clerk, or taunted by a passel of homophobic prowlers who (mis)recognize him as gay. 2. The cracked crystal: Deleuze aligns the second crystal-regime, ascribing even stronger performative valences to selfhood and sexuality, with Jean Renoir’s human comedies. As immured in many ways as Ophüls’s roundelays, Renoir’s crystals eventually crack such that someone or something escapes to a zone outside the crystal that is not the space of death: “The crystal is never pure and perfect; it has a failing, a point of flight, a ‘flaw’ . . . Something is going to slip away in the background, in depth, through the third side or third dimension, through the crack” (C2 85). The gamekeeper’s gunshots shattering the glass cage of social protocols in The Rules of the Game (1939), the convicts escaping the weirdly stagy prison in Grand Illusion (1937), the ecstatic dance at the end of French Can-Can: for Deleuze, these offer signs that, as in Ophüls, “the trying out of roles is indispensable” (C2 87). Such role-playing proves consistent with how life unfolds outside the crystal: “One leaves the theatre to get to life, but one leaves it imperceptibly” (C2 88). Most characters remain encased in closed economies of performance and ritual, but those who flee attain new and open futures defined by a deterritorializing of desire and of time, since “from the indiscernibility of the actual and the virtual, a new distinction must emerge, like a new reality which was not pre-existent” (C2 87).

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Many filmmakers have appropriated this model for their queer narratives, investing varying degrees of optimism in the anomalous escapes. They all, however, sustain Deleuze’s conviction, quite familiar from queer theory, that regimes of performative identity prevail outside even the most closed and self-regarding communities. In the realm of cinematic nonfiction, which Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 almost totally elide, and from the heart of New Queer notoriety, Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1990) constructs such a crystal. Here, performativity in Judith Butler’s sense of the term, constituting all gender as iterative ritual, melds with performativity in the House of LaBeija’s sense of the term, festooned with spotlights, sequined gowns, banjee girls, and military realness. The daily grind of poverty and thwarted aspiration reflects the more abstracted temporalities of the nocturnal balls, as windowless as casinos. Participants are as likely to designate the hours they spend walking the floor as “actual” life as the time they spend scraping together the means to do so, in many cases by walking the streets. As in all cracked-crystal films, rules prevail—to delirious, comical extremes in some scenes—but they also exist to be broken and reperformed with difference, within an environment portrayed as largely closed, despite the incongruous presence of the camera. Not all participants survive their forced forays into the equally performative but less selfaware world that lies outside the balls. If, however, we shift focus from Butler’s controversially severe privileging of Venus Xtravaganza in her reading of the film and foreground instead the improbable, globe-trotting success story of Willi Ninja, it becomes clear that desires and futures can occasionally find windows for release.15 Collectives need not be as large or spectacular as that in Paris Is Burning to constitute a cracked crystal. Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997) pares the structure down to the smallest possible circuit with no sacrifice of intensity. Tony Leung’s Lai Yiu-fai spends most of the film caught within a suffocating, codependent coupling with Leslie Cheung’s histrionic Ho Po-wing, amidst which even his dreams take the shape of a closed orbit around the top of Iguazu Falls. At last he launches himself out of the relationship and their adoptive land of Argentina, climactically returning to the accelerated, light-streaked, monadal energies of his native Hong Kong. In the hands of famously clock-obsessed filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, Lai Yiu-fai thus exits not only a crack in his Sisyphusian relationship with Cheung—where professed breakups draw them closer together and interludes of wounding togetherness feel like virtual breakups—but also a crack in historical and postcolonial time, as well, returning to Hong Kong just as the principality releases itself from British occupation in 1997. This was the historical event to which Happy Together’s production and release were carefully timed. Lai Yiu-fai may be heading into a wholly open future, in sync with his homeland, or he may specifically be chasing the handsome global nomad played by Chang Chen, whose own desiring-orientation remains unclear, endowing Lai’s line of flight with specific desiring-implications alongside its

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temporal and historical resonances. In both respects, he escapes a long interval of stagnation. A bleaker example, Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry (1999), crystallizes the terrible end of Brandon Teena (Hilary Swank), simultaneously staged as a realistically unfolding present; as a retroactive martyrology, complete with haloing lighting effects; and as a weirdly futuristic abstraction in which clouds and headlights hurtle forward at unnatural speed, and midwestern Qwik Marts and factories emit space-station hums and plutonium glows. Brandon’s ranks among the most infamous contemporary tales of actual and virtual gender, his sexual self-perceptions rendered both limpid and opaque by a film some viewers have indicted for an incongruously lesbian gaze in certain scenes.16 Either way, Boys Don’t Cry presents itself as a tragic, out-of-time allegory of the right seed landing in the wrong environment. Then again, “wrong” is in the eye of the beholder, since the movie portrays Falls City, Nebraska, as a town where all social and gender identities are reciprocally performed along mandated scripts. Several characters perform for each other what Amy Villarejo has called a “karaoke masculinity,” conscripting the town’s women as their well-trained audiences and enablers.17 Brandon does not survive the rules of the game in this very dark crystal, yet the film rockets Chloë Sevigny’s Lana onto a lamp-streaked, horizon-less highway at the finish, much as Happy Together does with Leung’s Lai Yiu-fai. 3. The evolving crystal: If the first type of crystal suggests time and desire as sealed-off circuits, and the second approximates the first except in allowing the odd route outward, the third finds the crystal amid a constant process of growing. Exits are once again sealed but points of entry proliferate, with circuits of actuality and virtuality enlarging to accommodate them: “The question is no longer that of knowing what comes out of the crystal and how, but, on the contrary, how to get into it. . . . It is a crystal which is always in the process of formation, expansion, which makes everything it touches crystallize, and to which its seeds give a capacity for indefinite growth” (C2 88–89). This evolving crystal suggests the queer movement itself, as redefined in the wake of AIDS activism and academic theorization, adding more and more links to alphabetical daisy chains like LGBTQ. As we see among Lauren Berlant’s and Michael Warner’s queer counterpublics and practitioners of public sex, or in Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit’s cinematic models of collective identity, or among Gayle Rubin’s sexual outliers, or in Cathy Cohen’s unlikely armadas of punks, bulldaggers, and welfare-queens, this type of crystal constantly forms new faces, invites new inhabitants, and further displaces its borders.18 Deleuze’s exemplar for this expansive crystal is Fellini, whose films become increasingly carnivalesque across his career, absorbing urban wanderers, circus performers, mythic and historical figures, anonymous extras, authorial standins, and other motley crews. “In Fellini,” Deleuze argues, “numbers and amusements have replaced the scene” (C2 89), accumulating sounds, spectacles, and

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participants rather than exhibiting overt dramatic structures. Temporally, Felliniesque crystals explore nomadic and distressed presents (La Strada, Nights of Cabiria), kitsch-cabinets of variously embellished pasts (Satyricon, Ginger and Fred), imminent but repeatedly deferred futures (8½), decadent declines (La Dolce vita), or portals into wholly imaginative fantasia (Juliet of the Spirits). Still, temporal flows often stall as the films survey these copiously seeded environments. Notably, as Fellini abandons the neorealist “any-space-whatevers” of La Strada for the more floridly deterritorialized sheets of Juliet of the Spirits or Satyricon, genders and sexualities also drift further from normative forms. Like Fellini, Pedro Almodóvar explores actual and virtual figures and environments, having similarly begun his career with eccentric surveys of plausible, present-focused social idioms: in urban middle-class farces like What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984), in the slightly more florid Law of Desire (1987) and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), or in the surprising incursion into more rustic living in The Flower of My Secret (1995). Over time, these idioms shift to a series of temporally disordered, pastobsessed, metatheatrical mise-en-abymes such as All About My Mother (1999), Talk to Her (2002), Bad Education (2004), Broken Embraces (2009), or The Skin I Live In (2011). In All About My Mother, a transgendered, Felliniesque sometime-actress named Agrado describes embodied selfhood as a reconciliation of actual and virtual states. “You are more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed of being,” she claims, noting that this pursuit costs a lot of money. Almodóvar’s gendernauts like Agrado and the queer collectivities they compose draw even more mundane-seeming subjects (nuns, housewives, heterosexual men) into assemblages where no sex or gender feels immune to virtuality. He showcases within and across his films “one and the same crystal in the course of infinite growth. . . . It is life as spectacle, and yet in its spontaneity” (C2 89).19 Other filmmakers have marshaled this form of the crystal-image toward queer purposes. In Teresa Rizzo’s account, Deleuzian molecularities of desire underpin Julian Schnabel’s adaptation of Reinaldo Arenas’s memoir Before Night Falls (2000), serving as the seeds for creative impulses conjoined to political dissidence.20 The films and gallery installations of Thai wunderkind Apichatpong Weerasethakul also adopt this model, queering relations among actual and virtual states in especially idiosyncratic, non-anthropomorphic ways. Figures in films such as Tropical Malady (2004), centering around an elliptically romantic bond between two men, or his Palme d’or-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) have been known to pledge familial, friendly, and erotic devotions to apes, monkeys, tigers, spirits, and catfish, carrying the Deleuzian conceit of “becoming-animal” to quite literal extremes. Weerasethakul populates his films with nonprofessional actors, constructing many sequences as quasi-documentary spelunks into the any-spaceswhatever of Thai jungles, caves, hospitals, and villages. He thereby crosses

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actual and virtual lines not only in his characters’ desiring relations but in how the films challenge their principally Western viewers to demarcate actual realities from embellished, exoticized, or otherwise virtual lore. The films’ temporal loops, sudden ruptures, and ambiguous hops amongst pasts, presents, and futures only intensify these conundrums. Contrasting Weerasethakul’s bucolic enigmas, but less than you might think, is the urban jungle of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), ranking as his most overtly metacinematic and among his most temporally and erotically confounding desecrations of squeaky-clean American archetypes. Mulholland, with its mirror-filled mise-en-scène, doubly and triply crosses porous borders between actuality and virtuality, while coevally estranging desire from the heteronormative sex-gender system so dear to those midcentury Hollywood baubles that Lynch both celebrates and renders sinister. In one popular reading of this shape-shifting film, which draws even its most mundane images into a crystalline vortex, Lynch reveals a torrid lesbian revenge drama as the “actual” story beneath the Nancy Drew-ish waking dream of a blonde starlet falling instantly in love with a dashing male filmmaker. Mulholland, however, refuses to stabilize actual and virtual coordinates or to fully ratify even this tempting gloss on its baffling formal and narrative movements, full of sound-image disjunctions and other time-image tropes. The film crystallizes all desire as an absorbent, inescapable puzzle box—graphically figured by a cryptic blue contraption requiring an impossible key, but also by the crystalline reprisals of early images and characters at the end of the film, where they seem not to belong. No one escapes the wormholes of desire in Mulholland or in films it quickly inspired: for example, Olivier Assayas’s demonlover (2002) and François Ozon’s Swimming Pool (2003), delivering their own shattered and eroticized tangrams of identity and orientation. 4. The decomposing crystal: “The final state to be considered,” Deleuze says, “would be the crystal in the process of decomposition,” a putative obverse of Fellini’s expanding crystal that is nonetheless more complicated than that, and indeed not quite parallel to any of the other models. For one thing, Deleuze explicates this crystalline variation with more restricted reference to one auteur, Luchino Visconti, than he does with the others. He even adduces four cornerstone attributes of this image-type, reflecting Visconti’s imputed “obsessions” in very specific terms. These include an overt preoccupation with wealth, a motif of opulence in decline, an oblique awareness of history, and, in Deleuze’s opinion most importantly, a vague penumbra of “belatedness” that pervades all facets of the image. “This something that comes too late is always the perceptual and sensual revelation of a unity of nature and man” (C2 96), Deleuze says, recalling the naturalist impulse-images of Cinema 1. The examples he offers of such “sublime clarity” all concern eruptions of non-normative sexual desire, such as the interdicted, possibly homosocial desire that an aging male prince feels for his son’s fiancée in The Leopard (1963); an undissected

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link that Deleuze perceives between homosexuality and personal salvation in Ossessione (1943); and the eroticized humiliations of older men at the hands of young, beautiful, insolent boys in Death in Venice (1971) and Conversation Piece (1974). Although its conceptual structure is not as clear as Ophüls’s loops, Renoir’s escapes, or Fellini’s expansiveness, traces of Visconti’s profligate, semihistoricized endgames do emerge in recent queer films. The extravagant I Am Love (2009), directed by another gay Italian auteur, Luca Guadagnino, specularizes the magnificent modern-day anachronism of a Milanese family’s dynastic wealth, ritualized into elaborately prepared meals staged as state dinners. This fossilization within their own money proves illusory, however, as their textile plants falter under the family’s stewardship and amid the aggressive circling of transnational buyers. Meanwhile, I Am Love mounts the melodrama of Emma Recchi’s infidelity as a virtual reflection of her family’s doomed love affair with money—unless, instead, the fiscal plotline virtually allegorizes the film’s metaphysical argument about desire as a grand but somehow belated prospect, as announced right in its title. Forces of decline and the quality of belatedness collide with an even more ersatz facsimile of Old World wealth in Portuguese filmmaker João Pedro Rodrigues’s To Die Like a Man (2009). Tonia, a cantankerous drag performer festooned in the hair and the jewelry of a fallen Hapsburg, balances the dual strains of a young, drug-addicted lover and a violent son in flight from the law, all the while concealing the grisly infection she has contracted from her silicone breast implants. Quick, tense skirmishes linked to some offscreen military campaign play an obscure role in Rodrigues’s slow drama of internal rot, as do interludes where the palette drains entirely to magenta, plaintive ballads waft through the trees, and time stops entirely in a Weerasethakul-style forest. The Mexican filmmaker Julián Hernández contrasts the Recchis’ pyrrhic wealth or Tonia’s tawdry burlesques of munificence, staging Viscontian ruin instead within obscure, time-bending fables set against the mytho-historical backdrop of Mexico’s drift from gold-plated Aztec pasts. In Raging Sun, Raging Sky (2009), a typically lengthy and kaleidoscopic epic that won Hernández the Teddy prize for the best queer film at the Berlin Film Festival, a trio of men and one spectral female presence negotiate three interwoven crises: a prehistoric kidnapping that may culminate in human sacrifice, a withering of public and economic infrastructure in present-day Mexico, and a portents of an actually feared scenario by which the lakes nourishing the capital city may evaporate in the near future. All three storylines, joined through enigmatic crosscuts and entailing tense sexual couplings and rivalries among the three men, are as notable for their erotic frankness as for the semi-opaque national and economic allegories they imply, and for how each prismatically reflects the others. The Viscontian experiment in decomposing crystals, then, proves repeatable to varying extents in the work of subsequent directors. Even in Deleuze’s

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own example, however, both the vector of decomposition and its odd, epiphanic upshot—the belatedly recognized “unity of nature and man”—suggest co-implications of time and desire that for some reason Cinema 2 seems eager to overlook. The key principle in Deleuzian theory, of course, that unites “nature and man” is their mutual basis in the molecular activities of the desiring-machines. Anti-Oedipus elucidates this crystalline relation as it unfolds over centuries, via quasi-historical commentaries on the settlement of territories, the creation of kinship systems, the formation of states, the rule of despots, the advents of imperialism and later of transnational capitalism, and the ideological implantation of such decoy-desires as Freud’s Oedipal drives and the incest taboo. The latter impulses, “forbidden” though we may never have harbored them, urge us into exogamous, state-sanctioned marital relations that may counter our desires as well as our interests. In these respects, the four aspects of the decomposing crystal—the tropes of money and history, the pressures of belatedness and breakdown—feel less like an extrapolation of one filmmaker’s themes and more like a veiled reiteration of Anti-Oedipus’s theories of desire. This recognition clarifies why the Viscontian episodes Deleuze recounts all concern desire as a belatedly perceived, frequently blocked route out of individual and historical decline. And yet, via an odd swerve in tone, Deleuze openly deflects desire from emerging alongside time as an organizing concept for this passage. He demurs, “Let us not think that homosexuality is Visconti’s obsession” (C2 96), though without this oddly peremptory refusal, we would hardly be tempted to impute such an obsession. The closest analog in the Cinema books to this odd interjection and dismissive tone emerges around Sergei Eisenstein’s principle of “attractional calculus,” by which dissimilar images evince a “dialectical yearning . . . to gain new dimensions, that is, to leap formally from one power to another” (C1 36). This “yearning,” enunciated as a kind of desire on the part of the film, names what virtually any discontinuous shot in a time-image film emits in relation to all others, but without an existing philosophical endoskeleton to structure them, as Soviet dialectics do for Eisenstein. Deleuze’s immediate examples concern the “stream of milk,” the “jets of fire and water,” and the “fireworks” so nearly juxtaposed in Eisenstein’s film The General Line (1929), such that montage can “raise the drop of milk to a properly cosmic dimension” (C1 36). If attractional calculus sounds here like a premonition of the time-image, especially since Eisenstein is one of few early-century filmmakers to draw extensive analysis in Cinema 2, the sidelong glimpse at The General Line also suggests a homoerotic reverie or a not-so-dry run for, say, Kenneth Anger’s sparking, priapic, and milk-spilling short film Fireworks (1947). Deleuze ignores this resonance until cycling back eight chapters later to this same example of “the flood of milk . . . a fountain of milk, an explosion of milk” in The General Line, at which point he admonishes that “psychoanalysis has subjected these famous images of the creamer and what follows to such puerile treatment

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that it has become hard to rediscover their simple beauty” (C1 181). What is unclear to me is why the convergence of such hyperbolic, ejaculatory lines of flight, suggestive of homoeroticism and of desire’s volatile tendencies being “raised . . . to a properly comic dimension,” must be written off as puerile or attributed exclusively to unnamed psychoanalysts, forever typecast in Deleuzian theory as the ventriloquists of moribund ideas. My larger point here is that in his few pages on Visconti, Deleuze verges on describing how some forms of cinema work, philosophically and stylistically, in a way that strongly evokes his and Guattari’s potent metaphysics of desire as a deterritorializing force, agitating and agitated, prone to geysers, changes, and collapses. These evocations depend upon non-heteronormative desire, notwithstanding the theorist’s habit elsewhere of treating the visual and narrative “contents” of films as irrelevant to their immanent meanings. Rather than consider these films as manifestations of desire or of homosexuality in particular, however, Deleuze ascribes to them a thematic preoccupation with “belatedness,” itself a frequent scholarly metonym for antinormative desire.21 Surprisingly, the other rubric he applies to these motifs in Visconti echoes that “simple beauty” he perceives in Eisenstein’s cinema, rather than those films’ lively and seemingly obvious homoerotics and phallophilia: “Thus,” Deleuze attests, “the shattering revelation of the musician in Death in Venice, when through the young boy he has a vision of what has been lacking in his work: sensual beauty” (C2 96). He finishes his study of the crystal-image with the aphorism that “the Beautiful truly becomes a dimension in Visconti; it ‘plays the role of the fourth dimension’” (C2 97), refusing to invoke the Deleuzo-Guattarian first dimension, which is desire. In a sense, Deleuze indulges an off-putting reflex similar to those we identified earlier in David Cronenberg’s commentaries on his own queer work. Deleuze repeatedly foregrounds brilliant innovations by gay artists (Eisenstein, Pasolini, Visconti), all crucial to Cinema 1 and Cinema 2’s grand-scale arguments. Although it would be unlike either Deleuze or The Desiring-Image to overemphasize the filmmakers’ sexualities, it remains odd that he refuses any germane connections between their films’ evocations of dissident desires and the philosophical value of the ideas themselves. In a surprising volte-face from Deleuze and Guattari’s theses about desire in Anti-Oedipus, the Cinema books seem unconvinced that even the most capacious, depersonalized, antiOedipal model of desire could in fact prove so capacious as to rival the fecundities of time as a productive immanence, as a philosophical preoccupation, and as a genome of cinema. I hope, however, that my survey of queer cinematic crystallographies attests to how many recent films, in many styles and from diverse traditions, configure desire as a complex engine and actual/virtual preoccupation of film. Having found Deleuze’s four taxonomies of the crystal-image so abundant in queer cinema, we have reminded ourselves, particularly through the example of

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Visconti, that the nature of Deleuzian desire is to detach and break away: “Desiring-machines work only when they break down” (AO 8). Consequently, it should come as no surprise that some of the most interesting queer films in recent years erode the stylistic and conceptual partitions among the closed, cracked, evolving, and decomposing modes of the crystal-image, hybridizing their actual-virtual potentials in a range of new ways. The dynamics of the crystal, by which every virtual facet “envelops or reflects the real,” such that “there is ‘coalescence’ between the two” (C2 68), embodies a potential for new assemblages, for reciprocal deterritorializations, and for new collective and political prospects. Crystalline structures can disclose such potentials in realistically inclined films such as Brother to Brother or, as we shall see in chapters 5 and 6, in more conspicuous cinematic fabulations. Neither the scrappiest budget nor the deepest studio pockets, neither the roughest nor the most resplendent style precludes the aesthetic and conceptual productivities of the crystal-image. These suffuse “special” images of desire with mercurial potentials for variation and bear importantly on historical and political experiences of the past and present. Especially but not only for viewers who bring a queer perspective to these movies, these structures suggest how desire expands, contracts, fluctuates, accrues particular legacies, proliferates paradoxes and possibilities, and projects itself into unpredictable futures.

Looking for Bruce / Looking for Perry In one of the two narratives that propel Rodney Evans’s Brother to Brother, the gay writer and artist Richard Bruce Nugent (Roger Robinson) rallies with his better-remembered friends Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, and Wallace Thurman in 1926 to produce the short-lived, sexually frank, aesthetically boundary-pushing journal called Fire!! Denounced as crude and racially degrading by some of its own target audience, the publication of Fire!!’s single issue marks neither the first nor final instance in which these artists must defend their work against intramural assaults by fellow African Americans or against the condescending, touristic overtures of white editors and patrons. The complementary plotline concerns a contemporary African American college student named Perry Williams (Anthony Mackie). Disowned by his parents after they discover his homosexuality, he struggles with loneliness and isolation, racism and homophobia, meager resources, and burgeoning anger at entire social systems as well as specific antagonists. Much of Perry’s resentment aims squarely at black classmates who denigrate his sexuality and the self-consciously gay perspectives he thereby assumes on history, politics, and civil rights. He fights other battles in his budding liaison with a white classmate named Jim, a seeming first-timer at same-sex and interracial

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relationships, and in his nascent career as a painter in a New York arts scene largely circumscribed by white tastemakers and gallery owners. Bruce and Perry cross paths many times, on the subway, on a sidewalk, at the Nuyorican Poetry Slam, and at the homeless shelter where Perry works and Bruce resides. By that point, the younger man has sussed the identity and distinguished literary history of the elder, and they begin to offer each other a series of oddly literal guided tours through their century-spanning, analogous, but incongruent experiences of artistry, bigotry, penury, uneasy community, and marginalized sexuality. These sequences find Bruce and Perry not only peregrinating around the boroughs of New York City but also bending the rules of space-time in order to do so, sometimes in subtle ways that critics rarely acknowledged but which the notion of a crystal-image helps us to unpack. Perry, Bruce’s most present preoccupation during what turn out to be his final days, is also a reminder of the older man’s youth and a signal of possible futures for his work, and for the memories he passes on. After sharing Perry’s company for an evening in “Niggeratti Manor,” the famous hub for his Harlem cohort’s carnal and creative exploits, he confides to a bartender friend his resulting sense of estrangement in time: “You ever start talking to someone and feel like you’ve known them forever? An entire past and future passes right before your eyes. Your heart starts beating faster, ‘cause you know how hard their life’s gonna be.” While dwelling on Perry’s past and forecasting his future, even expecting that Perry’s future and Bruce’s past might be the same thing, Bruce comes to view his own body as a crystal of irrational temporalities: “I looked down at my hand, and thought to myself, ‘Where’d this come from?’ . . . Like, what’s a hot piece of ass like me doing trapped in this old man’s body?” Bruce, in turn, arrives during a chaotic period in Perry’s life, provides a vision of community that Perry sorely lacks, and urges him to keep producing his own art—a future for which the witty, resilient, yet lonesome and penniless Bruce is an ambivalent harbinger. Perry, too, responds to his new friendship with Bruce as a destabilization of his own body and lived temporality. Of Bruce’s poetry, he enthuses, “I really love it: the phrasing, the mood, everything. It’s like someone of a completely different time and place, but it’s exactly how I feel,” to which Bruce, rather than divulging his similar sense of virtual connection with Perry, stresses his own actuality: “I hate to be the one to break it to you, but I’m here and now, flesh and blood, right in front of your very own eyes.” Perry’s best friend Marcus (Larry Gilliard, Jr.), despite having already met Bruce, increasingly doubts this seemingly self-evident truth. “So, you think he’s for real?” he asks, after Perry relates more of his exploits with Bruce. “He could just be a nutjob with a really vivid imagination,” Marcus conjectures, reiterating a key word from Bruce’s poetry (“Truly, smoke is like imagination”) and his dialogue (“I been riffing on corners like this since before your mother was even a figment of your grandmother’s imagination!”).

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Given their shared tendency to solipsize each other, both men exist in the other’s eyes as actual beings and as virtual projections. The limits of “actuality” fluctuate in other ways, too, for even in a film whose script and visual style suggest a baseline of realism, Bruce and Perry’s most mundane encounters connote a virtual fabulation. Brother to Brother subtly asks us to accept the real Nugent, who was born in 1906 and died in 1987, as a cogent, highly ambulatory bon vivant in the New York City of 2004, the kind of urban flâneur Deleuze suggests as the prototypical character in postwar time-image films (C1 208).22 This impossible scenario, played “straight,” as it were, augments our sense of strange porosities among distant epochs, further derationalizing the film’s overall view of desire not as a site for rigid, solo identity claims (though both men identify as gay) but as a raced, classed, and location-specific foray into a four-dimensional, multivariable cultural calculus. The fact that critics have barely observed the conceptual brio of Evans’s film is unfortunate, but not altogether surprising in light of its surface aesthetic and production contexts. Brother to Brother was a difficult undertaking, even by the standards of independent film. Budget-induced hiatuses and forced reshoots lasted much longer than principal photography itself. Nonetheless, the completed movie earned a major award at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, enjoyed a brief theatrical run in the biggest North American markets, and received a high-visibility broadcast on PBS in June 2005, on the same day the DVD appeared in stores. The television airing, accompanied by a website of teaching resources and historical backstory, was a contracted corollary of support Evans secured from the Independent Television Service (ITVS), an initiative of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Both the theatrical release and the DVD, however, were distributed by a company called Wolfe Video, whose repertoire emphasizes the kinds of aesthetically modest, thematically safe, frequently flesh-flaunting entertainments that serve as objects of derision in many Y2K-era laments for the more stylized and politicized queer cinema of the 1990s.23 Indeed, Brother to Brother was the first film under the vaguely disreputable Wolfe aegis to achieve nonfestival theatrical bookings in the United States.24 Too shoestring for the arthouses but too conventional to suggest a cutting edge, promoted through channels associated with bare-bones pedagogical filmmaking (ITVS) and with ephemeral, Eating Out-style sex comedies (Wolfe), Brother to Brother may also suffer by inevitable comparison to Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1988). Indeed this scenario of overshadowing recalls Nugent’s own toil in the shadows cast by Hughes and his other, more famous cohorts.25 An obvious exemplar of crystal-image poetics and queer historiography, Langston’s barely narrativized collage of images vacillate between plausible stand-ins for the speakeasies and dance halls of the Harlem Renaissance and totally abstracted interludes in low fens, undecorated bedrooms, and other virtual spaces. The Felliniesque congeries of human subjects,

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mostly African Americans, are joined on the soundtrack by recitations of poetry by black gay men, including portions of Nugent’s Smoke, Lilies, and Jade, originally published in Fire!! Its blending of stock footage, Super 8, and shimmering celluloid bespeaks the influence of Julien’s contemporaries in queer, UK-based cultural-materialist filmmaking, especially Derek Jarman, anticipating as well how such tropes would be appropriated by New Queer films such as Haynes’s Poison (1991) and Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992). By comparison, Brother to Brother risks dismissal by viewers whose sense of New Queer Cinema’s vitality leaned entirely upon films approximating Langston’s sensual imagery, unmistakable anachronisms, and lapidary montage, which Evans either downplays or omits for artistic or pragmatic reasons. Interesting arguments have recently emerged on behalf of more stylistically subdued forms of queer cinema, including what Ros Jennings calls the “positive unoriginality” of critical darlings like Hettie Macdonald’s Beautiful Thing (1996) or what JoAnne C. Juett and David Jones’s designate as “lower case new queer cinema.”26 Patricia White, in her study of lesbian minor cinema, also reminds us that even the staples of minor and New Wave movements stand eligible for further acts of minoring, even if these have the effect of changing our assumptions about the “minor.”27 Coextensive with these shifts in the queer-cinema paradigm, I think Brother to Brother’s ingenuity and ambitions derive from how it generates crystalline tensions from such unostentatious mise-en-scène and montage. The diamantine mirrors and jewels of Ophüls, the handsome theatricals of Renoir, the opulent carnivals of Fellini, and the crumbling grandeur of Visconti exceed Evans’s budgetary reach and perhaps his storytelling interests, too. Few spectators seem willing to credit Evans with the philosophical grandeur attributed to those elite auteur directors or to gay auteurs of later generations whom Evans cites as influences: Schlesinger, Fassbinder, Riggs, Haynes.28 Even so, Brother to Brother derives rich, crystalline implications from its very merging of highbrow time-image constructions with the politicized parsimony and communal counternarratives of minor cinema. Cinema 2 implies such convergences in spirit, but in evoking political filmmaking in the global South (Rocha, Güney, Sembene, etc.), Deleuze says little about their specific deployments of camera or montage, and nothing to rival the scrupulous network of sign-systems he builds around Renoir, Fellini, and their ilk. Distastefully, to say the least, Deleuze addresses this disparity as the unavoidable effect of comparative artistic aptitudes: “A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language. . . . Precisely because talent isn’t abundant in a minor literature, there are no possibilities for an individuated enunciation that would belong to this or that ‘master’ and that could be separated from a collective enunciation” (K 16–17). Brother to Brother owes debts of its own to those minor traditions Deleuze does emphasize. Spouting memories and advice, admonishing the Brooklyn-born and borough-loyal Perry for his refusals even to

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walk through Harlem, Bruce resembles the jocular griots of a Sembene film, yet the directness of his address may suggest that Brother to Brother’s meanings lodge at the surfaces of its script and images. In other words, what we overtly see and hear, amid such bare-bones style, may seem to exhaust what the film has to offer. Even those surfaces contain a few fantastical flourishes irreconcilable to absolute realism, but even so, the film’s enigmas reach still further. Brother to Brother’s crystalline proclivities emerge as early as its first sequence, culminating in the first major fork between two strands of derationalized time. Perry starts the movie silently exchanging a series of looks— nonverbal seductions, perhaps—with another man of similar age seated across from him on the subway.29 Bruce chuckles in the background at how flagrantly Perry and the younger stranger check each other out.30 As the train pulls into the 7th Avenue station, a two-shot shows Bruce and Perry, the latter barely cognizant of the former, exiting shoulder-to-shoulder but in opposite directions and heading into different temporal and spatial trajectories. After a quick stop-motion insert in which several hours’ worth of passengers enter and exit the trains—further detaching the film from the tempos of daily life— the blues saxophone that underscores the whole sequence grows tinny and lowers in volume, revealing itself after a cross-fade as diegetic sound from Perry’s digital alarm clock. Between this shot and a second one of Perry struggling to wake up, he appears to remember, via grainier and more colorsaturated footage, an ill-fated trip to retrieve some belongings from his parents’ house after they have disowned him. Less clear, however, is whether the saxophone bridge necessarily contextualizes the opening sequence, too, as a dream of Perry’s. Granted, it is filmed in the same resolution as more “actual” scenes and it incorporates Bruce before the two have actually met. Nonetheless, as Brother to Brother continues, it multiplies such stray suggestions of temporal and diegetic disorder, further unsettling its realistic veneer. Similar questions accrue to twice-repeating shots later in the film—of Perry working at his canvas, for example, or taking a shower in a sex-club—that suggest neighboring scenes to be either recollections of actual events or fantasies of virtual ones, without ever settling these questions. Bruce’s curious relations to time are signaled even more strongly. After cleaving to Perry’s storyline for its first five minutes, Brother to Brother cuts back to Bruce debarking another 7th Avenue train, though clearly not the same one he rode with Perry; already he inclines toward repeated actions that vary only in subtle particulars. (For example, he is dressed differently than in the first sequence, and yet in the same beige palette, thus introducing but also minimizing variation.) As Bruce catches his breath against a steel girder in the station, he double-takes in a medium shot that reverses to show us three men who have neither boarded nor exited the just-departed train, raising some question of why they are loitering there. The two white men are both sleeping; on their right sits a black man, wide awake, with whom Bruce exchanges a

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deliberate glance, more furtive and suggestive than the first. This apparent stranger reciprocates his gaze, somewhat impassively, in a slow-motion closeup, an odd temporal flourish. As the frame freezes, the previously full-color image drains to monochrome. A third cut back to Bruce marks our first introduction to his younger iteration, played by Duane Boutte. Despite this shift in palette and historical register, the scene proceeds as one unbroken encounter: young Bruce asks the man on the platform, whose face, dress, and expression have changed not one iota, whether he might pose for a portrait in Bruce’s studio. “What’s in it for me?” the man asks, to which Bruce replies, “The pleasure of giving me pleasure, for one, and the ability to see yourself reflected through my eyes, too. Isn’t that enough?” Upon proffering the Niggeratti Manor’s address in close-up, the film cuts back to Bruce, once again older and in color. His gaze swivels away from the now-deframed strangers on the bench and tilts upward and away, suggesting some different snag on his attention. Here the film cuts to blemished, black-and-white stock footage of African American artists painting, sculpting, and drawing, before cutting to Perry, in color and in the present, working away at a canvas we do not see. The continuity of action linking him to these earlier artists is reinforced by another jazz-quartet sound bridge that has played continuously from the time old Bruce semiplatonically propositions the stranger on the platform—with hip-hop record scratches subtly blended in as a slyly incongruous, contemporizing trace. Brother to Brother keeps on troubling its temporal coordinates in distinctive ways, most often in Perry’s sequences through subtle, unexpected shots and repetitions and most often in Bruce’s sequences through such ostentatious effects as dissolves, variations in film stock, and shifts in color palette. As Deleuze reminds us, “Dream-images . . . seem to have two poles,” the kind that “proceeds by rich and overloaded means,” and the kind that “is very restrained, working by clear cuts” (C2 58). Occasionally, and specifically in relation to the Niggeratti Manor scenes, it becomes tempting to associate Bruce’s diegesis with virtual figurations of “pastness” and Perry with austere present realities. However, such neat divisions crumble at moments when Brother to Brother collapses its monochrome and color lensing, and the respective eras they tend to delineate. The effect of these “special images” is to imply islands of magic realism within an otherwise realistic drama—although, as I will continue arguing, these images only accentuate virtual mysteries endemic to the whole movie. In the most obvious scene of this type, older Bruce is able to escort Perry to a raucous jazz-age open house at the Manor. Crossing into black-andwhite mise-en-scène, they pass unremarked among long-dead celebrants, including the younger Bruce, who flits past his own aged avatar (see figure 4.1). The Manor is beyond question a “special image” in Brother to Brother, or what D. N. Rodowick calls a “stratigraphic space” for actual and virtual histories.31 It is here that Bruce and Perry will paint portraits of each other on the final night

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Figure 4.1 Brother to Brother: Bruce and Perry transported back to a party at the Manor. Brother to Brother, 2004, dir. Rodney Evans.

of the older man’s life, and where Perry will afterward retrieve a trunk full of Fire!!-related memorabilia from the attic, in a classically melodramatic scene of sentimental recovery.32 Questions persist, however, about exactly when and how Perry unlocks these seeds of his black queer patrimony, and whether the “actual” Bruce or a virtual figment has led him there—and whether that difference matters, given Brother to Brother’s emphasis on “imagination” as a modality of history. Facts are not immaterial in Evans’s script, which brims with historical references to specific dates and events. Bruce reports, for instance, in regard to Wallace Thurman’s drinking and fatal depression that “instead of slashing his wrists, he slowly drank himself to death. . . . In two years he was dead, at 34.” Still, the objective truth of this reference is complicated by the visual image, which contravenes Bruce precisely by showing Wallace slitting his wrists in a hot bath, reprising the sporadic motif of black-and-white footage dissolving into full color. Even when Bruce speaks with the accuracy of Encyclopedia Britannica, then, the film finds other strategies to render its images crystalline and riddlesome. Although Perry’s scenes lack such blatant juxtapositions of “true” and “false” elements, they do not automatically register as more stable. The film loosely comports itself as if Perry’s scenes unfold in the years of the film’s production and release, yet this assumption cannot be proved. So rare was it for New York movies of the immediately post-9/11 era to avert any mention of the Twin Towers, the Bush administration, or the age of terror that these very omissions conspire with Perry’s thrift-store threads and sparse, nondateable décor to conjure a “contemporary” New York anywhere from the mid-1980s to the early

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2000s—that is, at any time from when the actual Bruce Nugent died to when this virtual surrogate arises in Perry’s life. Jim, Perry’s problematic white boyfriend, offers no help. His lingo, hairstyle, and fondness for chunky headphones and skateboards conjure the same span of decades. He enjoins Perry to accompany him to a concert by De La Soul—the innovative rap group who formed in 1987, the year Nugent died—yet their indefatigable popularity with campus audiences allows that scene, too, to read easily in the context of 2004. Outfitted in an early scene in a red windbreaker, white T-shirt, and blue jeans, Jim’s outfits conjoin to his name and to the tousled, high-cheekbone look of actor Alex Burns to make him a virtual effigy for Rebel without a Cause-era James Dean, surrounding Perry with yet another actual person who registers as a virtual archetype, and one specifically susceptible to queer sentimentalization. Only two bits of trace evidence lock Perry into a twenty-first-century existence, albeit with the collateral effect of exposing Bruce as a ghost, a Deleuzian “zombie,” or in Marcus’s words “a nutjob.” One is Perry’s diegetically significant paperback of Phoebe Hoban’s Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art, a book not published until 1998. Even more tangentially—in fact, confined to a deleted scene on the DVD—Marcus and his buddies extol Jay-Z’s collaborations with Beanie Sigel, which any rap fan can date as a postmillennial meeting of two kings. Still, a fleeting prop and an excised shot, especially in a low-budget film with little dramaturgical oversight, offer slim foundations for any definitive argument. In short, though Deleuze defines virtuality as a “pastness” that “coexists with the present it [once] was” (C2 79), Brother to Brother equally furnishes, and in crystalline style, an untethered “presentness” that coexists with an actual past. In this scenario, too, the poles of actual and virtual constantly reverse and interpenetrate. The film’s faux-antiquated aesthetic in its 1920s scenes evokes people and events that actually were, while its deceptively “real” aesthetic in the present encompasses an impossible transhistorical rendezvous within a highly ambiguous “now,” floating somewhere amid a two-decade margin of error. Even when the camera seems to record straightforward events as simple truth, “narration ceases to be truthful, that is, to claim to be true, and becomes fundamentally falsifying” (C2 131). As Perry goes looking for Bruce, and Bruce goes looking for Perry, perhaps without realizing they were looking, the Harlem Renaissance relinquishes any status as an objective archive or as a dreamlike projection from any fixed point in its future. Instead, it becomes what Shawn Anthony Christian, via Van Wyck Brooks and others, calls a “usable past,” and what Scott Bravmann similarly champions as a “queer fiction of the past,” making popular memory and semisubjective recollections productive for individual characters and for collective becomings.33 Within their coexisting temporal registers, Perry feeds Bruce’s desiring-machines and vice versa, entailing more erotic feeling on the older man’s part but allowing both men to construct a historical and affective continuum between them—even producing new artworks as a result, in the fecund tradition of Deleuzian desiring-production.

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Through a Crystal-Image, Darkly My final three points about Brother to Brother, tightly bound to one another, concern the “type” of Deleuzian crystal the film ultimately embodies; the specific and reciprocal relations of blackness and gayness within Perry and Bruce’s crystalline bond; and the dialectics of time and desire within that usable past that Brother to Brother assembles.34 Not unlike The Watermelon Woman, and traversing nearly the same two epochs of black cultural history, Evans’s film spins a parable about seeking present-day inspiration from an artistic forebear whose actuality the film both promotes and undermines. Like Cheryl, Perry winds up as both a defeated and a newly purpose-driven artist, his assumptions about “the” past more upended than Dunye’s. Still, they both conjure a memory and a regalvanized desire for images of a class-ambiguous, multicomplexioned, urban-bohemian, African American past, mostly but not entirely black. Marcus, Perry’s straight but steadfast childhood friend, keeps urging Perry to at least entertain the possibility of such community in the present as well. “Not everyone is against you, man,” is something of a mantra for Marcus, as when he exhorts his friend not to sneer quite so reflexively at the interested overtures of white gallery owners. Perhaps by the end of the film, Perry is better-positioned to believe this. Still, his prospects remain hazy for finding or producing a functioning collective, helping him to make and sell art on his terms, or to find succor in love or friendship. Jim proves distressingly capable of reciting James Baldwin’s The First Next Time in their Black Political Struggle seminar and of blithely relishing Perry’s “sweet black ass” as a personal treasure when they are in bed. Perry’s professor in that course thinks little of laying out expectations that require “part of your presentation must come from your own voice, your own thoughts and ideas,” but Perry seems less and less sure of how to shear away virtual inheritances and encumbrances so as to attain his “own” perspective. Indeed, without fully conflating them, Brother to Brother signals the recidivist returns of many of Bruce’s youthful problems within Perry’s more contemporary dilemmas. The Fire!! coterie, too, were denounced by putative allies; the Manor’s only sustained erotic relationship is, like Perry’s, interracial and prone to racial fetishism, including by a Carl Van Vechten-style photographer who snaps Wally and Harold in naked postures of loving but also stabbing each other. Even among this trusted circle of collaborators, plagiarism problems blur the idea of retaining one’s “own voice,” though not everyone at the Manor agrees on this as a problem or even a goal. That these core predicaments change so little from Bruce’s era to Perry’s suggests the crystal they inhabit to be dispiritingly closed, with Bruce’s death marking the only verifiable escape. At least, as in The Earrings of Madame de . . . and other Deleuzian examples, that death can effect a spiritual transubstantiation, renewing his survivor’s and maybe his spectators’ capacities for belief: “His

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ability to use words to transport me to different realities would forever alter my perception of the world,” Perry reflects, as he spreads Bruce’s ashes into a bayside wind on a cold, gray day. “He taught me how to weave spells, and conjure myths, the power of which would not be denied.” Again as in The Watermelon Woman, we hear of a lesson absorbed but are not made witness to its promised fruits; we cannot, then, gauge its status as a Renoir-style pathway out of a crystalline cage or as yet another dream deferred. Perry even dissolves into the image of the empty beach, before some closing text yields these elegiac lines from Langston Hughes: “I loved my friend / He went away from me / There is nothing more to say / This poem begins as softly as it began / I loved my friend.” Now that Perry, too, vanishes from a film where time has been a Möbius strip throughout, is an always-present Hughes mourning this young man of the future, as well? And is the closing beat on a quotation from Hughes’s poetry, however poignant, a sign of his legacy once again overtaking that of his once and future colleagues, blocked from getting the last word in their own movie? Meanwhile, the irrational coming-together of Bruce and Perry would not seem to suggest a ready platform for politics or for broader collectivity; Perry remains alone, and even the cohort of Aaron, Zora, Wally, Langston, and Bruce ends in disbandment. Still, the film’s insistence upon unresolved virtuality—on the ability to imagine not just other subjects but one’s own eccentric relations with those subjects—is something of a victory. To rewrite Riggs’s famous dictum, Brother to Brother holds that black men imagining other black men, is “the revolutionary act,” or at least the beginning of one, perhaps with more universal claims on lots of people who identify otherwise but feel in whatever way marooned. Still, such opening up of new attachments, in whatever temporal or demographic contexts, carries tremendous stakes for young black gay men, resisting as they must three coeval threats that their standpoints will be “written out” of history: virtually available but never actually perceived or actualized, possibly even by themselves, especially if they see themselves reflected nowhere else. Nowhere are these stakes clearer than in Perry’s first attempt at a seminar presentation, screening a friend’s film (again, not his “own” voice) that stages a philosophical duel between James Baldwin and Eldridge Cleaver. Already this film constitutes a highly virtual artifact, shot against a blank black backdrop with two actors obviously substituting for the historical figures.35 The sequence’s diegetic bounds are further troubled by editing. It properly begins after Bruce finds Perry sleeping at his desk with Hoban’s Basquiat biography—perchance to dream of the radiant child Jean-Michel in yet another act of imaginative bonding with a black queer forebear with whom Perry, later, will verbally identify. With Perry’s semiconsciousness yet again raising diegetic questions about the “actuality” of what we see next, Evans cuts to stock footage of civil rights protests scored to African songs and drums, crosscut repeatedly with the Baldwin and Cleaver surrogates. Soon, these men’s mounting imprecations overtake the whole sequence. By the end, Cleaver bellows, “You let the white man fuck you

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in the ass! What does that make you?” and knocks away the table as though commencing a physical altercation. Here, however, the sequence cuts back to more stock footage, this time interpolating Gay Pride as well as Black Power rallies.36 Eventually, the sound of loose celluloid flapping on a metal reel suggests the film has run out: a further jolt to our sense of Perry’s shifty “presentness,” since he projects 8mm film, not a YouTube montage or digital file, in an allegedly twenty-first-century classroom. Indeed, that space is barely more situated or less sparse than the virtual deprivation tank where Baldwin and Cleaver aggress each other, reflecting fellow students’ hostile standoffs with Perry. We already know Brother to Brother premises itself on a crystalline suture or “point of indiscernibility” (C2 82) between the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In this sequence, Evans for the first time evokes the actual historical gap that the lead characters’ improbable communion traverses, during which Baldwin and Cleaver quarrel over the very issue of what constitutes a real black man—a debate sparked as much by the legacies of Bruce’s cohort as by the very possibility of someone like Perry. Each contestant is at least as virtual as he is actual, especially given such figural accents as Baldwin’s white button-down and Cleaver’s all-black cottons, encoding the imputed racial treacheries of the former and the virulent racial essentialisms of the latter. Their enmities draw strength from what they denounce in each other (Baldwin’s homosexuality and Europhilia, Cleaver’s homophobia and chauvinism) but also from what they recognize in each other (a shared black maleness they conceive so differently, finding the other’s performance intolerable but impossible to disavow as a distorting mirror of oneself). Baldwin and Cleaver thus inhabit their own closed crystal, accentuated by the camera’s prowling tracks around them. Their debate permits no “outside,” guaranteeing that someone like Perry will forever fight feelings of his own virtuality despite his obvious actuality, and at the expense of becoming alienated from what can prove empowering or erotic about one’s own virtual potentials. Perry at least recognizes this, in choosing to exhibit this curious film for his classmates, so as to certify a history behind his precarious positioning as a black gay man, contesting allegations that his homosexuality has “got nothing to do with” the course’s theme of black political struggle. Even more salutary, as reflected in Perry’s second stab at a project for his course, Bruce’s unexpected arrival—a kind of cracking in to a closed world, a dynamic Deleuze does not theorize—rescues Perry’s sense of virtual possibility and power.

What’s Sex Got to Do with It? Kafka-esque questions of individual and collective constitution, of political urgency, and of deterritorialized time ghost the entire crystal of Brother to Brother, even when the film digs into so-called actual history. If, as we also saw

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in The Watermelon Woman, the rock of spectral invisibility and the hard places of fetishized appearance weigh heavily in an African American context, these impediments also plague evocations of queer desire—epidemically derealized as everything from a “phase” to a bogeyman to a social death, but also doggedly corporealized as an entirely carnal disposition, particularly among men. Of course the stakes of this double bind only escalate when the experiences of blackness and queerness co-constitute each other, easily mitigating capacities to imagine backward, forward, or through one’s own moment. Pressures, then, to actualize a vision of a black queer past for his classmates and for himself, or to establish virtual bonds with figures in time and in nearby space, operate as heavily on Perry as on Rodney Evans’s film. The crystal-image structure, as articulate of erotic and political contradictions as of temporal and aesthetic ones, enables them both in their respective films to achieve that high-wire task. Sexuality of any kind should not be privatized as a bedroom-only concern or colonized strictly in the genitals, a perceptual threat that afflicts some crowds more than others. Nor, according to Deleuze and Guattari, can sexuality be understood as the sole, abstracted basis for a revolution (AO 350) or, in the words of Perry’s version of Cleaver, for “fundamental, irrevocable liberation.” Bedroom desires and genital activities are, however, indelible to Bruce’s and Perry’s experiences and to their mutual recognitions; they also influence Baldwin’s and Cleaver’s failures and horrors of reciprocal recognition. Citing homosexuality as “more than an example” and closer to a paradigmatic case for their platform of decolonizing the machinic unconscious (AO 68), Deleuze and Guattari nevertheless demur alongside Foucault that “no ‘gay liberation movement’ is possible as long as homosexuality is caught up in a relation of exclusive disjunction with heterosexuality” (AO 350). “Sexuality” requires deterritorializing into looser, broader, more politically invested discourses, like that of desire, for sexual “liberation” to mean anything but an unwitting reconsolidation around false binaries—though there are, of course, many ways to go about this, and considerably more than I mean to address here. In any case, just because desire does not equal sexuality, entailing many other facets and forms of expression, this “does not at all mean that desire is something other than sexuality” (AO 116). Perceiving relations between the two as pliable and co-constitutive but not precisely identical—as crystalline, in Deleuze’s not-yet-articulated cinematic locutions—is an insight that proves “necessary to open sexuality and libidinal investment onto the determination of a sociohistorical field” (AO 183). This is precisely what seems to have happened around the table shared by Nugent and Hurston and Douglas and Thurman and Hughes, and what happens even more expansively within the irrational but affecting encounters between Bruce and Perry. Though Brother to Brother only obliquely allegorizes the genesis of Nugent’s work, much as Naked Lunch suggested the origin of Burroughs’s novel, the movie recommends Nugent as an equal progenitor of that “strange Anglo-American

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literature” written by “men who know how to leave, how to scramble the codes, to cause flows to circulate” (AO 132, 133). These include codes of time, desire, and fellow feeling that Brother to Brother enables through its peculiar quantum mechanics between two historically removed protagonists. They become the foci of an erotically, artistically, temporally, politically, and historically resonant ellipse, inviting others, including viewers of all persuasions, to share and stretch that orbital space with them. This achievement aligns with Cheryl’s chasing of Fae but also with queer recovery missions like Ann Cvetkovich’s journey into the archives of lesbian feeling or Heather Love’s creation of “an image repertoire of modernist melancholia,” another tradition to which Nugent surely belongs.37 Perry enacts Love’s protocol of feeling backward in relation to Nugent’s 1920s, Baldwin’s 1960s, and Basquiat’s 1980s, which all feel stratigraphically present in different ways within Perry’s own ambiguous “presentness.” Meanwhile, through complex twists of Deleuzian time and affect, Old Bruce paradoxically feels his way “backward” to the much younger Perry, whose story he senses he has already experienced. Neither the characters nor their film can soothe queer history’s wounds or soften its disappointments; nor do they escape the “temporal splitting at the heart of all modernism,” which they all but embody.38 Still, they persist and inspire more of what Love describes as Orphic retrievals of scintillating figures who cannot be looked at too closely without losing them anew. And so we find ourselves giving another queer, affective, and redolently cinematic spin on Deleuze’s famous statement of the minor’s dilemma. In this version, we as queers, or as anyone trying to find a foothold and a coalition in the present, cannot exist without a past that virtually abides within that present, yet we cannot afford to look at the past too romantically or relentlessly (the Orphic trap), but we also cannot afford not to look. Two extremely welcome deus ex machinas that help to square this maddening circle are desire and imagination. Brother to Brother’s negotiations of endlessly splitting temporality yield something similar to what Foucault famously described Anti-Oedipus to be: an “ars erotica, ars theoretica, ars politica” (AO xii). Within Evans’s film, this process of artistically producing desire, relations, and mutual understanding, within and despite differences, culminates in the late evening when Bruce, having asked Perry for nothing but “a little bit of time,” paints his portrait in the now-threadbare but still-standing Niggeratti Manor. Both men, though only Bruce owns up to it, discuss their art-making and their time-defying rapport as a sexual coming-together. “Maybe you can get a little bit of it back tonight,” Perry suggestively proposes to Bruce, as the film cuts to a shot of the suddenly bare-chested younger man asking, “So how do you want me?” Though Perry, the tease, laughs off Bruce’s salacious expression of willingness, he does purse his lips while he models, just as he did for that fetching stranger on the train in the first sequence. After these men paint their mutual portraits, the film fades to black—a bit of film grammar famous for its sexual frissons.

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Figure 4.2 Brother to Brother: Bruce and Perry produce each other’s images, locked in mutual, crystalline regard. Brother to Brother, 2004, dir. Rodney Evans.

Evans then fades back in with both men asleep on the floor, Perry’s hand on Bruce’s heart. In these, Bruce’s valedictory moments on earth, the men’s conjoined will is, to borrow words from D. N. Rodowick, “‘artistic’ rather than aesthetic” and “does not realize itself in the accomplished image of art, but rather in that being of becoming that is the creative act; it is intrinsically temporal.”39 Actually, the accomplished image of art does figure here, as the portraits Perry and Bruce have rendered of one another lock into a reciprocal, uninterrupted gaze across the room, and across other boundaries these two men have magically traversed, including that of historical time (see figure 4.2). But this artistic will is also intrinsically suffused with desire, another “nonlinear and non-chronological force whose relation to the whole is entirely different from that of the movement-image.”40 The desires Bruce awakens in Perry, even those that may have produced Bruce where he really shouldn’t exist, are permeated by their own pastness as the older man pulls a semiplatonic Purple Rose of Cairo on Perry, and later as his ashes blow through the wind. They are permeated, too, by their own passing presentness, poignantly in the undepicted night between Bruce and Perry that fades out just as it was getting going, and even more poignantly as Perry somehow fades away in the last shot, right before our eyes. They augur an uncertain futurity, always needful of imagination and desire as solace and shield. The shared will or “being of becoming” between Bruce and Perry is a crystalline fusion of both states, and of many other forces and feelings encompassed by desire in its queer, Deleuzian forms.

{5}

Crystal-Queer Economies Beau travail What’s Money Got to Do with It? The Niggeratti Manor party constitutes Brother to Brother’s most overtly crystalline episode, with old Bruce and young Perry swanning through blackand-white scenes of long-ago debauchery. This revelry convenes, it is worth recalling, as a fundraising party for Fire!! We never glean how or at what point funds were raised, though they must have been, because the journal gets produced. Not coincidentally, this sequence is also the film’s most erotically vivacious: Wally and Harold vigorously make love before the event starts; Bruce kisses several men once the party starts hopping; and a frisky, impromptu nude-photography session closes out the scene. Through this interval, and by extension across the movie, money—solicited, redistributed, but largely invisible—is the virtual shadow of lush living, of artistic ambition, and of desire’s most lubricious forms.1 Deleuze articulates similar ideas about money in a key passage from the crystal-image chapter of Cinema 2—ideas often quoted outside this original context, but holding essential resonances for filmmaking in this mode. Money embodies for Deleuze its own crystalline structure: simultaneously the actual, exchangeable form that labor and value assume in the world and the virtual network of abstractions into which they are plunged and occulted, extracted from producers and production sites rather than accruing to them.2 Due to filmmaking’s complex temporalities and profound reliance on capital, money is cinema’s “most intimate and most indispensable enemy,” and “the obverse of all the images that the cinema shows and sets in place, so that films about money are already, if implicitly, films within the film or about the film” (C2 77).3 If we read these claims back through Cinema 2’s notions of temporality, we could add that every actual image in this extravagantly expensive, hyper-commodified art form suggests the following: (1) The pastness of money budgeted, amassed, and spent by producers; (2) a passing box-office transaction by which artists’ labors and patrons’ appetites strive to reflect each other as closely as possible; and (3) an open-ended catalyst for profits, sequels, imitations, tie-ins,

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and occasional innovations that current films make possible for the future. Within the more specific terms of the crystal-image, as we rehearsed them in chapter 4, any actual shot in a film reflects these virtual movements of money. However, insofar as these designations are always trading places, we can also posit every cinematic image as a virtual mirage of its actual processes of production: the labor of machines and people, the balancing of ledgers, and the real “bottom line.” Cinema 2 places such weight on the permanent but polymorphous bonds among money and movies—and the flows of capital preoccupy Deleuzian theory so generally—that we must attend to this essential, crystalline relation, and to what it portends for other crystalline relations I have theorized, including those of queer desire. Still, to explore the roles of money or, more broadly, of value-laden exchanges within the desiring-image is not to abandon this book’s theoretical orientations for a more strictly materialist analysis. A Deleuzian theorization of queer cinema affords opportunities not just to release desire from idealized forms of hetero- or homosexuality but also to conceptualize how money, desire, and image-making produce and presuppose one another, in ways that remain subject to change. I will pursue these issues in relation to two important titles in recent queer cinema, Claire Denis’s Beau travail (1999) and Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine (1998). Before we proceed to those readings, however, allow me to articulate the theoretical premises of this chapter more fully. Whereas, as we have just heard, capital is the virtual coefficient of the moving image in Deleuze’s Cinema 2, capital is equally the coefficient of desire in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. Both are implicated in the same cycles of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, each tracing breakaway lines of flight from an existing social body.4 Deterritorialization, we recall, is the endemic habit of desiringmachines wherever they have not been blocked by Oedipal mandates: spreading always toward new horizons, producing, absorbing, and aggregating into new forms that will later require their own atomizations. In relation to capitalism, the same concept of deterritorialization furnishes “the very fabric of its existence, as both its primary determinant and its fundamental raw material” (AO 33). By substituting market prices and exchange-rates for actual costs and labor-value—and by moving always to fill every vacuum and swallow every out-of-field—capital “has created an axiomatic of abstract quantities that keeps moving further and further in the direction of the deterritorialization of the socius” (AO 33). Desire and capital both deterritorialize “organized” assemblages, yet eventually, they yield new consolidations, binding subjects and groups into formations that may antagonize their interests, politically, libidinally, and otherwise. Deleuze and Guattari further contend that just as the “abstract axiomatic” of capital permeates all movements of the socius, for better or worse, “beneath the conscious investments of economic, political, religious, etc., formations,

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there are unconscious sexual investments, microinvestments that attest to the way in which desire is present in a social field” (AO 183). In this respect, “all sexuality is a practice of economy” (AO 12), and so, via a mission statement that queer theory later takes up through different terms and methods, “it is necessary to open sexuality and libidinal investment onto the determinations of a sociohistorical field, where the economic, the political, and the religious are things that are invested by the libido for themselves, and not the derivatives of a daddy-mommy” (AO 183). In other words, not only does sexuality assume innumerable forms beyond those poles prescribed by the Oedipal “triangle,” but desire does not originate within psychic or familial bases, from which it then proceeds into social and market relationships. Rather, desire creates and works within the same flows that produce social and economic worlds, whatever shapes they might take. The heteronormative nuclear family that is the cornerstone of Oedipal theory, patronizingly termed “daddy-mommy” by Deleuze and Guattari, is but one contingent form the desiring-machines assume and reinvest, under considerable pressure to do so, within a particular sociohistorical arrangement.5 Thus, by a transitive property in Deleuze’s thought across multiple books, if image = money in Cinema 2, and money = desire in Anti-Oedipus—even if the equals signs denote not congruencies but crystalline bonds—then it follows that image = money = desire. Reading this substitution into Cinema 2’s claims about money, desire becomes another “obverse of all the images that the cinema shows and sets in place.” If, moreover, “films about money are already, if implicitly, films within the film or about the film,” then it follows that films foregrounding the “microinvestments” of capital are also, however implicitly, “about” the microinvestments of desire within a sociohistorical field. By still further extension, shifts within either economy surely imply related shifts in the other. Bearing in mind how these actual and virtual economies operate for producers, exhibitors, and consumers of film—and from more theoretical vantages as well—I want to reassess the queer and political implications of the crystalline desiring-images in Beau travail and Velvet Goldmine. If the modest style of Brother to Brother conceals its subtler intricacies, the mercurial virtualities of Denis’s and Haynes’s films could hardly be more flagrant, inescapably prompting one’s sense that there is more to these movies, erotically and otherwise, than meets the eye. Both texts, albeit very differently, reflect perpetual, ambivalent intimacies between desire and money, as situated within particular contexts of history, temporality, politics, and new prospective coalitions. Money appears absent from the Legionnaires’ moribund microsociety, which we observe in detail throughout Beau travail, and seems barely less absent from the Djiboutians’ public sphere, which we perceive only peripherally. Desire, too, plays at best a tacit role within the film’s images or in the strained socius they evoke. Notwithstanding this dearth of specifically erotic

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imagery, Beau travail was received eagerly by queer audiences, in the United States especially, as a result of prescriptive marketing—the film’s widely attributed queerness produced by profit-seeking design, no matter how actually or obviously homoerotic its images appeared to some viewers. Nevertheless, despite what the advertising implied, the economies of sex, money, and other forms of exchange that link the soldiers and the Djiboutians prove cryptic and open-ended—deterritorialized, however temporarily, from Oedipal and capitalist structures. These ambiguities expand, confounding assumptions of what registers as actual or virtual within even the most hyperbolically gendered bodies or in the potential relations among those bodies. Given the asymmetries between the film as made and as marketed, its reputation as a homoerotic drama also relied, I will argue, on the intellectual economy of queer studies, as it had circulated for almost a decade before Beau travail debuted.6 More recent trends in queer studies, however, including the emergent field of transgender theory, furnish new ways of viewing Beau travail beyond those that its distributors promoted. In crystalline fashion, Denis’s film works very differently and admits wider, more virtual potentials than the movie’s outward aspects suggest, especially regarding desire, embodiment, and their relations to power or privilege. Beau travail avoids posing a mere textual parallel of the controversial “wrong body” trope in trans studies, whereby the film might be taken to furnish a Melvillean essence inside an incongruously modern shell. Instead, the movie generates formal and conceptual spaces wherein readings of gender and sex, relations among images, nascent sympathies among individuals and collectives, and potential “meanings” remain in flux, bartering with each other amidst a field of uncertain values. Even the hardest-bodied denizens of Denis’s film are vulnerable to the forces that multiply temporalities, unsettle perceptions and collectives, deterritorialize circuits of exchange, and proliferate potentials for immanent transition everywhere around them. Such transitions—and indeed “trans”-ness in all its forms—thus supply important lenses for reevaluating the film. By contrast to the Legionnaires’ ascetic life-world, Velvet Goldmine conjures corporate and commodity capitalism as insistent forces within its images, most ominously amid the mausolean pall of the Reaganite 1980s, from which vantage a great deal of the movie is narrated. Granted, one cannot assert confidently that Goldmine is narrated “from” anywhere, so replete is it with mutually undermining sheets of past and points of present. In any case, the virtualities of money are no less endemic than the molecules of desire in producing the film’s kaleidoscope of sounds, images, objects, fantasies, collective investments, and erotic thrills, especially in the movie’s 1970s plotline. Both films, then, in their stories and as commodities, highlight Deleuzian tensions that bind movements of money to even the queerest images of desire. These tensions further inflect how they obliquely adapt their uncredited but widely

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acknowledged source texts: Herman Melville’s Billy Budd in the case of Beau travail, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane for Goldmine. Each film rejects any impulse toward exact duplication, a relation Deleuze, in his essay on Melville, glosses as “mimetic rivalry”—even though the marketplace usually demands that approach from literary adaptations in order to generate cultural and monetary capital.7 Through their internal and intertextual orientations, Beau travail and Velvet Goldmine also suggest new forms of the crystal-image, recombining all four of the stylistic and ideological varieties that I outlined in chapter 4. Both films convey desire as trapped within looping cycles while signaling new, isolated lines of flight, even as they stress tangible collapses into erotic stagnation, dwindled wealth, and “belatedness” broadly construed. Both films are as skeptical as Deleuze is about the “revolutionary” promise of desire, and yet neither forecloses on potentials for change or novel desiring-productions. If “there is indeed a sexual revolution,” Deleuze and Guattari stipulate, it “does not concern objects, aims, or sources, but only machinic forms or indices” (AO 366), which in Beau travail’s case concern new social, erotic, and economic relations, largely deframed, that have barely taken hold within the postcolonial Djiboutian socius as the film concludes. Still, the film’s open ending(s), peculiar economies, and metatextual traces demonstrate that old, inherited systems (such as Billy Budd, military hierarchy, regimented heterosexuality, etc.) can be deterritorialized in fresh ways. Beau travail thereby implies that even fragile circuits and inchoate desires may yet enable new collective becomings and politically salient transformations.

The Oyster and the Book in Blood Beau travail, depicting an irresolvably actual and virtual army, shifting among two or more temporal tracks, reperforming while also distorting Billy Budd, has already attracted readings through the heuristic of the crystal-image. Martine Beugnet distinguishes it as “probably the most ‘Deleuzian’ of Denis’s films” insofar as “the certainties of place and time dissolve in jarring cuts, superimpositions and backwash movements reminiscent of Deleuze’s definition of the crystalline narration.”8 Denis, an erudite reader of Deleuze and other philosophers, employs comparable metaphors for Beau travail’s construction, describing its script as existing “in two parts, with two valves, like an oyster.”9 She has even confessed that a quotation from Deleuze was part of the initial brief she received from ARTE, commissioning her work as part of its “Terres Etrangères” series.10 Elsewhere, Denis relates how a tense, circling standoff between Sgt. Galoup (Denis Lavant) and his mystified subordinate Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin) allows Beau travail “to crystallize something that has to do with the body, and do this better than we could have done with a scene in

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Melville’s text, where a bowl of soup gets knocked over.”11 Denis’s allusion to the spilled-soup episode from chapter 13 of Billy Budd—crucial within that text’s queer economy of spontaneous emissions—affirms her agenda of rendering in crystalline, cinematic terms some of Melville’s most notorious scenes, including his most homoerotic figurations.12 Correspondingly, Denis describes an unusual preproduction process in which she and co-writer Jean-Pol Fargeau generated actual and virtual drafts of the script: one that more or less dictated the movie as filmed, and another in the guise of a journal kept by the defrocked Sgt. Galoup.13 One virtue of this approach was fiscal: Galoup’s diary encompassed events that might prove expensive to film, and so the “actual” script offered budget-friendly, poetically abstract metonymies for the impractical spectacles, while opening those images to alternative readings. For example, filming actual military exercises soon proved impossible once hostile Legionnaires and Djiboutians began spreading rumors that Beau travail was a pornographic production and/or an anti-French jeremiad and/or an exposé of homosexuality within the corps.14 Instead of an actual drill, Denis filmed a shot of the soldiers’ underwear hanging on a laundry line, thus implying the rigorous training regimen that would have produced so much wash. Beau travail’s elliptical tableaus and crystalline montage thus have much to do with money, whether saving or spending it. They also bear direct precedents in Deleuze, who asserts in his essay on “Bartleby” that every book an author produces is in fact two books, one rendered in ink (or on celluloid, in Denis’s case) and one “written in the soul, with silence and blood.”15 By scholarly consensus, homoeroticism ranks high among the Melvillean themes that necessarily remained “silent,” or at least relatively so, at the surface of the text.16 Still, given the deframed but titillating scenes Beau travail implies wherein, for example, a squadron of soldiers are simultaneously without their underwear, Denis’s and Fargeau’s crystalline mode of adapting Billy Budd evokes potent ties to sexuality, among other forces. Even apart from those “special images,” Beau travail suggests that its puzzling images and gaps concern desire at a fundamental level, a position Denis herself avows while refusing to ascribe it, as Deleuze would have done, to her status as a female filmmaker.17 She states: I think women are like men; they take up sex because it is the way of approaching matters to do with cinema. Sexuality is included in such a cinematic quest. Photography already interrogates us on the living and the dead, the present and the past, and we arrive obligatorily at desire, the desire of the character put on display, as sexuality. It is difficult to make films without that.18 In other words, desire is at some level a virtual mainstay of all cinematic images. Even its most actual or perceptible manifestations, “as sexuality,” register but one face of a larger, crystalline problem—expanding to encompass pastness

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and presentness, or life and death, and fully ingrained into the ontology of what cinema is. If sexuality entails only one aspect of desire, though, and homoeroticism but one potential assemblage of sexuality, what other desires might Beau travail produce on the screen or in the audience? Denis’s messages are astute but mixed. She suggests that the outermost edge of desiring possibility in the film is “sexuality between men,” a frontier she credits Billy Budd as already having broached.19 Then again, in her account of filming Beau travail, she more cryptically describes the desires circulating among her and her all-male cast as “not at all” on the “order of heterosexuality” but as “a very strange feeling,” palpable in only a “vague way.”20 She further asserts that the always-already eroticized bodies of the Legionnaires invite lascivious appropriation beyond the homoerotic (viz. Edith Piaf and her famous song) and that “the partitions separating men and women are not as impermeable as all that.”21 Hence, the porous gender-divides and crystallization of “very strange feelings” in Beau travail imply other desires more freshly afoot in this text and more amorphous. Denis thus considers homoeroticism a conscious inheritance from Melville. An important generation of queer scholarship amplifies her sense of homosexuality as already “universalized” among Billy Budd’s men, in ways that the circumlocutionary prose both indicates and conceals. However, Denis joins Deleuze in postulating desire as a broader and stranger phenomenon than that which shows itself as “sexuality,” and she reports of vague erotic economies and of permeable partitions among gender categories. Furthermore, as this book has insisted, images bespeak their own immanent desiring-productions that cannot be conflated with those of represented characters or their auteurs. Given the determination of Deleuzian desiring-machines to break from extant assemblages—emitting new potentials rather than affirming old ones—how might we articulate Beau travail’s very strange feeling not of expressing a homoeroticism already “in” Melville’s novel but of producing “vague” desires of its own? This possibility prompts me to ask from different queer vantages whether we know, for sure, who belongs to the category of “men” in Beau travail, what we think we know about them, and why.

The Broken Compass and the Three Economies To begin with the film’s most oyster-like valve, Beau travail passes repeatedly between an apparently present reality of the court-martialed Sgt. Galoup, relegated to civilian life in Marseilles, and what Deleuze would call “pure recollections” of life in the Djiboutian outpost. Possibly these sequences are flashbacks to events that actually happened, subject or not to Galoup’s revisionist filter. They may also constitute “pure potentials” as to what could have transpired in Djibouti, unlashed to any character’s purview or any insistence

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on fact. In any event, not every shot allows for Galoup’s visual or diegetic point of view. We have uncertain access to his interiority, no signs of when (if ever) we exit or enter his perspective, and in prototypical time-image fashion, “there is no place from which to ask” (C2 7).22 The opacity of the “book in ink” may whet appetites to schizoanalyze the “book in blood,” always a precarious project. In a sense, Billy Budd is the book in Beau travail’s blood, offering a tempting legend for Denis’s deterritorialized images. However, as we observed in Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch and will again in Velvet Goldmine, veiled relations to a hypotext often betray intense reworkings of incident and theme, even beyond transplanting Melville’s eighteenth-century maritime drama to a late twentieth-century Foreign Legion camp along the Red Sea. The film’s structure hinges upon one colossal change: whereas Billy Budd’s errant strike at venal Sgt. Claggart unwittingly kills him and necessitates Billy’s execution, Denis’s Galoup survives the parallel blow administered by Gilles Sentain. Sentain’s sentence, milder than Billy’s, is to be dropped in the harsh Djiboutian desert and forced to navigate his way home. Galoup sabotages this endeavor by breaking Sentain’s compass, depriving him of any orientation—a term whose ideological work across spatial, sexual, perceptual, and philosophical registers Sara Ahmed has explored in rich detail, all of them pertinent to the case of Beau travail.23 Galoup’s treachery, discovered when Sentain’s comrades find his wrecked compass being sold by nomads (see figure 5.1), prompts his expulsion to Marseilles, where he may or may not commit suicide at the film’s conclusion. Sentain’s fate is also unclear, pending how we reconcile one image of him

Figure 5.1 Beau travail: The crystallized compass. Beau travail, 1999, dir. Claire Denis.

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dying of dehydration in a limitless expanse of salt crystals with a subsequent image of him being found and nursed by yet another African caravan. Unperceived by Galoup or by anyone in the old unit, establishing no definitive point from which to gauge their temporal situation or diegetic actuality, these shots of Sentain emerge as “‘pure recollection,’ which is always virtual” (C2 123). Such “irrational” images persist outside any temporal sequence or fixed economy of relation, whether among the film’s images or between the film and the viewer. Instead, resonantly with Denis’s figure of the compass, Deleuze says such a shot acts as a “magnetizer” or “shining point” for surrounding images. Our final impressions of Galoup are similarly magnetic, especially the infamous coda where he dances, alone and possibly dead, in that mirrored, windowless, literally crystalline dancehall through which Beau travail’s characters have occasionally passed. These images of Sentain and Galoup living or dying at the film’s finish recommend themselves as “special images,” given their late emergence, their hazy clues as to the film’s obscure perspective (i.e., its orientations, in every sense), and the ways these characters both anchor and trouble Beau travail’s link to Billy Budd. These images furthermore capture both men in a state Deleuze and Guattari name as “trans-alivedead” (AO 77), one they further and strangely specify as “transsexual” and as liberated from Oedipal coordinates, releasing spores of virtual, contesting signification in all directions.24 This quality of “pure recollection,” however, describes so much of the film, including scenes that encompass none of the ostensible protagonists, that Beau travail coalesces as a chain of what Cinema 2 calls “pure audio and sound situations.” That Beau travail dismantles our own spectatorial compass, magnetizing almost every shot into a pure recollection, does not stop us from trying to navigate its needle-spinning terrain. Nevertheless, we remain to some extent as lost as Sentain is within an expansive, crystalline field. Different viewers may privilege different figures as cardinal coordinates, making different, provisional “sense” of Beau travail, but any reading is necessarily extracted from a virtual field of other, simultaneous possibilities. Meanwhile, just as Sentain’s defective compass assumes a second life as a vendable ware, our frameworks for reading Beau travail embroil us, too, within changing economies of value. But what kinds of economies are these? In order to theorize the systems of exchange linking the film’s images and tendering them to a possibly mystified audience, it may help to begin at the level of economy as overtly represented in Beau travail’s images. Denis’s film exhibits three models of exchange, with three associated apparatuses of value and power. The first involves the symptoms of a dehydrated, postimperial economy, from which goods and wealth were systematically reterritorialized back to a First-World hub. Beau travail, however, imparts little sense of the French preserving such privilege or of the Djiboutians producing toward these ends. With the colonial apparatus enfeebled and Djibouti’s resources apparently

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close to exhaustion, that circuit appears to have subsided. The second economic model concerns the subtle infiltrations of such Western commodity brands as Marlboro, Sprite, and Coca-Cola into the mise-en-scène. While we do not see these products actually traded or consumed, the film uses billboards, bumper stickers, and other signs to mark their virtual presence within this sparsely populated space. Harking to complexly multinational rather than imperialistic flows of money, this economy also promises its consumers a different adequation of value. That is, the Coke you buy will look like the Coke in the ad, and it will please you in exactly the ways the ad implies, if only through a steady but arbitrary deterritorialization of tastes and expectations around the actual qualities of this commodity. Despite the prodigious global wingspan of late-century capitalism, the sequences in Djibouti admit a third economic model, localized and based in bartering, rejecting any centralizing of values and subsisting on singular, point-of-sale negotiations. In one instance of such exchanges, two Djiboutian women, one of whom is casually Galoup’s lover, debate the different rates they charge their customers for their handmade carpets and prayer rugs—albeit within an interior space festooned with ads for Western-owned cola and cigarette companies. The broken, salt-encrusted compass itself appears on a table where a caravan hawks a series of similarly crystallized goods, all with contingent values. A young boy at this vending table, for example, asks 1,000 francs for what looks like the iodized skull of a beira or gazelle. Is the skull “worth” that? Who can say? Having rehearsed the economies manifested in the movie’s images, we can align those with economies of the images, or obtaining among them. As the “most Deleuzian of Denis’s films,” we expect Beau travail to reject any fixed or centralized regimes of meaning or relation among images, thus rejecting the structures of the first economic mode. Shots unfold outside narrative or temporal organization, much as the Foreign Legion outpost persists without a fixed imperial mandate—so much so that the Djiboutians gaze impassively on the unit as a zoo-like, unthreatening curio. At all levels of its global-political allegory, then, as well as in its Cinema 2-style aesthetics, Beau travail suggests a massive deterritorializing of rigid systems: of meaning, of money, and of postcolonial relations between the former rulers and the formerly ruled. For many viewers, this arc extends intuitively to the movie’s ambiguous erotics, and from there to queer cinema’s presumed position at a decentered margin of the cinematic marketplace. When David Pendleton proposes, with reference to Beau travail, a Deleuzian contrast between a “gay cinema” that emphasizes genre templates, identity politics, and proscribed communities against a “queer cinema” built upon more “open” forms, communities, and exchanges, his terms resonate totally with what Martine Beugnet articulates as a contrast between the “closed” economy of the postimperial Legionnaires and the “open” circuits of exchange among the Africans.25 These traits suggest a film rooted in

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the third type of economy, where relations among images, between the film and its literary source, and between the text and its viewers must be ceaselessly bartered outside any organized grid of value. However, as deterritorialized as Beau travail is in form, theme, and mysterious desires, we have already reviewed how that metaphysic characterizes both the second and third economic models, not only around the nomad’s table but also amid multinational capitalism. The latter constantly renegotiates new markets and limits, spreading to new terrains (as we also observe in Naked Lunch) without “empowering” their denizens or easing inequalities of capital. Its viral brands remind us that deterritorialization need not connote heroic dissidence, which no one would ascribe to the Camel cigarette company for attaining a foothold in an East African outpost. Money and desire accompany each other along multifarious routes, and not every breakaway line of flight opens up equal potentials for revised politics. In this economy of money and images, the Sprite poster and the Marlboro decals operate not unlike the laundry hanging from the soldiers’ lines: they are crystalline signs for actual and virtual transactions too complicated to film. Given Fredric Jameson’s laments at how Hollywood misrepresents the modern, globalized economy through clichéd figures of an “immense communicational and computer network,” Denis’s diffuse and crystalline strategies may be the only feasible way to suggest this world-system with a minimum of distortion.26 In that sense, even if many viewers of Beau travail take no conscious note of them, the billboards and brand images function as “special images” within the film, placing it within a historical and political context that makes us appropriately wary of conflating deterritorialization with minor potentials and escapes. I doubt these shots constituted product placements in the legal sense, and I wonder if Denis even paid for their use. Regardless of whether they incurred revenue the way such shots would in a Hollywood studio film, they signify a global economy where even a film like Beau travail—one whose enigmatic story, odd rhythms, impenetrable characters, and puzzling gender dynamics feel innately noncommercial—remains tangled within these conduits for amassing and unevenly distributing wealth. Such vexing intimacies persist even when filmmakers, including production companies and distributors, labor to make such “special images” feel unremarkable to our eyes. These issues importantly inform the movie’s relationship to desire, concerning what we see in the film and how audiences are oriented around the film. This discussion requires reiterating those co-constitutive relations among money, desire, and the cinematic image that I derived from Deleuze at the start of the chapter, for these economic relations refract onto Beau travail’s surprisingly avid reception among queer spectators in and beyond the academy, who oriented “around” the film in surprising numbers and with unabating intensity. If the Coca-Cola placards, et al., offer the text’s clearest signs of larger, virtual economies infiltrating its arid environment, the glistening, half-naked

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male bodies, particularly that of Gilles Sentain, similarly served as “special images” that iconographically situated Beau travail within corporate, nichemarketed economies of theatrical booking, advertising, and DVD sales. These images of Sentain and his mates, barely distinguishable from pictorial ads for gay clubs in any urban, LGBT-centered nightlife circular, promise a textual economy of hyperbolically masculine forms, of men living without women, and—especially given the links to Melville—of homoerotic implications. These effects endow even the most evidently natural images of actual bodies against actual landscapes with virtual relations to money, audience building, and profit. As Catherine Grant has documented, even Beau travail’s kinship bond with Billy Budd emerged less as a self-evident fact of the text than as an orchestrated product-support decision, implemented differently in various markets. This research provides not just a structural template but, in more ways than Grant’s article highlights, an inextricable dimension of how Beau travail became perceptible as a “homoerotic” film, with marketers performing “affective labor” on the film before most audiences even had a look at it.27 This conjunction of literary legacy and sexual overtone reaches an apogee with New Yorker Video’s North American DVD, which features on its cover Grégoire Colin’s sculpted torso under the pull-quote “Voluptuous . . . Stunning . . . Visually Spellbinding . . .,” and commences the plot précis on the back of the box (the reverse-face, as it were, of this purchasable crystal) with the phrase, “Inspired by Herman Melville’s Billy Budd.”28 One might posit that Melville’s imprimatur gives this hunky soldier class while he gives Melville sex, except, following queer scholars’ reorienting of Melville around ideas of homoeroticism, it appears that Billy Budd endows Beau travail with class and sex: an aura of literary prestige as well as confirmation of that homoerotic promise hovering over the bare-chested cover-boy. Without that accumulated critical context, Colin’s aloof and lissome body, like those of the other Legionnaires, might signal very different ontologies and economies of sex and gender, falling closer to Melville’s Deleuzian legacy as a progenitor of indecipherable bachelors, unlikely collectives, and deterritorializing effects than to Melville’s queer-theoretical profile as a generator of humid and historically situated homosocialities. In fact, one goal of Deleuze’s Melville, deterritorializer extraordinaire, would be to stop Colin’s body from working like a commodity form—a Coke bottle or a Marlboro man—such that the body itself “means” homosexuality, either avowed or repressed, for viewers trained to make that attribution. To the extent Beau travail’s poster and images did wind up working in more or less this way, how do we explain that, but also, what else could we take these stranded-beefcake images to mean? My goal is not to expose Beau travail as a benighted artifact of commodification or to guilt anyone for finding the film homoerotically titillating. My aim instead is to showcase how the film’s rapid acceptance as a “homoerotic” film and its swift canonization as a modern classic of queer cinema bulked up its revenues

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and its critical standing but arrived at some cost to other, virtual possibilities of meaning and relation in the film. I agree with commentators who detect in Beau travail a considerable charge of queerness. For me, though, the film performs its most interesting labors as a queer film—and as a Deleuzian minor text in other respects—through its nascent sketch of bodies, desires, politics, and economies that, in Deleuze’s odd but recurrent phrase, “do not yet exist.”

Beau travail, or the Ambiguities For Billy Budd to serve as an orienting compass within Beau travail’s magnetic field of bewildering images, especially one that points viewers further in the direction of perceiving homoerotics, these spectators must possess the requisite literary-cultural capital and/or receive the necessary goads from promotional materials even to recognize Beau travail as a mirror-image of Melville’s novella.29 Grant, however, reveals that just as Denis includes no mention of Billy Budd in the on-screen credits, early advertising materials in France made no reference to Melville beyond a website link to Britten’s score and the same site’s reproduction of two Melville poems on its entry page.30 Only when Beau travail bowed to international audiences in Venice and then in New York in the fall of 1999 did press materials begin to pitch the film as having been adapted from Billy Budd.31 These concessions to foreign markets did not significantly adjust the film’s reception in France, where it was advertised and reviewed primarily as a tale of intrigue within the Legion and of uneasy postcolonial entente. Within a year, Beau travail secured reviews in more U.S. periodicals than any previous Denis title, and it turned a profit on its boutique arthouse release, Denis’s only feature to do so since her debut film, Chocolat (1988). By this point, “everybody seemed to ‘know’ . . . that Beau travail was a loose adaptation,” with quotation marks denoting such “knowledge” as highly constructed.32 Grant’s interest in this narrative, derived in part from Timothy Corrigan’s work on the commerce of auteurism, relates to the fiscal and cultural capital that accrue to the writer-directors of such “free” adaptations as Beau travail.33 Moreover, I read this process of auteur creation as I did in Cronenberg’s case, as a parable for all Deleuzo-Guattarian subject-production, where individual identities cohere only as decoys for more complex, molecular conjunctions that exceed, produce, and unsettle them. Meanwhile, the film’s reputation for homoeroticism, which ghosted Denis’s project even during filming, received ever-greater attention upon its American release—not just in common with the Melville-centered discourses but possibly because of those links. Pendleton was among the first responders to vaunt the film as a case of heterosexual, non-Anglo directors furnishing hotter, formally richer, and politically sharper films for LGBT audiences than their U.S.- and

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U.K.-based colleagues were doing by the end of the 1990s, though these were the markets where New Queer Cinema had so recently fluoresced.34 Special, Beau travail-centered issues of Studies in French Cinema and the Journal of European Studies paid significant attention to sexuality in the film, as did new, book-length studies of Denis’s filmography. One of these was written by lesbian-feminist film scholar Judith Mayne, who describes Beau travail as “a reading .  .  . of the homosocial and homoerotic triangle of Melville’s novel through the New Wave’s (and especially Godard’s) explorations of heterosexual desire.”35 The film has not lost its status as a queer touchstone, even as other reception communities canonized it within their own disciplinary rubrics, everywhere from postcolonial to literary to dance studies, from surveys of African cinema to sociologies of the Foreign Legion to scholarship on women directors. Though Grant soft-pedals the queer valences of Beau travail’s authorobsessed reception, she on two occasions names “gay cinema” first on a list of niche-markets toward which U.S. ads promoted the film. She also alludes to first studying Beau travail as part of a Queer Research Group whose writings about the film eventually constituted the issue of the Journal of European Studies mentioned above.36 Such excitement stands seemingly at odds with how little sexual content the film contains. What could we adduce as “sexual” or “erotic” in Beau travail? A fully clothed spooning session between Galoup and his female lover Rahel (Aïcha Med Robleh)? The flirtatious cruising in a unisex, Franco-African dance club? A split-second, high-angle, wholly de-eroticized glimpse of a nude Legionnaire under a makeshift shower? Even the film’s stylized calisthenics sequences, in which, for example, bare-chested men stretch in the sun or clasp each other’s torsos in quick succession, are shot and sonically mixed to suggest sterile encounters among what Forbes Morlock calls “solid objects,” rather than subcutaneous transmissions of desire.37 As entrancing as the Legionnaires’ bodies may be for some viewers, to posit them as inherently homoerotic is to presume out of hand that their erotic appeal routes exclusively or even primarily toward gay men (via a film whose director, editor, and cinematographer are all women), or that desire commands a sexed or gendered modifier. The ardent queer reception of Beau travail also squares uneasily with readings of the film that differently comprehend the bodies on display and their mutual implications. Leo Bersani, for example, sees Beau travail as exemplifying a type of human collective that is not essentially erotic or even essentially communal. For him, the Legionnaires’ bodies are conductors not of a “sexual bonding” but of “a strenuous and fundamentally indifferent coming together.”38 Rob White similarly avers that “it’s possible to imagine a more explicitly gay Beau travail,” one in closer sync with its U.S. press materials.39 Regarding the hard, lapidary qualities of light and mise-en-scène that Morlock theorized as “solidity” and philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy describes in Beau travail as an “unbearable literalness,” White wittily describes these in terms of an “extreme outness.” As such,

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“surfaces do not give way to interiors,” and so no psychic or erotic hypothesis of homosexuality can be affirmed—even as these, of course, are what “outness” teasingly implies.40 Examining the scene where Sentain pulls a downed pilot from the sea, White offers that, typically of other transactions in Beau travail, “something is passing between them but we do not know what.” Against readings of active or repressed homosexuality in the film’s vision of the Legion, then, White argues that Beau travail “is also intelligible, perhaps more interestingly so, as juxtaposing desire as such with a sort of void or transmutation of desire.”41 How, then, to reconcile a rapturous reception of Beau travail among so many queer scholars and media outlets with the equal convictions of other critics that Beau travail produces not a homoerotic field but a “void of desire”? We could ascribe this paradox to a legacy of certain scholarly modes that have entrenched dyadic views of gender. For instance, after the U.S. ad campaigns foregrounded them as the lucrative epitomes of the film, the muscular Legionnaires suggested a “to-be-looked-at-ness” that many film scholars since Laura Mulvey have theorized as the inveterate “place of woman” in cinema.42 In that context, this seeming reversal lubricates a path toward reading the film’s Legion as structurally effeminized or even queer, via a dubious yet common slide from rubrics of gender to those of sexuality. A subtle version of such reasoning informs Sarah Cooper’s psychoanalytic syllogism by which Sgt. Galoup’s inflamed mixture of envy and fetishism in regard to Sentain—given that Freud presents envy as a strictly female capacity and fetishism as a male-only prerogative—can only be understood as a hermaphroditic synthesis, with queer ramifications for the movie and its claims on the audience.43 Beyond these dimorphic logics by which established gender positions are superficially flipped, even as they preserve basic codings of feminine passivity and fetishistic masculine potency, other queer-theoretical texts—read somewhat against their own psychoanalytic tendencies—show how categories of male and female could tilt instead into a molecular chaos of gendering, rather than a rigid dyad. Lee Edelman’s Homographesis, for example, posits homosexuality’s perennial associations with literary panache and flamboyant figuration: its own forms of to-be-looked-at-ness. However, homosexuality also names a form of difference that can be disturbingly “invisible,” to the ire of normative masculinities that aspire to a state of what Edelman calls “notto-be-looked-at-ness” and hope not to be confused with those “other” men.44 Hence, coercing exhibitionistic self-performance from gay men, even as these performances get reframed as a natural habitus of male homosexuality, can cast contagious suspicions on “straight” masculinity—unless straight men prove their difference from those men who are, as they say, “different.” Thus, the double edges of homographesis induce vigilant, performative demonstrations from all male bodies, rendering them both theatrical and oddly illegible:

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Homosexuality, therefore, remains subject to figuration as that which threatens the catastrophic undoing of history, national and familial both, by opening an epistemological gap, a space or void, in maleness itself—a gap in which, in the end, as it were, there is nothing to be seen, and no assurance, therefore, that the visual display of masculinity’s phallic ensign can suffice as evidence of the heterosexuality for which “masculinity” has become a trope.45 Beyond his serendipitous, Beau travail-ish allusion to a dephallicized “ensign” and an environment of historical and national catastrophe, Edelman clarifies how a florid apogee of homoerotic imagery and a “void or transmutation” of desire not only can coexist but often do. Moreover, this void, subverting any self-evidence in “maleness itself,” resonates with chapter 1’s account of how the time-image and hence the desiring-image incorporate forces they seem to exclude, and never more so than when those images appear most self-evident and self-contained. Edelman’s gaps in masculinity and Deleuze’s irrational intervals in cinema are emblematic, too, of what Grant more loosely glosses as “the narrational conventions of the art film,” involving “the connotation of potential meanings through the juxtaposition of images and sounds, without always providing a clear, explanatory framework.”46 Grant draws an analogy between this sketch of art-film poetics and Eve Sedgwick’s famous, deconstructive reading of Billy Budd as a shadow game of gay connotations and of historically newer gay denotations, a reading that has obligated all subsequent critics to wrestle with queer desire in Melville’s text. Sedgwick’s reading turns on the rhetorical figures of periphrasis (talking around a subject) and preterition (making only furtive allusions to topics of major import). Grant downplays how the gaps and “unclear frameworks” that comprise virtually art cinema do not simply mirror the bases of Sedgwick’s gay reading but effectively overlap with Sedgwick’s sense of what homosexuality is. Billy Budd’s epistemology of the closet as a circuit of “homosexual-homophobic knowing” exists precisely to create that figure of the “knowing spectator” whom Grant describes as sitting in the audience of Beau travail, intuiting the film’s Melvillean debts and thus the persistence of that “‘ambiguity’ presented around the motivations of Claggart and Vere at the heart of the Billy Budd hypotext.”47 Once again, Grant uses quotations marks to highlight the constructedness of this “ambiguity,” an important Melvillean byword. To cement her point, she follows her nod to Sedgwick with D. A. Miller’s gloss on Barthesian “connotation,” but without flagging this passage as hailing from Miller’s analysis of Hitchcock’s Rope, in which preterition and periphrasis once again emerge as queer tropes par excellence. Rather than arguing, then, that Beau travail prospered economically and critically as a queer film alongside its boutique marketing as an art film or through strategies similar to the seven-veils disclosure

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of its literary patrimony, I contend that tropes of the “knowing subject,” the open secret, and the derationalized, ambiguous “relation” serve co-constitutively as queer, arthouse, and Melvillean tropes. They coax viewers into the same spectatorial habits and enable them, upon discerning any one of these frameworks of meaning, to infer the other two. To read Beau travail’s “ambiguities,” especially in the knowledge of its Melvillean derivation, is already, in strong senses, to read the movie as gay. Beyond its role in fostering queer connotations, selling Beau travail as a Melville adaptation forces an emphasis on Galoup, Sentain, and Forestier as the film’s key figures, and specifically as crystal-reflections of the ClaggartBilly-Vere triangle. Taken as the key nodes of Billy Budd—as opposed to, say, maritime law, Christian allegory, or real historical mutinies, all of which organized earlier scholars’ approaches to Melville’s text—this trifecta of men has assumed a different cast in the wake of queer criticism. Sedgwick perceives Sgt. Claggart as a new literary and historical type: “There is a homosexual in this text,” she famously states.48 Yet Melville’s self-described “inside narrative” also suggests to her an infrared map of homosocial ardors linking all the men aboard the Bellipotent. In Deleuzian terms, she discloses how the actual homosexuality of John Claggart, however semi-obscured by Melville’s serpentine locutions, poses only the most visible face of virtual desires circulating among all men. These encompass even Captain Vere, who notarizes his own sexual and judicial neutrality in paradoxically flamboyant and self-interested ways, thus embodying Edelman’s crisis of homographesis. Given his italicized, unbearable literalness as “a homosexual,” Claggart, who “could even have loved Billy but for fate and ban,” therefore offers both a cardinal coordinate and an any-point-whatever on a homoerotic compass that becomes magnetized in multiple, bewildering directions.49 The growing global audience for Beau travail not only “seemed to know” that Denis had adapted but Billy Budd but also seemed to know that Billy Budd itself had become a periphrasis for homoeroticism. It is always risky to presume the cultural reach of scholarly claims, even among the elite-skewing, university-educated audiences of a coastal-market and repertory-driven title like Beau travail. Crucially, though, Beau travail was not alone among films of its vintage in presuming among niche and mass audiences some familiarity with queer-theoretical precepts. Four months before Beau travail debuted at Venice, another French filmmaker, Leos Carax, premiered Pola X (1999), which transplants the scenario of Melville’s 1852 novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities to contemporary France, depicted by Carax as a territory haunted by its xenophobic policies and its denials of Eastern European genocides.50 As with Beau travail, the French reception of Pola X revolved around these issues of national identity and political crisis, while international responses orbited at least as much around issues of sexuality. These include the film’s participation in that global trend toward actual sex in commercial movies that I explored in

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chapter 2, since Carax infamously photographs the unsimulated moment of Pierre’s incestuous penetration of his sister Isabelle’s body. Almost as widely noted was the film’s clear signaling of an erotic history between Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu) and Glen Stanly (renamed Thibault in the film, and played by Laurent Lucas). The novel defers its juicy suggestion of this homosocial bond until a late chapter, but when it arrives, it dilates in length and intense connotation; Pola X, by contrast, treats such male-male eroticism as yet another “something” that everyone seems to know about. The triangulated lusts linking Pierre, Glen, and Lucy Tartan are pivotal to James Creech’s argument in his book-length study of homoeroticism in Melville. Writing only three years after Epistemology of the Closet, Creech insists that “unavowable homoerotic experience was an active ingredient in Melville’s writings” and that “Foucault notwithstanding . . . it is important politically and ideologically to point it out. It is the only corrective we have for the real, nonhypothetical repression which weighed on him so severely, and which still weighs on individuals within our culture today.”51 Meanwhile, by 1999, even Hollywood-produced, studio-distributed titles increasingly absorbed “homoerotic” storylines, tropes of New Queer style, or rebukes of heteronormative custom in their narratives and aesthetics. These included the popular, semiotically heightened melodrama American Beauty and the highbrow literary murder mystery The Talented Mr. Ripley, both culminating in hate crimes born of internalized homophobia; the surrealist farce Being John Malkovich, culminating in a child-bearing lesbian union; Boys Don’t Cry, the Oscar-winning dramatization of the life and death of Brandon Teena; and Fight Club, a filtering of masculine rage through a brawny, glistening idealization of beefcake physiques within secret, all-male societies. (The first rule about homoerotic periphrasis is that we don’t talk about homoerotic periphrasis.) Queer media scholars were as likely to respond to this bouquet of commercial films as a consumerist reterritorializing of queer tropes as an exciting proliferation of the same.52 Either way, these films’ disparate stories and styles take for granted an audience with a substantially revised awareness of gender and sexuality as performative regimes, and of how homophobia incites inward as well as outward violence. Amy Villarejo builds a particularly complex and revealing case around the devastating police-confession scenes in Boys Don’t Cry, wherein Brandon appears forced “to speak the pathology of transgender, to confess to a ‘sexual identity crisis,’ even as the film knowingly stages the confession as an act of heteronormative discipline.”53 In other words, the only reason a swath of Boys Don’t Cry’s audience doesn’t heckle that film for “represent[ing] the very gesture it condemns”—that is, for forcing a battered Brandon in wide-angle closeup to name his hard-fought masculinity as a psychological disorder—is because, as the film implies through a series of stylistic clues, “the spectator is meant to make sense of this moment from within the knowledge that she has

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read Foucault, or, at the very least, the spectator is presumed to have some access to the coercive dimensions of Brandon’s confession, not from outside but from, as it were, the inside/out.”54 Villarejo’s savvy spectator cannot possibly stand in for everyone who happens upon Boys Don’t Cry in its rhizomatic media afterlives, but she must be presumed to exist in sufficient numbers that the film risks an otherwise damaging culpability in the very violence it so movingly and memorably excoriates. I feel the same way about the knowing spectator whom Grant entrusts to perceive ambiguities within Galoup’s, Sentain’s, and Forestier’s triangulated desiring-productions, despite the impressive opacity of all three men. Whereas, however, Boys Don’t Cry hopes its spectator will translate Foucaultian axioms to a different but apropos scenario, the Beau travail viewer’s understanding of “male-male desire as the glue rather than as the solvent of a hierarchical male disciplinary order” may arise directly from Sedgwick’s encounter with Billy Budd itself, or from Creech’s study, or from comparably queer takes on Melville by other scholars.55 I propose a parallel, then, to that interval in Brother to Brother where the Baldwin-Cleaver tête-à-tête emerges from an ineradicable cleave at the heart of a historically bifurcated movie, helping to frame the conflicts on either side of a pivotal gap. That actual-virtual staging of conflict in Brother to Brother helps to politicize Bruce’s and Perry’s personal struggles but also unfolds as if we already know they are political. In a similar way, the offscreen exchanges between Billy Budd and its queer interpreters fill a historical and epistemological gap between the novella’s final drafts in 1891 and Beau travail’s production in 1999, presuming Denis’s audience as already aware that periphrastic homoeroticism is seminal (as it were) to what we talk about nowadays when we talk about Billy Budd. It thus becomes clearer how and why Beau travail was received as a peak of homoerotic representation despite the film’s frequent loitering amid deserts of nullified desire. Beau travail’s imaginary reader-viewer accepts the idea of “something . . . passing between [two men] but we do not know what” not as a dodge from representing queer desire but as a fully germane figuration of it. Any spectators incompletely interpolated into such knowledge are recuperated at the level of marketing, nudged by that discourse to join the ranks of more “knowing” viewers. What, though, of the converse risks of reading Beau travail too closely as Billy Budd? Bersani observes how the dark-eyed, taciturn Sentain departs from Billy’s example, folding so unremarkably into his stoic, ethnically varied unit that Deleuze might have called him an any-soldier-whatever. His appearances often defy the exceptionalism that print ads and Melvillean overlays would ascribe to Sentain; instead the film endows all the Legionnaires with equal mystique. For instance, four minutes into the film, the camera tracks slowly over to one of the squadron’s midday training rituals, panning across a soldier’s sinuous shadow on the sandy ground before alighting upon his actual body, arms raised vertically in the air.56 The left-to-right track proceeds to

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encompass more Legionnaires, ethnically varied and facing in different directions, which precludes any impression of fascistic homogeneity. Still, they all strike similar poses, and no shot distinguishes Sentain from the group. With the unbroken camera movement connecting each soldier to his comrades in precisely the way it links each shadow to a body, the men all serve as crystalline “shadows” or reflections of each other, despite variations in pigment, feature, and age. Even the shot that anchored the U.S. movie poster—a half-dressed Sentain slouching in sensual lassitude, bare-chested with hip thrust forward— signifies very differently within the film. In context, Sentain pauses atop a stone rampart during an obstacle course that multiple Legionnaires simultaneously negotiate, none more triumphant than the others. Granted, in this instant, and neither for the first nor the last time, Galoup sizes up Sentain with a distinctly menacing sneer. Cooper argues that Beau travail all but traps its viewers into acceding to Galoup’s Sentain-focused economy of envy and ardor—a more dynamic model of queerness, at least, than simply attributing to the bare, male body an “unabashed eroticism,” which is what the U.S. ads imply, no matter what that body does or doesn’t get up to.57 In a sense, although the ads promote the allure without the corrosive envy, they adopt Galoup’s habit (and to some extent Forestier’s) of isolating Sentain from the collective for no clear or consistent reason. Moreover, they assign Sentain’s figure a fixed value, as an icon of “voluptuous” eroticism, translated in most reviews as homoeroticism. Yet within the film, as a perceived rival to Galoup, an enticing orphan and adoptive heir to Forestier, a portrait of the white body after imperialism, and an occasional cause célèbre among his peers, the terms of Sentain’s appeal or value are constantly in flux, placing him often as but one among many symmetrical bodies. Ultimately, blasted by the same sun and coated in the same salt-crystals as the broken compass and the other “goods” on the vending table, Sentain’s body reveals itself as a figural and economic analog for these objects: hard to read or to valuate. Certainly he does not orient the ending of Beau travail as Billy’s suspended figure organizes the finale of Billy Budd: doomed but gorgeous, attracting every gaze, rousing but also quelling the angers and ecstasies of his shipmates, who teeter on the edge of an orgasmic mutiny they ultimately suppress. If Sentain’s body “points” anywhere, it is toward a kind of celibate stasis that does not distinguish him from the other legionnaires but enfolds him within their sexually ambiguous collective—even as that collective extends to include their Djiboutian hosts, especially the women.

Compound Crystals What we have actually received in paying the going box-office market rate for the spectacle of Sentain’s “homoerotic” body becomes less clear as Beau travail proceeds. If Sentain is the film’s gleaming hood-ornament, signifying commercial

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and erotic value for the vehicle to which he attaches, then who or what constitute Beau travail’s specific desiring-machines as the film unfolds? Moreover, to pose our favorite minor inquiries, in what collectives or political projects do he or the film participate? Kent Jones supplied a memorable rephrasing of these questions, more specific to the sexual dimensions of the film’s reception: “Calling Beau travail’s images of bare-chested legionnaires training under the African sun ‘homoerotic’ is a little like calling an Eric Rohmer movie ‘talky’— terrific, but so what?”58 The same skepticism reverberates when Rob White asks, “Do we see desire expressed in Beau travail and does the film arouse it?” and, of the Legionnaires, “So they are beautiful. They have, as Forestier says, ‘elegance.’ But are they desirable?”59 Denis’s “solid” style of lighting and mise-en-scène, whereby the screen “both mutely, blankly, opaquely resists our gaze and in full volume and brilliant colour returns our projections and desires to us,” implicitly poses the same question of what we do with such refunded projections, which the movie opts neither to explain nor to endow with self-evident value.60 After all, according to Deleuze, “that which has ceased to be useful simply begins to be” (C1 185), and by now we recognize his distaste for static being as against virtual, dynamic becoming. The film’s crystalline montage amplifies these questions, inducing virtualities in and around its ostensible solidities, and blending all four of the subvarieties that Cinema 2 outlines, with their shifting connotations of entrapment and escape, growth and decay. Denis and editor Nelly Quettier frequently cut from the Legionnaires to various indices of detumescent power: a derelict tank, a jeep’s wheel moldering on the sea floor, a toppled and rusted-out oil barrel, or a military bunk repurposed as a tanning bed. Even as the soldiers’ arresting choreographies suggest for Bersani “a filmic experiment in bodily relatedness” or for Elena del Río, with a clear nod to Deleuze, “pure kinetic situations,” their collective movements also sustain an impression of driftlessness: practice raids on gutted buildings, full-dress military marches to nowhere, dusty digs for no perceptible quarry.61 Walter Benjamin, in his famous essay on cinema, describes how “war is beautiful because it insinuates the dreamt-of metallization of the human body,” yet however much metallization manifests in the leanness and hardness of the men’s physiques, the film still suggests an oxidizing of martial purpose or imperial might.62 If, from a Deleuzian standpoint, we conceive desire as a series of flows that “exert the irresistible pressure of lava or the invincible oozing of water” (AO 67), the backgrounded chains of extinct volcanoes and the flatness of the Red Sea in Beau travail augment the film’s aura of arrested molecules and cooled vitality. Beau travail hardly expects its audience to grieve at this funeral for the colonial fist, which coevally implies a slow fade of gendered and sexual chauvinism. Denis’s Legionnaires wear their chiseled bodies with hardly any

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Figure 5.2 Beau travail: The crystalline disco, full of indifferent cruising. Beau travail, 1999, dir. Claire Denis.

swagger, and they emit an almost lackadaisical sexuality, reflecting no clear orientation but uniquely unsuffused with either homosexual panic or masculine droits du seigneur. The soldiers half-heartedly cruise the women in the disco, in scenes that undo the geometries of masculine, scopophilic gazing more typical of narrative film—so much so that the men’s looping circuits through the crowd are nearly indistinguishable from indifference or from lazy cruises of each other. Dance partners change uneventfully, and the African women and the Legionnaires vacillate between engaging each other and distractedly facing away (see figure 5.2). Men and women are shot from identical, nonfetishizing angles, and no one in the club exerts sole claim on the quality of to-be-looked-at-ness that Mulvey offered as the basis of classical cinema’s gendered division of labor. In these contexts, neither the soldiers nor their bodies, however poster friendly, function as legible brands for stable genders or sexualities—not in the way similar physiques are commissioned to do in many war- or sportthemed films or, most venally, in nationalistic propaganda like Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1936). Signaling its own “gap . . . in maleness itself,” Beau travail nonetheless departs from the example of Homographesis, where such gaps emerge amid nervous approximations of an ideal—desperate to match signifiers to heteronormative values and to avoid their dreaded “opposites.” By contrast, in Denis’s open, desultory economy of desires, browsed or bartered in casually unisex establishments, it gets harder to imagine anything, certainly any desiring state, as the firm opposite of anything else, or as permeated with any charge of sexual anxiety.

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From within this remarkably easygoing environment, many critics focus their responses to Beau travail on the relative anomaly of Galoup’s virulent affect and the sheer agitation he releases in the coda, alone inside the crystalline disco. His exertions, scored to Corona’s house-music anthem “Rhythm of the Night,” have been read diversely as a soul’s liberation, a dark purgatory, an eruption of objectless but gay-coded desire, and a kind of postcolonial molecularization of a body too long obsessed with ideologies of mastery. This latter claim, floated by Susan Hayward, Elena del Río, and others, and describing Galoup as “coming to terms with the meaninglessness of his past colonial endeavors,” projects more onto his state of mind than I think the film supplies.63 Certainly his breakdance bears nothing in common with his mechanistic self-governance up to that point in the film, as much in Marseilles as in Africa. His surgical bed-making, relentless push-ups, and scrupulous ironing suggest a “mastery of a set of skills” that Judith Butler associates with “an acquitting of oneself,” such that abandoning such ritualistic self-mastery could connote some long-deferred expiation.64 However, Galoup’s berserkness entails such an extreme deterritorialization from any foregoing routine that any number of norms could be cited as its now-abandoned ground—whether moral, sexual, vocational, or psychological. Bersani even sees Galoup as dancing away from the Legion’s patriarchal models of obedience and self-regulation. If anything is “queer” in his view of Beau travail, it is this rejection, whether actual or fantasized, of a structure grounded in reactionary familialism.65 From all of these vantages, deterritorialization itself implies relief, if not some Damascene epiphany, atoning for political wrongs of the past or rejecting ossified frameworks of desire. Galoup’s body expands its potentials for becoming-other much more than Sentain’s buff, statuesque masculinity seems to do. His disconcerting queerness, less iconographic than Sentain’s, resists market appropriation as a symbol of “homoeroticism.”66 Indeed, through Galoup, Beau travail refuses to endorse either of what Deleuze calls the normative poles of embodiment in cinema: a “ceremonial body” of territorialized ritual, as in the Legionnaires’ incessant training exercises and self-care protocols, or an “everyday body” rendered invisible through intensely socialized behavior (C2 192). In seeking alternatives to these poles, Deleuze warns us against “glorifying marginal characters . . . [or] hysterical attitudes” (C2 196), especially when such singular embodiments discourage new collective embodiments.67 A related risk, as we have noted across this book, is that deterritorialization can abet reactionary as well as productive desires and collectives. Melville’s Captain Vere reveals stark ideological limitations in a schizophrenic selfperformance similar in some ways to Galoup’s, feigning an erotic disinterest in Billy and his fate that Sedgwick indicts as highly suspect and yet indispensable to the Captain’s goals of asserting and indeed embodying the law’s impartiality. To meet these goals, he must ventriloquize “not only the police but the judge,

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witness, defense, and D.A. in different voices.”68 This one-man puppet theater leads to an “intensely projective fantasy” that Sedgwick describes through conjoined semantics of dance and desire: What “martial duty” dictates is a rhetorical tour de force by which the line between the official and the unofficial can be danced across back and forth, back and forth in a breathtakingly sustained choreography of the liminal, giving the authority of stern collective judgment and the common weal to what are, after all, the startlingly specific sensory hungers of a single man.69 Vere’s deterritorializing of himself into every niche of the martial-juridical apparatus preserves existing machineries of power and desire, as does his mutiny-averting and drily legalistic sacrifice of Billy. Differently from this actively preservative function, Galoup’s manic auto-choreography, despite its “indefinitely deferred erotic charge,” makes absolutely no difference in the life or death of Sentain or in the political afterlife of the Legion.70 Even if the dance is “unabashedly offered” to us, more liminal and provoking in many ways than Sentain’s, it remains unclear what we can do with this image of a “startlingly specific” outlier from any collective formation—such a loose and wildly defibrillated desiring-machine. Galoup’s trajectory, for all his enervation, therefore suggests the first kind of crystal-image we surveyed in the previous chapter, whereby desire inhabits a delimited circuit, with no conceivable outside except death. Galoup’s “soul,” if he has one, may ultimately commute to some plane that is radically unavailable to us, but his impacted desires, erupting amid the beveled surfaces of the disco, remain uncracked. One might argue, as Bersani does, that Galoup/ Lavant’s last-second exit through the club’s invisible door suggests an arc out of this closed space, invoking that second mode of the “cracked” crystal through which isolated characters escape from some limited socius.71 But whereas Willi Ninja in Paris Is Burning takes the regimens of voguing on a global tour, and Lana in Boys Don’t Cry transports her newly labile epistemologies of gender and sexuality outside of Falls City, Galoup neither goes anywhere nor joins anybody beyond his admittedly strong impact on the spectator. Meanwhile, throughout the film, this realm of crystalline desire that Galoup finally occupies and enigmatically departs has overseen the comings and goings of the Djiboutian women and the mostly anonymous Legionnaires. This club, an utterly deadpan Shortbus Salon, plays host to their inscrutable, halfhearted transactions and incomplete passes. Their furtive, vacillating interests in one another suggest a desiring-economy not unlike that of the bartering table—not because Beau travail implies any monetary payments for sex, but because singular exchanges and temporary orientations are formed, broken, and reconjoined in the disco. The constant decentering of gendered and sexual values and the fluctuations of intensity and object-choice within this coolly,

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ambiguously eroticized space suggests a collective desiring-field with no emblematic images and no movements so deterritorialized as to stand apart from or within an already-loose collective. Sometimes, desiring-links forged in the club sustain themselves outside of it, as when the men walk the nighttime streets hoisting some elated comrade on their collective shoulders—a clear echo of Billy Budd’s opening passage about the tradition of the “Handsome Soldier,” although the body so designated shifts a few times in Beau travail. Sometimes the women gather alone in this club and dance with each other or with their own mirrored images— reflecting, as it were, how the Legionnaires casually mirror and admire each other’s bodies as they swim, dine, fish, or exercise together. This nonexclusive, barely eroticized economy of desire and sexuality extends to Rahel, Galoup’s sometime girlfriend, who is blasé without being indifferent as she describes their relationship to a friend. For his part, Galoup’s attachment to Rahel does not preclude his dogged leering at Sentain or his scoping of other bodies, male and female, in the dancehall. In this respect, especially, he seems more like his fellow Legionnaires than detached from them. In a reversal, then, of typically crystalline proportions, which sometimes allow the odd monad to flee a collective glass cage, it is the loose multitude formed among the laconic Legionnaires and their Djiboutian hosts—defying sexed or cultured clichés, saucy but wary in both directions—that escapes through the “cracks” of this crystalline environment, leaving only the agitated monad Galoup immured within it. The range of the escapees’ movements becomes profound. Back in Marseilles, for example, in the hours preceding Galoup’s suicide (or whatever virtual reckoning the dancing scene implies), a small band of his former charges serenade him through a café window with a song about the Legion. This image is clearly hallucinated; the ensuing cut, bridged by their continued singing, suggests it may actually transpire at the airport in Africa, with the Legionnaires facetiously toasting his expulsion. Soon after, as Galoup lies back on his primly made bed, pistol in hand, the film flashes to an incongruous long shot of his sixteen comrades, including Forestier but not Sentain, facing the camera and smiling on the beach, the azure sea rolling behind them—a “postcard come to life,” to cite another of Deleuze’s emblems for the crystal-image.72 This racially mixed and semi-opaque collective, then, bears a remarkable knack for moving across diegetic and even topographic planes of the film, including those we likely understand as Galoup’s internal terre étrangère.73 They are as nomadic as the Djiboutians who pass equally often in and out of the crystalline disco, repeatedly shot from moving vehicles (or within them) and also multifarious in complexion and cultural aspect. The recurrent disco scenes point toward kaleidoscopic convergences between these already-mixed groups, each perplexed by but curious about the other. Their bartering transactions— social, sexual, and economic—blend into a general socius of newly deregulated

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exchanges. In this sense, the film suddenly sounds a lot like the third type of crystal, the Felliniesque type: permeable from several points, encompassing remarkable diversity, and caught in a perpetual act of self-expansion. Still, unlike Fellini’s exitless crystals, the film allows the Legionnaires and the Djiboutians to move anywhere, back to and away from their bases, which for both groups include the dancehall. This tentative, multiracial, nomadic collectivity suggests a less hierarchical, more creatively negotiated social body that Djibouti may now become, with a petty martinet purged and the thumb of colonialism more or less lifted. If that portrait sounds too optimistic, then plenty of other signals suggest a quality of doomed “belatedness” even as the nation of Djibouti is just, as they say, developing. Consider the apparent decrepitude of basic infrastructures; our first image of this emergent land is of a radio call-box that is not quite working, located on a rickety vehicle traveling a barely-extant road. The end of outright colonial occupation and its sinister twin, a proudly patriarchal desiring-system, does not occlude the hard truth that it feels too late in many respects to engineer a new economy, whether of desires, social relations, or growable wealth. Still, Beau travail hints repeatedly at an inchoate potential for a multihued, multilingual, cross-gendered population, where neither whiteness (though the Legion was never exclusively white) nor Frenchness (ditto) nor masculinity (a kind of evacuated assemblage, despite appearances) carry their former warrants of automatic privilege. Remaining behind in Djibouti, even if their images have ways of getting around, the Legionnaires seem poised to assimilate into a local economy that is just taking shape—not without sobering premonitions, but not in ways that we can map entirely in advance, either, and such that power, gender, and desire might establish new, less fixed coordinates of value.

Bachelors and Belles Transitions This reading of the film suggests, as I have hinted, a greater debt to Deleuze’s Melville than to Sedgwick’s; though, of course, I am arguing for a crystalline compatibility between them. For queer critics, Melville furnishes a literary corpus in which binaries of all types are both posited and constantly deconstructed, where “actual” homosexuals or proto-homosexuals announce themselves and yet “every impulse of every person . . . that could at all be called desire could be called homosexual desire.”74 For Deleuze, though, Melville’s legacy has less to do with collapsed dichotomies than with outright paradigm shifts of language, desire, and solo or group becomings. He surfaces repeatedly in the Deleuzian oeuvre: as an innovator of literary modes of deterritorializations in A Thousand Plateaus, as a progenitor of “becomings-animal” in Kafka, as the prompt for Deleuze’s late and very important “Bartleby” essay, and as a rare literary avatar of the time-image in

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Cinema 2 (C2 72, 115, 134). While Kafka insists that “there is no longer a revolutionary desire that would be opposed to power, to the machines of power” (K 57), the book goes on to propose “schizo-incest” and “a sort of homosexual effusion . . . a homosexuality of doubles, of brothers, or of bureaucrats” (K 68) as two contortions of traditional kinship, alliance, and economics that force those systems of power toward self-imposed limits. Melville passes unnamed in this specific discussion, but “schizo-incest” comes as close to designating the anarchic crises of Pierre as “homosexual effusion” does to naming those masculine propinquities that surge across Billy Budd. Kafka presses onward to further frontiers of social reorganization. “The bachelor is a state of desire much larger and more intense than incestuous desire and homosexual desire,” Deleuze and Guattari argue, even though “it has its problems, its weaknesses, such as its moments of lowered intensity . . . and, even worse, the suicidal desire for self-abolition” (K 70–71). This “bachelor,” then, entails a figure who opts out of Oedipal, dynastic kinship structures, abetted as they are by territorialized desires, power relations, and logics of linear succession, and instead adopts positions as far as possible from these territorialized flows. After all, within the structuralist terms of Oedipus, endogamous incest or “homosexual effusion” bespeak legible ties, albeit strenuously forbidden ones. The risks in forging either relation are hardly to be underestimated, yet the “bachelor,” “foundling,” or “orphan” deterritorializes such prestructured economies even further around singular encounters, broken chains, fluctuating values, and virtual, endlessly reorienting effusions of desire: “In his activity, as in his passions, he is simultaneously the most deterritorialized and the most deterritorializing figure—the Orphan” (K 79). Billy Budd, of course, is famously an orphaned foundling, and so too is Denis’s Sentain a “beau trouvaille,” in the punning words of Bruno Forestier. Melville’s Bartleby, for Deleuze, is another such bachelor, declining hierarchical edicts and entering a “community of celibates” where “alliance replaces filiation and the blood pact replaces consanguinity.”75 This does not mean that Billy, Bartleby, or the figures to whom they might form elective bonds refrain from erotic desire entirely (although they might). Rather, their desiringmachines defy mappable positions and do not reproduce themselves in their own image, across encounters or even within standing relationships. In this spirit, Deleuze fires off his opening salvo that “‘Bartleby’ is neither a metaphor for the writer nor the symbol of anything whatsoever.”76 He wished that Melville’s orphan economies had predominated more fully in the literature of such a new and calico nation, an “American patchwork . . . devoid of a center, of an upside down or right side up.”77 Still, he stands out in Deleuze’s work as a sort of major minor writer, within range of Kafka’s high standard. He seemingly avoids the fate of other American authors who “caus[ed] deterritorialized flows of desire to circulate, but also always ma[de] these flows transport fascisizing, moralizing, Puritan, and familialist territorialities” (AO 277–78).

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Beau travail sustains this vector of deterritorialization, stripping the “metallized” male body of its Riefenstahlian residues and its marketed affinities with homoerotic signification. The film submits this redefined body to economies that neither presume old values and unidirectional flows nor allow us to view their objects as a “symbol of anything whatsoever.” Instead, Beau travail’s traffic in images, gendered and otherwise, elaborates a version of what I have been calling a decentralized barter economy, but which could just as well be called a celibate, a bachelor, or an orphan economy, where contacts of all kinds, from the sexual to the creative to the mercantile, would be locally determined, temporary, and inconsistent. As in Deleuze’s account of Melville, such a network all but presupposes heavy modifications to the nation-state as a territorializing apparatus, conjoined as it is to racist, patriarchal, and antidistributive economies of power. Such a new socius could resist what Lee Edelman excoriates as “reproductive futurism” but offer at least a shimmer of alternative, minor collectives, which No Future appears unable or disinclined to envision in detail.78 Respondents to Beau travail have been quick to highlight the film’s deterritorializing of national systems, usually in line with its novel pressures on sexed, raced, and other cultural categories.79 In so doing, they echo the theorems of such Deleuzian film scholars as Bill Marshall, who contends regarding Robert Lepage’s film Un zoo la nuit (1987) that “the very gendered national ‘authenticity’ at the heart of the film is thus demonstrably a construction, its neurotic masculinity finally unable to fill the lack, to stitch together the unravelings provoked by historical, economic, and cultural globalization and the de-traditionalization of identity.”80 These scholars expand upon an existing drift in the Cinema books, away from the first book’s nationally partitioned filmmaking traditions (the American, the Soviet, the French, and the German) and toward the more heterodox, auteur-driven cases of Cinema 2. They also, unsurprisingly, work in tandem with larger trends in queer theory critiquing not just specific nationalist ideologies, such as Lauren Berlant’s indelible diagnosis of the United States as more hospitable to fetuses than to adults, but also the heteronormative assumptions undergirding almost any idea of “the nation.”81 Some of the most exciting recent work in humanities-based queer studies interrogates overlaps of nationalist and heterosexist discourse through the figure of the orphan or foundling, affording another fruitful bridge between this field and Deleuzian theory. Christopher Nealon’s Foundlings and Heather Love’s Feeling Backward remap queer modernisms by reconfiguring our views of gay and lesbian writers such as Walter Pater, Willa Cather, Hart Crane, and Sylvia Townsend Warner as belonging crucially to Anglo-American literary genealogies while outwardly resisting tropes of “belonging.”82 The queerness of these writers alienate them from erotic kinship and community more often than hailing them into it, with the frequent effect of making them rebarbative to contemporary scholars seeking affirming visions of “our” queer forbears,

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from communal or national perspectives. “Foundlings” such as Radclyffe Hall risk further orphaning within gay and lesbian literary studies precisely because those terms abrade Hall’s self-identification as an “invert,” as well as that of her protagonist, Stephen Gordon, for whom more recent lexicons like transgender may prove more fitting.83 Melville, by contrast, with his frequent priapism, his fondness for seminal imagery, and the other ways in which his work bespeaks an emphatic masculinity (if hardly a normative one), seems an odd candidate to inspire anything like a transgendered desiring-image. However, as a new concept with minoring potentials for queer studies, transgender theory helps elucidate Beau travail’s deterritorialization of Billy Budd’s legacy as an ostensibly homoerotic text. After all, Denis signals an emergent, cross-national collective in which epistemologies of gender are prone to intense reformulation, and where even the most paradigmatically masculine bodies do not necessarily entail masculine identities or sexualities as we have commonly imagined them—without, however, any polarized drift into a legible femininity. In considering Beau travail as a kind of transgender film, we surpass the earliest bastions of trans discourse, though these still exert strong claims within many transgendered people’s testimonies about themselves: for example, the “wrong body” thesis that preserves polar coordinates between male and female sex or masculine and feminine gender, thereby understanding transness through a rubric of binaristic mismatch. Beyond idealizing oppositions of male/masculine and female/feminine as fixed magnetic poles of sex and gender, this frame presumes a teleology in which arduous, expensive, and potentially undesirable alterations of one’s sex and/or gender become necessary toward “proper” alignment. A consequent goal in transgender activism, scholarship, and awareness campaigns (though not, of course, a universal one) has been the ratifying of “trans” as a capacious category of gendered and/or sexed and/or sexual experience that admits any range of interstitialities and does not presuppose transition per se (much less a “completed” transition) between one configuration and another. Understood this way, “trans” echoes Deleuze’s thinking in forbidding any “part” of a body, individual or social, from metonymically reflecting the “whole” to which it belongs—just as Melville’s, Deleuze’s, or Denis’s orphans hold back from any socius that presumes their belonging. “Trans” equally radicalizes temporal clichés, since persons can no longer be assumed to “await” or “conclude” or even fall “along” a linear trajectory leading from one gendered configuration to another (much less “the” other). Hence, transgender furnishes vibrant ripostes to familiar notions of visible-invisible or part-whole schematics of perception, of continuous movement from A to B, or of time as a rationalized progression—in other words, the very paradigms Deleuze most intensively complicates across Cinema 1 and Cinema 2. Certainly a great deal of transgender discourse suggests deep sympathies with Anti-Oedipus’s espousal of

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“not one or even two sexes, but n sexes,” and its clarion declaration that “the schizoanalytic slogan of the desiring-revolution will be first of all: to each its own sexes” (AO 296). Hopefully, transgender also extends intuitive bonafides as a Deleuzo-Guattarian minor enterprise, deterritorializing molecules and syntactic units of “major” sexes and genders through stutters, willing suspensions, estrangements of sound and sense, restructurings, and tactical resignifications. Scholarship on Beau travail often subtly invites a transgendered take on the text, without ever making overt use of the term, and mostly by intermixing rather than machinically unraveling notions of femaleness and maleness.84 For example, James Williams reads Galoup’s final, ecstatic bodily movements to the tune of a female vocalist’s pop song as part of the movie’s “gradual, salvatory drift to the feminine,” itself a key dynamic within the movie’s “uncertain ‘queer feel,’” which he contrasts with a more “open homoeroticism of exposed male flesh.”85 Much more broadly, the litany of “trans” terms in Catherine Grant’s anatomy of this “deontologized” film include its “transfiguration of particular aspects” of its source text, its “translating” of that text, and its membership within a modern praxis of “contemporary film-literary transtextuality.”86 None of these imply teleological procession from one textual form to another, but rather an assemblage of relations that emphasize and even eroticize their ambiguities. What strikes me as most productively transgendered about Beau travail is how the film refuses to attribute to either masculinity or femininity any of the essentialist, erotic, structural, syntactical, or, in any sense of the word, political attributes that so frequently accrue to them. Rather than rehabilitate what Bill Marshall calls that “neurotic masculinity” of the nation-state and the broader structurations of gender that enable it, Beau travail reconciles itself to an orphaned, Melvillean unraveling. Homoeroticism does not register as a concept sufficient to our needs of dismantling and scrambling categories and value-tables in this new world. The film consigns its three ostensible protagonists to highly elliptical fates and leaves the Legionnaires amidst a highly fragile, barely incipient alliance with the woman-dominated populace of Djibouti. In the absence of any clear narrative sutures or resolutions or any teleological drive, we have no way of knowing what becomes of the Legionnaires, the Africans, or their provisional fumblings toward new intimacies. At the very least, the women of Djibouti are dragooned by neither the camera nor the narrative into a facile discourse of “empowerment” or a didactic portrait of passive oppression, just as the men of the Legion are neither humiliated for their vestigiality nor reinfused with individual or collective puissance.87 Even when flashing us suntanned pectorals and biceps, then, Beau travail challenges us to behold not a homoerotic but a trans body: one in which sex and gender have been molecularized and demagnetized, and where machines of desire, perception, sexual brand-recognition, or communal positioning bear no automatic tie to each other. The temporality of bodily routine remains uncertain, but surely transness affords the viewer and the Legionnaires more

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room to develop than belatedness does. Sentain may thus remain an apt trademark for the film, but in his status as a free-radical foundling rather than a marketable blazon of beefcake. In terms of the Cinema books, gender operates more in Beau travail as a center of indetermination or an active interval than as a fixed object or idea. Amid such incipient and unclear becomings, men seem no more bonded to each other as men than women do as women, and other principles of potential coalition appear very much in flux. What new collective identifications might arise from this zone of foundling discoveries and belles transitions, or what collective politics or intramural desires might be activated, remain entirely open enigmas. When Sedgwick wrote about Billy Budd, her guiding convictions and questions concerned how that text “is a dangerous book to come to with questions about the essential nature of men’s desire for men,” and that as “a book about the placement and re-placement of the barest of thresholds, it continues to mobilize desires that could go either way. A better way of asking the question might then be, What are the operations necessary to deploy male-male desire as the glue rather than the solvent of a hierarchical male disciplinary order?”88 I hope it is obvious how much her adroit demolitions of putative binaries within Billy Budd still guide me in negotiating that novella. But as hard as this is to concede, for readers who recall the thrill of fresh discovery on every page of Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick was writing at a very different time, historically, academically, and politically. She was also writing about a very different text than Beau travail, despite Claire Denis’s tremendous debts to Melville. Billy Budd finds European imperialism amidst its most muscular flexions, whereas in Beau travail, that world-system cannot help looking belated, especially to the bemused Djiboutians wandering through Denis’s montage. The socius in Beau travail is not nearly so hierarchical as Billy Budd’s and has only broken compasses to lead it through a barely legible map of power. Furthermore, if Billy Budd complicates “questions about the essential nature of men’s desire for men,” the essential nature of masculinity itself stands at “the barest of thresholds” in Beau travail. Epistemology of the Closet observes that Billy’s beauty, craved by all, and Billy’s crime, prompted by a homosexual in this text, and Billy’s execution, prompted by a little-recognized pseudo-homosexual in this text, all function to “glue” the crew of the Bellipotent, first in fellow feeling, then in outraged refusal, and finally amidst a strange shipwide detumescence. By contrast, neither Sentain’s strandedness nor Forestier’s disappearance nor Galoup’s semisuicide have a provable effect of drawing the Legion further together or pulling them further apart. Neither solvent nor glue seems like the operating chemical in a film so comprehensively crystalline, whether connoting impenetrability or exceptional escapes, expansive possibility or implacable expiration. In their varying and semi-opaque transactions of all kinds, in their representation through crystalline grammars, and in their estranging of gendered or sexed

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typologies, the persons in Beau travail sustain a collective so unusual as to feel orphaned from precedent. Such a rare circumstance usually excites Deleuze to imagine some new vision of future becoming. One struggles, however, to feel unreserved optimism for this postoccupation, seemingly depatriarchalized Djibouti, where all relations appear tenuous and all values fluctuate. And yet, this orphan has many pasts: the Melvillean tradition of the bachelor and the foundling; the Deleuzian ideal of the “people who do not yet exist”; the long-standing cliché of the French Foreign Legion as a haven for misfits; and the so-called modern cinema of derationalized images, illegible and nonexchangeable through any but the most idiosyncratic economies of perception.89 Unusually, by Deleuzian standards, Beau travail attains this collective, politically suggestive vision by fusing the protocols of minor cinema (associated largely with the global South, where Beau travail unfolds), the cinema of the body (as principally evolved, for Deleuze, by female directors), and the forms of the crystal-image (linked reverentially to the white, male, European elites of masterpiece-cinema). “Transness” once again resonates as a rubric for our heterogeneous assembling of these stylistic and political modes, differing from any that Cinema 1 or Cinema 2 proposes on its own.90 Neither suggesting a compromise between the movement-image or time-image, nor self-evidently following time-image structures along any one course Deleuze has plotted, Beau travail inhabits its mode of transness more elliptically. In its desiringproductions, its intertextual associations, its geographic and sociopolitical locations, and its strategic courting of viewers and profits around a heterogeneous globe, the film coevally implies a puzzle, a pause, a novelty, a collapse, a remake, and a leap into unknown futures.

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Theses on a Philosophy of Queer History Velvet Goldmine Changing the World and Changing Ourselves Like Beau travail, Velvet Goldmine (1998) comprises a bivalve narrative structure, again suffusing one story with heavy affective fallout from the events of a chronologically earlier one, and finding the carryover character once more suspended in a woebegone urban existence. If anything, Todd Haynes heightens the tonal contrast between his interlocking narratives more than Claire Denis does hers. Yet still, in common with her film, Goldmine manages to suggest different forms of the crystal-image uniting in positive conjunctions. Set in London in the 1970s, the earlier plotline comprises a pop fantasia constellated around a series of androgynous, sexually pliable pop stars. Among them, the film privileges the case of sullen, sylph-like Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), slain at the height of arena-filling fame in 1974, although the press quickly trumpets the shooting as a hoax staged by the now-vanished singer. Scenes tracking Brian’s rise to superstardom form a polychromatic and polyphonic whorl, a cloudburst of glitter and electric guitar, forsaking normative gender performances or stable diegetic coordinates. Several scenes, indistinguishable as actual events, music videos, or virtual sheets of fan fantasy, bear some ineffable tie to the headspace of Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale), a titillated, shame-saturated London teen and glam devotee. One year later, the entire glam-rock movement receives an onstage funeral, the “Death of Glitter” concert, amid and around which climactic events unfold. “Like almost all provocative trends of the time,” Chris Pizzello writes about the end of glam, “it was eventually drowned by the tide of crass commercialism that swamped the 1980s.”1 Profuse with facets and wild spectacles, spiraling backward to recover the rise-of-Brian narrative but repelled by the impenetrable mystery of his evanescence, this half of the movie reprises that third model of the crystal-image we have associated with Fellini, Almodóvar, and Lynch: magnificently expansive, variously permeable, but ultimately sealed off. Pizzello’s “Crass commercialism,” meanwhile, barely hints at the massive reterritorialization of Anglo-American cultures a decade later around corporate

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money and conservative politics, palpable throughout Goldmine’s second major strand. Set in New York in 1984, evoking Reagan’s reelection with inevitable Orwellian overlays, the soundscape, images, pacing, and acting of these scenes are fully defrocked of musical or theatrical exuberance. The downturn emerges visually through the gray skies, blue camera gels, sickly fluorescent bulbs, heavy shadows, and drawn expressions of main characters and anonymous passersby alike. Spatially, the film charts a Stygian path through dark vaults, underground trains and tunnels, hushed hospices, and shuttered nightclubs. Aurally, these sequences emit the dim hum of public loudspeakers giving lip-service to neoconnish entities like the “Redeem America Committee” and the “Committee to Prosper” and to faceless conglomerates like MicroAtlanta and TransElectric. While these scenes orient around the vantage of the adult Arthur, now a permanently downcast journalist based in New York, the profound dolor of the age constitutes a free-indirect zone of indetermination, blending a widespread societal fact, a portrait of one person’s affective depletion, and much in between. Arthur’s task in 1984 is to research the alleged Slade shooting on its tenth anniversary. He resents the assignment, deducing his only credential comes in being the staff ’s “resident Brit”—a bitter euphemism for being the only queer on the payroll. The film gradually unpacks Arthur’s misgivings based on personal memories, via interviewees’ flashbacks in which he sometimes figures directly, and through free-floating virtual spectacles from his life that blur into those irrational montages built around Brian. Arthur’s contacts include Brian’s ex-wife Mandy (Toni Collette) and his rock-star accomplice and sometime lover Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), each crucial to the 1960s and 1970s sequences as well. With no major figure added since the earlier plotline, and amidst such a carceral sensory environment, New York evokes an adumbrated take on the first, most self-enclosed crystal-form. We also, however, perceive aspects of the fourth, that of Viscontian breakdown. Goldmine’s images mourn the torpor of desiring-machines and the air of economic collapse in those quadrants of New York where we spend our time, no matter how much profitaccretion seems to transpire in the out-of-field. Throughout both plots, Arthur remains uneasy with his sexuality, fumbling into the glam-rock scene amid its fluorescence, and later faced with “being paid to remember things that money, the future, and the serious life made so certain I’d forget.” This much-cited line of voice-over is not in the original shooting script, which U.S. distributor Miramax published as a book—a rare gesture of support for a film whose release was truncated and underfunded, in deference to concurrent, blitz-promoted studio stablemates Shakespeare in Love and Life Is Beautiful (both 1998). This embellishment of Arthur’s internal soliloquy has the welcome, complicating effect of admitting his absorption within a capitalist ethos linking money, futurity, and so-called seriousness, rather than casting him romantically outside that cycle.

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Arthur will end the movie all but foiled in ascertaining Brian’s whereabouts or the truth about his so-called death. Even his conviction that a surgically renovated Brian currently thrives in plain sight as label-friendly pop star Tommy Stone remains indeterminate as either a conclusive discovery or a paranoid projection—signaled by the film’s speeding through that ostensibly pivotal revelation. When Arthur learns that the Herald has dropped the whole story, he suspects Tommy’s assistant Shannon (Emily Woof), formerly Brian’s wardrobe mistress, of secretly contacting the paper, thus reframing the irrational life and “death” of Brian Slade as a highly orchestrated conspiracy among invisible, unlikely potentates.2 Conceding defeat, Arthur repairs to a dive bar populated by an even more fatigued-looking mishmash of people than the one in Beau travail’s disco. These youngsters are poignantly if pitifully excited when Arthur bequeaths them his expired press pass to Tommy Stone’s nearby concert. Otherwise, desire of any kind seems fully dehydrated inside this putative watering hole. If, according to Deleuze, “the people are missing” in modern cinema, this is just the sort of nonplace where they may be hiding, waiting for something to draw them out. This bar, of all places, will play host to Velvet Goldmine’s climactic epiphany. First, however, a surprise awaits Arthur there, as does a new vocabulary for debating at a time of grand-scale ruin the most salient way to couch that ruin, parsing battles won and lost. In the empty back room, Arthur is stunned to find Curt Wild, slouched in dark, anonymous introspection. Having refused Arthur’s interview requests many times, and after rebuffing his inquiries even now, Curt initiates the key dialogue exchange in the film. About his fellow glam rockers, he says, “We set out to change the world, ended up just changing ourselves.” Arthur asks, husky with emotion, “What’s wrong with that?” to which Curt responds, “Nothing . . . if you don’t look at the world.” Here, amid another eerie hum, the image dissolves to a slow-motion dolly shot of the bar’s driftless denizens, staring into the camera as it retreats from them, like the stultified mannequins in a Fassbinder tableau. This exchange between the thwarted reporter and the disenchanted satyr casts everything Arthur has recently faced about his own past, everything he believed glam rock to attempt, and maybe even the world as a whole into a shambles of unfulfilled dreams, unverifiable facts, and harrowingly ineffective action. Such despondency underlies much of Cinema 2’s book-length quest to reengender forms of belief—in anything—despite the despoiling of old stories and ideologies, and the horrific disgracing of mass organization as a political goal. “What happened? How have we arrived at this point?” (C2 50) is, for Deleuze, the paradigmatic question raised by the incompossible “forks” of time in postwar cinema. This question arises in Cinema 2 in the context of what Deleuze calls the recollection-image, a cinematic relation to the past exemplified by the films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, replete as they are with formal and narrative gaps: which woman’s husband has eloped with a mutual friend

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in A Letter to Three Wives (1949)? Who is Eve Harrington, really, in All About Eve (1950)? And what happened to Sebastian Venable so Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)? These films ultimately soften the blow of irrational disorder, recuperating stabilized answers in expository terms, typically through extended flashback. By contrast, and despite their range of genres and tones, Marcia Landy alleges that “‘What happened?’ is the same question, tailored to specific circumstances but defiantly unanswerable, that powers all Haynes’s films, constituting his major strategy for challenging cinematic realism.”3 In Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), no one can explain why the dissipating pop star could not be saved; in Safe (1995), a woman manifests grievous auto-immune symptoms for no apparent reason. The films’ disenchanted inquiries refuse those pat explanations that a recollection-image would supply. As such, Goldmine unfolds as “an exploration of ‘what happened’ in and to the politics of the 1960s and early 1970s.”4 This formidable, recurring interrogative structures Haynes’s films such that they “probe the impossibility of traditional conceptions of narration as well as of evolutionary and revolutionary discourses by means of allegory in Benjamin’s sense.”5 Narrative itself, then, especially putative nonfiction of the type Arthur is paid to write, joins other actions rendered impossible and unbelievable in our age. At the same time, as indicated by Goldmine’s endless origin myths, alter egos, and publicists’ puff-pieces, possible or even false narratives exponentiate. We have discerned this pattern in Cinema 2-inspired films as different as Naked Lunch, The Watermelon Woman, Brother to Brother, and Beau travail. Deleuze’s own exemplar for the time-image’s swerve into blizzards of falsified narrative is Citizen Kane (1941), whose story, montage, and mise-en-scène Velvet Goldmine constantly reiterates. With explicit reference to Welles’s tale of celebrity hubris, cryptic death, and thwarted reporters, Deleuze describes how the purest time-images admit the implacability of the question, “What happened?” As a result, “as if we were carried away by the undulations of a great wave, time gets out of joint, and we enter into temporality as a state of permanent crisis” (C2 111–12, original emphasis). That a new desiring-image arises around the 1990s, amid similar paralysis and skepticism, suggests the arrival of another “great wave” in which desire enters its own state of permanent crisis. In an era where antinormative sexualities are both empowered and besieged, this desiring-image must find how its own out-ofjointness might be marshaled, like that of the time-image, into productive pathways for feeling and thinking through a pertinent set of problems—initiating, by extension, novel forms of relation and positive production. This new image might resuscitate the movement-image’s tie to coherent continuities (disgraced for Deleuze, but a nostalgic object for many) or the time-image’s rampant disarticulations (of coherent sequences, of determined orders, of identity-based movements, etc.). Perhaps, in a best-case scenario, both could be creatively

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reconjoined, such that cinema regalvanizes its desiring-machines and generates lots of new ones, responding to the boons as well as the drawbacks of new “crises” and “waves.” Remarkably, Velvet Goldmine manages to awaken belief in more or less these directions, even amid a quasi-historical imagining of 1984 when such belief reached tragically low ebbs for queer populations, so shortly after some exhilarating highs. Let’s acknowledge the epidemic in the room: whatever Arthur’s present-day, undivulged relation is to his queer, gender-bending past, neither he nor Goldmine’s script breathes a word about AIDS, even though its terrifying clench over gay New York and the rest of the world commences between the two plotlines. Consistent with cinema’s increasing evocations in the decades after World War II of what Deleuze calls virtual “insistences,” AIDS tacitly pervades the ominous, unaddressed gap in Goldmine’s timeframe and at its heart. This same gap Susan Sontag describes as “filled with historical meaning . . . the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.”6 Her invocation of “privileged populations” posits AIDS as not just the nightmare of gay men but of societies that believed financial, familybased consolidations would protect them at a time of famine, infection, recession, and arms races. If the enormity of AIDS and of homophobic (non)responses of governments and major-culture publics goes unnamed in the film, it typically goes missing from scholarship and reviews of Goldmine as well, even when it palpably lingers in the out-of-field.7 Nevertheless, Arthur, presumably still queeridentified in some way, finds himself forced at high emotional cost to revisit the lingering vacuum of one already-vanished queer cultural scene—the global glam-rock rumpus in which he ardently participated—and to do so from amidst an even bleaker vacuum, one which may or may not have touched him personally, but in whose long shadows he continues to live, as do we.8 These are high impediments to clear if anyone, particularly a queer person, is to conjure belief either in “changing ourselves” or in “changing the world,” whether in 1984 when this film ends, or in 1998 when it debuted, or even today. Certainly the queer activists—PWAs who campaigned across Arthur’s New York, and allies such as ACT-UP and Gran Fury foot-soldier Todd Haynes— were hard-pressed to observe anything around them except failure and grief.9 Queers have found copious reasons in three subsequent decades to perceive more wreckage, despite relative and in some cases tremendous strides in rights, health prospects, and visibility. Absorbed ever further as a kind of cultural mode, habitual disenchantment and skepticism pervade New Queer Cinema coverage by the late 1990s and early 2000s, unfolding as a kind of Death of Glitter dirge. One widely cited epitaph critiqued specific filmmakers for the fact that “a cinema that exploded with uncommon energy and assuredness merely fifteen years ago has now all but caved in on itself.”10 Among other culprits, the author singles out Haynes and in particular Velvet Goldmine for

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moving in “hazy directions,” offering a “prettified, plasticine fantasy” in place of the director’s onetime commitment to “real gay people” and politics.11 The parallel eulogy by B. Ruby Rich damns Goldmine differently by omitting it from her ambitiously comprehensive autopsy of what does not work in High Art (1998), Boys Don’t Cry (1999), or most other LGBT films, and of what works only somewhat better in Gods and Monsters (1998) and Being John Malkovich (1999).12 I believe Velvet Goldmine participates in this vein of queer auto-critique but determines with Deleuzian resolve to produce something from its argument. The film’s chilly daguerreotype of 1984 was itself historically distant for Haynes’s audiences in 1998, who could ask regarding that duel between “changing the world” and “changing ourselves” whether we felt differently than Curt does, artistically, socially, or politically. We can still ask. Velvet Goldmine is not a film about marching affirmatively forward from a depressive sociopolitical quagmire, related but not limited to AIDS deaths. It is not even clear the film moves forward at all. The 1970s scenes begin with Brian’s “death,” rewinding from there and then catching back up to only a year or so later. Arthur’s scenes are entirely given over to water-treading retrospection amidst the not-so-great wave of the new normal. Indeed, this second unfilled gap between Goldmine’s finale in 1984 and its point of articulation in 1998 encompasses another unspoken sea change. Between those dates, queer theory and queer cinema studies get inaugurated and more widely circulated under those names, each foregrounding tropes of gendered and sexed performativity, intricate pastiche, and reinterrogated identity categories. These sites of inquiry and excitement for many students, scholars, onlookers, and participants were points of contention among others, especially those who harbored different, broader, or more explicitly political ideas for what a radical theory of sexuality might emphasize, or what a queerly revolutionary cinema might attempt. In all those ways, the spectacular awe and encroaching disillusion that Velvet Goldmine articulates around glam doubles as a virtual meditation on queer theory and New Queer Cinema— approaching their ten-year anniversaries, amid rumors of their deaths, not unlike Brian Slade. I do not believe that Gender Trouble, Paris Is Burning, or their many heirs are only about “changing yourself ” rather than “changing the world.” Still, there are reasons to pose the question, and for many people that charge continues to stick, especially for those who felt that 1990s-era queer cinema, as Pizzello asserts about glam rock, was “eventually drowned by the tide of crass commercialism.” Into this breach, among other breaches, Velvet Goldmine charges, without promising an affirming conclusion. On one level, the film entails a resuscitation of Cinema 1 ideals. In his moorless life in New York in 1984—no shot places him in a private living-space, either his or anyone else’s—Arthur at least takes stabs at coherent truth-telling. Of course, as Heather Love reminds us,

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and might have reminded Arthur, queer forms of “feeling backward” tend to risk inconclusiveness and to entail high emotional tariffs, redeemed only by two hard-won dividends: “Criticism serves two important functions: it lays bare the conditions of exclusion and inequality and it gestures toward alternative trajectories for the future.”13 Arthur, while not a critic per se, certainly gets dragooned into feeling backward. He both remembers and currently inhabits a world of “exclusion and inequality,” in specifically sexual terms and also, of course, in others. Meanwhile, though neither the temporal structure nor the affective pall of Velvet Goldmine implies any “alternate trajectory for the future,” we might understand Arthur as somewhat reluctantly searching for one. He undertakes this quest in more than the abstractly temporal or even belief-centered terms that Cinema 2 supplies. He endeavors to vindicate a lasting value in changing ourselves, or at least in having tried, and to do so from a specifically queer vantage, responding to continuities he still feels with that long-ago life-world, however much he has suppressed them. Arthur’s task is not just journalistic, then, but also affective and philosophical. At the same time, neither the journey nor the chasm he must traverse would mean the same thing—and nor would Haynes’s tactics of structuring this story—if he were not, in whatever way, queer. Velvet Goldmine’s bivalve structure and Arthur’s crystalline memories launch backward in search of two depleted fossil fuels, neither of which feels readily at hand in 1984: first, queer desire’s delicious virtualities, radiating across bodies and in bedrooms, as-yet untainted by biomedical terror; and second, queer desire’s equally delicious actualities, embodied moments where sex contracts into euphoric peaks of relation, often after long periods of shame or isolation, yielding a source of life-saving affective value. Both of these restoratives prove hard to recover, because of Reagan, Thatcher, AIDS, and homophobic discourses they all stoked in the 1980s, but also because glam’s deterritorializations of sex, gender, and desire inevitably bespoke its deep embeddedness with deterritorializations of money. Glam was never innocent of this dimension, but it assumes a monstrous new apex in Tommy Stone, obsequiously thanking “President Reynolds’ Committee for Cultural Renewal” for making his concert possible.14 So, there is that sea change to feel backward across, as well. Money, which Arthur admits is an important concern in his life, is not to be naïvely discounted, but perhaps it need not overwhelm absolutely everything else. Velvet Goldmine, then, aspires not only to retrieve forsaken memories and potentials of desire from across great divides, but also to negotiate a series of complex dyads: past-present, life-death, desire-money, our world-ourselves. The film solicits belief in both coherent action and recuperable memories, attempting to answer, “What happened?” even as it defends irrationality and disorder as queer survival strategies, maybe even as minor deterritorializations. In this way, despite all the obvious temporal wormholes in Haynes’s

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montage, Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 emerge as yet another dyad that Goldmine crystallizes toward productive effect—culminating, inevitably, in a double ending, although not a predictable one. Goldmine enables its sheets of past to resonate simultaneously with actual history, with real if disconsoling continuities, with general theories of the image, and with specific, disorderly values based in desire. The film thus “steer[s] New Queer Cinema towards a version of social constructionism that strives to express something integral to a uniquely queer perspective on human experience” and acquits that cinema from “appearing to disavow historical relations altogether,” balancing postmodern impulses toward forgetting with revised forms of memory.15 Put differently, Goldmine draws together multiple crystalline modes and philosophical systems, making queerness actual within all of them as a historical and collective force capable of producing novelties and relations—beyond just resignifying inherited codes and myths. The movie suggests not a cinematic movement in its final throes but a glimmering future of new paths. In that spirit of novelty, some of the ideas Goldmine digs up feel initially incongruous to the film’s ostensible recovery missions, on behalf of queer intimacies and proud, ostentatious collectives. Excavated between, alongside, or beneath those valuable quarries is yet another lode, glinting with different possibilities, and structured in the closing moments as an open provocation. Given the range of obstacles Arthur tries to overcome, plus the Deleuzian imperatives to reclaim the old and to generate the new—a task especially incumbent on minor intercessors and populations, organizing along innovative lines—both the film and the audience must take a genuine leap. Goldmine’s leap, or perhaps its angelic flight, lands not just amid fond memory or rescued principles, but also among unexpected relations. The movie turns its crystal around and around, considering facets we might previously have missed.

Angels, Aliens, and Orphans Throughout this book, we have seen how Deleuze recruits counter-intuitive figures or terms to keep a text or concept from “organizing” too cleanly. Haynes is an equally strategic purloiner and avid punch-spiker, never more so than in Velvet Goldmine, which devotes itself to a generation of performers for whom wild pastiche was as nourishing as air and water. In this context, the film’s visual motifs, its structure, and Deleuze’s allusions to time in “a state of permanent crisis” welcome a surprise guest to this alternately glittery and lugubrious party. They recall, as Marcia Landy has already done, Walter Benjamin’s prophetic vision from “Theses on the Philosophy of History” whereby “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.”16

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Beyond just resonating with Benjamin’s sense of historical crisis, Velvet Goldmine serially reprises the essay’s signature attitude of looking despondently backward, in tandem with its famous epitome of the Angel of History facing the “wreckage upon wreckage” of the past while being propelled toward a future (one hopes) even it cannot perceive. AIDS only amplifies this figure’s resonance for queers, given the “end-of-an-era feeling that AIDS is reinforcing; an exhaustion, for many, of purely secular ideals—ideals that seemed to encourage libertinism or at least not provide any coherent inhibition against it.”17 This collective affect can route itself toward such nonsecular ideals as “spirit” or the “divine,” two planes of immanence Cinema 1 occasionally invokes (C1 17), or toward “belief,” a concept Cinema 2 pursues through its emergent minor collectives and, relatedly, through the time-image’s invitations to thought.18 By way of retrospective, even apocalyptic orientations, we have already seen how Goldmine’s 1984 soberly reconfronts 1974, and how Haynes as intercessor in 1998 looks back upon both.19 For its part, the early-1970s glam movement aims a retroactive critique at the late-1960s folk hippies with whom the faithless Brian first cast his musical lot.20 Additionally, a series of queer orphans and Kafka-esque connectors stretch across the film as far backward as 1854, where we find the infant Oscar Wilde, the queer foundling-forefather of the modern pop idol. Beyond such pervasive retrospection, details of Goldmine’s mise-en-scène suggest strong traces of Benjamin’s essay. Sandy Powell’s ingenious costume designs cast several characters as angels at moments of calamity or interment, starting from Brian’s donning of a huge ostrich-feather ruff for the concert where he is assassinated.21 By the film’s end, following Curt’s reproof about having failed to “change the world,” the track backward from the dazed-looking huddle in the miserable bar mirrors the angel’s retreat from what it knows not how to fix. (Making matters grimmer, the image dissolves to a haloed publicity still of the ersatz Tommy Stone, a hunk of purely secular matter passing as its opposite.) Following a final, pivotal exchange between Arthur and Curt that concerns a magical green pin—a key prop to which we shall return—the image fades to black amidst yet another backward track. Summoning one final breath, the movie fades back in on Jack Fairy, elliptical muse of glam rock, whom we now behold sporting a giant, wing-like neckpiece for the Death of Glitter concert, where his elegiac song repeats the refrain “Here’s looking at you, kid” (see figure 6.1).22 Velvet Goldmine offers as much a sustained reading of “Theses on the Philosophy of History” through the prism of queer experience as a glam-andguitars, sequins-and-sodomy pastiche of Citizen Kane. Audiences ought to have been prepared for this, since only five years previously, to worldwide acclaim, Tony Kushner’s two-part theatrical landmark Angels in America alighted on Broadway, recruiting Benjamin’s Angel as an even more overt model for a queer conception of historical breakdown. Angels even presages Goldmine by

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Figure 6.1 Velvet Goldmine: Jack Fairy as Benjamin’s Angel. Velvet Goldmine, 1998, dir. Todd Haynes.

locating its angelic visions, its political alarms, and its alienation-effects amid Reagan’s United States as a scene of political, economic, homophobic, and pathogenic catastrophe.23 Still, Velvet Goldmine’s heady conceptions were received with bafflement and disdain by many members of those tiny audiences who actually saw the film in theaters.24 Comparisons between Haynes’s gay fantasia on pop-musical themes and the apposite, Brechtian project in Angels in America may clarify the value of Goldmine’s departures from realism as a counterintuitive means of stoking belief—belief in what Prior Walter very simply calls, at the end of Perestroika, “more life.”25 In a sense, like all of Haynes’s films, Goldmine shares the epictheatrical mandate of forcing viewers to “engage the problems and understand the constraints operating on the nation and on themselves as social subjects.”26 Though critics like Kelly lamented a consequent inaccessibility to “real gay people,” this task of epic engagement can only happen, as readers of Brecht know, by refusing to “let spectators off the hook by allowing too much psychological investment in particular characters or too much good feeling of resolution in the end.”27 Within a Verfremdung-centered reading of Velvet Goldmine, the undisguised scaffolding of Citizen Kane registers an ongoing alienationeffect; still, Haynes’s floridly citational and intellectual approach to filmmaking does not jell perfectly with Brechtian alienation. More like Kushner than Brecht, he typically demonstrates joint impulses to edify and to empathize, to offer us both a treatise and a tissue.28 Moreover, given Haynes’s flair for complex semiotic conjunctions, these Benjaminian Angel figures—often trailing feathery flurries that equally recall Charles Foster Kane’s snowglobe—are not the only entities that Velvet Goldmine spots up in the air. Responding in a different way to Sontag’s farewell to

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“purely secular ideals” and extending the film’s experiment in testing actual and virtual limits of desire’s figurations, Haynes leaps past alienation-effects and interpolates actual aliens, even crediting glam alter egos like Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust as “the first overt alignment of the notion of the alien with the notion of the homosexual.”29 Hence, a UFO briefly docks in Victorian Dublin in the movie’s opening scene, depositing newborn Oscar Wilde on his parents’ doorstep, his swaddling-clothes clasped by the emerald pin that passes through a zig-zagged, stardusted series of heirs, until Curt gives it to Arthur in the final scene. The alien craft deposits, then, in the form of Wilde, another fertile instance of the orphan or foundling—a figure we previously rehearsed with regard to Beau travail as a Deleuzian mainstay.30 Velvet Goldmine suggests an entire ecology of such orphans: not just Oscar Wilde but also Curt Wild, who is rumored to have been either raised by wolves or packed off by his parents for electroshock sexual “therapy”; Brian Slade, consigned into the guardianship of an unseen aunt and her husband, a vaudevillian caught fellating a co-star; Arthur, expelled from yet another suburban house after his parents catch him masturbating to a newspaper image of Brian kissing Curt; Mandy, a woman of obscure American origin who moves to the U.K. and precedes the homonymous, Michigan-born Madonna at the shifting-accents game; and Deleuzian flocks of young, parentless pop fans thronging the streets of the early 1970s, then sequestering themselves in 1980s saloons lit like dirty aquariums.31 These foundlings’ polynomial gender performances and erotic permutations register as causes and effects of their estrangement from narrative or genealogical positions, or from anything like an orientation. They reinforce a reciprocity Deleuze establishes between his figurations of the orphan and of the “transgendered, transsexual schizo”—reminding ourselves again that for him, a schizo is not a sick person but a clever, committed code-scrambler. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari’s foundling or orphan, lacking even the affinitive orientations of a purported gay community, but not devoid of coalitional potentials, is “not simply bisexual, or between the two, or intersexual. He is transsexual. He is trans-alivedead. . . . He does not confine himself inside contradictions; on the contrary, he opens out” (AO 77). The glam era in Velvet Goldmine looks, then, like a rare realization of that much-invoked queer-theoretical ideal, publicly dismantling sex-gender systems and extending carte-blanche invitations to angels, aliens, orphans, and other disaffiliated subjects. Neither the death nor the duplicity of Brian Slade should be sufficient to vaporize so much erotically, creatively, and collectively harlequin activity. And yet, this is the world that Curt Wild now rebukes as having succeeded only in changing ourselves rather than changing the world. Whether from the vantage of the imminent escapee (Brian Slade) or the elected eulogist (Jack Fairy), Goldmine’s fabulously costumed Angel surrogates appear to perceive such exciting gender trouble as a scene, somehow, of hopeless historical disarray.

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The paradox is baffling: so resplendent in color, so turned on by all its characters and their fleshy cavorts, so eager to advise via an opening title-card that “although what you are about to see is a work of fiction, it should nevertheless be played at maximum volume,” Velvet Goldmine is the last movie to impugn such androgynous panoplies or alien maquillage. But then why Curt’s censure, and why does this possible world disappear? What happened that so rapidly killed off glam and the potentials for change it appeared to augur? As we start hunting explanations, likely to concern the fickle, deterritorializing centrality of money within every sequin and seam of this “revolution,” I offer a more Deleuzian and cinema-specific framing for the same questions I just asked. Thinking back to Curt and Arthur’s climactic debate, “setting out to change the world” is not only Deleuze and Guattari’s goal in works like AntiOedipus and Kafka, it is what several films in Cinema 1 aspire to do, including D. W. Griffith’s often-misguided liberal paeans and Sergei Eisenstein’s dialectical spirals toward ideological golden means. As we know, from Deleuze’s point of view, increasingly routinized perceptions and fascist appropriations despoiled these structures of cinema. “Changing ourselves,” meanwhile, is a looser but allowable gloss on what Cinema 2 often advocates. Sometimes Deleuze describes the audience of modern films as forming “ever new lobes” (C2 125) in attentive response to cinema and to each other. Via another sweeping claim, albeit one sustained less consistently through the book than this phrasing implies, “Since the new wave, every time there was a fine and powerful film, there was a new exploration of the body in it” (C2 196). Minor cinema, foretelling a “people who are missing,” who currently do not even “exist,” implies an especially far-reaching notion of how cinema might change selves and change the world in particularly momentous ways. In outlining a cinema that extends new potentials for the brain, the body, and collective becomings, while generating valuable ideas through gaps and incongruencies innate to all these things, Cinema 2 reflects queer concerns with actual/virtual states (especially regarding the body) and with political aspiration, even in situations of steadily diminished hope. But, by the same token, Cinema 2 stands vulnerable to hostile charges similar to those that have dogged queer theory and queer cinema: of diaphanous politics, of “hazy directions,” of aestheticized radicalism, and of failing to reflect “real gay people.” In his chapter on cinematic deterritorializations of the body, Deleuze warns against the risks of “a glorification of marginal characters” and of “insipid ceremony,” brutal paraphrases of the most damning charges that have been lobbed at queer theory and its tropes.32 We reframe, then, our key dilemma: in Curt Wild’s view, and in that of many people, neither Deleuzian strategies for redeeming the action-image nor queer or Deleuzian redefinitions of the body’s immanent potentials have forestalled epochal disaster. Angels, aliens, orphans, a whole generational armada with no discernible interests in the status quo have become its paper-pushers

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or its pallbearers, or else its disempowered fugitives, waiting it out in desolate bars. Perhaps once more “we need new signs” (C1 207), as we did when Orson Welles produced Velvet Goldmine’s immaculate progenitor. To avoid, however, throwing the foundling out with the bathwater of current impasse, this cinema might require capacities to hold opposed elements in tension: ceding the import as well as the limitations of bodily self-styling, for example, or acknowledging the co-constitution of desire and capital, or preparing conditions for genuine change while admitting the inevitable compromises and surprises that will complicate that goal. These contradictory pulls cannot and ought not be reconciled into ineffectual synthesis. Instead, we can try striking them together like two hunks of flint—producing immanent sparks as virtual potentials for change that remained imperceptible in the raw ingredients before we brought them together. That is how you start a Deleuzian fire; how you initiate a form of productive dialectics that Benjamin and Haynes help us conceive and that Deleuze would not sprint to extinguish; and how you search out minor potentials even where collective relations seem most enfeebled. So where, in Goldmine, are they hiding?

Point A to Point B Even without any onscreen credit or acknowledgments in the marketing, Kane’s atavistic presence within Velvet Goldmine is unmistakable, as many people found Billy Budd’s to be in Beau travail. Giveaways include a reporter’s probing of a famous figure’s life and death, an ex-wife discovered after hours in a down-market club, and a former colleague (in this case, also a former lover) interviewed as a now-ailing man in a wheelchair.33 Still, popular reviews often described the Kane residues as inscrutable or arbitrary, contrasting the ecstatic welcome offered four years later to Haynes’s even more obvious riff on Douglas Sirk in Far from Heaven (2002).34 I contend that in relating Kane and cinematic modernism to late-century glam rock and queer poststructuralism, Goldmine offers not just a performative reiteration but a productive, Deleuzo-Guattarian intervention, a “formal leap” into minor histories of desire, even more illuminating than the “comic amplification” of existing structures that characterizes Heaven’s take on Sirk (K 19ff ). Goldmine manages to “launch a counter-investment whereby revolutionary desire is plugged into the existing social field as a source of energy” (AO 30), in part by launching into the existing cinematic field of Kane. The film thus deterritorializes in multiple directions, drawing on movement-image and time-image devices to achieve this effect—again, not surprisingly, since Welles’s film already sits at the fulcrum of those schemas. Rather than domesticate tensions between them, however, Goldmine sparks productive deterritorializations of each by the other, forcing new thoughts about the space between

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the movement-image and the time-image as well as the open future after them. To do so constitutes an aesthetic and philosophical feat of considerable finesse; an apt strategy for conveying Deleuzian desire as a machinery of positive conjunctions and productions; and a tactic for reading queerness into the historical and political orientations that Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 describe. Especially in recent chapters, we have seen how such intertextual and transhistorical relations convey themselves through Deleuze’s “crystalline” modes. Once more, these will guide much of my forthcoming analysis. Yet insofar as desire and its images achieve in Goldmine a “political rather than a historical view of the past,” the film also invites the term “dialectical,” a concept that, even in Benjamin’s sense, often sits uneasily with Deleuze’s readers.35 Clearly, the two theorists evince marked differences in their thinking, even at the level of the filmed image. Benjamin famously endows cinema with an auratic trace, however dangerously dulled by mass-production and audience desensitization; Deleuze is much less willing to grant any conceptual distinctions, auratic or otherwise, between images in cinema and in daily life.36 The two thinkers jell on many other points, yet as Ian Buchanan pointedly observes, dialectical readings of Deleuze are often rebuffed through what amounts to a blanket category dispute: Deleuze and Guattari never stop saying they are anti-dialectical, it is a kind of mantra with them. But in going along with them on this we do ourselves a profound disservice, I believe, because we neutralize one of the most effective tools we have for mobilizing their work towards positive political ends and consequently fall tendentially into a paradigm of pure description of the adjectival kind. More importantly, it assumes that there is only one kind of dialectics, which is patently not the case.37 In mounting, then, a coevally Benjaminian and Deleuzian reading of Velvet Goldmine as a thesis on a philosophy of queer history and desire, we begin by distinguishing an “adjectival” from a more dialectical reading of Haynes’s clearest lift and biggest departure from Welles’s recipe. This concerns Arthur’s intensive characterization in Goldmine as both a discrete personage and a historically situated figure of semireluctant, post-Stonewall, and eventually AIDS-era queerness. Whereas Jerry Thompson, his erstwhile alter ego in Kane, registers a literally faceless instrumentality, Arthur’s poignant storylines of sexual, generational, and historical coming-into-being, plus his personal implications in the onion-peeling mystery of Brian, operate very differently. These factors hugely impact what Velvet Goldmine ultimately produces from his story and its conjunction with other stories. Arthur is the furthest thing from an adjectival supplement to Brian’s tale, especially if we take a political and a historical view of Goldmine’s narrative: reinterrogating relations among desire and money, pasts, presents, and futures, and individual and collective becomings.

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Arthur, then, constitutes both a pair of orienting eyes for an inquisitive audience and, for a while, a gussied-up participant within the film’s glittery genderfuck—and later, a grim conscript into the film’s funereal socius. In common with so much early queer theory, he obviates binaries of insider/outsider or subject/object while also fulfilling the minor filmmaker’s need for “a free indirect relation with a minority intercessor . . . constructing a narration between two points of enunciation where author and subject continually exchange roles so that their relative positions become indirect or indecipherable.”38 Both the richness and the difficulty of Velvet Goldmine spring from the film’s activation of this dynamic in four concurrent ways, placing Arthur first in free-indirect relation to the viewer-fan and, second, in relation to Haynes as fact-finding auteur.39 Third, Arthur continually exchanges roles between his younger and older selves. His fourth, most crystalline, and most dialectical relations in the film, however, are to Brian Slade, the sphinx at the center of every scene Arthur does not appear in, and the only major character he never meets, although each man’s existence is virtually premised on the other’s. From the moment Brian’s face burns in the projector at the end of his newsreel-style bio and Goldmine fades in on the extreme close-up of Arthur’s stare, the movie posits these two men as its elliptical foci: point A(rthur) and point B(rian). A joining of two affection-images, one already dispersing, the other slowly resolving, this edit conjoins Arthur and Brian as a reflective face of what glam collectively signifies in Velvet Goldmine. Simultaneously, these shots comprise an intensive series of inassimilable qualities, heightening everything cosmetic and confronting about Brian’s gaze and everything pained and deflective about Arthur’s. Not coincidentally, this moment is also one when Kane’s watermark on Goldmine is strongly apparent yet quickly undone— not only because Brian’s image literally breaks down, but also because the film’s free-indirect complicity with Arthur’s perspective so instantly diverges from the Jerry Thompson playbook of pure, disinterested labor. This close-up of Arthur’s fraught introspection further clarifies his role in producing the images we have just seen. If this odd, hieroglyphic montage corresponded only or directly to those images the Herald editor projects for his stable of reporters, we certainly would not behold, for example, the shots of a much younger Arthur anachronistically watching this 1940s-style newsreel as a late-1960s teen, abashed at having his leg groped by a fellow moviegoer. The complexity of Arthur’s role does not, however, slacken the film’s interest in Brian, who corresponds to Charles Foster Kane as a mercurial public figure and as the (possibly) posthumous target of the reporter’s queries. Brian remains an incompossible puzzle throughout Velvet Goldmine and is furthermore so hypnotizing that he consigns obvious questions to the out-of-field. Never, for instance, does anyone ask who shot Brian on stage, only whether he was actually shot. Haynes films Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Brian in a key of what Anti-Oedipus, in a rare invocation of cinema, describes as a delirium of desiring-machines: an

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endless array of guises, costumes, postures, and alter egos, sometimes to the point of unrecognizability.40 The soundtrack similarly oscillates between Rhys Meyers’s own singing and prerecorded tracks by “original” glam rockers and their modern heirs. Posters, video footage, newspaper photographs, and album covers emblazoned with Brian’s image crop up in the mise-en-scène with the same regularity as “actual” images of this endlessly virtualized character, who thus becomes all but synonymous with the commodity form. Years before Tommy Stone, then, Brian embodies a totally machinic image of desire and capital as mutual deterritorializations, aiding as well as contesting one another. The crystalline and ultimately the dialectical character of Velvet Goldmine depends upon the many ways Arthur and Brian are mutually engendered despite appearing so opposed. Most obviously, the teenaged Arthur imagines leaping to his feet in his family’s drab living room, pointing his finger at the television screen where Brian has avowed his bisexuality, and shouting to his impassive parents, “That’s me! That’s me!”41 (See figure 6.2) From there, the shy adolescent takes from Brian more cues of self-styling and self-perception; even his transoceanic travels as a youth and an adult are often determined by Brian’s movements. More crucially, we notice the intense, voluptuous way in which Arthur affects Brian’s images (on an album sleeve, in a newspaper, on the television screen), but also, reciprocally, how he produces (and funds) Brian’s status as a polysexual avatar with multifaceted allure. The long, central montage when Arthur’s father catches him masturbating to the snapshot of Brian and Curt kissing is liberally intercut with images of Brian and Curt on stage, flagrantly miming fellatio. Throughout this centerpiece sequence, audiovisual intensities, additional crosscuts, and the continuous, howling bridge of

Figure 6.2 Velvet Goldmine: Arthur Stuart sees himself on TV in bisexual form. Velvet Goldmine, 1998, dir. Todd Haynes.

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the glam-punk track “Baby’s on Fire” bind the scenes of Arthur’s stirring arousal and shameful expulsion (themselves inseparable) with Brian and Curt’s long-deferred consummation. In grammatical terms, Arthur both witnesses and generates the undecidably actual and virtual coupling among his heroes, which the irrational images do not stipulate as necessarily unfolding “at the same time.” More relations collapse into virtual reciprocity: for example, by that point in the film, we associate Arthur with his career in the newspaper industry, so in that way, too, he figures as both engine and audience for this printed photo, just as he exists within his youth as Brian’s simultaneous product and producer. When I first wrote about this film, I read the connections and disjunctions between Arthur and Brian, including those mediated by the film’s formal presentation of their plotlines, as allegorizing relations between the more organized Cinema 1 and the delirious Cinema 2. Brian’s half of that analogy still seems wholly apt, in line with the time-image’s atomizations of the body, its insoluble link to money, and its pervasive “powers of the false.” He is a consummate performer of a self that never coheres, “exemplary of the politics of the gestural, the potential of the body for communicability,” and a prototype of Deleuze and Guattari’s transsexual, trans-alivedead schizo, opening spore-like into his own multifarious desires and contradictions.42 Costumed in glittery homage to eighteenth-century courtiers and Victorian fops, and elsewhere as an extra-terrestrial skulking around dilapidated movie palaces, Brian’s actual images are a kind of dervish-assemblage of virtual images. He appears so many ways at different times that we relate to him as virtual multiplicity, no matter what actual face he poses in a given instant. Indeed, he reflects all four crystaltypes at once: self-enclosed, mysteriously escaped, deliriously expansive, yet unmistakably belated. Indeed, for his final, diegetically mystifying performance as a blue-skinned djinn in an opulent ballroom, cinematographer Maryse Alberti lit the whole sequence from below to convey Brian as the last survivor of a world gone down in flames.43 Brian’s scenes, in part by being shuffled out of order, corrode any reality-principle, whether of gendered essentialism, lived chronology, stabilized desire or sexuality, or “actual” history. He distills the reasons why, for so many scholars, Cinema 2 dovetails well with theories of performative gender, and also why those inroads into theorizing queerness can be limiting. Brian is a desiring-machine, a virtual money-movement, a free-radical molecule of deterritorialization. Arthur’s sequences work differently than Brian’s, yet not, I now think, in a way that aligns cleanly with Cinema 1, as against Brian and Cinema 2. On the one hand, he still invests in rational, reconstructible narratives, even if he does not wind up producing one. The relatively coherent montage structuring many of his appointments reflects this disposition, as does their rational sequencing: Arthur needs answers, so he visits the databank, which leads him to the decrepit ex-manager Cecil (Michael Feast), who prompts him to visit Mandy,

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and so forth. He investigates what happened ten years ago at Brian’s concert with more rationality than, say, Resnais’s zombies exhibit in asking what precisely happened last year at Marienbad. The past, for Arthur, is more than a series of sheets. He is a hardworking, source-scouting journalist, if a somewhat embarrassed one—employed by “a once prominent New York newspaper” and bumped from a presidential entourage in order to pursue the Slade story. Yet Arthur is also, in his way, a Cinema 2-style forger, an artist of his own narratives, occasionally an outright fantasist, one who provides the film multiple opportunities “to ‘queer’ the present by reconstituting the notion of ‘reality’ itself through multiple juxtapositions of histories remembered, forgotten, and repressed.”44 That the word “art” surfaces twice in the name Arthur Stuart, and that the connective ligament “hurst” is a direct homophone of “Hearst,” augments Arthur’s claim on his own protean stature within this crystalline Kane.45 That early fade into the extreme close-up on Arthur’s eyes is the kind of shot that often connotes a chute into imaginary or otherwise subjective space, and some of his scenes are teasingly coded this way. For example, when Haynes follows an extended recap of scenes from Arthur’s adolescence with a shot of him waking from a nap on the New York subway, or when he seemingly hallucinates the presence of Curt Wild outside a subway station, we cannot adjudicate these impressions as true or false. In sum, Velvet Goldmine bases itself on the largely but not totally dissimilar figures of Arthur and Brian, luring them into intimate dialectics: as idol and worshiper, then later as quarry and seeker. Meanwhile, Brian’s scenes—desultory, compacted, stratigraphic compressions of scare-quoted and highly eclectic pastness—obviate distinctions between sheets of past and peaks of present. He exists as pure, hieroglyphic series, with no traceable links to any points of historical or collective contact, even if he figures importantly in other people’s senses of their past(s) or their present(s). He conjures not just the irrational images and intervals of Cinema 2 but also the future of speedier, freer, “informatic” transactions that Deleuze sees coming after the provisional end of Cinema 2. Arthur, meanwhile, evokes hope that some continuities may still be retrievable, and even salutary. His own memories and his audition of other characters’ remembrances furnish a vast ream of irreconcilable sheets of past, yet he attempts to play by the rules of a linear, serious, money-driven temporality that he recognizes as a construct. He appears to agree with queer historiographer Scott Bravmann that “the past really did happen,” although his exact investments in that past or in believing in that past are not immediately clear.46 If Brian so profoundly embodies the spirit, irrationality, and acceleration of the time-image that he goads us to think beyond it, Arthur, like Kane, inhabits the uneasy join between the movement- and time-images. He struggles to sort out a relation between historical continuities and wholly virtual pasts. On similar grounds, Brian and Arthur embody different forms of the Deleuzian pseudo-subject, with unequal potentials for relating outside

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themselves—whether to make minor leaps or dialectical leaps, or to crack their imprisoning crystals. Brian is the schizo who “is and remains in disjunction,” emanating “pure, fully detached creative energy oscillating between a breakthrough to a new mode of existence and a breakdown into an already spent mode.”47 Perhaps Brian Slade and Tommy Stone signal the two sides of that novel yet exhausted oscillation. Still, as I have claimed, in his constant deterritorializations, Brian manages to conjoin all four crystal-types, though his claim on the second form is crucially under review. His putative escape from a selfenclosed life (the premise of crystal #2) may have entailed his death or conveyed him to some other nonplace (crystal #1), or despite his best, duplicitous efforts constituted no escape at all from a world of asphyxiating celebrity that continually expands (crystal #3). Either way, by now occupying the humiliating form of Tommy or of someone whom most people have forgotten, it may be too late to go anywhere or produce anything (crystal #4). Arthur, by contrast, so stilted in his attempts at performance (awkward dresser, poor dancer, etc.), and so central within those gray New York scenes where Brian is pointedly absent, suggests an even greater force of worn-out, ungifted belatedness (crystal #4). The poignant, philosophical upshot of Velvet Goldmine is that Brian, serial escape-artist, stays immured in the hall of mirrors, relegated like Sgt. Galoup to a zone nobody can access; Arthur, meanwhile, finds a way out of his lockeddown dejection through a brief, powerful reconnection with a history that feels both private and public. He learns, then, that sheets of past can well up when you need them, and that they can still feel meaningfully continuous with who you are, individually and collectively, not just despite but in relation to the yawning voids and Benjaminian “wreckage” that threaten to swamp them. Having reborn himself as an urban foundling when he left his parents’ house, having continuing on that path as a comically awkward groupie for at least a year after Brian evanesced, and having caught himself in the strong currents of “the serious life” ever since, Arthur has ended up unattached, inexpressive, and ambiguous in his desires. He has had no place to “be” in relation to those desires, not just spatially or affectively but in the way he regards his own past, despite all the possibilities that his youth opened up and which his current job threatens to awaken. A disheartened reversal from so many of queer cinema’s coming-out tales, Arthur’s story thus emphasizes both a coming-in and a closing-off, recalling temporal, sexual, and gendered dilemmas more familiar from transgender cinema. In the autobiographical documentary Prodigal Sons (2008), for example, the director-subject Kimberly Reed parses her life into a male childhood spent denying that she was a woman, followed by an immediately post-transition adulthood denying she had ever inhabited that body. Finally, after “testing” multiple matches among gendered self, sexual partners, and social scenes— and following her own surprising collision with the legacy of Citizen Kane— she reaches a plane where all her realities can be freely acknowledged. The

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incompossibility of her selves did not synthesize into anything easier, per se, and in a Deleuzian sense all her narratives are equally false. Yet it turned out action was possible: like Kushner’s characters, one could choose “more life,” finding it in the past and thus in the future, even from amidst a profoundly disordered present. This is the kind of leap we want for Arthur, possibly before he desires it for himself. It is not one Deleuze makes easy to imagine; Arthur’s corollary among Deleuzian pseudo-subjects is clearly not the Brian-style schizo but the bachelor, orphan, or celibate, seeking loose collectives from which he will always stand apart at some level and which may not yet exist. According to Kafka, “The actual bachelor and the virtual community—both of them real—are the components of a collective assemblage,” itself the prerequisite for a minor becoming, capable of reawakening group desiring-machines and of seeking conditions that keep those machines functioning (K 84). In this spirit, then, of seeking collectives, knowing Arthur stays trapped without them, and to understand how it comes to pass that Velvet Goldmine compels belief in his quick but powerful escape, we must detach from Arthur and Brian as the film’s remarkable points and shift our focus to actual and potential fields of relation between and around them. This dilation outward involves more than a search for characters who might link them together, although this is far from a trivial pursuit. Moving further away from Arthur and Brian will mean facing, for example, the immanence of money to all this chameleonic shape-shifting, a major, mediating term within Arthur and Brian’s already-existing relations that is tempting to ignore. My motive in exploring this issue is not because money is a “serious” issue, in Arthur’s audibly agnostic words, whereas desire is somehow superficial. Velvet Goldmine never stops promoting the idea that momentary flashes of history, deeply related to sexuality, desire, and individual orientations, substantially impact “real” collective history. These flashes allow for productive inquiry into what history comprises. They also challenge us to make meaning from peaks of present we may only experience swiftly, or sheets of past we recover only fleetingly and in exceptional circumstances, amidst our state of permanent crisis. In terms specific to Arthur’s queerness and historical location, it bears repeating that for even one queer to recapture a contented, life-giving image of himself from the mausolean vantage of 1984 represents a major victory, personally and communally. Still, the challenge remains for these moments to ramify outside themselves— to attain collective and political import, in the Deleuzian vocabulary of minorness. Over the course and by the end of Goldmine, multiple options for relation will exist for Arthur and for others, and in the Deleuzian spirit of “either . . . or . . . or . . .,” Goldmine does not make him or us choose among them. Through a combination of forces, volitional and otherwise, the movie’s double ending elevates (literally) the import and idiosyncratic historicity of what can happen erotically between two people, especially, in these circumstances, between two people of the same sex. Yet this transpires in a way that exerts powerful, potential claims on

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people whose investment in such a scene would otherwise appear minimal. Having evoked a possible world where, of all things, the blissful possibility of male-male sex connotes historical recovery, collective import, and a sign of “more life,” the film summons the sodomitic pleasures of the pre-AIDS past to challenge its queer spectators, especially: if Velvet Goldmine can treat love on the eve of epidemic as a hard-won sign of historical rescue, can we invest in equally surprising, scenes starring unlikely comrades, and see our own futures in them? Through these images, provocations, and circuits of relation, Velvet Goldmine thus offers an “intimation of an era that is already emerging as yet another mutation in the regime of signs,” not just because Arthur remembers something that money, authority, disease, and the serious life almost tricked him into forgetting—a minor image, with deterritorializing, collective, and political resonances—but also because the sequel to this memory is a further challenge toward newer, stranger conjunctions between men.48

Wild Cards and Unexpected Critiques I now devote the rest of this chapter to key figures by which Arthur and Brian’s stories enter into larger circuits. The two cases I privilege, while touching on other forces and subjects, are those of the rock star Curt Wild and that stuttering chain of men who pass along the green pin that travels for at least 130 years by the movie’s finish—all the way from the alien changeling Oscar Wilde to the crestfallen journalist Arthur Stuart who finally, in the film’s penultimate scene, cracks his first smile since the 1970s. These two sites in the text overlap insofar as Curt is both a recipient and donor of the pin, in circumstances decisive for how the movie finishes. Both, in a sense, are remarkable, somewhat inscrutable singularities around which interesting series form. In other ways, they contrast each other—bearing different relations, for example, to actuality and virtuality. Though his behaviors, sound, and personal style virtually reflect several real-world entertainers, from Iggy Pop to Kurt Cobain, Curt always maintains one foot solidly in the actual, as it were. He comments lucidly on the moments he inhabits; wends in and out of various crowds without looking incongruous, though he may feel himself to be; proves oddly recalcitrant to the numinous veneer of commodification, even when it might help him to adopt that veneer more easily; and, perhaps most pivotally, stands up for realizing one’s principles, whether these have to do with personal loyalty, global awareness, or claiming sexual identifications for other than faddish reasons. Conversely, the green pin, intensely virtual, encrusted in jewels and lore, seems to exist to orient its heirs both toward and around itself and around each other, toward deeply uncertain ends.

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An impulse-image personified, an American bobcat abroad, aquiver with rebel energy and naked enthusiasm, Curt functions at first as Velvet Goldmine’s equivalent to Naked Lunch’s sex-blob, emerging loudly and abruptly into the mise-en-scène, flaunting his appendages. Curt is at different times the lover of Brian and of Arthur, their shared point C. Goldmine’s plot pivots twice around these sex scenes—both edited such that we wonder if they actually took place, and amassing vastly different stakes within the unfolding story. In general, Curt evinces a knack for joining new series and shaking them up. He arises first as a musical and theatrical innovator, bringing a rougher, more amplified sound and persona to glam than Brian ever conceived. After their short, combustible collaboration, however, Curt charts an odd, gradually quieter career: from scene stealer to lover to second banana to disenchanted burnout, ending as Goldmine’s figure of bitter conscience. As this account suggests, Curt’s storyline is deeply implicated in three highly deterritorializing planes: namely, image-making, money, and desire. His arrival ramps up productions of all three; they later seem to vanish from Curt’s life, but these, among all Deleuzian forces, never really leave. When Brian and his new manager, Jerry Devine (Eddie Izzard), initially pitch Curt on cutting a record together—which, for Brian, also entails a sexual pitch— both men regard him as a virtual sugar-plum vision. Jerry has shamrockgreen dollar signs animating his eyes as he peers at Curt, while pink hearts beat in Brian’s. This contrast is, of course, untenable. After all, the slow pan over the absurdly gilded dining room in this scene reveals that Brian, the besotted convener of the meeting, is plying Curt with visions of wealth, even as he emanates waves of earnest adoration. Jerry, similarly if oppositely, realizes the profits he could harvest from dandified press conferences that play peekaboo with the men’s couplehood, and from “candid” video footage in which they frolic half-dressed on the grounds of their shared home. As Mandy recalls, “It was pretty clear what was happening. Happens every day. But for the world to think it was happening, well, that was Jerry’s particular genius.” What the clamoring fans in the street experience as a burgeoning, spontaneous image-bank of public appearances, staged put-ons, album covers, and paparazzi shots is, obviously, a strategized commercial market that deterritorializes consumers’ desires and also the contents of their billfolds. Capitalist machinery quickly learns to catch up to new objects and desiring-flows that few see coming (both Brian and Curt are roundly jeered at their earliest, separate shows); to lay more track ahead of these conjoined machines as they build profit-making momentum; and to generate more erotogenic images whose flip-side, Deleuze tells us, is always money. As luscious an aura as Goldmine bestows on its 1970s images and objects, and despite how drastically it drains such appeal from the 1980s life-world (where money’s movements are much discussed but never visibly produce anything), the film avoids naïve clichés in

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which a queer past was “free” because money played no role in it, and the future becomes spoiled because capital suddenly floods it. Such honesty is rare in commercial cinema, perhaps especially at a time when, in the long wake of AIDS, Sontag argues, appetites for nonsecular inspiration ran so high. While taking artistic chances on its numinous angels and kitsch aliens, Goldmine also shows us that what Sontag describes as a hunger for something higher is all too often slaked by making money and the images or artifacts it produces seem auratic and nonsecular. One of Deleuze and Guattari’s subjects, in fact, is “the mysterious, well-nigh miraculous process whereby something historically contrived like capital can come to seem strangely emanative, and godly, when surplus value is produced.”49 The epitome of such faux transubstantiation is Jerry Devine. His name is a joke about the false godliness of surplus; Jerry is both highly affronting and, the film concedes, integral to the film’s flows of pleasure and desire. The peak and nadir of this cruel insight come when Jerry nabs Brian as his client through the fell swoop of challenging Cecil, Brian’s initial manager, to an arm-wrestling contest before a corporate board— each member of which is lit from below by individual spots, like a capitalist College of Cardinals. “Pin me,” Jerry dares, staring right at the fey and tremulous Cecil, and intolerably laying his money-grubbing claim on a verb that everywhere else in Velvet Goldmine connotes a delicate series of tribal recognitions among queer survivors (although, speaking honestly, even these tender comrades rarely lack for extenuating motives in passing their emerald torch). Curt and Jerry, then, are both crafty at joining into various series. Jerry, though, thrives upon whipping up “strangely emanative” and “godly” (which is to say, munificent and marketable) auras around mundane people and objects. Curt, however, despite his alternately virile and androgynous charisma, tends to make already-sublimated moments, objects, and discourses seem more actual—exposing them more as they are than as they appear in hands like Jerry’s, though that opposition is, of course, too simple. Sometimes Curt fails to register when this demystifying effect is taking hold, even over himself. He seems truly unprepared, for example, when Brian breaks things off in the middle of mentoring Curt through a solo recording everyone else knows will never sell. The isolated vocal track we hear is genuinely excruciating, and the blank, overexposed whiteness of the booth where he growls the song is comparably off-putting and unflattering to him. The film refuses to sentimentalize Curt’s slim gift. And yet, his descent into obscurity is quick and breathtakingly total. Nine years later, Tommy Stone’s jukebox-loving fans appear not to recognize him at all. Curt, then, appears at different times amid every series that most interests the movie: the glam rockers, the love triangle, the zoo of sexual experimenters, the passers of the pin, the subjects of Arthur’s interviews, and the anonymous, drifting publics of 1984. He does not reconcile these flows and, if anything, adds to the tensions among them, in part because he is so prone to sudden leaps and so inclined to demystify legends. In some ways, Curt is like a desiring-machine

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or like money: he exists on both sides of every equation; he cycles up and down in value; he connects, disjoins, and breaks down repeatedly, in unpredictable sequences; he is both elusive and ubiquitous. He appears at stuttering, unpredictable moments in the film, across both timeframes. Whatever collective Velvet Goldmine might eventually generate, Curt may or may not participate; a true Wild card, you never know when he will join, seduce, chastise, or vanish. Curt does not symbolize anything, least of all “the people”; when publicly interviewed, or photographed against crowds, he seems uncomfortable. Yet he expresses the only direct outrage in the film at The Way Things Are. He achieves greater, less inhibited erotic intimacy with both Brian and Arthur than anyone else in Velvet Goldmine does with anyone else in Velvet Goldmine, but he is also the only subject to answer Arthur’s queries on broader terms than those of personal anecdote or private betrayal. He proves crucial to the film, then, in bringing apparently inassimilable ideas together, though again, without conflating or reconciling them. He proves that erotic energy and at least a modicum of historical lucidity can coexist across a film, whereas Brian and Arthur tend emphatically to pick one of those two sides. That said, Curt does not suggest a born minor intercessor. He appears reluctant to speak for anyone else, and when he does, he sounds skeptical of his fans’ overnight enthusiasms and cutting about the very minor movements to which he seemingly belongs. “We set out to change the world, ended up only changing ourselves,” he pronounces, not even saying “we” when he can get away with it. Curt’s critical impulse is not to tell a tale of mistreatment at the hands of Brian, or of Jerry, or of the label, or of money. The object of his critique is the protominor movement itself, the enterprise in which he participated—that of abruptly successful, culturally promoted, pastiche-driven, temporarily wellfunded, widely mimicked, sumptuously ornate, and salaciously limned distortions of sex-gender, hand-in-hand with grand entertainment and cheerfully blown raspberries at prevailing idioms of sex and art. If that account sounds like a workable précis of New Queer Cinema by 1998, I take that as no coincidence. What could it mean for a queer film, especially a late New Queer film, to have its character of conscience and avatar of selfcritique—simultaneously its ambisexual dreamboat and its most severely defrocked commodity—judge a cognate movement so harshly? What does it mean for Curt to arraign glam rock as a short, spectacular, but stunted experiment, just as the same charges amassed around New Queer Cinema? What could glam have done differently? What could queer cinema? By approaching its climax and perhaps hitting its climax with two protagonists debating the relative merits of “changing the world” and “changing ourselves,” Goldmine hails an audience that has heard similar convictions agonistically argued for nearly a decade in queer studies up to that point, and increasingly around queer cinema as well. As intellectual and creative traditions, these fields were most often credited (as, I find, they still are) for debunking

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gendered and sexual binarisms, exposing queer traces and affects where none seemed obvious, multiplying gender categories and the performances thereof, and challenging myths of “heterosexuality” or “homosexuality” as transhistorical identity categories. Amidst all this work, however, several voices even within the field posed versions of a qualm that gay historian George Chauncey memorably distilled at a “Queer Frontiers” conference in 1995: “It strikes me as troubling that after a decade of dazzling theoretical ruminations and cultural studies, we have a more complex and nuanced understanding of Madonna’s popularity than of Reagan’s popularity.”50 A precaution like that, spoken in the most sympathetic possible voice, reverberates across contests within Velvet Goldmine over the relative value of coming to grips with the mysterious fate of a glam-rock singer, or of one’s investment in that singer, as opposed to coming to grips with the “world” as Curt perceives it even (or especially) from his windowless watering hole. By 1984, this crushingly gray world is one where we keep hearing radio chatter about the “Committee to Prosper” without noting any signs of prosperity, although we spot plenty of signs that more and more people are clearly going missing, in manifold ways. Granted, the actors’ close-ups and line-readings, as well as the balanced edits in this pivotal exchange, express as much sympathy with Arthur’s belief that “changing ourselves” has been a valuable enterprise as with Curt Wild’s position that it has not been valuable enough. Velvet Goldmine appears no more eager to moralize on the question than to dismiss out of hand those variable productions of desire that a shame-drenched adolescent or a flock of urban outsiders or (as we witness in one short scene) a pair of fantasizing schoolgirls achieve through negotiating their pet commodities. Haynes treats these investments, possibly even these overinvestments, as possessing affective integrity—even if they naïvely mistake streamlined corporate products for spontaneous expressions of feeling, or even if these purchases have made some rich people richer in the out-of-field. Still, without growing dogmatic, the movie’s molar intelligence about politics and history suddenly seems at loggerheads with its two-hour commitment to consecrating inventive stylistics of the body, and its seductive evocation of pop opulence and bricolage on their own Viscontian terms. Curt, too, once entertained this as world-changing work, but he notices now that perceptions have not turned easily into actions—just as Deleuze warns us, at the end of Cinema 1. Curt’s critique, however, extends to strategies put forward in Cinema 2, regimes of kaleidoscopic self-performance and proliferating virtualities, which have neither solved old problems nor avoided inaugurating new ones. Changing ourselves and changing the world both suddenly feel like invaluable agendas that are nonetheless hard to reconcile, and hard to defend without caveats. Perhaps they are unfairly positioned to come at the other’s expense, since defending the former, especially in a context like glam, can feel

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paltry once the latter is evoked. Still, our sense only intensifies of real, intractable problems having arisen where we once, either as spectators or survivors, experienced self-discovery, sexual arousal, and public fellowship. Retrospectively, Velvet Goldmine appears constructed along a series of unacceptable compromises or at least diminishing returns. An anomalous boon in pansexual chic has become (or else always was) a fleeting market-bubble in exploitable androgyny. An effusion of queer masculinities and androgynies opens up a whole new world of sexual play and self-presentation but seems to strand and harden its women, including one locked away in an empty bar with her divorce papers, and another stuck as the millionaire traitor’s paid enabler. A collective apex of promiscuous pleasure turns out to precede not a mass reinvestment in sexual freedoms but major conservative backlashes on every frontier. The film achieves a nimble reperformance of Citizen Kane, arguably modern cinema’s most august landmark; yet this ode to the solace and thrill provided by images, bodies, and sounds concludes amid a dolorous atmosphere that telegraphs more urgent concerns than music or makeup or fucking or filmmaking. No wonder Curt is perturbed, and that the Angel of History is both baffled and in full retreat—the contradictions are as confounding as the physical and emotional dilapidation is ubiquitous. Even Kushner, having constructed a comparable phalanx of epic stalemates by the end of Angels in America, struggles by some accounts to end his two-part cycle. Perestroika concludes with a passel of surviving characters squabbling in front of Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain—a modest ode to collective entente and to being granted “more life.” This epilogue, however, was one of the few aspects of the play to elicit noteworthy critique, as a retreat into liberal pluralism and merry-band solidarity, following several hours of rigorous dialectics, radical conceptions, and productive alienations, both of the nation’s possibilities and of the theater’s.51 Setting the bar even higher against the prospect of a satisfying finish, Velvet Goldmine operates out of a New Queer tradition whose possibilities were already falling under pointed critique from some of its initial champions and target audiences—precisely for not having changed the world in the way that its adherents, advertisers, practitioners, and first-wave audiences had believed it might. Perhaps the filmmakers’ or even the theorists’ underlying notion of change had been miscalibrated. If that is the case, it may now be worth differentiating two different ideologies of change as they operate in the disciplines this book has conjoined—one associated with queer theory, the other with Deleuzian desiring-production. Each is attributable to Velvet Goldmine but their emphases are drastically different. One bases itself in performative resignification, and the other, more Deleuzian ideology on a schizoanalytic model of what we have called throughout this book positive production—or, paradigmatically, desiring-production, generating novelties rather than simply repeating or revising inherited forms.

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This reading mode, whose compatibility with queer tropes and ideologies Velvet Goldmine helps to showcase, not only addresses “change” as the key term in Curt’s and Arthur’s final dialogue, but also pivotally reframes the final chain of images in the film, unveiling a series of seeming non sequiturs as an open provocation, not unlike Curt’s inflammatory speech. As we have learned by now, the most characteristic, valorized product of Deleuzian desiringmachines are relations, whether actual (that is, currently perceptible or enacted) or virtual (signaled as immanent possibility). If the nature and value of change is what Arthur and Curt’s final tête-à-tête explicitly enjoins us to reconsider, it is the nature of relation—deterritorialized relation, collective relation, and political relation—that Velvet Goldmine forces us to reconsider through all its images, but especially those in its closing moments. Can we relate two forms of change that seem so differently premised and valued? How do we relate to our own pasts and memories, especially if they are no longer recognizable to us? If we can do that—hopefully as trained by queer theory, Deleuzian philosophy, and modern cinema to construct relations among patently dissimilar propositions—then what new forms of difference will we prove able to relate across?

Toward Productive Ends I argued about Beau travail in the previous chapter that Denis’s film presumes an audience with some skills of queer reading or thoughts about queer experience already at their disposal. I think Velvet Goldmine harbors the same assumption. Denis, however, hazards her audience’s savvy about queer themes so as to propose an even more transitive economy of genders and sexualities than that implied by homoeroticism. Todd Haynes, by contrast, prompts questions about the value of what we know about queerness, or what we imagine we know as queers, and whether we know enough. Denis wants to keep moving us toward new, elliptical frontiers. Haynes also wants to do that, in part by asking us to step back and reflect, and also to forge empathetic alliances across seemingly tantamount differences and discrete life-worlds, inhabited in remote terrains. In the years leading up to Velvet Goldmine’s debut, Claire Colebrook suggests, these kinds of metacritical provocations had become more frequent, whereby a queer text asks its reader and/or viewer to ponder the nature and stakes of queerness. One such metareflection that Colebrook takes up concerns Butlerian performatives and resignification, easily the most widely circulated tropes of queer theory, and also the most commonly associated with the Homo Pomo styles of New Queer Cinema. However, Colebrook argues that they may not be the best and are certainly not the only lenses through which one might conceive of change, especially of queer change. Her hypotheses map

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helpfully onto the kinds of queer intertextual projects we observe in Velvet Goldmine or Beau travail or Naked Lunch, each of which reinhabits the husk of an earlier work: Against an art of parody or drag that would repeat the norm in order to destabilize it from within, positive repetition and difference make a claim for thinking time in its pure state . . . Art would not be the representation or formation of identities but the attempt to present pure intensities in matter, allowing matter to stand alone or be liberated from its habitual and human series of recognition.52 A film like Goldmine, then, exists not to demonstrate, via its performed constructedness, that the major-cultural monolith it “repeats” (i.e., Citizen Kane) has always been a construction, too. This epiphany, if it counts as one, razes hierarchies of value between old and new productions, but does so in ways that are prone to disregard the specific qualities of each text that a Deleuzian schizoanalysis would observe more closely. Nor should the goal of such a work involve reterritorializing every constituent relation or affective texture into some picture of the “sense” it makes, or a prescriptive plan for politics, or a new framework of identity. What Colebrook advocates, then, through a Deleuzo-Guattarian discourse of “positive production”—endemic, as we know, to these theorists’ conception of desire—is a principle not of mutual gravitation to the same antifoundationalist plane but of magnified differentiation. By taking for granted what Goldmine swipes from Kane, we focus our attentive recognition on its departures, responding not to anything pyrrhic in the hypotext but to how the new assemblages operate, even when they perplex the viewer or resist instantaneous takeup. A stark illustration here arrives care of Goldmine’s exact contemporary, Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (1998), which adheres with notorious precision to Hitchcock’s blueprint, much more than Haynes does to Welles’s. The restricted deviations thus become all the more arresting: the livid fluorescents of Anne Heche’s costumes, the shocking bareness of Viggo Mortensen’s body in the prologue, the aggressive literalizing of Norman Bates’s voyeurism, and so forth. Jean-Luc Godard famously said about Weekend (1967) that it wasn’t a film about blood, it was a film about red. Psycho, by Godard’s and Colebrook’s reasoning, isn’t only about Hitchcock’s themes but also “about” orange and chartreuse and skin, and “about” the sheer, perspiring heaviness of Norman and Marion’s birdlike sharpness. Through these lenses, although sensory arrest requires no intellectual rationalization, new concepts emerge that are not “in” Hitchcock per se: for example, the odd flamboyance we sometimes indulge while pretending inconspicuousness (why else a neon-colored outfit, right down to the underwear, while fulfilling a felonious errand?). As genres agglomerate and artistic novelties become harder to find, Deleuze increasingly “describes all art as the repetition of the history of art, but always

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with a struggle to release sensations from their subjection to figuration and repetition. There is no such thing as a bare canvas, for we are already composed and dominated by clichés.”53 Queer and Deleuzian theories of art may equally grasp the paucity of bare canvases, but the logic plays out differently. Butler, in Colebrook’s reading, affirms the being of queer subjects in the world by, paradoxically, insisting upon the linguistic materiality of all sex and gender but no other materiality. For her, as many readers will already know, being and becoming amount to an aesthetic regime practiced within circumstances of constraint, a series of performatively executed contracts whose stipulations often pass as immutable laws (albeit with impressive incentives and violent enforcements that Butler absolutely acknowledges). An odd logical problem emerges, though, of trying to coax a positive state of being out of a negative scenario of demystified origins and deconstructive zero-sums. By contrast, Deleuze derives positive states of becoming from already-positive accumulations of virtual force and potential relation, actualized in new ways at different times and through different channels. These two philosophies of difference, relation, and change import another frisson of uncertainty into that final exchange between Curt and Arthur about changing the world versus changing ourselves, insofar as neither interlocutor makes clear what notion of change he has in mind, regardless of its object. If glam rock had changed “the world,” would it have exposed that world as perched atop even shakier disciplinary struts than anyone had previously recognized, bringing privileged figures down (or up) to the same discursive level of glam’s orphans and aliens, its angels and Maxwell Demons? Would it have encouraged more focus on how glam felt, from inside or out, regardless of what it “meant”? Or would glam, in a Deleuzian spirit of production, have added something genuinely new into that world, something whose “pure intensities” challenged the “habitual and human series of recognition,” making glam a positive goad to desire, sensation, thought, and new collective relations? If glam did succeed in “changing ourselves”—and even Curt implies that it did, albeit with a whimper instead of a bang—did it expose the falsity of our previous selves, such that our new selves need not be so cowed by them and their norm-abiding models? Or, again, did the value of this change manifest not through some retroactive epiphany but through a genuine novelty in our selves?54 This emphasis on production, one way of getting at Deleuzian schizoanalysis as I have invoked it across this book, can organize readings of individual films, not just cross-textual pairs. If we apply the Deleuzian style of reading to both Citizen Kane and Velvet Goldmine individually, responding to each film’s series of images as a chain of productions, we not only observe very different figures but very different scales and circuits of change. For example, the final dividend produced at the end of Kane is, of course, the Rosebud sled, melting in a furnace, disclosed to the audience but to no character in the film, and

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framed tightly in a close-up, banishing all else to an out-of-field. By contrast, Goldmine’s greater orientations toward profuse, polymorphic production are palpable even in its multifarious series of closing spectacles. These include the final, crucial cameos by the green pin; a song heard concurrently via jukebox, radio, and live performance, in two different countries in at least two different years; an ephemeral, inspiring image of sex between two characters we know; and a brief montage of decontextualized images of characters we emphatically do not know. One thing Velvet Goldmine positively produces in this flurry of endings—exacerbated by but independent of their difference from Rosebud’s solitary monumentality—is the sheer feeling of dispersal. By implication, Goldmine has not structured glam’s importance or its legacy to inhere in one figure or travel in one direction. The closing sequences invite further centers of indetermination in a film that can already claim several—reconfiguring queerness with machinic Deleuzian profligacy, not as a project of repeating differently but of generating freshly and atomizing widely. Beyond the highly dispersed orientations of Velvet Goldmine’s closing ellipses, as against Kane’s emphatic full-stop, we could draw out further contrasts, even if we limit our comparisons to just the sled and the pin. Unlike the viewer’s exclusive vantage on Rosebud, and its exclusive pertinence to Kane among all the movie’s characters, Goldmine’s pin is both recognized and transferred by a semiveiled series of men, soliciting ambiguous recognition from still others. The sled ends the film amid its own destruction, while the pin gets passed to a new heir. The sled harks back to an image of a birth mother, implying Kane’s dying affect of natal alienation, while the pin invokes a diagonal series of unpredictable transmissions among foundlings and cosmic transplants, many generations of whom we have glided over. Indeed, the Rosebud sled presumes as poignant the last moment before young Charles became more or less an orphan, shipped off to live with Thatcher, never to return. The pin, by contrast, is a proud blazon of foundling status, in its trials as well as its secret glories, enabling rather than sundering connections, however aleatory and opaque.55 Minus any rational schema of transfer from inheritor to inheritor, Velvet Goldmine’s pin furnishes no incentive for the viewer to perceive Oscar, Jack, Brian, Curt, and Arthur as an identical or automatic set. Again, from a standpoint of positive production, Velvet Goldmine’s concluding emphasis on the pin and its passers-on orients the film around orphanness and discontinuity, not just as an aesthetic experience but as a principle by which one’s own allies or affines can never be guessed in advance. For a film set in 1984, such erratic transmissions among queer men who barely know each other—such that they bequeath one another with something wondrous, instead of fearing they have inherited something disastrous—is also a positive production. This claim for positivity holds in the sense of being new and useful, not just in offering salve and comfort, and quite apart from the obvious departures from Citizen Kane’s tragic mythos of hubristic dynasticism. Lastly,

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the brevity, hypnotic beauty, and rapidity of the scenes where the pin gets passed produce a context in which evanescent moments can register as potentially tremendous, even transformative in their import, able to launch an alien or orphan into a new collective, where he or she would not have imagined fitting. This ethos of production as potential affiliation is richly exploited by the movie’s literally eccentric end.

The Minors and the Miners Velvet Goldmine preserves its crystalline tensions through its bivalve endings, each betraying actual and virtual aspects, in and of themselves and in relation to one another. Each orients intensely around the one model of the crystal that Haynes has mostly postponed until this point: the second or “cracked” model, permitting escape for an isolated character from a highly theatrical and largely self-enclosed world. By that logic, no matter how definitively the “Death of Glitter” is declared in the concert hall downstairs, there still exists a possibility for “more life” somewhere else, even nearby, in unanticipated directions of escape. No matter how distant the 1970s or how entrapping the 1980s, pathways outward and transformative potentials abide even then. The double ending also speaks to that reading I have proposed of Velvet Goldmine as a meditation on queer theory’s own decade-long preoccupation with textual, bodily, and cultural resignifications. Such practices figure here as glam rather than drag but possibly—at least according to characters like Curt—come at the expense of imagining alternatives for more overt political alliance or worldchanging collectives, convened among groups who have never noted their affinities. The first ending allows Arthur to reconnect to himself and to his past, and to so by producing an image borne of desire, even if the “memory” itself is untrue or embellished. The second ending, also quite open, pushes that idea of relation further. Having by that point seen so many relations modeled in Velvet Goldmine and felt the late affective surge of one especially gratifying relation for Arthur, the viewer must determine how big a leap she or he is willing to take into nonclichéd perception and untested coalition. While Sontag argues that AIDS, even more than cancer, has militated against any “compensatory mythology,” and I do not claim that Goldmine generates one, the film hits an apogee of poignant memorializing that neither the slippery spectaculars of the Brian Slade sequences nor the haunted, depopulated Arthur Stuart sequences have so far yielded. As Arthur’s talk with Curt unfolds, the film emits short, elliptical flashes from the roof of a solid-brick building where Curt and Arthur, both half-dressed and looking as they did in 1975, are laughing, tickling, and urinating in shots so overexposed they are almost purely white. We have some context for these images. Only a few minutes prior in movie time, Goldmine’s staging of the “Death of Glitter” concert

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ended with Curt and Arthur catching each other’s eyes backstage, and the singer cuing the awestruck fan to meet him upstairs. In shots that begin amidst heavy nighttime lighting but gradually amass a warmer glow, Curt and Arthur begin to make love on the rooftop—almost certainly Arthur’s first time with anyone. The film elides most of the action, but at one point, as Curt cradles Arthur’s bare torso from behind, they look up and see Oscar Wilde’s mothership wash through the sky, raining golden glitter. It suddenly seems to matter more that Arthur confessed at the top of this scene to being high on a button. Even in discreet long shot, however, oriented from a building or two away, the love-making looks “actual”—less in the Shortbus sense than in Scott Bravmann’s sense of a past that “really did happen,” give or take the odd UFO. The scene ends with Curt’s and Arthur’s voices reciting in etherized unison a strange midcoital endearment: “I will mangle your mind.” This vision erupts amid Arthur’s and Curt’s exchange a decade later, specifically as Curt rises to leave and the journalist spots the emerald pin on his jacket—a dead ringer, as it were, of the spaceship in miniature. Goldmine then furnishes a flash-cut to an even more distant scene of Brian giving Curt this pin, inside some abstract white space, on distressed film stock, and amid the same overexposed light as Curt and Arthur’s rooftop aubade. Afterward, we return to that early-morning reverie—not to the sex itself—and linger on Arthur’s uncharacteristically broad smile. Crosscutting back to the bar in 1984, Curt offers to let Arthur keep the pin but Arthur, making a gesture possibly unprecedented in this pendant’s strange life, refuses. Does Curt recall their brief encounter? Did it even really happen? (There it is again: “What happened?”) Everything that conveyed Arthur’s swagger and Curt’s discomfort at the top of the scene, from the actors’ attitudes to the relative tightness of their close-ups to the blocking of who sits and who stands, has now reversed to favor Curt. That is, all the formal choices that previously conveyed Arthur’s knowledge of something Curt wished to deny (the truth about Brian/Tommy? the memory of Brian, period?) now constructs Curt as the site of knowledge and Arthur as the naïf or suppressor. The memory of sex itself is unlikely to be the object of Arthur’s anxious refusal, since those impressions have already been divulged in the earlier moments. What carries greatest force amid this second round of memories is not the men’s bodies but Arthur’s face, suffused with enjoyment, free of the perspiration that mottles his brow even today, even when he has the upper hand on Curt. Free, too, of the heavy, highcontrast lighting that often pools every possible shadow in Christian Bale’s stone-cut face. What Arthur refuses is, I would hazard, the memory of pleasure in sex, or of comfort in another person, particularly a same-sex person—and possibly the long-dormant impulse to relate “across difference” with his own prior self, for reasons that are plainly personal but also collective, political, and epochal for any queer man of Arthur’s generation. Despite all these looming impediments, this image or memory floods back even more as Curt abandons

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Arthur to the cheap linoleum and fake paneling of this unlovable bar. Arthur takes a last swig from his beer and almost chokes on . . . the pin, which Curt slipped into the bottle before slipping away himself. To be careful about terms, “memory” is a fraught word in this context, despite formal and affective lures to perceive these images as recollection—not in the Mankiewicz sense that would suture too many gaps in this pointedly fissured movie, but at least far enough to grant this event as really having happened. We need not refuse the recollection-based reading outright: as I have argued repeatedly, the desiring-image should reject Cinema 1’s categorical premium on coherent continuities but should be equally skeptical about Cinema 2’s barely relenting insistence on the false, the free-floating, and the totally derationalized. We have also observed many reasons why Velvet Goldmine or its viewers might take valuable solace in remembering mid-1970s contentment from the standpoint of what seems fair to call mid-1980s PTSD. Still, the careworn 16mm, the jumpy editing and overbright lighting, and the arrhythmia of these unbidden flashes, entering the film at brief, abrupt moments and then reclining back into the past, suggest a more free-indirect orientation behind these images, something even stranger than memory—a power of the false, percolating in the spectacle even before the UFO arrives.56 Possibly these diaphanous flourishes originate in Arthur’s tenderly “mangled” mind or else as sheets from the film’s own plane of immanence, which in Goldmine’s case has always inextricably involved temporal disorder and molecular desire, each in a permanent state of emergency, though not just any state of emergency. We cannot insist that sex “really” happened between Curt and Arthur, still less that it happened in just that way, but to reprise Mandy’s rejoinder regarding an earlier act of rumored erotic congress, even the most fantastical details “make for a very strong case.” And possibly something more important than truth unfolds: we can believe that sex happened, and that happiness and togetherness were possible. However joyful in that respect, this fleeting scene of queer historical recovery is ill-equipped to challenge Curt’s view that nothing that transpired in the glam world from 1969 to 1975 did anything but change ourselves. Given the lingering question of whether Curt even remembers, plus the unsolved mystery of how soon Arthur reverted from this blissed-out sexual initiate to the locked-down urban zombie we meet nine years later, it is not clear that this rooftop interlude changed even these two selves. Any hope in that arena rests on the eccentric shots that follow Arthur’s smiling discovery of the pin in his beer-bottle, and the ensuing flashback to Jack Fairy closing out the “Death of Glitter” concert in those black peacock feathers, singing Bryan Ferry’s “2HB”— the same song now playing from the jukebox in Curt and Arthur’s bar, thereby bridging the remainder of Goldmine’s queer benediction. What odd images they are. First, as the camera floats upward from the concert-hall stage, we rediscover Curt and Arthur against the white-washed skyline, slouched in

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postcoital exhaustion, and glimpsed through a whirl of blurred-out feathers or snowflakes that, for the last of many times, recall Citizen Kane’s snowglobe, a signature figure within that film for impenetrable crystals of time. Velvet Goldmine cracks that crystal, first by continuing to float, past the lovers as well as the abstract flurry—the storm, perhaps, that some retreating Benjaminian Angel observes in its own wake.57 The camera remains largely airborne through the five shots that follow, all linked by gossamer dissolves: a low-angle close-up of a young boy with eyes closed, daydreaming against a cloud bank; an overhead pan above three boys of similar age in wide, 1970s-style lapels, gawking at something unspecified near the camera’s vantage; a similarly oriented but brighter and closer shot of two uniformed schoolgirls, swaying beneath a leafy tree, as though they can hear “2HB”; an overhead shot of urban foot traffic on a damp, slate-colored sidewalk, citing an identical image in Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) but in funeral-parlor colors; and, most unexpectedly, a chest-level, candlelit, right-to-left pan across eight or ten men in a working-class bar, some dimly reflected in a mirrored wall behind them, ending with a slight push-in to an old transistor radio. With this pan, not only does the angelic, aerial camera return to earth, but Jack Fairy’s loud and crystal-clear rendition of “2HB” grows quieter and tinnier, until the scene places it as diegetic music, whispering its way out of that barroom speaker.58 Within the film’s affective and syntactic terms, Arthur’s sex beneath the stars, indeed his sex with a star, is an episode we would gladly perceive as actual, if only Haynes did not film it with such virtualizing accents: sex in a time of starships, with a head-in-the-clouds chaser. The closing montage reprises related tensions: the images themselves pose no impediments to our actual belief, but the only links we can conceive among these school-ground kids, these Arcadian girls, these scuttling city-dwellers, and these low-lit, low-volume, middle-aged raconteurs are intensely virtual, premised on unclear pasts or present or points of intersection. What could they bear in common, either with each other or with “2HB,” particularly so as to merit inheriting Velvet Goldmine’s final images? The elongated sound-bridge of Fairy’s riff on Ferry’s song increases without illuminating the possible connections, since it starts as early as the Curt-Arthur interview and folds those two men, plus the time-killing denizens of that New York dive, and then the assembled pallbearers at the “Death of Glitter” within the finale’s odd, airborne cross-section. We can only attest that this obscure survey of disparate folks does not exist as a legible “people,” not the kind that “exists” in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, even to themselves. Such seemingly insuperable heterogeneity may of course be the point of the sequence and even of the film. After all, Deleuze and his most prominent champions cannot be clearer that any minor politics depends on refusing logics of identity or of preestablished relation. The population in question “must not be understood as an ideal image of unity,” they need not fall within the terms of a “demographic minority,” and “ideally, a minority discourse is

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collective without unifying,” such that “the people are never one but several and multiple, not molar but molecular.”59 Kushner advanced in this same direction by grouping the black queen Belize, the late-middle-aged Mormon matriarch Hannah Pitt, and the semireconciled exes Louis Ironson and Prior Walter as Angels in America’s parting ensemble. But of course those characters all know each other, inhabit one space, and have spent a two-part, full-day theatrical cycle parsing their differences and hard-won compatibilities. Velvet Goldmine’s zoetrope of parting glances spins in more Deleuzian directions, signaling only the barest incipience of collective affinity, risking accusations of utter arbitrariness, or of over-absorbing Cinema 2’s spooked refusal of anything like a united front. The film may even dare a late grab at “real,” change-the-world politics insofar as the closing shot of the pub bears a strong historical referent in the 1974 and 1975 miners’ strikes in the UK, cutting off raw materials to power stations and resulting in black- and brown-outs like the one gripping this bar. Of course, the next renowned series of miners’ strikes emerged just where Goldmine picks up in 1984, under the rule of the Iron Lady, albeit with fewer power cuts. So, no matter which of the film’s historical enunciation points is actually invoked here, the other thrives as collateral, virtual resonance. Either way, the image entails Goldmine’s final restoration to British shores, where glam was born and then buried. Our glimpse of these miners—who are in no way the minors toward whom Velvet Goldmine ever implied a trajectory—transforms before our eyes from a belief-beggaring conceit to a crucial hinge within an emergent vision of political curiosity and collectivity. In grammatical and spatial terms, which may feel suspiciously like movement-based terms, the closing sequence describes a cloud-grazing parabola that starts amid a grim and backward-looking New York bar, momentarily astir over a low-value gift (the press pass) and a lowcost pleasure (the jukebox). After lifting off, coasting skyward, and landing back in an English bar, we find another crowd, comprising either the agents demanding change (the miners) or the neighbors bearing up amiably through their protest. The austerity of this scene, too, feels relieved a bit by the lowfrequency cheer of chatter, beer, and distant music. Is either bar a gay bar? There is no reason to think so, although Arthur does draw quite the cruisy double-take from two handsome men nearest the jukebox as he makes his way to the backroom where Curt has squatted for the night. As for the English establishment, centuries of tavern culture preclude us from reading an all-male barroom as necessarily a site of queer implication. Then again, if our sensory-motor habits can be suspended, there is no reason not to ask. Maybe all the miners are straight, and all the queers are glam rockers, but surely some of them are brave.60 Should we require, for some reason, further incentives to imagine queer possibility among the radicalized members of the English working class, Velvet Goldmine’s original shooting

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script called for a final, exterior shot of “the locked mouths of two handsome Dockers, kissing,” before tracking over to a nearby barge on black, sparkling water.61 Haynes and his collaborators filmed the shot but excised it from the final edit. In the director’s words, “We had to let it go because the shot was very confusing as the final note. It felt weightier than intended. . . . I didn’t want the shot to imply glam rock made everyone gay, there’s no message of that sort in the film.”62 Nonetheless, one among many “messages” that are in the film suggests that desire could work almost any way through anyone, albeit not in the same ways at all times, and not in perfect correspondence with our outward perceptions. Desiring-images repel clichés of sexual assumption more than movement- or time-images do, buttressed as those images often are by unexamined dimorphisms or heterosexist assumptions; so, too, are many movies shaped and sold as gay or lesbian cinema. Shortbus, we recall, also ended in a counterpublic space amid a power outage, one where brazen erotic experiments regularly unfold, with pointedly “actual” dimensions that the audience could hardly miss. Velvet Goldmine’s candlelit pub conjures immanent desire in a nearly opposite way, in the total absence of manifest sexual desire. The risky invitation posed instead by montage to find some principle of connection among the glam rockers, the queer groupies, the anonymous members of several publics, and the residents of this pub may deter us from presuming heteronormative values, if we suddenly question our impulses to do so. By the same token, though, we may recuse ourselves from assuming that shared sexual identification is the only point of possible alliance among these groups, even following all the sexual spectacle and boundary-testing of the previous two hours. Desire, understood as malleable for everyone, and as a principle that can draw groups together who have more in common than they immediately recognize, is in those senses shared by the miners and the Goldminers. The surface incongruity of the association, combined with the bold transversality of this closing sequence, may at least prompt us to mull the possibilities: producing nonclichéd thought and feeling, as the best Deleuzian cinema does. What relations, then, can we posit between Arthur’s quasi-memory and the closing semiparabola? For starters, the rooftop interlude suggests both a peak of present and a sheet of past for Arthur. In relation to the 1970s scenes, that night culminates a process of self-transformation, contracting a cornucopia of foregoing movements, desires, connections, disjunctions, intensities, and relations into one concentrated instant, plainly bearing more facets than those we can perceive. Almost as soon as it happens, it recedes into a general past, as Deleuzian presents always do. This happens again almost immediately after Arthur recalls (or imaginatively produces) the scene as a floating sheet of past in 1984. Whether that contact with Curt or anything that directly preceded it counts as changing more than “himself ” is a decision for Arthur and for each viewer to surmise, without a prescription in either direction from the film.

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Neither Curt nor Arthur fits squarely under a sign like “gay” despite enjoying sex with other men. Indeed, between them, many relations of difference are tested: Arthur is an English suburban, taciturn to an extreme, self-conscious to the point of perma-frown and perma-sweat, entangled today in “serious,” moneyed concerns that endanger his hold on his own queer past. Curt is an American imp of the perverse, the Icarus of glam rock who for better or worse has survived his fall and wonders if the whole movement all along aimed for the wrong targets. The world Curt is eager to change would likely perceive any sexual exchange between these two as an act of “homosexuality.” It is not clear, though, that Curt and Arthur identify that way, or that they are particularly struck by their sameness, or if they are more similar than they are different (and by whose estimation?), or that “masculinity” is where their centers of gendered gravity inhere, or that maleness is what attracts them to each other. This sheet of enigmatic pastness gets swept up quickly within a strange series that extends to events and arcs, public and private ones, major and minor, that we never definitively understand. This erratic chain takes us from a New World bar to an Old World pub, reflecting in one sense the AngloAmerican contact that Curt and Arthur attain within their own intimate conjunction. This resulting crystal joins a two-person encounter and a collective series that initially appear to say nothing to each other. Neither of these images is the more provably “actual” or “virtual.” As in any crystalline pair, they feel bound to swap those roles ad infinitum. Amidst all of this, the emerald pin gets passed, linking queer pasts to queer futures that rarely recognize each other. As Curt reveals the pin, the memory of the rooftop surges. As Arthur holds it ambivalently in his hand, the film cuts to a close-up of a quarter dropping into a jukebox slot, and a 45rpm record of decade-old desiring-machines gets dredged from the archive of pastness to re-grace the present. The only beat in the scene when Curt could have managed to slip the pin into Arthur’s bottle is during this shot, or the one of the loose collective arrayed around the Wurlitzer: dissimilar in stature, style, and skin color, held precariously together by the sentiment one of them interchangeably expresses: “I love this song.” The two moments, the one we witness and the one we retroactively infer, conjoin around the idea of desire rediscovered and replayed—in one case by an actual machine, in the other by countless, reawakened, virtual machines. From this moment forward, the song, not the pin, organizes that final series of images, though the transitions among them, in their way, are as erratic as those that once conveyed Oscar Wilde’s brooch into Jack Fairy’s hand, or Curt’s wildness into Brian’s cold embrace, or Arthur’s past at long last back into Arthur’s present. The pin does not vanish, though we have no clue what will happen to Arthur from here, and whether or to whom he will give it away. As the pin, then, travels among its hieroglyphic series of visually striking minors, the song departs any diegetic order and alights among a crowd of striking

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miners. Any or all of them could be queer; the image declines to decide, and gives us no place from which to ask, although ask we might. No one is paying much attention to “2HB,” which will soon enough disappoint its own lyrical plea to “fade away never,” devolving into the ever-growing archive of pasts. For now, the miners look much more focused on their mugs of beer. At any rate, the song proves even more portable than the pin, capable of taking itself anywhere, just as the world might at any point ride a crest of productive transmission and change, based on who knows what alliances or eruptions of fellow-feeling, especially if unlikely people start forging counter-intuitive but productively coalitional bonds with each other. Because these miners refuse to work until they are compensated fairly, they have no electricity. The burnished glow of the scene, though it may for us evoke nostalgia for the now-muffled song, literally arises from the bottles all over the bar, each one planted with a lit candle. Back in New York, or maybe years later in New York—since montage, as so often in a postwar film, tells confusing and slightly different tales—the pin that symbolized inchoate change and unforeseeable alliance is also found at the bottom of another beer bottle. This motif, in its remarkable but easily missed consistency, begs this question. What could it mean to pass the legacy of Oscar Wilde and Brian Slade onto these resistors of class-based exploitation? Any conceivable answer, however remote, is what a film like Velvet Goldmine exists to unearth and investigate, not to cast out of hand. Even the film’s odd title, swiped from one of many David Bowie songs he refused to license to the film, marks a poetically improbable collision of the luxurious and the laborious. The miners in this English night are not, to say the least, in the market for gold. They appear wholly unseduced by Tommy Stone, that hunk of cubic zirconium, if they even know who he is. But does that mean their story has nothing to do with the actual one we believe we have been watching? From the standpoint of 1998, feeling backward to all of the epochs his story encompasses, Todd Haynes again poses his favorite query: “What happened?” He also pointedly expands the repertoire: What else might have happened? What did we do? Who are “we,” and what could we be to each other? Maybe Haynes takes comfort in the idea that the pack of queer orphans who came together to produce, consume, and eventually commemorate glam rock might have seen some crystalline reflection of themselves in these disenfranchised workers. After all, they harvest the material that keeps the jukeboxes spinning, just as the glam rockers unknowingly soothe the airwaves in their barroom. Perhaps the reverse could also prove true. Velvet Goldmine confronts its millennial audience with these untapped possibilities, at a time when the appeal—even the need—for creative, counter-intuitive bonds among the have-nots and the aliens only seems to escalate, with less and less sense of how to distinguish among them. While Velvet Goldmine’s capacity to keep producing new images, relations, and questions—right up through that unforeseeable coda—is quintessentially

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Deleuzian, the movie’s view of history strikes me as Benjaminian, in what it rouses us to see and simultaneously appears to retract. What Arthur surely learns from that final barroom encounter is that “the true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”63 Though we may still harbor questions about exactly what Arthur recalls, invents, or willfully misconstrues about this seemingly remembered moment, this does not in and of itself invalidate his vision, since “to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’” but rather to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.”64 Surely this is just what Arthur does: he remembers pleasure and he re-perceives his own desires, just before it becomes too late to ever recover them. Of course, a simultaneous threat, which Curt warns him (and us) against, is to stay so focused on this fleeting image that other facets of the current “moment of danger” can pass by unattended. In this way, too, Velvet Goldmine is remarkably crystalline. On the one hand, it is a gender-bending, pleasure-baiting, hormone-firing, freely adapting, time-warping, glitter-bombing, assumption-testing spectacle and soundscape, with one eye trained on the very lowest points of recent queer history. Equal parts pleasure and pain (indeed, reluctant to disjoin this pair), Goldmine speaks from a future of popular queer image-making that few in 1975 and possibly even fewer in 1984 could have foreseen. Though I am arguing neither for telos nor apotheosis, Goldmine plays to me as a film to which New Queer Cinema had been leading, and certainly not as an indicator, despite its critics, that queer cinema was dying. This is why I choose to end The Desiring-Image on this film, and why this chapter incorporates so many allusions to films I have previously discussed. Haynes has made his own Felliniesque crystal of crystals but also insisted on cracking it irrationally, so that there are many productive ideas and relations to follow outward—even as he charitably resuscitates the dream of remembered tenderness, in circumstances that seem so overdetermined around gloom. On the other hand, Velvet Goldmine emits a palpable melancholy over problems that queer theory and New Queer Cinema had insufficiently addressed. Goldmine itself, among its many paradoxes, reflects sensual appetites, stylistic euphoria, and conceptual frameworks that it nonetheless feels compelled to critique. Even at the end, however, its ideas about “changing the world” mostly involve shifting expectations and stoking capacities for conjecture and for new forms of belief, leaving off at just the moment when the makers and writers and distributors and teachers and scholars and patrons and minors and miners of queer cinema will start digging in and doing the necessary work that will follow through on those new possibilities of relation. Like Benjamin’s Angel (and who can blame it?) the film has a harder time looking ahead and imagining what is in store than it does in looking backward and seeing a pile of ruin, disorder, and paradox, despite the movie’s obvious, infectious enthusiasm for disorder

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Figure 6.3 Velvet Goldmine: Oscar Wilde’s spaceship, heading into new, queer directions. Velvet Goldmine, 1998, dir. Todd Haynes.

and paradox. For all of these reasons, Velvet Goldmine plays to me also as a film New Queer Cinema needed to force it along different paths, encouraging embellishments and departures from still more touchstones of the past, tackling a host of questions and opening new channels for alliance, belief, and what Bruce Nugent calls, in his sumptuous baritone, imagination. For almost a decade previously, beginning in a fictive moment “around 1991,” two brilliant traditions of filmmaking and scholarship—passing under the names queer theory and New Queer Cinema—had seized their audiences with a fervor not unlike the one exerted by glam, and seemed to explode overnight. Of course, this sense of spontaneous emergence is, at best, and like much in Goldmine itself, an alluring myth laid over top of more complicated histories. Queer theory, queer cinema, and glam rock overlapped in many points of their appeal and in many appetites they fed: for sensory stimulation, for artful pastiche and unexpected alliance, and for counter-hegemonic resistances, some more consistently waged than others. Still, after ten years, this cinema and perhaps, too, its sibling school of scholarship found themselves arguably better equipped to offer a more complex and nuanced understanding of David Bowie’s popularity than of George Bush’s popularity. Within that context, Haynes made a film that estranges and deterritorializes our desires, including our sexual desires but also our other forms of Deleuzian desire, those that drive us to create and conjoin with each other in unpredictable ways, to produce and to speculate rather than backpedal or repeat. To see, perhaps, striking miners as deprived not just of wage and work but of their desires; or to see queer kids in a street or a sad pub not as revelers caught after last-call but as members of an oppressed class. Velvet Goldmine and the movies to which it conjoins urge a future where no desiring-machines or desiring-paths are

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ruled out in advance. They also pine, however, for relatively recent pasts in which greater bonds across difference might have been established but mostly were not. Even so, as much for what they face and produce as for the limits they mourn, reflect, or push against, these films abound with deterritorialized multitudes, with complexly provoking collectives, and with flexible terms for new kinds of politics, or for old kinds of politics pliably reconceived.

Conclusion The Pin and the Pearl Holding out a fleeting promise, appearing and departing at virtually the same instant, recognizing a moment of danger but perhaps not attending equally or sufficiently to all aspects of that danger: this all sounds equally, and not coincidentally, like Benjamin’s view of history, like Velvet Goldmine’s memory of glam rock, and like the view many important critics have taken of New Queer Cinema. Its own best promoter, B. Ruby Rich, must have hated to pronounce that cinema, nine years or so after first catching onto it, as “a more successful term for a moment than a movement.”1 Arthur Stuart, reexperiencing the depth charge of his contact with Curt Wild nine years or so after it happened, may similarly describe that event as more of a moment in his life than the beginning of a movement. His current mien and stated priorities do not suggest much of a through-line. But then, you never know. As Deleuze is the first to insist, and Benjamin agrees, through-lines are easy and even dangerous to overvalue, and things do not entirely evaporate the moment we stop perceiving them. Arthur offers living proof that the horizon-filling phenomena of one moment can, for any number of reasons, evanesce for years at a time, without falling away irreparably from our grasp. As I have tried to attest throughout this book, from its earliest to its most recent case studies, I do not believe that the excitingly collective, eccentrically political, impressively deterritorializing impetus behind New Queer Cinema or behind any contemporary queer cinema ever went away. The desiring-forms that realized themselves with such energy through and around these movements and moments have continued to amass new, actual forms in contemporary queer cinema, the extent and dimensions of which we have only begun to assess. To urge those desires and energies toward new frontiers—as Curt wishes glam had done, and as many of New Queer Cinema’s detractors wished it had done—is not to bury but to praise the deterritorializing impulses that constitute a desiring-image in the first place, forcing new productions and responding to the world in its innumerable, changing facets.

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These movies, their makers, and their audiences keep passing Oscar’s pin—an irresistible stand-in, I find, for Deleuze’s crystals. The power and mystique of that pin, as with the crystal-image form (which could easily have described Naked Lunch or The Watermelon Woman, or of any of our previous case studies), and as with queer cinema altogether, depends a great deal on the unexpectedness of its transfers; on the wildly different ensembles in which it appears; on the periods when it seems to go underground; and on the moments when it resurfaces, however gleamingly or modestly, ready to grace a totally new type of person or collective project. Inevitably, some heirs will make more conspicuous or counter-intuitive use of the pin than others. Sometimes it recedes to the bottom of a bottle, or much further, and sometimes it takes surprisingly long to float back up. Recognizing, extracting, and passing the pin from film to film or from movement to movement may require unexpected efforts, unanticipated allies, and welltrained, constant attention. In these respects, the desiring-image as a concept resonates with many figures in the films I have explored—not just Velvet Goldmine’s pin, but also Naked Lunch’s warren-like Interzone, and its loose-leaf shuffle of pages, waiting for each reader or viewer to place them in new orders; Brother to Brother’s dusty time-capsule waiting for Perry to open it, and the Niggeratti Manor party opening its door to so many unlikely visitors downstairs; or The Watermelon Woman’s troves of photos, documents, and videos that show us so much and provoke so much feeling, but do not always show or tell everything we hoped they might. One of the richest images for me is Claire Denis’s “oyster,” her preferred metaphor for describing Beau travail’s bifurcated narrative. To me, the desiring-image is the pearl that can result when cinematic forces join together in sympathy and in friction. The manifold relations among Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 work this way in producing and shaping a desiring-image. The relations among Deleuzian philosophy and queer theory work this way, as do those between superficially dissimilar branches of those traditions. The relations among sexuality-specific and more broadly production-based notions of desire work this way. The idiosyncratic relations between any-film-whatever and its unpredictable spectators can work this way, as long as neither the film nor the spectator gratuitously impedes any aspect of desiring-production or its associated processes of discovery. The bivalve shell, of course, is only a metonym and a rather dainty one for what actually produces a pearl. Anyone who has ever poked around inside an oyster shell knows how messy and yet machinic the production process actually is, as does anyone who has peeped into a movie set, a production lab, an editing suite, a mixing booth, or a screenwriter’s garret. The same goes for anyone who haunts a lot of movie theaters—particularly when feeling moved, provoked, turned on or off or both at once by some unnameable figure or aberrant force emanating from the film.

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Theorizing such transactions is a necessarily speculative, never-ending completed task, especially when just reacting to Claire’s womb or Cheryl’s film or the Shortbus Salon or Bill Lee’s blob or Galoup’s dance or Arthur’s memory is both a tall order (where to start?) and an unrefusable summons (who could turn away?). As Louis Ironson says at the end of Angels in America, “You can’t wait around for a theory. The sprawl of life, the weird . . .,” and then he leaves off in stuttering muteness until Hannah Pitt offers the word “Interconnectedness.”2 Gilles Deleuze has been the perfect guide and his books the perfect apparatus in diving for these pearls because he has a consistent, articulated philosophy of film, and a related conception of desire as well, each of which flexes in response to what it encounters. The last thing he would ever want is to tame “the sprawl of life,” which is exactly what he finds interesting and multitudinous in cinema and in desire, and I do, too. Around every desiring-image, one finds more than two valved parts, but rather an entire organism of parts and sets, out-of-fields, and palpable, immanent forces. No one has ever described it more beautifully, as an explicit tribute to what she called “the gift of thinking poetically,” than Hannah Arendt did in her introduction to Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations. Arendt’s closing metaphor, at the end of a very long essay, resonates in context with the “true picture of the past” as Benjamin conceives it in his “Theses,” and as queer films so ambitiously and diversely crystallize it. Like Deleuze, like Haynes, and like Denis, Arendt alights upon the same images of the crystal and the pearl to articulate processes that concern them all: This thinking, fed by the present, works with the “thought fragments” it can wrest from the past and gather about itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past—but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things “suffer a sea-change” and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living—as “thought fragments,” as something “rich and strange.”3 For “this thinking,” substitute Deleuze’s complex, neologistic, porous, and poetic way of thinking, but conjure also certain forms of filmmaking, those that share the pearl divers’ gumption, their savvy, and their passion for the “rich and strange.” For the sea, think of cinema, but think also of desire in its expansive,

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translucent, fathomless histories and limitless productions, replete with prevailing forms but no less filled with strange currents, sea changes, dissolutions, and crystallized possibilities. As for the desiring-image itself, its corollaries in this scene are the forms “rich and strange,” the thought fragments, the constantly changing pearls waiting for a diver to pry them loose, and ready at that point to join the world of the living.

{ Glossary } More nuanced definitions of these and other Deleuzian terms arise in the chapters where I invoke them. However, readers new to Deleuze, especially, may appreciate these shorthand sketches of those concepts which recur most frequently or prominently in this book. See the texts by D. N. Rodowick (1997), Barbara Kennedy (2002), Ronald Bogue (2003), Patricia Pisters (2003), and Paola Marrati (2008) in the Works Cited for additional, accessible translations of these terms. Adrian Parr (2005) and Charles J. Stivale (2005) offer helpful dictionaries to Deleuzian terminology, with less specific focus on cinema. Italicized terms within these summaries refer to other keywords defined in this glossary. Where possible, I have indicated passages of Anti-Oedipus (AO), Cinema 1 (C1), Cinema 2 (C2), Kafka (K), or A Thousand Plateaus (TP) that offer concentrated accounts of these concepts. Action-Image The type of shot that follows a perception-image and an affection-image within the prototypical, three-stage protocol on which Deleuze’s cinema of the movement-image depends. At this third stage, a set of perceived elements, as endowed with affective, narrative, or political import by an intervening shot, engages in a filmed action that reorganizes these elements or advances their relations in a new way, thereby restarting the perception-affection-action cycle. The post–World War II cinema of the time-image substantially reduces the role of this type of image. See especially: C1, chapters 9, 10, and 12. Actual/Virtual Especially in Cinema 2, the actual aspect of an image entails traits we see and hear, and relations we perceive among them. The virtual facets entail further, potential relations, linked to multiple pasts, presents, and futures, none of which we can see; subsequent shots may or may not call these aspects to the fore and render them “actual.” Deleuze holds that virtual potentials exist “in” time, just as objects exist in space even when no one regards them. He compares actual and virtual relations to the limpid and opaque aspects of a crystal (a visible face, many hidden faces, a murky interior, all made of the same material), or between a seed and its complex environment. See especially: C2, chapter 4. Affection-Image Any shot, but usually a face in close-up, that organizes objects in a prior perception-image into coherent relations, often to prepare an ensuing image of action. Beyond this work of sustaining narrative logic, political argument, or temporal sequence, these shots also serve a productive function, by yielding affects, personifying subjects, etc. I argue that affection-images do this work even after the turn from Cinema 1 to Cinema 2, where Deleuze no longer mentions them. See especially: C1, chapters 6 and 7. Any-Whatever A recurrent locution (in French: quelconque) that operates differently based on the concept to which it attaches, typically to level relations among ordinary

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Glossary and privileged forms of that concept. Any-instants-whatever signify time and duration as cinematic constants, separate from unusual or climactic instants in the rhythm, chronology, or plot of a film. (Think of time as always unfolding, not just at special moments when the clock gongs.) Any-spaces-whatever typically designate anonymous, abstracted, or contingent sites where images unfold—albeit on a continuum with more recognizable or overdetermined locations, not as a separate category. Any-movements-whatever similarly indicate how motion operates and evolves throughout all images in a film, including within frames that look transitional or unremarkable on a celluloid print.

Assemblage A combined formation of heterogeneous parts, irreducible to any of them (and thus opposed to the “automaton,” a functional aggregate of identical, rationalized parts). The assemblage operates or produces in a way that would change in kind if any element were subtracted or added; it entails not just disparate elements but their diverse and singular relations. Forms of montage, cinematic sequences, philosophical concepts, persons perceived as subjects, and minor populations (i.e., people who do not exist) are all examples of assemblages. Center of Indetermination Akin to the idea of point of view in film, except Deleuze denies even the most objective camera or most subjective vantage a definitive take on events; his notion of the image involves infinite, mutable vantages beyond what presently manifests on screen. Center of indetermination thus underscores the fleeting, contingent aspect of any point of view, resisting the idea of any outside or privileged vantage, since the forces that produce an image also produce the observer, and they alter and multiply the positions from which that image might be seen. See especially: C1, chapters 4 and 5. Crystal-Image A post–World War II regime of the time-image in which actual/virtual relations alternate constantly, such that distinctions of true or false collapse. Pasts, presents, and futures also accumulate and interlock in irresolvable ways. Deleuze describes four species of this image, each associated with a key European auteur: one that traps characters inside sealed worlds (as in Ophüls), one from which a solo character escapes (Renoir), one that expands to admit an array of characters but allows none to leave (Fellini), and one where time and milieu visibly decompose (Visconti). See especially: C2, chapter 4. Desiring-Machines and Desiring-Production Evoked at the start of Anti-Oedipus as the elemental plane of ontology and activity in the world. Connecting and detaching rampantly with each other, desiring-machines produce the world through the drawn-off energy, materials, and relations generated through their serial encounters. The writers deny that these machines are metaphors, refusing any difference between desiring-production (the work of these machines) and social-production (the same, only under “determinate circumstances”). See especially: AO, unit 1. Deterritorialization Among the most recurring yet most mutable of Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts, deterritorialization refers at times to the process by which language, power, or other assemblages are displaced from familiar coordinates and forced to operate on different grounds. At other times, it denotes how a force such as desire or capital escapes an existing arrangement, moving in some new direction or toward some new goal. In economic or imperial contexts, it involves the extraction of wealth or the displacement of the powerless in multiple capacities. Within an image or a face, it evokes how one

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element abruptly attains new intensity within its field of relations. This partial list of definitions captures how deterritorialization can derail systems of power or convention but does not always do so. Facialization The process by which faces must be produced as such rather than presumed as existing forms. Any image can be facialized, so long as it draws a boundary around a “reflective field” (a human face, a clock face), supplies it with “intensive features” of expression (eyes, mouth, clock hands, minute marks), and mobilizes relations among these features and their encompassing surface, which signify in legible ways to a perceiver. This is the core principle of the affection-image. See especially: C1, chapters 6 and 7; TP, chapter 7. Immanence A principle by which certain productive forces and capacities for change are presumed as both internal to and constitutive of the assemblages they produce. Movement and time constitute cinema’s “planes of immanence,” because motion pictures operate as such via these terms, and because it is through them that images and their relations can change. Anti-Oedipus similarly defines desiring-production as an immanent principle of all objects, subjects, and relations. Impulse-Image A type of image Deleuze associates with literary naturalism, disrupting the movement-based sequence of perception-images, affection-images, and action-images via “primordial” or occult forces within or beneath the visible image. Such images typically trap a film and whatever milieu it depicts into either a desecrating collapse (as in Greed and other Stroheim films) or a cycle of endless repetitions (as in The Exterminating Angel and other films by Buñuel). See especially: C1, chapter 8. Lectosign A type of image, foregrounded at the end of Cinema 2 but implied in moments of Cinema 1, that requires the spectator to read it attentively, including what it suppresses or cannot make visible. Such an image contrasts more clichéd types that a spectator can glancingly or uncritically absorb, through a reflex process of what Deleuze calls “sensory-motor” recognition. See especially: C2, chapter 10. Minor Minor literature (or minor art, minor cinema, etc.) emerges inside a “major” language, composed by authors whose social and political marginality prompts them either to amplify patterns of the major language to defamiliarizing scale or to infiltrate the usual sounds, syntax, sense, and structures of that language, estranging them from within. These acts deterritorialize the major language from its usual modes, give provisional voice to new collectives for whom the writer stands as a very loose surrogate, and open new political possibilities for that group’s emergence and effects. See especially: K, chapters 3 and 4. Movement-Image The first of Deleuze’s two regimes of the image, naming not just moving images or shots “of ” movement but sequenced images that inspire philosophical concepts of movement, made visible as a force of constant, qualitative change. Cinematic movement always bears traces of ideology, as evident in the narrative, character-driven movements innovated in U.S. films; the dialectical movements of history favored in the U.S.S.R.; and the qualitative escalation of movements in French cinema (and their obverse, the general stultifying of movement in German cinema).

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Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari’s shorthand for the most (in)famous Freudian concept of familial and sexual relations, via which imperial and patriarchal structures are misrepresented as “natural” to human psychology and relations. They thus can serve as alibis for global power inequities rather than reveal themselves as effects and tactics of those imbalances. Often, the term becomes a stand-in for static theories of desire and power in general, and for symbolizing, idealizing, and privatizing forms of reading, relating, thinking, and being, all divorced from collective change. See especially: AO, units 2 and 3. Out-of-Field What Deleuze calls the relative out-of-field, familiar from other film studies, denotes spaces or elements outside the temporary bounds of the frame; from that locus, they can suffuse the image with dread, wonder, or other affects. The absolute out-offrame, a second and more distinctly Deleuzian form of this concept, entails time, spirit, or other invisible forces of qualitative change. Thus, even motions or durations enacted “within” an image extend well beyond its borders or its legible surface. This concept defined in Cinema 1 lays the groundwork for the theory of actual/virtual relations in Cinema 2. See especially: C1, chapter 2. Peaks of Present A form of the time-image wherein multiple forces or relations in the accumulating past condense into a highly contingent image of “the” present. Such a peak is never definitive; the bounty and complexity of available pasts could generate different, equally true images of the same “present,” depending on which relations are summoned or made important at a given time from one among many perspectives. Films in which truth proves elusive because apparently “present” images appear equally true and yet contradict each other subsist on the peak form. See also sheets of past. See especially: C2, chapter 5. People Who Do Not Exist Deleuze’s phrase not for extant groups that cinema habitually ignores, but for groups that are neither active nor even thinkable until some minor movement re-orchestrates and politicizes language (or images) in ways that reveal new coalitional potentials. Even in that event, these literally eccentric groups preserve some stake in maintaining limited perceptibility or “existence,” since Deleuze associates iconic images of “the people” with homogenization, rigidifying power structures, and protofascism. See especially: C2, chapter 8. Perception-Image The first term in Cinema 1’s perception-affection-action cycle. Deleuze flags these images as “perceptions of perception,” since they call conspicuous attention to their own status as framed images and to our task of relating elements within the shot. These are typically long shots, whereas affection-images are typically close-ups. Deleuze describes solid, liquid, and gaseous forms of the perception-image, depending on how much change and motion they imply. See especially: C1, chapter 5. Recollection-Image A transitional image-type between the movement-image and the timeimage in which governing structures of the former appear to loosen and temporality approaches a state of flux, but which ultimately re-attain some rational order, via structures like the flashback or dream-based conceit. See especially: C2, chapter 3.

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Relation-Image A transitional form marking the “crisis of the action-image” and the incipient time-image. Under this regime, an overall montage still defined by action and movement nonetheless induces larger gaps among images, while also generating anomalous figures (or demarks) within shots. These anomalies solicit active thought on the part of the spectator to conjoin movements that the film’s grammar leaves incomplete. Deleuze associates this form of the image paradigmatically with Hitchcock. See especially: C1, chapter 12. Schizoanalysis Deleuze and Guattari invent this technique both for diagnosing patients and for locating desiring-machines within artistic representations or textual assemblages. Rather than treat details of a text or case history as surface manifestations of some familiar, underlying complex (an approach they deplore in psychoanalytic practice), schizoanalysis takes stock of unique elements in a field, mapping routes among these singularities and measuring their relative intensities, frequencies, speeds, and other traits, as well as relations among them. The analyst thus discerns those that seem pivotal to how the assemblage works, and those that might vary to yield different desires. See especially: AO, unit 4. Sheets of Past A form of the time-image wherein images presented as perceptions of the past unfurl in random order, often flooding the present and defying any organization into rational or linear series. Their abundance, the unfilled gaps between them, their contradictions of each other, and their unfixed, proliferating points of view conspire to make clear, stabilized perceptions of the past unachievable. See also peaks of present. See especially: C2, chapter 5. Time-Image The regime of post–World War II image-types and montage, emphasizing temporal duration unbound to narrative action, linear progression, or political dogmas that subordinate time to their own ends. Time-images also furnish “pure optical and sound situations,” their audio and visual stimuli released from all the same constraints. Reinvigorating sensory response, these images also provoke viewers to think about and to read them, rather than passively absorbing them.

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{ Notes } Introduction 1. Jagose (1996), 1. For the essay most often cited as the formal declaration of “queer theory,” see de Lauretis (1991). 2. See Bordwell and Carroll (1996), especially Bordwell’s essay “Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory,” 3–36. The collection barely acknowledges gay, lesbian, or queer film theory, grouping them among miscellaneous “culturalist” trends in cinema studies, via a single footnote crediting Vito Russo (1987) and Richard Dyer (1990). Deleuze appears only three times by name in this sizeable anthology, and never specifically as a theorist of cinema. 3. Edelman (1994) and P. White (1999), for example, employ psychoanalytic methods in their influential queerings of classic Hollywood films. Queer psychoanalytic approaches also factor crucially in such indispensable anthologies as those I have cited by Bad ObjectChoices (1991); Fuss (1991); Gever, Greyson, and Parmar (1993); Creekmur and Doty (1995); and Hanson (1999). This book aspires not to contest or displace these volumes but to push against some of their boundaries, theorizing desire on other bases, and drawing out different potentials and questions. 4. McGowan (2007), ix. D. N. Rodowick, amidst his pivotal championship of the Cinema books in the mid-1990s, similarly emphasized Deleuze’s capacity “to reinvigorate questions and problems that have otherwise reached an impasse,” citing “a certain inertia in film studies,” particularly around questions of theory in the U.S. academy. See Rodowick (1997), xi. Gregory Flaxman observes a similar impasse in The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (2000), 7. 5. See Deleuze Cinema 1 (1986) and Deleuze Cinema 2 (1989). Subsequent citations of these volumes throughout the book will be parenthetically indicated by the abbreviations C1 and C2. 6. Rodowick’s Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (1997) was the most instrumental book in circulating Deleuze’s film concepts to English-speaking researchers. Texts by Gregory Flaxman (2000), Barbara Kennedy (2002), and Ronald Bogue (2003) also deserve credit here, among others. 7. Ian Buchanan quickly flags cinema as a peripheral concern in his rich monograph Deleuzism (2000), and it remains marginal in Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr’s collection Deleuze and Queer Theory (2009). Sexuality, meanwhile, and queerness in particular barely figure into Rodowick’s Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine or Bogue’s Deleuze on Cinema. Desire remains a fleeting topic in such recent, vital anthologies as Buchanan and Patricia MacCormack’s Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema (2008); Rodowick’s Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy (2010), though Rodowick’s own essay “Unthinkable Sex” in that volume marks an exception; and David Martin-Jones and William Brown’s Deleuze and Film (2012).

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8. See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (1983). Subsequent citations throughout the book will be parenthetically indicated by the abbreviation AO. Flaxman is among the earliest writers to note that “vantages on gender and sexuality are only beginning to be explored” regarding the Cinema books, citing Angelo Restivo’s essay in the same anthology as a rare example of such scholarship. Restivo takes note that Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Antonioni’s Il Grido (1957), and Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), three films occupying the historical and aesthetic pivot between Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, double as tales of masculinity in states of crisis. See Flaxman (2000), 29; and Restivo (2000). 9. Largely due to B. Ruby Rich’s work, cited extensively below, 1991 and 1992 often receive credit as the coming-out years of New Queer Cinema. Still, 1980s-era features such as Gus Van Sant’s Mala noche (1985), Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Sheila McLaughlin’s She Must Be Seeing Things (1987), Patricia Rozema’s I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987), Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1988), and Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989) predate the movement’s “arrival”; for many commentators, they even constitute some of its unmatched peaks. Contreras (2004) and Wallenberg (2004) note the deracinating of New Queer Cinema and the dubious ghettoization of “New Black Queer Cinema” when the early-1990s films are enshrined at the expense of Julien’s and Riggs’s work, especially. 10. See Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka (1986). Subsequent citations throughout the book will be parenthetically indicated by the abbreviation K. 11. See, for example, Duggan (2002) and Warner (1999). It bears repeating that rejecting hetero- or homonormativity does not involve censuring any gendered or sexual arrangement, or preclude anyone from affiliating in different ways or at different times with queer and/or homonormative and/or heteronormative perspectives. All I mean to refuse are gendered and sexual ideologies carried to their strictest extreme—invariably reinforced by class-based, nationalist, and economic ideologies—that pose any one configuration of gendered and sexual relation as the sole, natural, or best alternative. 12. Kara Keeling warns in The Witch’s Flight about the danger for any of us working across these fields of “falling into ‘Deleuzobabble,’ a hermetic system of terms and concepts with precise, if at times obscure or obtuse, meanings created by Deleuze in his attempts to challenge and/or break out of existing philosophical systems.” See Keeling (2007), 5. 13. Buchanan similarly differentiates his Deleuzian analysis of Blade Runner from psychoanalytic readings of the film that exhume ideas the filmmakers self-consciously planted in advance—a model of engrained “meaning” that Deleuzians perpetually reject. See Buchanan (2000), 127ff. 14. Rodowick cites the plentiful images in Deleuze’s book on Francis Bacon as evidence that Deleuze does not condemn illustration, just false stand-ins for cinema. See Rodowick (1997), 38. 15. On occasions too numerous to mention and too complex to distill, “becoming” is Deleuze’s recurrent keyword for how the world, its objects, and its occupants avoid stagnation, constantly testing their capacities for transformation and productive realliance. 16. Paola Marrati evokes Nazi cinema as the nightmare apotheosis of the cinema of movement in a particularly eloquent passage of Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy (2008), 80–81. 17. In terms of the contextual role AIDS plays in relation to queer cinema, Douglas Crimp’s work deserves mention for his early, unblanching observations about the cultural transformations induced by AIDS in and beyond the visual arts. See the writings collected

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in Crimp (2004). José Arroyo (1993) furnishes an early, influential claim on behalf of AIDS as the political unconscious of New Queer Cinema, even in cases where the disease goes uninvoked in the diegesis. Roger Hallas (2009) argues that queer films and videos since the 1980s have in many senses “reframed” cinematic conventions, both of the sickly body as the icon of AIDS and of how audiences relate to AIDS and the lives it claims—though he addresses just one narrative feature film, John Greyson’s avant-garde musical Zero Patience (1993). 18. On queer theory as a deconstructive “politics of difference” rather than a “politics of identity,” see Jagose (1996), 75–83. 19. Ibid., 1. 20. “Strategic essentialism” is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s phrase but has been mobilized by several queer theorists, perhaps most memorably in Fuss (1989). 21. Though Deleuze sounds more sanguine and closer to his rhizomatic ideals in Cinema 2 than in Cinema 1, he stipulates many times his refusal to favor one book over the other. See, for example, C2 4, 40, 270. By integrating concepts from both books, I distinguish my claims from those of other scholars. See Pendleton (2001) for a forceful blending of queer, cinematic, and Deleuzian discourses that more typically associates Cinema 1 with identitybased “gay” politics and Cinema 2 with the “queer” turn, valorizing the latter terms over the former. 22. The continued influence of the “New Queer” locution is further visible in how it has traveled into studies of other media, as in the recent anthology The New Queer Aesthetic on Television, by Keller and Stratyner (2006). 23. Rich (1992a), 41. 24. Rich (1992b), 32. “Flock of films” resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s “becominganimal” locutions in describing minor groups, wherein individuated subjects are submerged within a faceless flock, herd, or pack. 25. Rich (1992b), 32. Richard Dyer detected similar shifts in gay cinema a year or two beforehand. He called this a “post-affirmation” trend, one that “combines an awareness of surface, construction and play with a sense of urgency and edge.” Presaging Rich’s invocation of a “pomo” sensibility, Dyer adds that this cinema’s “touch is light, its approach eclectic yet it moves beyond the quality of many of its postmodern peers, in which there is a bit of this and a bit of that but nothing much matters.” See Dyer (1990), 284. Dyer, together with Julianne Pidduck, later issued an updated version of Now You See It with an expanded section on New Queer Cinema that credits Rich as the movement’s primary herald, despite her overlap with his own observations about slightly earlier films. See Dyer and Pidduck (2003), 254–64. 26. “The films, as Rich pointed out, had few aesthetic or narrative strategies in common, but what they seemed to share was an attitude. . . . Indeed, what binds the group together is, I feel, best described as defiance.” See Aaron (2004), 3. 27. Jarman et al. (1992), 35. 28. Rich (1992b), 32. 29. Rich (2000), 22, 25. Eventually, the movement’s demise becomes a self-fulfilling argument: “Is either one a New Queer Cinema product?” Rich asks, referring to Boys Don’t Cry and The Talented Mr. Ripley. “I think not. If only because no such thing can exist anymore.” See Rich (2000), 25. For a critique of New Queer Cinema based on its political shortcomings, see Adnum (2005), though he traces this problem to the movement’s origins rather than presenting it as

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a gradual default over time. For a rare account of New Queer Cinema that takes its generic and stylistic transformations in stride rather than presenting these as a reneging on earlier promise, see the introduction to Juett and Jones (2010). 30. Duke University Press has announced a March 2013 publication date for Rich’s longdeveloping book, now titled New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut. The new name, after being attached for so long to its more openly pessimistic working title, may signal a new uptick in Rich’s belief that the movement has survived as more than a “moment.” Introducing her anthology about New Queer Cinema, Aaron assigns these astringent parameters: “‘New Queer Cinema’ is the name given to a wave of queer films that gained critical acclaim on the festival circuit in the early 1990s. . . . The wave, or movement, consisted of the surprise hits of Sundance 1991 and 1992.” See Aaron (2004), 3. Mennel (2012) frames her chapter on New Queer Cinema within similarly strict bounds. 31. The internationalizing trend in recent queer cinema studies propels, for example, Kuzniar (2000), Grossman (2001), Yosef (2004), D. W. Foster (2004), Griffiths (2006), and Rees-Roberts (2008). 32. Speaking of fifty-year-old Derek Jarman and teenager Sadie Benning appearing together on a Sundance Film Festival panel, Rich closes her essay by observing, “The world had changed enough that both of them could be there, with a host of cohorts in between. All engaged in the beginnings of a new queer historiography, capable of transforming this decade, if only the door stays open long enough. For him, for her, for all of us.” See Rich (1992b), 34. 33. Rich (2000), 25. 34. Rich (2000), 25. For a broader overview of Hollywood films that seem unimaginable without New Queer Cinema as an influence, see ch. 12 of Benshoff and Griffin (2006). 35. For one of the shrewdest illuminations of the corporate interests that produce New Queer Cinema rather than “overtaking” it, see Pramaggiore (1997), especially 60ff. 36. Rich (1993a), 89. 37. Deleuze and Guattari state upfront that “a schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch” (AO 2). 38. For a rebuke framed in terms of the post-1991 filmographies of New Queer trailblazers Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes, and Gregg Araki, see Kelly (1999). Pendleton (2001) also characterizes a New Queer collapse in terms of the frustrated careers of these men as well as Rose Troche, Todd Verow, Isaac Julien, Tom Kalin, and others, though he is more positive than Kelly about Haynes’s work after Poison. 39. Elsewhere in Anti-Oedipus, the conflation of sexuality with desire or desiringmachines is nearly total. See AO 216, 294. 40. Buchanan (2000), 15. 41. Ibid. 42. As I discuss in chapter 6, Claire Colebrook uses this aspect of desire as novel production, rather than a resignifying practice, to distinguish a Deleuzian queerness from the reiterative models espoused by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble. See Colebrook (2009) and Butler ([1990] 1999). 43. The critical literature on Paris Is Burning is famously and deservedly copious, but Butler’s reading in Bodies That Matter maintains its oft-cited, oft-critiqued centrality within that scholarship. See chapter 4 of Butler (1993). 44. Daniel Contreras notes how prevailing discourses of imitation rather than production in responses to Paris have the racist effect of crediting its nonwhite cast with a knack

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for responding to culture, rather than a key role in producing culture. If anything, the routes of pop-cultural innovation and appropriation have tended to pass from nonwhites to whites more often than the reverse. See Contreras (2004), 124–126. 45. For a rare and compelling exploration of this link, see B. Kennedy (2002), especially 78–83. See also the last chapter of Dienst (1994), especially 148–149. 46. Patricia MacCormack’s recent book Cinesexuality (2008) adopts different orientations than I do in theorizing cinema as itself desire, including her relative reluctance to engage queerness as a rubric. 47. Theresa Geller, citing debts to Elizabeth Grosz and other feminists who work directly with Deleuze or echo his concepts, marshals these ideas toward her own exciting brand of “cinematographic feminism.” See Geller (2005–2006). 48. Versions of this idea repeat across Anti-Oedipus and other Deleuzo-Guattarian texts, including the famous invocation of “a thousand tiny sexes” in A Thousand Plateaus that inspired Elizabeth Grosz’s renowned essay of the same name, published more or less “around 1991” and constituting a key moment in feminism’s appropriation of Deleuzian thought. See Grosz (1993). 49. Among the burgeoning subfield of queer theorizations of temporality, two of the most suggestive are Halberstam (2005) and Freeman (2010). Deleuze is not a major frame of theoretical reference in either work, though both authors cite him. 50. Deleuze’s “essential problematic, as Deleuze and Guattari admit, is the fact that desiringproduction has to be induced on the basis of representations, which is to say, discovered where it is not.” See Buchanan (2000), 31. 51. The models of representation these writers reject extend at least to iconic figures (homogenizing representation), naturalized metaphors (idealizing representation), delegated politics (“representation” over direct engagement), and artworks abstracted from larger relations (static, aestheticized representations, rather than machines). 52. Buchanan (2000), 21. 53. Buchanan and MacCormack (2008), 14. Dana Polan concurs that “Deleuze and Guattari obviously do evaluate, do believe that certain practices stand a better chance of opening up to multiplicity.” See Polan (1986), xxv. 54. Deleuze and Guattari describe “the first positive task of schizoanalysis” as “discovering in a subject the nature, the formation, or the functioning of his desiring-machines, independently of any interpretations” (AO 322, original emphasis). 55. Deleuze and Guattari’s bitterest (and funniest) indictment of psychoanalytic reading strategies, by way of endorsing their own attention to schizoanalytic detail, comes in their astonished reaction to Freud’s dogmatic, detail-deprived response to Judge Schreber’s floridly strange tale: “It should be noted that Judge Schreber’s destiny was not merely that of being sodomized, while still alive, by the rays from heaven, but also that of being posthumously oedipalized by Freud. From the enormous political, social, and historical content of Schreber’s delirium, not one word is retained, as though the libido did not bother with such things” (AO 57, original emphasis). 56. Confirming that desire haunts every form of Deleuzian production, some very queer erotics limn Deleuze’s famous account of his own labors of creating concepts. Homoeroticism, with Cronenbergian aplomb, takes odd turns into any-desire-whatever: My way of getting out of it [the history of philosophy] at that time was, I really think, to conceive of the history of philosophy as a kind of buggery or, what comes to the

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same thing, immaculate conception. I imagined myself getting onto the back of an author, and giving him a child, which would be his and which would at the same time be a monster. It is very important that it should be his child, because the author actually had to say everything that I made him say. But it also had to be a monster because it was necessary to go through all kinds of decenterings, slips, break-ins, secret emissions, which I really enjoyed. My book on Bergson seems to me a classic case of this. Given the centrality in this scene of Henri Bergson, the seminal figure (as it were) within Deleuze’s idiosyncratic imagining of the cinema, I take this passage as doubly ratifying the right of queer film scholars to make ribald, even “monstrous” use of Deleuze. The translated quotation hails from Tomlinson and Habberjam (1988), 8. The excerpt comprises their translation of Deleuze’s response to an interviewer in Cressole (1973), 111. 57. Deleuze’s gloss on the cumulative logic of firstness, secondness, and thirdness might guide any intellectual project situating itself “after” Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, as this book does: “If firstness is ‘one’ by itself, secondness two, and thirdness three, it is necessary that, in the two, the first term should ‘recapitulate’ [reprenne] firstness in its own way, whilst the second affirms secondness. And, in the three, there will be a representative of firstness, one of secondness, the third affirming thirdness. There is therefore not merely 1, 2, 3 but 1, 2 in 2 and 1, 2, 3 in 3” (C1 198). Scholarly projects like David Martin-Jones’s on cinematic narratology, temporality, and national identity make clear that a categorical shift in how movies convey or enact desire is not the only way to gauge what is new about cinema since the mid-1980s, even from a Deleuzian perspective. See Martin-Jones (2006). More recently, Martin-Jones has investigated the possibilities of braiding together Deleuzian film theory, minor cinema, and New Queer aesthetics in his responses to work by Gregg Araki, a New Queer mainstay whose body of work The Desiring-Image barely engages. I recommend Sutton and Martin-Jones (2008), 51–64; and Martin-Jones (2009), 224–31. 58. In A Thousand Plateaus, the ontological priority that Anti-Oedipus cedes so early to the desiring-machines devolves instead to politics: “Before being there is politics” (TP 249). In a sense, the two Capitalism and Schizophrenia volumes map an arc from desire to politics as their key concept. Then again, positing desire and politics as both existing “before being” suggests the co-implication of these categories. For more on this connection, see chapter 4 of Patton (2000). 59. This is not to deny that individual writers have offered nuanced derivations of the “politics” they have in mind or to imply that I have tasked myself to do so in this book. I only state that often, in queer work, the term passes without any genealogy or definition, such that “politics” aptly enough names the stuff of which bodies, genders, bonds, labors, coalitions, and dreams are made, with clear stakes in all of those areas. They name as well the concatenated forces with which all subjects (very) differentially contend, and the paths we must constantly renegotiate so that change might be achieved. 60. As indicated above, even Deleuze’s notoriously difficult and ornate prose, pervaded with neologisms and counter-intuitions, stands as a formidable bulwark against sedentary understandings or rote applications of his work. 61. In his introduction to the English translation of Kafka, cited above, Polan inveighs against a recurrent pattern by which adoption of Deleuze’s terms “can assuage the unhappy guilty conscience of the depoliticized intellectual by offering him or her the alibi of a process

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in which everything one does can be something that one can pretend is politically engaged” (xxvi). 62. Keeling (2007), 18. The interpolated quotations are from C2 21. 63. “Cinematic perception is not confined to interactions with moving-image media such as film and television. Involved in the production and reproduction of social reality itself, these perceptual and cognitive processes work to order, orchestrate, produce, and reproduce social reality and sociality.” See Keeling (2007), 11. 64. Rich (1992b), 34. 65. In a rare aside about “gay liberation,” reading much more like a Guattarian platform than a Deleuzian sentiment, Anti-Oedipus declaims that “no ‘gay liberation movement’ is possible as long as homosexuality is caught up in a relation of exclusive disjunction with heterosexuality” (AO 350). Stray comments and noteworthy silence about the scare-quoted politics of “gay liberation” make clear that Deleuze distrusted the movement as identitydriven, based on a mistaking of sexuality for an avenue of liberation rather than, at least in part, a technology of control. 66. Guy Hocquenghem is the Deleuzian interlocutor who worked earliest and arguably hardest to articulate Deleuze’s concerns on behalf of a “homosexuality” whose orientations and politics seem proleptically queer. See Hocquenghem (1993). 67. Deleuze, as inspired by Artaud, declines to root his concepts of cinema in either the “commercial figurative” cinema of mainstream money-makers or the “abstract experimental” cinema, which sit on either side of the upper-middlebrow echelon from which my case studies hail. Deleuze finds most commercial cinema too barren of those “neuro-physiological vibrations” (C2 165) required to invigorate motor-reflex habits of perception. Experimental films, by contrast, are for him so supersaturated with intensive affects that they abandon the circumstances of lived realities and thus cannot serve as productive motors for change in the ways we inhabit those realities. 68. For rich arguments bridging queer cinema and modes of experimental filmmaking, or queer cinema and so-called Third Cinema, see Leung (2004), Pidduck (2004), and chapter 5 of Mimura (2009). Conversely, Ian Buchanan urges that Deleuzian film analyses must “emphasize those works which do not escape the commodification process.” See Buchanan and MacCormack (2008), 6. 69. Ahmed (2006), 116, original emphasis. 70. Gallop (1992), 10. 71. de Lauretis (1994), 293. 72. “For me, a kind of formalism, a visceral near-identification with the writing I cared for, at the level of the sentence structure, metrical pattern, rhyme, was one way of trying to appropriate what seemed the numinous and resistant power of the chosen objects.” See Sedgwick (1993), 3. 73. Rosi Braidotti has consistently explored the relations Deleuze theorizes among desire, artistic representation, and minor sexuality, urging fellow feminists toward this material by attesting, “I do think that ‘minority subjects of subjugated knowledge,’ such as feminist, black and postcolonial, queer, and other theorists are in a privileged position as readers of Deleuze’s transgressive philosophical phantasmagoria.” See Braidotti (2002), 93. Though feminism remains Braidotti’s primary frame of reference in this work and others, her emphasis on collectives and planes of positive production dovetail closely with The Desiring-Image’s model of queer desiring-production.

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74. In addition to work cited throughout The Desiring-Image by feminist Deleuzian scholars I have already noted such as Braidotti, Colebrook, Geller, Keeling, and Patricia White, often with a focus on film, readers eager to absorb key texts of Deleuzian feminist analysis should start with Jardine (1984), Grosz (1994, especially chapters 1, 7, and 8), Grosz (1999, especially chapters 1 and 6), Olkowski (1999), Marks (2000), and Pisters (2003, especially chapter 4). Colebrook’s recent theorization of “queer vitalism” and Grosz’s work linking Deleuze, Darwinism, and temporality provide exceptional models for the simultaneously feminist and queer potentials and politics to be found in Deleuze’s machinic and molecular definitions of life and of desire. See Grosz (2005), especially parts 3 and 4, and Colebrook (2010). 75. Gallop (1992), 4. 76. Dudley Andrew even argues in a recent manifesto that “what cinema is” alters at the very moment The Desiring-Image picks up the threads of Cinema 2 and of a not-quiteadolescent queer theory: “The cinema came into its own around 1910,” Andrew says, “and it began to doubt its constitution sometime in the late 1980s.” See Andrew (2010), xiii. What Andrew has in mind rhymes with what Deleuze, from different motives, calls at the end of Cinema 2 a gathering “electronic automatism,” a “network-space” where bounties of information outstrip sites of perception (C2 265, 268). For both writers, by the end of the century, cinema becomes something more tabular than vertical, more automated than perceived: “the tele and video image, the numerical image coming into being, either .  .  . to transform cinema or to replace it, to mark its death” (C2 265). For an especially accessible account of these millennial transformations in cinema, see Shaviro (2010). Still, as The Desiring-Image argues, this technophiliac emphasis is not the sole way to grasp a constitutional change in cinema around this time. 77. For an analysis of The Watermelon Woman and of queer cinema in general in relation to YouTube, fake documentaries, and students’ own image-making, see Juhasz (2010). 78. Marrati (2008), 77. These questions conclude Marrati’s chapter about the time-image; she takes them up explicitly in the ensuing chapter, “Images and Immanence: The Problem of the World.”

Chapter 1 1. Grünberg (2006), 30. 2. Ibid. 3. See Robert Foster (1998), plus the chapters devoted to Shivers in the book-length studies of Cronenberg cited throughout this chapter. 4. Many of these motifs inhere in Stereo and Crimes of the Future, too, but these short features were seldom screened after the early 1970s, until the independent DVD label Blue Underground included them as bonus features in their two-disc, limited-edition pressing of Cronenberg’s obscure, Roger Corman-style stockcar drama Fast Company (1979), in 2004. Though I describe the ending of Shivers as “pessimistic,” Cronenberg invariably claims sympathies with the inhuman forces in his films; from that perspective, the “triumph” of the virus in Shivers or of the urban contagion in Rabid are not pessimistic endings at all, but triumphs of productive force. 5. Paul Hurley describes an array of public and private performance-art experiments he conceived in response to Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of “becoming-animal” and “becoming-invertebrate” in A Thousand Plateaus, pressing his body into comparable

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“becomings.” These astounding, often revolting experiments, which Hurley significantly calls queer becomings, could be mistaken for set-pieces in Cronenberg’s cinema. For his project Becoming-Housefly, clearly resonating with Cronenberg’s film of The Fly, Hurley “eat[s] a lunch of tomato and couscous salad with a lemon dressing, and repeatedly regurgitate[s] it until the food became a liquid consistency and I am able to ingest it simply by sucking the mixture through my lips.” Other experiments with strong Cronenbergian echoes include becoming-spider and becoming-cockroach. See Hurley (2005–2006). 6. Auteurist locutions are a barely avoidable convention of film writing, repeated throughout this book; Deleuze’s use of the practice, naming no other artists who worked on any film, remains controversial. However, Cronenberg’s collaborators have been key in establishing a coherent aesthetic and philosophy in the films I analyze, plus all of his later and much of his earlier work. This steady repertory encompasses composer Howard Shore (a constant since The Brood), editor Ronald Sanders (since Fast Company), production designer Carol Spier (since Videodrome, though missing from Spider), and costume designer Denise Cronenberg (the director’s sister, first employed on The Fly). His most intensive collaborator is cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, who has shot all of Cronenberg’s movies since Dead Ringers and whose creative input, according to Cronenberg, inheres as early as script writing and storyboarding. Suschitzky’s bold use of color and tense framings, so crucial to Dead Ringers, were evident in earlier films like The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and thus cannot be ascribed to the director’s hand alone. 7. R. Wood (1983), 115. 8. Beard (2006), ix. This wave of major book-length publications also includes the cited texts by M. Grant (2000), Browning (2007), and Mathijs (2008), as well as Grünberg’s volume of interviews (2006). Even in non-“controversial” art, political analysis of the director’s work has become more common. Indeed, Cronenberg’s critical ascendancy has, since the conflagrations around Crash (1996), tempered any real controversy around his films, though for an exhaustive study of that film’s travails in UK courts, see Barker, Arthurs, and Harindranath (2001). 9. Tautologically addressing this evasion, Cronenberg reports, “I didn’t want to show [John] Lone’s cock because suddenly it becomes a scene about a cock. . . . Nakedness, not the cock, is important in our scene.” See Rodley (1997), 183. Many years later, in Eastern Promises (2007), “the cock” becomes emphatically important in the celebrated bathhouse knife-fight. Consonant with my reading of Birchall’s abrupt appearance in Dead Ringers, this homoerotic set-piece crystallizes but also displaces accumulating tensions between Viggo Mortensen’s Nikolai and Vincent Cassel’s Kirill, who all but openly lusts after Nikolai, watching eagerly as Nikolai has sex with a (female) prostitute. 10. For a fuller definition of New Queer Cinema, see Rich (1992b) or the introduction to this book. 11. Dead Ringers earned the Los Angeles Film Critics Association prizes for Best Director and Best Actor in 1988, the same year New Queer forefather Derek Jarman received a Special Award from the same group. Naked Lunch garnered the 1991 prizes for Best Director and Best Screenplay from the National Society of Film Critics, who proved their embrace of New Queer Cinema in giving their Best Actor prize to River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho and Best Documentary citation to Paris Is Burning. 12. The reception of The Fly, the film Cronenberg made just prior to Dead Ringers, marks a notable anomaly. Many spectators understood that film as a horrifying yet high-romantic

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AIDS parable, thus opening his work to queer readings and to new attributions of sympathy with what was still, in 1986, largely considered a gay disease. Cronenberg demurs from this reading, citing his career-long interest in contagions and breakdowns. For more on this dimension of The Fly’s reception, see Mathijs (2003) and Mathijs (2008), 147–152. Even before The Fly, Robin Wood denounced incipient critical links between AIDS and Cronenbergian illness. See R. Wood (1983), 129 n.1. Andrew Parker explores resonances between Reagan-era AIDS paranoias and Cronenberg’s apocalyptic previsions of venereal epidemic in Rabid, evincing a somewhat tenser balance between admiring and deploring Cronenberg’s figures and his self-representations. See Parker (1993). 13. For an early, influential, but differently oriented application of Deleuzian theory to Cronenberg’s early films, up through Dead Ringers, see Shaviro (1993). 14. To adapt a distinction Claire Colebrook has introduced, Dead Ringers does not primarily illustrate how various social and historical configurations have constituted, classified, or eliminated sexually nonconforming subjects, as New Queer films often do. Instead, the “queer vitalism” of Cronenberg’s films discloses desire itself as a force preceding and in fact producing “social configurations” and “non-conforming subjects.” See Colebrook (2010). 15. Taubin (1992), 8. 16. Steenbeck (1997), xii, voicing a common refrain about Cronenberg. Judith Mayne, paraphrasing Annette Kuhn’s reading of The Big Sleep (1946), has remarked that “while censorship is usually understood as pure elimination, it is read more compellingly as a productive process, particularly insofar as censored elements do not necessarily disappear, but rather return with the force of the repressed.” Cronenberg’s films similarly produce peculiar forms of gender and desire, seeping like groundwater into our outward perceptions, and accounting for these images’ extraordinary force. See Mayne (1990), 26. For the essay she addresses, see Kuhn (1985). 17. Browning (2007), 29. 18. R. Wood (1983), 128. See also Britton, Wood, and Lippe (1979). Wood’s allegations remain so influential that Cronenberg often rebuts them spontaneously, even when interviewers have not raised the issue. Thankfully, his rejoinders have grown less noxious over the years, compared to his early admonishing of Wood for “justifying [his] own sexuality through his criticism,” adding, “When your work becomes an apology for an event in your own life, then I think you have invalidated yourself as a serious critic.” See Beard and Handling (1983), 192. He responded in turn that “I am certainly not aware that my sexuality needs ‘justifying.’” See R. Wood (1983), 121. 19. Wood (1983), 130, 119. 20. Ibid., 131. In order to reach the screen, such purportedly antisocial visions relied, ironically and controversially, on a socialized arts-support mechanism, the Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC), which funneled tax monies into Shivers; into Rabid (1977), where well-known porn actress Marilyn Chambers plays a woman who commits several murders with a phallic, retractable scimitar lodged inside her armpit; and into The Brood, with its bubonic mother and her vengeful, mallet-wielding manikins, all of them whipped into a frenzy by a male guru of “Psychoplasmics,” training women to manifest their angers toward men in corporealized forms. Note that the “botched” skin graft in Rabid and the “successful” practice of Hal Raglan’s occult bioscience culminate in equally harrowing scenarios. The most infamous protest of the CFDC’s support for Cronenberg’s early

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work was penned by Robert Fulford under the pen name Marshall Delaney in the Canadian national magazine Saturday Night. See Delaney (1975). 21. See Frank (1991), Showalter (1991), Robbins (1993), M. Russo (1994), Pharr and Haas (1996), Kauffman (1998), and Creed (2000). For a closely related reading that strays further from psychoanalytic methodologies, see L. R. Williams (1999). Cronenberg’s early-career motif of externalizing bodily interiors may itself tempt Freudian proclivities toward coaxing out hidden structures through symptomatic performances. Either may harbor an affinity for reductive schemes of adaptation that measure all cinematic signs against an injunction to make manifest something that is already “in” some original environment, waiting to be beckoned out. 22. Pharr and Haas (1996), 35, 38. Haas stresses formal analyses of the films’ sightlines and scene structures at least as much as archetypal or psychoanalytic paradigms. Not coincidentally, Haas ascribes more agency and nuance to Cronenberg’s women than does Pharr. 23. Ramsay (1999), 53, 54. Even these blistering indictments should not have disqualified Cronenberg from New Queer consideration, given all the murdered and murdering queers and pseudo-queers in so many of the movement’s flag-bearing films: Swoon, The Living End, Heavenly Creatures, Frisk, etc. 24. Ramsay (1999), 53. Ramsay’s conclusions feel conditioned by her aim to align Cronenberg’s visions of queerness with six mainstays that Thomas Waugh itemizes as “mythologies of same-sex sociality” in Canadian cinema. She paraphrases these as “homosocial bonding narratives, narratives of the traffic in women, iconographies of the male body, geographical iconographies, discourses of the Anglo discovery of ethnic alterities, and,” of most import to her essay, “homophobic violence narratives that leave queers humiliated, beaten, or dead” (1999), 47. For the lecture that inspires this portion of Ramsay’s argument, leading off the same issue of the Canadian Journal of Film Studies that includes her essay, see Waugh (1999), especially 37–41. 25. Freud’s analysis of Judge Schreber, mentioned on the first page of Anti-Oedipus and threaded across the volume, serves as Deleuze and Guattari’s emblem of how Oedipal psychoanalysis launders singularities into a pregiven logic of positions and overdetermined scenarios. I confess to feeling similarly when every closed space in Dead Ringers is automatically read as a “womb,” or when every female figure is allegorized as a “mother”—even Claire, whose alienation from maternity is a major, poignant crux of the film. 26. Robey (2010), 84, 80. 27. Even such eloquent, nuanced reassessments as Creed’s—embarking from her observation that “much has been written on the horrific, disgusting, metamorphosing flesh of the Cronenberg world, but very little, if anything, on the homoerotic body of his increasingly bleak, closed, homosexual universe”—have proved insufficient in recuperating Cronenberg fully from his reputation for reactionary conservatism vis-à-vis gender and sexuality. See Creed (2000), 84. 28. Cronenberg’s later literary adaptations Spider (2002), A History of Violence (2005), and Cosmopolis (2012) are more heterosexually oriented even on the page. Perhaps not coincidentally, they are also more directly mimetic of their original sources. 29. Neither bore any sign of violence on his body and no drugs were detectable in Cyril’s system. See Kleiman (1975), Breasted (1975), Perlmutter (1975), and Rensberger (1975a and 1975b) for initial reportage on the men’s demise. 30. See R. Rosenbaum (2000). Understandably angry over twenty years after Cronenberg used his title and his research without attributing any credit to his article, Rosenbaum

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vents some of his frustration in an entry on his blog, “Ron Rosenbaum, Writer.” See R. Rosenbaum (2007). When Cronenberg filmed Dead Ringers, legal contracts demanded an onscreen credit to Wood and Geasland’s novel, though the film solemnized the spirit, amplified the aesthetic ambitions, and altered the incidents of the brothers’ story to an even greater degree. The final screenplay was officially credited to Cronenberg and Norman Snider, though the latter’s contributions inhered in an early and mostly abandoned draft of the script. Dead Ringers, then, is a film about two characters loosely based on two other characters loosely based on two other characters, derived from a script loosely based on another script loosely based on a novel loosely based on true events. 31. Hutcheon (2006), 21ff. 32. Jaehne (1992), 5. See also Silverberg (1992), 14. 33. D. N. Rodowick helpfully glosses this “twofold problem of perception” in chapter 2 of Gilles Deleuze’s Time-Machine (1997), especially on page 30. 34. Deleuze and Guattari’s sketches of the three types of desiring-flows I describe below can be found in AO 36–41. 35. Dead Ringers again mitigates Freudian approaches, which often presume part-whole relations insofar as a freestanding beating fantasy, retentive phase, or fetishistic impulse, et al., stands in for systematized wholes that encourage the diagnostician to hypothesize unreported and unperceived stages of desire by unsubstantiated inference. By contrast, in a Deleuzian or indeed a Cronenbergian context, trying to divine a categorical fact about gender, embodiment, or sexuality based on a single or even a series of instances is often like trying to reconstruct an image of a whole animal on the basis of a single slice of meat. Deleuze creates a system of desiring-production where unassimilated products participate in heterodox, case-specific series, rather than homogenizing patterns. 36. Beyond the most obvious instances of doubling, the girlfriends Cary and Claire are homonyms, and Elliot hires identical twin call-girls. Lines of dialogue repeat as well—even, poignantly, by the end of the film. “Shall I insert the renticulator?” one of the Mantles asks the other near the end of the prologue, as they operate on a plastic anatomical model; near the finale, as Elliot lies prone in a gynecologist’s chair, awaiting his brother’s lethal incision, he asks, “Do you think the renticulator is required?” 37. In his next collaboration with Cronenberg, on the film adaptation of M Butterfly, Jeremy Irons plays another character who fails to recognize a homosexual man whom the film’s spectators have immediately recognized as such—galling many critics who found Song Liling’s secret much too obvious. Teresa de Lauretis and Rey Chow not only take this divergence between Gallimard’s perceptions and ours as essential to the film, but read Butterfly as a palimpsest of asymmetrical, politically shaped misreadings. De Lauretis argues that even the most astute critics of M Butterfly, including Chow, appear reluctant to recognize Song as a homosexual male, which in her perception he manifestly is. See de Lauretis (2007) and Chow (1998). 38. In the second section of Gender Trouble, Judith Butler reads taboos against homosexuality as necessarily prior to but also inextricable from those against incest, since Freud countenances the latter only in terms of father-daughter and mother-son liaisons. This ostensibly “founding” prohibition, then, cloaks a preceding disavowal that cannot speak its name, subtending Butler’s argument about gender as melancholia. She has always cited this claim as the core of Gender Trouble, despite the disproportionate attention cast on her

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schema of gender as performative repetition and her very brief comments on drag. See Butler ([1990] 1999), 57–78. The incest taboo also furnishes a major crux of Deleuze and Guattari’s critique in Anti-Oedipus of falsely imperializing psychoanalytic logic. See, for example, AO 154–184, 200–240. 39. Creed (2000), 95, 96. 40. Edelman (1994), xv, 6–7. 41. “You can trace a line through the director’s male protagonists to see them consistently positioned as outsider figures, uncanny presences and lodes of an alien sexuality which isn’t necessarily homosexuality (but can be).” See Robey (2010), 80. 42. Edelman (1994), 196. Edelman’s exemplar for these ideas is Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944), in which prissy Waldo Lydecker, played by Clifton Webb, is clearly conscripted into showing the other characters and the audience what an ostensibly “coded” homosexual looks like. Simultaneously, though, he serves to limn the effeteness of other men in the film, such as Vincent Price’s Shelby Carpenter, and to cast suspicion even on the presumptive heterosexuality of Dana Andrews’s stalwart detective Mark McPherson. 43. Braidotti (2001), 188. For an expansive view of her thoughts about nomadism, see Braidotti (1994), especially chapters 5 and 8. 44. Braidotti (2001), 189. 45. Ibid. These comments resonate with Deleuze and Guattari’s about the desiringmachines approximating a kind of cinematic “montage” within “temporalized” coordinates (AO 286–287). The literary example Braidotti recruits for this segment of her argument is Villanelle, the web-footed Venetian girl who is the heroine of Jeanette Winterson’s novel The Passion, which appeared in print one year before the premiere of Dead Ringers, and treats its “mutant woman” with the same enthusiasm for resilience and irregularity that is, I think, the hallmark of both Cronenberg’s and Bujold’s approach to Claire Niveau. 46. For the most flexible, compelling reading of “womb envy” in the literature on Dead Ringers, see Robbins (1993). 47. Buchanan (2000), 146. 48. Deleuze here adduces a third form of the impulse-image, beyond Stroheim’s ruinous collapses and Buñuel’s protracted repetitions. In this iteration, linked to the films of Joseph Losey, the image centers upon a “reversal against the self ” (C1 137), “the role of the double” (C1 138), and “a violence which is not merely internal or innate, but static” (C1 136), all of which “sets the trap of psychological or psychoanalytical interpretations” (C1 138). These and other phrases in Deleuze’s profile of Losey’s impulse-image sound aptly descriptive of Dead Ringers. This contrast of terminally “enclosed” men and adventurous women echoes but exceeds William Beard’s contention that Cronenberg’s work tends to pair “a man who is pathetic and monstrous and a woman who is sane and functional.” See Beard (2006), 226.

Chapter 2 1. For more about Rich’s definition of “Homo Pomo,” see Rich (1992a) and Rich (1992b). For more about “palimpsestuous” adaptation, discussed in the last chapter, see Hutcheon (1996), 21ff. I will refer to Cronenberg throughout this chapter as the author of the film Naked Lunch but again, as always, the case is more complex. Christopher Meir points out that the

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cross-cultural orientations, the idiosyncratic reworking of a major novel, and the directorcentered marketing of the film echo many other films shepherded by Naked Lunch’s producer, Jeremy Thomas. These include Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky, adapted from the most famous novel by Paul Bowles, aka “Tom Frost” in Naked Lunch. Thomas subsequently collaborated with Cronenberg on Crash (1996) and A Dangerous Method (2011). See Meir (2009). 2. Burroughs famously confesses in Queer that “the book is motivated and formed by an event which is never mentioned, in fact is carefully avoided: the accidental shooting death of my wife, Joan, in September 1951,” and that he feels “forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing.” See Burroughs (1985), xvii–xviii, xxii. 3. The introduction to the Grove Press reissue of Naked Lunch offers a compressed account of the novel’s picaresque through several court hearings, including excerpted court transcripts. Under the heading “Naked Lunch on Trial,” see Burroughs ([1959] 1987), ix–xxxiv. 4. Beard (2006), 278. Burroughs was a mainstay in trailers, interviews, and promotional materials, including a coffee-table sized “making of ” book. He wrote the enthusiastic introduction, citing how “Raymond Chandler was once asked, ‘How do you feel about what Hollywood has done to your novels?’ He reportedly answered, ‘My novels? Hollywood hasn’t done anything to them. They’re still right here, on the shelf.’” See Silverberg (1992), 15. 5. Taubin (1992), 10, 8. Sight & Sound follows Taubin’s article with Michael O’Pray’s, echoing the view that “Cronenberg’s Lee is a heterosexual let loose in a paranoid homosexual-riddled phantasy,” and then with Mark Kermode’s interview with Cronenberg, who diagnoses Burroughs’s discomfort with his own homosexuality as the seed for his countercultural prose—even though Cronenberg has remained adamant in refusing these kinds of psychobiographical tendencies in interpretations of his work. As a group, these articles signal the “event” status to which Cronenberg’s films had graduated in the British market, as well as a swift consensus about the film’s “confusion” of homosexual and heterosexual affects. See O’Pray (1992), 10; and Kermode (1992). For more instances of the “heterosexualizing” accusation, see Beard (2006), 318–325; Dellamora (1995), 150–156; Downing and Kerbis (1998), who adopt a medically diagnostic angle on this question; Lyons (1992); Russell (2001), 2–3; Skerl (2009), 168–171; and Zurbrugg (1999). 6. Dellamora (1995), 158. Carrying psychobiographical critiques of Cronenberg into new areas, Dellamora diagnoses the director’s hostile refusal of Bill Lee’s or William Burroughs’s homosexuality as a resistance toward minoritarian identification per se, beginning with the filmmaker’s professed indifference to his parents’ Judaism. 7. See Silverberg (1992), 14. Peter Weller, who stars as Bill Lee, testifies in the documentary William S. Burroughs: A Man Within (2009) that, when asked at a press conference about the gay rights movement, Burroughs tartly responded, “I’ve never been gay a day in my life, and I’ve certainly never been part of any movement.” Lynn Snowden’s joint interview with Cronenberg and Burroughs corroborates the novelist’s distaste for dimorphisms of sex, gender, or sexuality. Quoting, of all people, the would-be assassin of Andy Warhol, Burroughs offers this modest proposal: “Valerie Solanis [sic] in her manifesto, gets around to the position that females are almost as bad as males. And that’s much closer to my

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position, where it’s all a bad idea. Male and female. You know, let’s call the whole thing off.” See Snowden (1992), 219. 8. Once again, for a compressed account of queer theory as privileging a politics of difference over a politics of identity, see Jagose (1996), 75–83. 9. An extreme version of “pure optical and sound situations” motivate the “cut-up films” by which Burroughs, with Antony Balch and Brion Gysin, imported his Dadaist prose experiments into a filmmaking praxis. Examples of this work can be found on the DVD William Burroughs: Thee Films, 1950s–1960s (2007). 10. Burroughs ([1959] 1987), 121. 11. Ibid., 207. 12. By no means did these links arise by reflex from postwar film’s rejection of formal and ideological continuities. Indeed, many scholars observed how the French New Wave, Italian neorealism, and other midcentury movements consolidate gendered and sexual typologies more than upsetting them. See, for example, Restivo (2000) and Geller (2005–2006). The first example Deleuze names of “pure optical situations” in modern cinema is the hyperbolically heteronormative icon of a woman’s pregnant belly in De Sica’s Umberto D (1952). See C2 1. 13. “Of the three chronosigns, the construction of time as series (sometimes called the genesign) is also the least clearly defined in the cinema books. . . . The difficulty of the concept also does not lend itself well to a formal description through close analysis. Moreover, the organization of time as series is barely comprehensible without understanding Deleuze’s version of eternal recurrence.” See Rodowick (1997), 141. 14. “Series express an affirmative will to power as a force where time puts truth in crisis. The forms of identity no less than the model of the true are affected here.” See Rodowick (1997), 151. 15. This overt biographical allusion still bespeaks Deleuzian powers of the false, since Burroughs actually shot his wife in Mexico City. 16. Such interpenetration of subjective and objective viewpoints aligns with what Cinema 1 calls “gaseous” states of perception, reviewed in the last chapter, and reminds us again that the operating modes of the movement-image and time-image are not as fully distinct as the bifurcation of the Cinema books or the claims of several readers may imply. 17. To adopt another difficult Deleuzian semantic, we might call the desires in this film “heautonomous,” a term Cinema 2 utilizes to describe relations between nonsynchronized sound and image in several postwar films, such that both regimes operate independently of each other, with their very discordance lending new potentials to their relation. See, for example, C2 252. 18. For more on links Deleuze establishes between desire and writing, see chapter 4 of Lambert (2012), especially 106–108. This discussion links back to arguments Lambert has made about minor literature as necessarily the enterprise of multiple writers working across a variety of modes, a panorama Cronenberg shows us, however idiosyncratically— mitigating the mythos of the individual, romanticized artist in ways I also believe Naked Lunch does, despite opposed viewpoints I confront later in this chapter. See chapter 3 of Lambert (2002), especially 150–151. 19. Though Downing and Kerbis diagnose William Burroughs himself as exhibiting “many features of the alexithymic or schizoid patient” as defined by Freud, not Deleuze, they understand Bill Lee’s repeated shootings of Joan as a standard traumatic repetition. See Downing and Kerbis (1998), 776.

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20. Sedgwick, reminding us with sublime simplicity that “people are different from each other,” pertinently catalogs a long, incisive list of other varieties in sexual taste and experience that “sexual orientation” might just as sensibly connote. See Sedgwick (1990), 22–35. Ahmed reconsiders all “orientation,” sexual and otherwise, as an avid turn toward some objects or away from others, along “desire lines” linking the perceiving subject and the objects of orientation. See Ahmed (2006), especially chapters 1 and 2. 21. Bill Lee’s often-passive channeling of desires recalls Leo Bersani’s theorization of “Gidean homosexuality [that] is strangely undemanding, almost to the point of being indistinguishable from a homophobic rejection of gay sex.” Bersani goes on to make “the admittedly peculiar claim that Gide’s fastidious sexuality is even more threatening to dominant cultural ideologies. Not only does it play dangerously with the terms of a sexual relation . . . it eliminates from ‘sex’ the necessity of any relation whatsoever.” See Bersani (1995), 121–22, original emphasis. This framework helps us to view Bill’s laconic affect as itself a desiringstate, neither “homophobic” nor “heterosexualized,” although Deleuze would read even these behaviors as forms of relation, rather than a Bersanian eliminating of relation. 22. The so-called Mujahideen is not a genuine Arabic-script machine. Nor, despite Cronenberg’s commentary track on the Criterion Collection DVD of Naked Lunch, is it of British origin. Identifying the model as a nineteenth-century, Iowa-produced Oliver typewriter, historian Darren Wershler-Henry reveals even this prop as an incompossible object. See Wershler-Henry (2007), 118–131. 23. Burroughs ([1959] 1987), 49. Martin recites this passage in longhand from a notebook—a writing practice Bill vociferously rejects in favor of his typewriters, making Bill even less viable as the author of these words. 24. Taubin cites this “terrifyingly erotic” sequence as a “flagrantly transgressive” climax from which the film never recovers any stable erotic orientation, presuming stability as a virtue even as she vaguely endorses the “brilliance” of this highly provocative sequence. See Taubin (1992), 10. 25. Murphy, (1996), 114. For Deleuze’s thoughts on drugs as a key element in the machinic assemblages of many American films, see C1 84–85. 26. For a political twist on this idea, see Wershler-Henry (2007), 125–129. 27. Rodowick (1997), 154. 28. Serving both to antagonize Bill and Joan amid their pleasures and to distill an orientalized figure of cruel sexual otherness, Fadela suits the double-bind on which Jasbir Puar constructs her virtuoso monograph Terrorist Assemblages. See Puar (2007). 29. The blatant, latexy artifice of the sodomitical pièce-de-resistance, rendered three years after the state-of-the-art digital compositing of Jeremy Irons alongside himself in Dead Ringers (proving that “better” effects were possible in 1991), further vitiates the “actuality” of the scene. Nonetheless, the scene summons such optical, sonic, and animal vividness that it makes a strongly “actual” claim on our senses. 30. See, for example, Butler ([1990] 1999, 1993, and 1997a). 31. Even Robin Wood agrees about Stereo’s challenges to heterocentrism. See R. Wood (1983), 133–135. 32. Before this deranging juncture, this scene already marks a high-point in how the film utilizes a glass-closet discourse of writing to transcode men’s sexual cruising of other men, specifically via an obsession with other men’s machines. Holm is barely less effete than Dead Ringers’s Birchall as he flirts, “If I get blocked again, I’ll let you use my Martinelli . . . Oh, come on, we’re both writers, we know what we’re talking about.”

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33. Deleuze (1997b), 107, 109. This short essay affiliates the stutter itself with the principles of minor language and literature. 34. For varying instances of Deleuze and Guattari drawing on this image, see Kafka 13–14 and Anti-Oedipus 284–286. The entomological resonance is fortuitous for the filmmaker behind The Fly, M Butterfly, and Naked Lunch. 35. Dellamora (1995), 162, 154. 36. Timothy S. Murphy makes a consonant claim with Dellamora’s, cited earlier, that this film “which might have established its connections with its politico-historical situation, instead reduces the text to a hermetically self-reflexive abstraction.” See Murphy (1996), 114. Murphy expands his contentions about Burroughs’s “amodernism” and, more briefly, about the political and artistic shortcomings of Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch in his monograph Wising Up the Marks (1997). 37. Murphy (1996), 115. 38. For related arguments about Naked Lunch’s and Cronenberg’s self-commodifications, see Murphy (1996), 115–119; Dellamora (1995), 150–155; Hantke (2007), 164; Skerl (2009), 167–174; and Ramsay (1999), 58–59. Browning’s David Cronenberg: The Film-Maker as Author is conditioned by this dynamic, even on occasions where Browning writes against an individualizing approach to Cronenberg’s artistry or the narrative logics of his films. See Browning (2007). Jonathan Rosenbaum’s argument about the “tragic vision” of Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch as finally elevating the film above comparable works by David Lynch or by Burroughs himself also reflects these individualist cults of the artist and the application of classical literary discourses to complexly funded and collaboratively produced motion pictures. See J. Rosenbaum (2000), 219. 39. Dellamora (1995), 161. 40. Ibid., 159, original emphasis. Dellamora similarly inveighs against Cronenberg’s tendency to speak in a register of “general humanism” (152) that is only attainable by draining the scenario and characters of racial, religious, ethnic, and sexually minoritarian specificity. 41. TP, 6, quoted in Murphy (1996), 115. Murphy perceives the pitfalls of the cut-up practice as less formal than circumstantial: he describes its value as having dissipated through copious, hit-and-miss adoptions, especially abroad. 42. Murphy (1996), 120–121. 43. Ibid., 122. 44. Helen Darby addresses the peculiar syncretism of Romantic, modernist, and postmodernist traces within the film as a sign of its formal and conceptual openness and as an issue on which spirited denunciations of the film tend to blur their discourses. See Darby (n.d.). 45. “The schizophrenic escape does not merely consist in withdrawing from the social, in living on the fringe: it causes the social to take flight through the multiplicity of holes that eat away at it and penetrate it. . . . There is a whole world of difference between the schizo and the revolutionary: the difference between the one who escapes, and the one who knows how to make what he is escaping escape. . . . The schizo is not revolutionary, but the schizophrenic process—in terms of which the schizo is merely the interruption, or the continuation in the void—is the potential for revolution” (AO 341). See also Deleuze (1992). 46. Money similarly ghosts the story beats and deterritorialized figures of desire in Dead Ringers. When Elliot first meets Claire in a restaurant and describes her trifurcate cervix, Beverly exists somewhere in the out-of-frame, doubled at another restaurant, shaking down a rich society matron for donations to their clinic. When Beverly later attacks a patient with his mutant tools, the ensuing scene features Elliot’s apology to the wealthy trustees of the

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hospital, not to the menaced patient. When Anders Wolleck agrees to manufacture these implements, so blatantly grotesque that Claire instantly pegs them as symptoms of derangement, he does so to profit from them as high-end gallery pieces. Mary Russo spots the sales sticker on Wolleck’s glass vitrine, conveying an eager market for these seemingly unlovable commodities. See M. Russo (1994), 111. 47. Though I decline to read Naked Lunch more directly in terms of its kitschy Orientalism, Anti-Oedipus makes that ideology almost endemic to its schema of desire: e.g., “Our choices in matters of love are at a crossroads of ‘vibrations,’ which is to say that they express connections, disjunctions, and conjunctions of flows that cross through a society, entering and leaving it, linking it up with other societies, ancient or contemporary, remote or vanished, dead or yet to be born. Africas and Orients always following [sic] the underground threads of the libido” (AO 352). 48. In this sense, the manifestations of desire in Naked Lunch underscore the contrast between a “problem” and a “theorem” that Deleuze appropriates from Pier Paolo Pasolini. See C2 174–178. 49. For more on the virtues and limits of “becoming-animal” as a tactic of minor literature, see K 34–37. 50. Deleuze introduces the lectosign not just as type of sign but a facet of any timeimage: “This is why chronosigns are inseparable from lectosigns, which force us to read so many symptoms in the image, that is, to treat the optical and sound image like something that is also readable” (C2 24). 51. I disagree, then, that the film extends what Jamie Russell calls a homophobic line in Burroughs’s critical reception, reaching back as far as Norman Mailer’s condescending tributes, which have been “always dependent on [Burroughs’s] being other than gay.” For Russell, “Cronenberg’s film produces a Burroughs-like protagonist who isn’t queer, just confused, stuck in a moment of sexual ambivalence.” He reads as prevarication what I see as positive, productive queerness, not at all in sync with normativities. See Russell (2001), 2–3. 52. R. Wood (1983), 124–125. 53. An earlier and substantially different version of this portion of the chapter was previously published as Nick Davis, “The View from the Shortbus, or All Those Fucking Movies,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14.4 (Winter 2008): 623–637. 54. Alfonso (2009), 122, 135. 55. S. Kennedy (2006) 42, 43. 56. L. Williams (2008), 284. 57. Ebert (1999). 58. Roddick (2006), 12. Shortbus’s comrades in the real-sex brigade at Cannes 2006 included the English thriller Red Road, winner of the Jury Prize; the absurdist Hungarian horror-comedy Taxidermia; and the international short-film portmanteau Destricted, with films by Marina Abramović, Matthew Barney, Larry Clark, and Gaspar Noé, among others. 59. L. Williams (2008), 290. 60. Even less represented are the idiosyncratic intensities of erotic, creative, and empathic contact in Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993), or the use of “actual” bodies as intimate parchments in Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book (1996), or the verbally administered orgasms in Bent (1997), or any number of other films that undertake their own redefinitions of what “real” sex could entail. 61. Perhaps Severin delegitimizes her own sexual involvements because she is paid for them. To the extent that she and James, a onetime hustler, isolate “real” sex from paid sexual

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labor, Shortbus valorizes an ideal of erotics untainted by money—an ideal never entertained in Naked Lunch, where money and desire constantly converge. 62. L. Williams (2008), 288. 63. For readings of Shortbus as a kind of musical, no doubt influenced by Mitchell’s trademark association with his earlier, gender-queer rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch and its screen adaptation, see Dargis (2006) and Ridley (2006). 64. For more on idealized and nonidealized representations of sex as a spectrum that Hollywood movies, especially, have long traversed, see Krzywinska (2006). 65. L. Williams (2008), 291, 288. 66. Rodowick (1997), 154. 67. L. Williams (2008), 292. 68. Berlant and Warner (1998), 563, rpt. in Warner (2002), 205. 69. For a recent essay on this technophiliac aspect of Shortbus, see Tinkcom (2011). 70. Warner (2002), 63. 71. Ibid., 199. 72. For much of Shortbus’s audience, New York-based or otherwise, these people may not be recognizable and consequently may “not yet exist” in a Deleuzian sense, except as a panoply of gender-ambiguous figures willing to take erotic risks on camera. In this sense, though Mitchell may appear to have cast his film with an “insider” audience in mind, Shortbus may actually pack more collective and political punch for audiences forced to “read” the crowd in their own ways, rather than identifying “actual” figures therein. 73. S. Kennedy (2006), 46, 42. 74. Alfonso (2009), 124. Julianne Pidduck writes persuasively of how avant-garde work by filmmakers like Cathy Sisler undermines this romanticization of the metropole, specifically of Manhattan, as a necessary locus for queer transformations. Bill Marshall’s work on Québécois queer cinema surveys a culturally and linguistically “minor” region of Canada as a heuristic for seeing how different queer cinemas produce alternately nationalizing or deterritorializing images of dissident desire. See Pidduck (2004) and Marshall (2008). For an important statement of the seemingly mandated diaspora of queers to urban environments, see Weston (1995). 75. For one influential instance of such a critique, see Halberstam (2005), particularly the first chapter. For a rare, fascinating reading of Shortbus as evincing midwestern rather than coastal values, culminating in the deliciously Deleuzian imperative to “sound the ass kazoo of freedom!” from wherever one finds oneself, see Zacharek (2006). 76. Rodowick (1997), 153. 77. Indeed, the status of minor art, located by definition within the major culture and attendant apparatus it seeks to deterritorialize, may always be more asymptotic than achievable. Justin Bond describes Shortbus in eloquently virtual, even incompossible terms as “an example of an aspiration” and a “beautiful expression of what New York can be like, a kind of living dream that can in fact be true at times.” See S. Kennedy (2006), 46. 78. Warner (2002), 81, 169.

Chapter 3 1. Dunye was an early New Queer success story, given the attention paid in B. Ruby Rich’s field-declarative article and in other publications to her short films, including Janine (1990), She Don’t Fade (1991), The Potluck and the Passion (1993), and Greetings from Africa

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(1996). These and others are available on the DVD The Early Works of Cheryl Dunye (First Run Features, 2008). For a rich reading of these shorts, see Fuchs (1997). 2. N. Jones (2007), 179. 3. Warner (2002), 169. 4. This is so much the case that Kara Keeling devotes a book to the problem of the black femme as the “radical elsewhere” of popular filmmaking. See Keeling (2007). Catherine Zimmer begins her superb analysis of self-reflexivity in Dunye’s movie, which culminates in some gestures to Deleuzian theory, with the same lament, a “testament to how little has really changed in the power structures of cinematic production.” See Zimmer (2008), 41. See also Braidt (2000), 181. 5. For more on the distinction between “orienting around” a concept and being “oriented toward” another, see Ahmed (2006). I gloss these terms of Ahmed’s briefly in the introduction of this book. 6. Winokur (2001), 235ff. 7. This scene ironically invokes Go Fish (1994), the lesbian arthouse hit that The Watermelon Woman repeatedly name-checks and from which it borrows key cast members. Where Go Fish closed its curtain on what the audience may well have been waiting for—the joyous and long-deferred sex scene between Ely and Max—Cheryl offers this charming but strained montage as a parallel “climax,” and then her confession of having pulled our collective legs. 8. As with the Cheryl/Dunye distinction, I will hereafter guide the reader by employing The Watermelon Woman as the title of Dunye’s feature and “The Watermelon Woman” to designate Cheryl’s ersatz biography. 9. For more on “bad affects” as a privileged object in queer theory, see Love (2007); or the many contributions, including Love’s, to Halperin and Traub (2009). 10. Irene Dunye is, like Paglia billed “as Herself ” in the credits. Of course, in this context, such assertions do not pass without skepticism. References to the filmmaker’s mother Edith Dunye in the printed Fae Richards Archive raise the exciting possibility that Dunye has put over yet another trick. However, the late Edith Irene Dunye (1930–2004), honored on a memorial page of her daughter’s website that has since been removed, turns out to have employed both names in different contexts. Still, nothing in The Watermelon Woman’s diegesis requires us to take their relation on faith or to presume Irene’s sincerity. 11. Deleuze reconceptualizes the flashback as a recollection-image, a schema by which scenes arising out of chronological sequence still attain “proper” order and recuperate coherent narratives by the film’s end. 12. Given how intensively film sequences are rearranged in editing, we are even more mistaken to credit the actor or character as the source of affects (again, more complex than feelings) that in fact emerge through montage. 13. Villarejo (2003), 7. 14. These films sustain the tradition of lesbian anti-narrative and anti-(re)production that Judith Roof identifies as a new tradition in literary modernism, with Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood as her touchstone. See Roof (1996). 15. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1987), 168. Subsequent citations throughout the book will be parenthetically indicated in text with the abbreviation TP. 16. To be fair, the writers briefly allow that, e.g., “the wall could just as well be black, and the hole white” (TP 169). They also articulate a theory of racist othering that makes the

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white man’s rise as the paradigm of the “facialized” subject into an absurd historical contingency, going so far as to name this archetype “Jesus Christ Superstar” (TP 177). So, characteristically idiosyncratic though it is, an interesting critique of racialized perception does manifest in this chapter, rather than just an entrenchment of familiar white/black tropologies, though these are quite prevalent. 17. Though functional affection-images need not be close-ups of faces, or even close-ups at all, Deleuze positions the face in close-up as emblematic of his concept: “It is the face with its relative immobility and its receptive organs, which brings to light these movements of expression . . .” (C1 66), and, with stentorian clarity, “The affection-image is the close-up, and the close-up is the face . . .” (C1 87, original emphasis). 18. That Fae’s face becomes, for Cheryl and for us, more poignant and arresting in direct proportion to the image’s material etiolation rhymes with a similar claim Lucas Hilderbrand makes about the affective impact of analog and anorectic dissipation of Karen Carpenter’s body in Todd Haynes’s outlawed, endlessly bootlegged film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. See chapter 4 of Hilderbrand (2009). 19. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (1994), 17. Subsequent citations throughout the book will be parenthetically indicated in text with the abbreviation WIP. 20. Flaxman and Oxman (2008), 39, 42. 21. Despite Cheryl’s tendency to adopt a first-person plural voice as a black woman (“our stories have never been told,” etc.), the movie skewers universalizing discourses like the “I Am Black Woman” rhetoric that passes for poetry at the Sistah Sound revival that she and Tamara are hired, hilariously, to film. In its tone of cranky impatience, its on-site conundrums, its mixed audience, and its polygon of sightlines among gazing positions, this sequence strongly recalls the prologue where Cheryl and Tamara labor uncomfortably as wedding videographers. That formal match signals how the women feel just as aloof from the Sistah Sound tropes of essentialized black femininity as they do from the well-heeled, heteronormative country-club nuptials outside Swarthmore. 22. P. White (1999), 204. 23. Flaxman and Oxman (2008), 41. 24. Sullivan (2000), 448. 25. Ibid., 450; and Braidt (2000), 182. 26. Gomez (1983), 110, emphasis added. Cited in Sullivan (2000), 450. Sullivan, in my previous citation, is careful to say “most invisible” but not “the most invisible.” Stefanie K. Dunning, citing related but more recent comments by Gomez, agrees with her that “even in black queer discourse, it is the black lesbian body that is most absent.” See Dunning (2009), 85. 27. For an articulation of “burdens of representation,” see Mercer (1990). Sullivan’s way out of the tension between documentary and deconstructive valences mostly entails shifting the queer tropes of performativity, contradiction, and fragmentation onto the generic frame of the movie as a faux-documentary while ceding a diverse, camera-ready reality to the black lesbians who populate it. José Esteban Muñoz’s supple account of “autoethnography” in Richard Fung’s videos maps well onto The Watermelon Woman, insofar as “autoethnography is not interested in searching for some lost and essential experience, because it understands the relationship that subjects have with their own pasts as complicated yet necessary fictions.” See Muñoz (1995), 89. For a response to this passage, addressing how queer filmmakers might exploit their limited resources to reinvigorate cinematic forms and desires, see Pidduck (2004).

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28. Keeling (2005), 220. Keeling cites Sharon Holland as similarly observing that the sign “black lesbian” is often forced to pass in and of itself “as the perfect answer to the problem of feminism.” Holland (2000), 141, quoted in Keeling (2005), 221. 29. Keeling (2005), 220. For similar skepticisms about visibility as a political goal in itself, as argued within a reading of this film that acknowledges the text’s complex negotiations of that ideology, see Reid-Pharr (2006). 30. As Keeling observes, The Watermelon Woman’s enthusiasm for interracial signification extends to how the ads for the film privilege semifamous white actress Guinevere Turner over black unknown Valarie Walker, who plays an equally weighted role in the movie. 31. For more on the particular prevalence of butch-femme definitions and other alternative group-names than “lesbian” within nonwhite and working-class groups of women, see Moore (2006). 32. I borrow this phrase, of course, from Audre Lorde’s essay “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger,” in Lorde (1984), 145–175. 33. These shots of waists, backs, breasts, et al., furnish perfect examples of close-ups operating only in an intensive key, minus any reflective field, and thus not as affection-images. Another way to think of them in Deleuzian parlance is as a series of impressions that barely transcend the level of perceptual secondness and sometimes stay sensuously rooted in firstness, terms I gloss in the “Schizo Homo Pomo” section of my introduction. 34. Pellegrini (1997), 88. For a contentious theorization of this interracial motif in lesbian cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, see Rich (1993b). For compelling reflections on lesbians’ refusals to admit when classed and racialized differences augment erotic interest, see Goldsby (1990). See also Van Leer (1997), especially 159–160. 35. This process allows cinema to redefine time and history as “pure virtuality which divides itself in two as affector and affected, ‘the affection of self by self ’” (C2 83). Hence, affection is the concept in Cinema 1 that most potently prefigures Cinema 2’s pronounced swerve from visible sign-types to virtual intervals; from perceptible links to irrational conjunctions and breakaway elements; from accumulating movements defined by part-whole relations to “false” images that defy such relations, instead requiring thoughtful intervention and acts of reading the image. 36. For more on popular memory and “queer fictions of the past,” see Bravmann (1997), with its nuanced arguments about queer approaches to histories that prove simultaneously gap ridden and overdetermined. 37. Rich (1992a), 33. Cherry Smyth echoed this sentiment in her contemporaneous remark that “in seeking past movies to parody, lost images to reclaim, icons to glorify, dykes have always had less booty to raid.” See Smyth (1992), 39. One year later, in the inaugural essay for the Film/Video Review section of GLQ for which she was to serve as editor, Rich proposed that “search parties might be organized, too, for the queers lost in the labyrinths of past film histories, lacking credits, titles, even names.” Because this injunction describes the plot of The Watermelon Woman to a tee and because it follows Rich’s account of Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967) as an exemplary case of queer texts in need of popular recovery, it seems especially apt to understand her charge in terms of black queer images. See Rich (1993a), 86. Teresa de Lauretis, in the article widely credited with coining “queer theory” as a phrase, observes that queer scholars and artists of color are also forced into what Rich calls the

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“alchemist” rather than the “archaeologist” role in relation to a comparatively paltry archive, though perhaps for different reasons: “Besides the severe problem of institutional access, the relatively greater scarcity of works of theory by lesbians and gay men of color may have been also a matter of different choices, different work priorities, different constituencies and forms of address. Perhaps, to a gay writer and critic of color, defining himself gay is not of the utmost importance; he may have other and more pressing priorities in his work and in his life.” See de Lauretis (1991), ix. 38. See P. White (2008), drawing on a rich vein of lesbian-cinematic tropes including Terry Castle’s notion of the “apparitional lesbian” and White’s own model of “retrospectatorship.” I would add to this list Judith Mayne’s notion of the gay and lesbian “critical audience,” Kara Keeling’s black femme as “radical elsewhere,” and Amy Villarejo’s complex derivation of “lesbian rule,” entailing strenuous affective labors often required to ascertain the lesbian value of films such as Ulrike Ottinger’s Exile Shanghai (1997), classified and frequently programmed as “lesbian” cinema without furnishing any “actual” lesbian referent. See Castle (1993), P. White (1999), Mayne (1993), Keeling (1997), and Villarejo (2003), as well as the early chapters in Straayer (1996). 39. Reframing the discussion in these ways should not blind us to the wealth of New Queer-era films—hailing from lesbian makers and/or foregrounding lesbian figures—that do engage past texts and frames of reference in ways that resonate strongly with that imaginative “archaeology” that Rich ascribes to gay male filmmakers. See, for example, Jane Cottis and Kaucyila Brooke’s Dry Kisses Only (1990) and Cecilia Barriga’s Meeting of Two Queens/Encuentro entre dos Reinas (1991), both invoked in Rich’s pioneering “New Queer Cinema” article, whose formal assemblage and relations to classic Hollywood presage The Watermelon Woman; Laura Nix’s The Politics of Fur (2002), which resets Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant among contemporary L.A. lesbians; and Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art (1998), a New Queer reimagining of All About Eve and of Nan Goldin’s professional ascendancy and retreat, comparable to how Naked Lunch, Velvet Goldmine and other films in this era (and in this book) flaunt their connections to literary, cinematic, and biographical pretexts. 40. Deleuze sees this among the Italian neorealists, field-based ethnographers like Jean Rouch, and “third world film-makers” everywhere from Egypt to Argentina to the inner cities of the United States. Helen Hok-Sze Leung, exploring potential compatibilities between Third Cinema and New Queer Cinema, references Cuban filmmaker Julio García Espinosa’s 1969 manifesto “For an Imperfect Cinema” as a powerful salvo “against the credo of technical perfection” that could be “capable of resisting the commercialization of New Queer Cinema and revitalizing the vision of Third Cinema.” See Leung (2004), 163. 41. See Cvetkovich (2003), especially chapter 7, which reviews lesbian-produced documentaries that dovetail with Cheryl’s praxis and includes Cvetkovich’s short reading of The Watermelon Woman’s C.L.I.T. Archive sequence as an obvious, fond joke about the invaluable, forever disheveled Lesbian Herstory Archives. 42. David Holzman is the protagonist of Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary (1967), which Dunye has cited as a touchstone. She has also credited Allen’s work as an influence, though the range of generic traces and specific intertextual allusions in The Watermelon Woman is too large to itemize here. For interesting and sometimes explicitly opposed claims about The Watermelon Woman’s status as a fake documentary and, by now, as a YouTube precursor, see Juhasz and Lerner (2006) and Juhasz (2010).

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43. Dunye speaks to the intractability of this conundrum in an interview with Juhasz: “One problem about media [is that] we create work for an audience as if they are just out there.” See Juhasz (2001), 297. An ethical and historical sensibility operates here as well, since The Watermelon Woman refuses in its form or its narrative to anoint any one image of the past as the past of African Americans, of black lesbians, of black cinema, of black queer cinema, et al., or to endorse one compulsory taste culture for the inevitably dissimilar members of these groups. 44. Dunye had already been charting this course for the face in close-up. In Janine (1990), one of the so-called “Dunyementaries,” the filmmaker relays a formative anecdote from her lesbian adolescence but in visually opaque ways that resist the transparent, testimonial orientations of the monologue. Cynthia Fuchs ascribes “Dunye’s performance of uncertainty” to her “halting, awkward, and repetitive speech,” but I see as more crucial the opacity of Cheryl’s expression, the low lighting, the sunglasses sported indoors, and other tactics of muted facialization. See Fuchs (1997), 197ff. 45. In her treatment of Chantal Akerman’s and Sadie Benning’s work in “Lesbian Minor Cinema,” Patricia White suggests that masklike faces are a recurring leitmotif of lesbian cinema, possibly as a strategy for disturbing the habits of ripe emotionalism or eager identification that describe so many female performances and responses to those performances in mainstream Hollywood cinema. See P. White (2008). 46. Spillers ([1977] 2003), 69, 70. 47. Ibid., 79. 48. This constellation of shifting perceptions extends as well to a touring exhibit of “historical” photos that Dunye commissioned from artist Zoe Leonard to promote the film, later issued as a hardback book. Produced by a press that previously printed collections by major queer artists like Nan Goldin and David Wojnarowicz, The Fae Richards Archive joins the film in veiling its status as a fabricated object until the final pages. See Leonard and Dunye (1996). 49. Mississippi Damned remains available for sale on the website of its production company, called Morgan’s Mark. 50. Amy Herzog (2008) offers a rich account on Deleuzian theories of the face in cinema with Bad Education as her key text.

Chapter 4 1. See Marrati (2008), as well as Schwab (2000). 2. See, for example, Pendleton (2001), 48. 3. Hollis Griffin’s untitled work in progress on LGBT-targeted entertainment in the era of multiplatform “convergence media” pays nuanced attention to the aesthetic tropes and economic frameworks for these direct-to-DVD or cable-targeted films. 4. The major boon to Nugent’s literary-critical celebrity was the publication of Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent (2002). Rodney Evans has cited Thomas Wirth, the editor of that compilation, as an indispensable resource in establishing the historical foundations, drafting the script, and inspiring the images of Brother to Brother. Nugent’s work is also treated at length in one chapter apiece of Schwartz (2003) and Gerstner (2011). For the most thorough scholarly analysis of Brother to Brother currently in print, see Christian (2010). 5. On the productive value of “willed poverty” in minor cinema, see P. White (2008), 414.

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6. “Brother to brother” is the incantatory phrase spoken, amplified, and superimposed over a black screen at important moments of Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989) and is the title as well of Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam’s indispensable anthology of new writing and cultural criticism. See Hemphill (1991). As such, the title of Evans’s film signals its debts not just to Nugent’s legacy but to the work of Riggs and to a century-long but frequently marginalized corpus of poetry, fiction, and experimental writing by black gay men. 7. See Spivak (1988). For a clear, helpful gloss on how Spivak’s critique of Deleuze informs a queer uptake of the Cinema books, see Keeling (2007), 41–44. Martin Schwab is one of the few readers of the Cinema books to allege a deep philosophical problem here, asserting that Deleuze overindulges his denunciations of mimesis and refuses to distinguish images in art from other ontological forms that Deleuze idiosyncratically classifies as “images,” including human beings. See Schwab (2000), 127–133. 8. Deleuze designates as “SASc” a basic structure of film movement in which some initial situation (S) withstands some intervening action (A) that decisively revises the initial scenario into a fundamentally changed scenario (Sc). By contrast, in other films, when a continuous action or routine (A) persists amid subtly or sensationally changed contexts (S), the original routine appears dramatically different, or it bears different effects (Ac). For more on these templates and the filmmakers with whom Deleuze associates them, see C1, chapters 9 and 10. 9. Amplifying confusion, Zvenigora, an avant-garde meditation on a Ukrainian folktale filmed in 1928, significantly predates the postwar advent of the “direct” time-image and is never reinvoked anywhere else in Cinema 2. 10. Beyond the mirror and the postcard, Deleuze offers several other crystalline tropes that evoke these inextricable, endlessly reversible aspects of actual and virtual, some of them relatively intuitive (the metafilm, the film of theatrical performance, the tableau vivant), some of them more idiosyncratic (the hotel, the crime, the sea voyage), and at least one (scenes or films about money) indispensable to his sense of cinema as always and inescapably territorialized by capital, a point we shall develop especially in relation to Beau travail. 11. The two richest statements on how Rock Hudson’s movies signify differently since his coming out and his death from AIDS remain Meyer (1991) and Mark Rappaport’s experimental, collage-based, quasi-documentary film Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992). 12. See Roof (1996). 13. In addition to Roof (1996), see chapter 1 of Edelman (2004) and chapter 1 of Halberstam (2005). For more on queer temporality, see also Freeman (2010), especially 1–19. 14. Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael adapted Eyes Wide Shut from the short novel Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler, who also wrote the story that became Ophüls’s La Ronde. 15. See the “Gender Is Burning” chapter in Butler (1993), especially 128–133. 16. See Halberstam (2001), 296–298, from a chain of ideas the author later expanded in Halberstam (2005), 83–96. The original article appeared as part of a short series of scholarly responses to Boys Don’t Cry published in Screen between Spring 2001 and Spring 2002, and republished together in Stacey and Street (2007), 257–295. The on-set disputes between Boys Don’t Cry director Kimberly Peirce and star Hilary Swank about the gendered and sexual politics of the film’s gaze are revisited in the memoir of the film’s producer. See Vachon (2006), 99–100.

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17. Villarejo (2003), 21. 18. See Warner (2002), 65–124, and Berlant and Warner (1998); Bersani and Dutoit (2004); Rubin (1984); and Cohen (1997). 19. For an especially deft unpacking of Agrado’s monologue and of All About My Mother in general as manifesting new forms of the collective, see Bersani and Dutoit (2004) 74–123. The term “gendernauts” I borrow from filmmaker Monika Treut, who in 1999 released her feature Gendernauts: A Journey Through Shifting Identities, a documentary devoted to transgender and transsexual people and other subjects she refers to as “gender mixers.” 20. See Rizzo (2005–2006). 21. Interventions in this vein include Patricia White’s theorization of “retrospectatorship” as a mode for actualizing queer potentials within classic Hollywood films and Lee Edelman’s study of “behindsight” as both a specific riff on Freudian Nachträglichkeit and a framework by which non-heteronormative desire often registers as troublingly “out of time.” See P. White (1999), 194–215, and Edelman (1994), 173–191. 22. These griots and flâneurs recall, too, the schizos who derive some of their power through wandering the streets, a healthy propensity encapsulated in one of the funniest passages of Anti-Oedipus: “What does schizoanalysis ask? Nothing more than a bit of a relation to the outside, a little real reality. And we claim the right to a radical laxity, a radical incompetence—the right to enter the analyst’s office and say it smells bad there. It reeks of the great death and the little ego” (AO 334). 23. See, for example, Adnum (2005), Kelly (1999), Pendleton (2001), and Rich (2000). 24. Few Wolfe titles have since achieved this distinction, though award-winning Canadian director Thom Fitzgerald’s 3 Needles (2005) did, and a few films on Wolfe’s roster, such as Achim von Borries’s Love in Thoughts (2004), have been significant hits abroad. 25. A truncated plotline in Brother to Brother concerns Bruce’s relative apathy when Langston points out that Wallace has in various ways been purloining Bruce’s words as his own. Langston cannot understand Bruce’s almost Deleuzian indifference to individual celebrity, which Bruce perceives as the only reason to fuss about authorship credits. 26. See Jennings (2006), 184ff, and the introduction to Juett and Jones (2010). 27. P. White (2008), 413. 28. See Evans (2005). 29. Christian argues that such exchanges of black male gazes are the structural core of the film, mirroring earlier scholarship on homoerotic male gazing by Kaja Silverman and others. See Christian (2010), 180, and, for context, the two chapters on Fassbinder in Silverman (1992). The unspoken cruising in this opening sequence, among characters still unknown to us, reactivates Deleuzian problematics of the affection-image as described in the previous chapter, since we must read “intensive” flickers in all three men’s faces before we can perceive any of them, Bruce and Perry especially, in relation to black male homosexuality as a “reflective unity.” 30. The second of Bruce’s two close-ups in this scene ends with him shutting his eyes and leaning back, as though possibly falling asleep, before an abrupt cut. The film calls little attention to this implication, but grammatically, the scene permits a reading of what follows as a semiconscious projection of a drowsy Bruce onto the handsome, flirtatious young black man he espies across the aisle. Were one to adopt this reading, it is unclear when, if ever, Brother to Brother would mandate a return to actual reality. 31. Rodowick (1997), 148.

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32. When, in that sequence, Perry uncovers a photograph of Bruce, Langston, Wallace, and Thurman—one that we observe being snapped in the party scene at the Manor, and which became central to the movie’s print ads and DVD box art—we can link Brother to Brother even more strongly to Deleuze’s comments on the photograph or postcard “come to life” as an index of complicated actual-virtual relations, as discussed earlier in this chapter. 33. See Christian (2010), 177ff. 34. See Bravmann (1997) 11–12 and 111–113, including his copious aggregation of relevant sources, on the quandaries that the gay life-world of the Harlem Renaissance poses to certain truisms about gayness as an emergent “ethnic” group and as a new form of urban collectivity within American cities, as evoked in historical scholarship like that of D’Emilio (1983) and Chauncey (1994). 35. The actors are Lance Reddick and Chad Coleman, now even more recognizable from the ensemble of The Wire. 36. Parallel cutting between black-nationalist and gay-pride rallies during the early 1970s registers a comparably provocative point in the recent documentary The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 (2011), edited by filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson from a trove of unearthed footage that Swedish documentarians filmed of civil rights marches, Black Power rallies, prison interviews with Angela Davis, and other important flashpoints of the era during eight years of visiting the United States. This would be a perfect film for Perry to show his class. 37. Love (2007), 5. See also Cvetkovich (2003), especially the introduction and 239–271. Love’s project further resonates with James Tweedie’s comments on trying to access the past in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio through a “mannerist sense of history,” one that, even in relation to a much more distant historical epoch than the one at issue in Brother to Brother, “incorporates formal strategies of political modernism while infusing history into the formula, becoming a form of modernism with hindsight, with a historical dimension that allows for a return both to and of the past.” See Tweedie (2003), 381. Given Brother to Brother’s resonant conclusion as an exchange of two paintings, Tweedie’s comments on 393–403 about erotic triangulation through painting in Caravaggio and in other Jarman films are also apposite to this film. Tweedie’s full essay reappears in Stacey and Street (2007) 208–235. 38. Love (2007), 6. Love also inspires the allusion in the next sentence to Orpheus and Eurydice as affective figureheads for contemplating queer desire, especially in relation to its ambivalent pasts. 39. Rodowick (1997), 135. 40. Ibid., 185.

Chapter 5 1. Rodney Evans resorted to the public-solicitation website Kickstarter to raise money for his second narrative feature, seven years after Brother to Brother—a delay that is sadly typical for even the most successful first-time filmmakers, especially those who identify as queer and/or nonwhite. His campaign to raise $15,000, a meager amount for a filmmaking budget, on behalf of a script called The Happy Sad, described as “follow[ing] two couples, one black and one white, whose lives collide as they navigate open relationships and sexual identity,” further discloses how queer artists must intensely work to raise capital by any

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means necessary. Then again, the Kickstarter phenomenon deterritorializes standard budget-collecting practices for feature films, furnishing a new, “minor” channel for subsidizing politically salient movies via self-organizing collectives. See http://www.kickstarter. com/projects/1309653304/the-happy-sad-from-the-director-of-brother-to-brot. 2. “Now this movement of displacement belongs essentially to the deterritorialization of capitalism. As Samir Amin has shown, the process of deterritorialization here goes from center to periphery, that is, from the developed countries to the underdeveloped countries, which do not constitute a separate world, but rather an essential component of the worldwide capitalist machine. . . . [Yet] it is no longer the developed countries that supply the underdeveloped countries with capital, but quite the opposite” (AO 231). 3. “Obverse” here implies not a relationship of contrast but a constitutive element of the same image. For more on capital, value, and queer film, see Tinkcom (2002). 4. Mark Seem’s introduction to Anti-Oedipus foregrounds as an axiom of the whole, two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia project that money and desire participate always in “one and the same economy, the economy of flows.” See Seem (1983), xviii. 5. For more on the historical constructedness of both gay identity and the nuclear family, see D’Emilio (1983), and Chauncey (1994 and 2000). 6. For a concerned reading about how queer theory initially functioned (and may still) to unevenly distribute advantage and to facilitate individual advancements within the academy, see Jagose (1996), 109–111, as well as the sources she cites in building this case. 7. Deleuze (1997a), 76. 8. Beugnet (2004), 26, 122. In addition, see Caroline Rooney (2004) for a reading of Beau travail as both clarification and critique of Deleuze’s crystal form, which she regards as a somewhat tortuous philosophical attempt to condense Kantian principles within a cinematic frame. For less direct accounts of Beau travail’s crystalline structures, see Ben Grant (2004), citing Elias Canetti on his notion of “crowd crystals,” and Jonathan Rosenbaum (2010) on Denis’s technique of “superimposing” roles on her actors or on previous characters played by those actors—sounding very similar to Deleuze’s account of how the film actor and her role enter almost inevitably into a crystalline relation with each other. 9. Castanet (2004), 145. 10. Renouard and Wajeman (2004), 20. 11. Ibid., 26. 12. The episode of the spilled soup begins this way: “Passion, and passion in its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a palatial stage.  .  . . Now when the master-at-arms noticed whence came the greasy fluid streaming before his feet, he must have taken it—to some extent willfully, perhaps—not for the mere accident it assuredly was, but for the sly escape of a spontaneous feeling on Billy’s part . . .” See Melville (1967), 356. 13. Renouard and Wajeman (2004), 23. 14. Ibid., 22–23. 15. Deleuze (1997a), 72. This passage and its image of the two books forms the conceptual seed for Ian Buchanan’s provocative derivation of “Deleuzism” in his monograph by that name. See Buchanan (2000), 3–9. 16. James Creech credits Robert K. Martin’s monograph Hero, Captain, and Stranger as the first major study of Melville written by a scholar of his generation to take homoeroticism seriously as a fundamental node of meaning in his work, and thus as an indispensable inspiration for his own book. See Martin (1986) and Creech (1993).

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17. Denis evokes personal relations to cinema very close to those Patricia MacCormack confesses in her monograph Cinesexuality; see MacCormack (2008). For more on the strong role desire plays in all of Denis’s movies, see, for example, del Río (2001), including its comparisons of multisensory imagery in Beau travail and Denis’s previous feature Nénette et Boni (1996). See also Mayne (2005). 18. Castanet (2004), 159. See also James Williams (2004), 53. Unlike Denis, Deleuze condescendingly projects this tie between cinema and embodiment as a natural preoccupation of women filmmakers: “Female authors, female directors, do not owe their importance to a militant feminism. What is more important is the way they have produced innovations in this cinema of bodies, as if women had to conquer the source of their own attitudes and the temporality which corresponds to them as individual or common gest” (C2 196–197). 19. “I think that Melville’s work turns on that. I chose it because of that. . . . I also chose it because of Galoup, Galoup’s subjectivity, in other words, his not admitting what kind of love can bind him to a man.” See Castanet (2004), 150–51. 20. Ibid., 151. 21. Ibid., 148, 155. On the subject of the eroticization of the Foreign Legion in France, she specifies: “For me, the army, and particularly the Legion, is completely full of fetishistic images. For the casting I went to a very specialized nightclub in Paris, which opens very late at night. I say specialized, because you could only go dressed as a legionnaire. There are pornographic films with legionnaires. It is not only a gay image, because Piaf ’s song, ‘Mon Légionnaire,’ was already a symbol, a sexual fetish. I could not make the film without thinking about that. . . . If the film did not confront the problem of the body from the outset, frontally, there would not be a film.” Ibid., 148–149. 22. Sarah Cooper, for instance, foregrounds the combination of envy and fetishistic detail that saturate these images—distorting affects, particularly given the sadistic aspects of envy, but also confusingly gendered, since Freud maintains the former as a fundamentally female disposition and the latter as exclusively male. This clash of gendered positionalities provides the basis on which Cooper reads Beau travail as a film that “queers the sexuality of visual pleasure,” and by extension makes the film impossible for audiences to enjoy without finding themselves complicit with Galoup’s envy and his queer blending of positions. See Cooper (2004), 174–175, 178–179. 23. See Ahmed (2006). 24. Recall here Denis’s assertion, cited earlier, about questions of sexuality as always concomitant with questions of life and death. 25. Pendleton (2001), 58–59. Martine Beugnet and Jane Sillars adopt the same terms in examining “how Denis positions the closed system of the Legion in opposition to the open economy of the local Djiboutiens; and how the eruption of desire in this closed system ruptures its unity, destabilizes its authority and reveals its internal divisions and inequality.” See Beugnet and Sillars (2001), 167. 26. Jameson (1991), 37. 27. See C. Grant (2002), cited several times in notes that follow. For my discussion of “affective labor,” see chapter 3 on The Watermelon Woman. 28. The ad-copy quote originates from Stephen Holden’s New York Film Festival review of Beau travail for The New York Times. In fairness, despite foregrounding Melville heavily in its opening paragraphs, the review adopts sophisticated positions on the film’s sexuality: “Where another filmmaker exploring the same material might emphasize its homoerotic

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subtext, Ms. Denis is in search of something deeper, more elemental and ultimately more elusive.” Some of Holden’s claims about the soldiers having “the bodies of sleek trained animals” and scurrying like rats through their obstacle courses feel ballasted with Deleuzian ideas about “becoming-animal.” See Holden (1999). 29. Given the film’s profusion of intertextual entry points—echoing Deleuze’s third, Felliniesque model of the crystal-image—viewers may also recognize elements of Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd (1961), interpolated heavily on the film’s soundtrack, or of JeanLuc Godard’s film Le petit soldat (1963), whose eponymous protagonist, Bruno Forestier, the film recruits as its Captain Vere figure, played by the same actor, Michel Subor. Rosenbaum amplifies Denis’s and my related equations of cinema with desire by citing the Melville, the Britten, the Godard, and other interpolated elements not as adapted hypotexts within Denis’s film but as its “aphrodisiacs.” See J. Rosenbaum (2010), 214. 30. Denis has often cited these poems, “The Night March” and “Gold in the Mountain,” as inspiring certain scenes and images in the final film. 31. C. Grant (2002), 67. 32. Ibid., 59. 33. See Corrigan (1991). 34. Pendleton (2001), 61. Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together, discussed in the last chapter, occupies a comparable role in Kelly (1999) and in Rich (2000) as a hetero-helmed, foreignlanguage production that vastly outpaces the sensual pleasures and aesthetic rigors of queer films produced within the English-speaking world by the end of the 1990s. 35. Mayne (2005), 95. 36. C. Grant (2002), 61 n. 21, 67 n. 41, 68. 37. See Morlock (2004). 38. Bersani (2010), 102, original emphasis. 39. R. White (2004), 137. I submit, as White comes close to doing, that Derek Jarman’s desert-set and sexually explicit martyring drama Sebastiane, made two decades earlier in 1976, was more or less that film, albeit far ahead of its time. 40. See Nancy (2004), 17; and R. White (2004), 136. 41. R. White (2004), 139, 141. 42. Mulvey ([1975] 1986), 203. 43. Cooper (2001), 74–79, 81–82. 44. Edelman (1994), 203. 45. Ibid., 169. 46. C. Grant (2002),65. 47. Ibid. 48. Sedgwick (1990), 92. See also Creech’s similar emphasis on the actuality of the queer figure he posits in a different Melville novel: Does a camp reading require us to state crudely that Pierre explores the price a brave man in Melville’s situation would have had to pay for owning his homosexuality frankly? Is it the story of a man who forswears his fiancé and runs away to the city with his homosexual lover, who accepts being disowned from family and rejected by society in order to heed a higher virtue of self-determination and integrity? And finally, shall we see Pierre as an early prototype of the gay novels which, for over a century to come, would have to end in the annihilation of their gay protagonists, often in a confrontation with a straight object of their (former) affection? Yes, we shall. (Creech [1993], 118)

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49. Melville (1967), 365. 50. In the novel, of course, Isabel’s Frenchness is a paragon of disruptive outsiderdom on an American terrain eager to certify its aloofness from European origins. 51. Creech (1993), 45. 52. See, for example, Rich (2000), cited in the introduction. 53. Villarejo (2003), 21. 54. Ibid., 20, 21. 55. Sedgwick (1990), 94. 56. The silhouette is a dead ringer for the cave-paintings of prehistoric Saharan swimmers that constituted the archaeologists’ pivotal discovery in The English Patient (1996), a recent global phenom at the time of Beau travail’s premiere—and thus another intertext, though with totally different romances and disillusionments regarding equatorial imperial misadventure. 57. See Cooper (2001), 174, 180, 181; and Thomas (2000). Thomas’s review, like Stephen Holden’s erotically loaded praise of the film as “voluptuous,” appears in large font on the DVD’s back jacket. 58. K. Jones (2000): 26. 59. R. White (2004), 137, 138. 60. Morlock (June 2004), 83. 61. Bersani (2010), 101; and del Río (2001), 196. 62. Benjamin (1936), 241, from the two-page “Epilogue” where the essay’s denunciation of fascistic trends in art reaches its climax. 63. Del Río (2001), 194. See also Hayward (2001), 160–165. 64. Butler (1997b), 118. See also Sedgwick (1990), 98–100 and 114–124 on this discourse of “mastery” as a necessary pretense and conduit for sustaining homosocial ties. 65. Bersani (2010), 103. 66. Auspiciously for Beau travail, Deleuze suggests that “since the new wave, every time there was a fine and powerful film, there was a new exploration of the body in it” (C2 196). He does not hold fast to this assertion, eliding any treatment of bodies in several films he considers “fine and powerful,” but the claim implies how starved he feels the cinema to be of variable embodiments and freed-up desiring-machines. For more on the goals of Deleuze’s “cinema of the body,” see Rodowick (1997), 154. 67. That list of dangers extends to “glorifying insipid ceremony, gratuitous violence, cultivations of catatonia, or hysterical attitudes” (C2 196), the earliest sounding like a risk of fetishizing the scenes of the Legionnaires ironing or fishing, as some accounts do, and the latter two harking to the increasingly inert Sentain and the increasingly agitated, possibly suicidal Galoup. 68. Sedgwick (1990), 113. 69. Ibid. 70. Del Río (2001), 190. 71. Particularly because Galoup’s dance is cross-cut with the initial frames of Beau travail’s closing credits, many viewers have noted how hard it is to distinguish between the actor and the character in this moment. Given Deleuze’s claim that the relation between actors and their roles is itself a crystalline construction, each “superimposed” on the other as cognates or reflections despite their differences, this confusion in Galoup’s case—and in this scene in particular—seems entirely apropos.

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72. For a full account of the “postcard come to life” image in Cinema 2, see chapter 4. 73. See Bersani (2010), 96ff., for more on the Legionnaires’ rootless mobility. 74. Sedgwick (1990), 92. 75. Deleuze (1997a), 84. 76. Ibid., 68. 77. Ibid., 77. 78. See Edelman (2004). 79. Julia Borossa, for example, describes how Beau travail “offers an exploration and critique of the very notions of family and nation, exposing the way that these are used for purposes of inclusion and exclusion.” See Borossa (2004), 98. See also del Río (2001), Hayward (2001), Beugnet (2004), and Bersani (2010). Borossa’s argument, despite its grounding in psychoanalytic methodologies that I have opted away from, would resonate just as fully with Carax’s Pola X. 80. See Marshall (2008), 97. Compare Susan Hayward’s related claim regarding Beau travail that “the post-colonial body is so challenging because, whereas, under the repression of colonisation, the colonised body was perceived as a single unity and subjectivity whose multiplicities were deliberately dismissed under [the] Western [Law of the Father] rule, now its multiplicities and its fragmentation come out into the open.” See Hayward (2001), 160. 81. See Berlant (1997), especially the first and third chapters. Scott Bravmann asserts around the time of Beau travail’s debut and via, for him, unusual allusions to cinema’s political potentials that many then-recent “queer fictions of the past have worked to disrupt the larger-scale cultural and political discourses that regard and construct national borders as primary, logical, and necessary.” The value of such texts, including films by Pratibha Parmar and Isaac Julien, lies in how they deploy queer ideas to “recognize the nation as a residual product and project” of a now-past “modernity.” See Bravmann (1997), 109. Sara Ahmed has more recently deployed queer theory to unpack and displace the sexual and gendered ideologies beneath such blithely exoticizing claims as Deleuze and Guattari’s that “our choices in matters of love . . . cross through a society, entering and leaving it, linking it up with other societies, ancient or contemporary, remote or vanished, dead or yet to be born, Africas and Orients, always following the underground thread of the libido” (AO 352). See Ahmed (2006), especially the third chapter. 82. See Nealon (2001) and Love (2007). 83. Some highly variegated texts that inform my deployment of transgender as a conceptual rubric through the remainder of the chapter—to include my understanding of trans discourse as both an emergent field within queer studies and a concerted unsettling of that discipline’s habits and assumptions—include Prosser (1998), Namaste (2000), Butler (2004), Halberstam (2005), Valentine (2007), and Salamon (2010). Prosser’s book includes an especially rich rereading of The Well of Loneliness through a transgender lens. 84. JoAnne C. Juett and David M. Jones are the first scholars of queer cinema whom I have noted proposing transgender as a suggestive term for queer cinema in its current and general orientations, to include its deviation in recent years from the templates set by early1990s New Queer Cinema: “NQC, in its nascent second wave, is poised to refocus the cinematic community in a productive struggle to inscribe transgender consciousness into the collective cultural understandings of human rights. . . . NQC no longer sits as the homosexual opposite pole of the binary opposition of hetero/homo or on either side of the gay/

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lesbian dichotomy; its new position is truly transgender, challenging the mainstream to look beyond traditional identification of character, director, and audience.” Juett and Jones (2010), xi, xii–xiii. In venturing these claims at the outset of their anthology, the editors express a particular debt to David Adair’s contribution to their volume. See Adair (2010). 85. J. Williams (2004), 50. 86. C. Grant (2002), 58, 59. 87. Though framed around a different film that arose from a different era, tradition, and national origin, Françoise Pfaff ’s survey of the roles afforded to African women in Ousmane Sembene’s film Xala (1975) still serves as an ample demonstration of how unusual Beau travail remains in neither centralizing nor marginalizing the Djiboutian females nor coaxing them into more archetypal profiles. See Pfaff (1982). 88. Sedgwick (1990), 94. 89. This adage of the Foreign Legion as a haven for fugitives, criminals, orphans, and adventure seekers from multiple walks of life, however at odds with the ceremonial pomp and nostalgic imperial history afforded to the Legion as an institution, is repeated endlessly in interviews with Denis and in writing about the film, particularly by French authors. This state of affairs, however true or false, fosters its own undecidable crystal—is the disreputable congeries of members or the august, centuries-spanning organization the “actual” face of the Legion? 90. Viviane Namaste offers a forceful reminder that, as “new” as they seem to many scholars, transgender studies and specifically transgender tropes have existed for years. Indeed, they have frequently fallen prey to complementary traps of their own nationalist discourses (especially in U.S. contexts) and of figuring negative or positive crises of nationalism, as in the bevy of transgendered characters in Québécois cinema and in the odd persistence of the cross-country road-trip as a generic frame for so many transgender representations in popular film. See Namaste (2000), especially the fifth chapter.

Chapter 6 1. Pizzello (1998), 30. 2. This trope Deleuze found immature in the most lauded American films of the 1970s, wildly overinvesting in delusions of hyper-organized cabals instead of grappling with disorganization as a patent fact of temporal and global relations, and an indispensable basis for cinema in pressing the limits of thought rather than perpetuating clichés, of which Shadow Conspiracy was certainly one. See C1 210–211. 3. Landy (2003). 124. 4. Ibid., 126. 5. Landy (2007), 7. 6. Sontag (2001), 171, 172. 7. Edward R. O’Neill’s analysis of Velvet Goldmine remains among the richest published, but even his governing trope of “traumatic postmodern histories” in the context of this film sidles up to “Reaganism” and to “queer activism, for which aesthetics and theater provided such an important component” without ever mentioning AIDS by name. See O’Neill (2004), 171. As we shall see, among published reactions to Velvet Goldmine AIDS is most predominant in Juhasz (2007). See also Landy (2003), 127; and Moverman (1998), xxv–xxvi.

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8. The tacit but profound presence of AIDS within the historical structure and affective texture of Velvet Goldmine resonates with José Arroyo’s famous hypothesizing of AIDS as the “political unconscious” of New Queer Cinema, and with Monica Pearl’s argument that New Queer films are always “about” AIDS even when they do not manifest it explicitly as a topic or theme. See Arroyo (1993) and Pearl (2004). 9. David France’s recent documentary How to Survive a Plague (2012) is not only a moving, informative chronicle of these activists’ efforts but, given its expert negotiation of so much primary-source footage, it offers a rich site for thinking through Deleuze’s “pure audio and sound situations” in a nonfiction context—a task he mostly avoids. 10. Kelly (1999), 16. 11. Ibid., 20. 12. See Rich (2000). 13. Love (2007), 29. 14. Tommy’s label-friendly denial of his androgynous past make him a clear reflection of “Let’s Dance”-era David Bowie, just as Brian-as-Maxwell-Demon could not shine more obviously as a funhouse spin on Bowie-as-Ziggy-Stardust. 15. DeAngelis (2004), 42, 41. 16. Benjamin (1940), 257. 17. Sontag (1989), 166. 18. I group spirit, belief, and the divine among those “different names” in which desire surfaces in Deleuze’s work. See Buchanan (2000), 15. 19. For a recent, nuanced reading of Velvet Goldmine that sees the film as both holding open possible futures and mourning radical futures that the reactionary 1980s foreclosed, see Luciano (2011). 20. Marcus Bullock quotes Todd Haynes’s reminder in a forward to a book about glam-rock that the movement’s targeted enemies were not the “older generation” represented by their parents so much as “the intense morality of the sixties youth culture (and the homophobia and misogyny it concealed).” Hoskyns (1998), xi. Cited in Bullock (2002): 7. 21. Powell is no stranger to semiotically dense, philosophically allusive costumes. She got her start on Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986) and remained part of his repertory on films like Edward II (1991) and Wittgenstein (1993) before launching a Hollywood career and losing to herself when Oscar-nominated for Goldmine’s costumes. 22. Haynes, of course, is no stranger to adapting scripts from critical texts, as witness his derivation of the half-hour short Dottie Gets Spanked (1993) from Freud’s essay “A Child Is Being Beaten.” James Morrison has written eloquently about how “Todd Haynes’s films are not themselves, in any ordinary sense, works of ‘theory,’ but one of their most notable features is their explicit relation to the body of knowledge that has accumulated under that banner for several decades.” See Morrison (2007), 132ff. After several answers that suggested the contrary, Haynes eventually demurs in an interview with Oren Moverman that Velvet Goldmine is “just a movie, not a philosophical investigation, right?” Moverman counters, “Maybe,” to which the director replies, “I’d like to think of it as just a movie for a while.” See Moverman (1998), xxviii. 23. For some who lived through that era, the affective experiences of withstanding medical, economic, sociopolitical, and sex-negative onslaughts overlapped. “After two decades of sexual spending, of sexual speculation, of sexual inflation,” Susan Sontag wrote, “we are

Notes to Pages 215–218

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in the early stages of a sexual depression. Looking back on the sexual culture of the 1970s has been compared to looking back on the jazz age from the wrong side of the 1929 crash.” See Sontag (1989), 164. José Arroyo writes about Benjamin’s Angel as a pertinent trope in Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991), which predates Kushner’s relative popularization of Benjamin’s essay as a queer point of reference. See Arroyo (1993), 89. 24. Again, part of the problem originated from distributor Miramax, which misleadingly marketed Goldmine as a kind of 1970s-centered prequel to its insubstantial, 1980s-nightlife drama 54 (1998), released a few months previously. 25. Kushner (1994), 148. 26. Reinelt (1997), 236. 27. Kelly (1999), 20; and Reinelt (1997), 236. 28. See Brunick (2010) for a spirited example of a major strain in Haynes criticism that regularly castigates his films (and Goldmine specifically, in Brunick’s case) for withholding empathy from his characters. I acknowledge this prevalent line of argument in Haynes scholarship, though I have never reacted to one of his movies this way. 29. Moverman (1998), xii. Gregg Araki, another tyro of New Queer Cinema, recurs frequently to such queer-alien motifs, extending to his recent films Mysterious Skin (2005) and Kaboom! (2010). Versions of this imagery in Nowhere (1997), the movie Araki released most contemporaneously with Velvet Goldmine, draw more ire in Kelly (1999), 20–21. 30. Anat Pick has elucidated how previous Haynes protagonists like Safe’s Carol White operate as Bartleby figures, possessed of a Beau travail-style “solid otherness” and refusing psychological inroads or genealogical lines into the social, political, and sexual problems they pose. See Pick (2007), 151. 31. My phrasing, by design, and the film’s shots, by serendipity, align these fan collectives in different ways with all the pack, herd, school, and flock discourse that Deleuze and Guattari bring to their recurring trope of “becoming-animal,” when subjects renounce individualism as a frame for their own being and submit to group affiliations. 32. Queer theorists, despite withstanding frequent attacks on these grounds, repeatedly differentiate their projects from that of voluntaristic self-fashioning and do not conflate the personal with the political without tremendous qualifications. For an early, nuanced defense against such misreadings, see Fuss (1989), 99–102. Still, even self-appointed leaders of the charge to conjoin queer and Deleuzian theories sometimes take a view very close to this one, arraigning Butler-inspired queer theory as “obsessed with the textualization of everything, and the deletion of anything that resists the latter.” See Nigianni and Storr (2009), 1–4, from the editors’ introduction. 33. AIDS inflects some of these Kane quotations, as when Arthur interviews Cecil, now bound like Jed Leland to a wheelchair in a hospital ward. Perhaps, as in a famously elliptical conversation about AIDS in Haynes’s Safe, no explanation for his illness is required. For a reading of Citizen Kane as already available to queer appropriation, see Doty (2000), 15–20. 34. I suspect that the proximal release of Gus Van Sant’s much-maligned Psycho (1998), discussed later in this chapter, also dampened enthusiasm for New Queer-style appropriations. Regarding Haynes’s mannered approach to adaptation, Mary Ann Doane argues that his “cinema demonstrates not so much that the image resides within a genre, but that the generic invades the image, reducing its singularity, making it available for

292

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recognition,” albeit differently from film to film. See Doane (2004), 12–13. See also O’Neill (2004), 184 n. 18. 35. Benjamin (1966), 182. Bullock quotes the same passage within his different but also Benjamin-inspired reading of Velvet Goldmine. See Bullock, (2002), 3–6. The exact quote appears on page 5. 36. For a nuanced treatment of this disparity, see Keeling (2007), 15–17. 37. Buchanan (2000), 46. 38. Rodowick (1997), 162. 39. For a dazzling dossier on Arthur as both an audience surrogate and a conduit of shame, an affect common to fans and queers, see Bennett (2010). Alexandra Juhasz reads Arthur as standing in for a generation of “glittery boys” stuck “inventing themselves as gay, with little but popular culture to guide them” and mourns for how many of them would be punished for such bravery by becoming the first wave of AIDS victims. See Juhasz (2007), 166. Even though Kelly recognizes in Arthur a germane portrait of “what gay men do with images, how they construct identities out of their fantasies” his obdurately cool reaction to Goldmine apparently requires him to dismiss even this aspect of Arthur as “prettified,” “plasticine,” and prone to “merely nostalgize teenage masturbatory sessions.” See Kelly (1999), 20. 40. See AO 274, arguing that the preeminent cineaste of sensory “delirium” is Nicholas Ray. 41. Arthur’s reliance on the lavishly dis-integrated Brian as a platform for declaring his own identity may be less paradoxical than it first appears. As Judith Butler states, “The inaugurative scene of interpellation,” of which Arthur’s leaping excitement in front of the television is a deliciously poignant example, “is one in which a certain failure to be constituted becomes the condition of possibility for constituting oneself.” See Butler (1997b), 197. 42. Landy (2003), 129. 43. Pizzello (1998), 33. 44. DeAngelis (2004), 46. 45. I thank Shirleen Robinson for this observation about Arthur’s name. 46. Bravmann (1997), 29. 47. Buchanan (2000), 164. 48. Rodowick (1997), 211n2. 49. See Buchanan (2000), 26. Tim Anderson’s interest in Velvet Goldmine has to do with how pop-related commodities, especially albums, comprise time-images insofar as studious immersion disarticulates time from standardized flows. See Anderson (2008), 52–53, 60–63. The synchronicity among loosened-up desiring-machines and capitalist consolidation gives Benjamin Noys deep qualms about any theoretical enterprise—including those of queer theory and Anti-Oedipus—that feed what he calls a “deregulation economy” of constantly disinvested and reinvested desires. See Noys (2008). 50. Chauncey (2000), 313. Chauncey is careful to distinguish the cultural-materialist tradition in queer studies that Stuart Hall and his colleagues spearheaded during the same years in the UK from the obsession with identity he perceives more strongly in American work—and, without dismissing the value of pop-culture critique, he recommends work like

Notes to Pages 230–240

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Hall’s as an important example for queer-studies scholars in all humanities disciplines to emulate more often. See Hall (1996) for an example of his thoughts on cinema. 51. For these rare but incredibly nuanced analyses of Angels in America and the ultimate implications of its production choices and its Central Park finale, see Reinelt (1997) and especially Savran (1997). 52. Colebrook (2009), 21. 53. Ibid., 22. 54. Colebrook clearly prefers the positive accumulation of Deleuze and Guattari to the deconstructive work of leveling and elimination she perceives in queer theory, even as she boils “queer theory” down to Judith Butler as iconic representative, and then licenses herself for argument’s sake to paraphrase one fold in Butler’s thought—the most influential, if not the most central or original, even in the context of Gender Trouble. Even so, Colebrook is more generous to Butler’s work and in her characterization of queer theory than are other contributors to the Deleuze and Queer Theory anthology; see the editors’ harsh words on these subjects, cited above. Two fellow contributors pointedly observe, “We are disturbed by a lack of generosity within Deleuze Studies towards Butlerian inspired queer theory; a sentiment somewhat evident in the editors’ drive to develop a postButlerian queer theory founded upon a ‘new image of thought outside that of representation .  .  .’” See Hickey-Moody and Rasmussen (2009), 41. The rest of their essay offers excitingly nuanced takes on the proto-queer dispositions of Anti-Oedipus and on the role of “the subject” in Deleuze and Guattari and in Butler. 55. “The question the pin carries does not move us usefully to ask whether [Arthur] is a fitting heir to the elegance of Wilde,” since the serial chain by which Arthur has come to claim it—several of whose links we have no way of even conjecturing—refuse any sense of patrimony. See Bullock (2002), 22. Juhasz agrees that there is “no teleology here,” and that “if anything, there is a reverse progress.” See Juhasz (2007), 166. 56. The use in these flash-cuts of such varying film stocks, including crude ones that struggle with extremes of light, recalls Derek Jarman’s queer, groundbreaking collages of home-video, Super 8, 16mm, and 35mm in his most diaristic films, including The Last of England (1987) and The Garden (1990), made as simultaneously private records and public firebombs of anger at Thatcher, at AIDS, and at public complacency. 57. James Morrison refers to this shot as one of many moments of “aerial aspiration” in Haynes’s cinema, “infused with freedom or escape” and connoting “possibilities of freedom or escape,” such as that point-of-view shot of young Richie Beacon vaulting from the window after rescuing his mother in Poison. See Morrison (2007), 142. 58. Here, as with the Jarmanesque shooting of the rooftop sequence, Haynes incorporates an homage to a queer British filmmaker of note, since the world of the pub, the amber lighting, and threnody of the music all hearken to the work of Terence Davies, who perfected in Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and in its companion piece The Long Day Closes (1992) a semi-autobiographical style that blended queer becomings with a pained but palpable nostalgia for the heteronormative family, through blends of diaphanous montage, sustained shots, virtuoso camera movements, and complex collages of song and sound— often favoring radios in exactly the way Haynes does in the final, quintessentially Daviesstyle shot of Goldmine. For more on Davies’s work as queer British cinema “around 1991,” see Ellis (2006). 59. Rodowick (1997), 153–154.

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60. My allusion, of course, is to the title of the indispensable anthology of black feminist criticism, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. See Hull, et al. (1982). 61. Haynes (1998), 136. 62. Moverman (1998), xxix. 63. Benjamin (1940), 255. 64. Ibid.

Conclusion 1. Rich (2000), 22. 2. Kushner (1994), 146. 3. Arendt (1968), 50–51.

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{ Index } Film titles, works of fiction, and frequently cited theoretical texts are listed with the last names of their directors or authors in parentheses. Separate index entries have been granted to filmmakers whose bodies of work the book treats in general terms, with cross-references supplied when necessary for separately indexed entries about individual films. Aaron, Michele, 259n26, 260n30 adaptation, approaches to, 37, 40, 42–44, 70–71, 73, 86, 93–94, 177–180, 185–186, 189–193, 202, 204–205, 218–221, 232–236, 267n21, 267n28, 268n30, 279n39 Adnum, Mark, 259n29 the Advocate, 97, 104 affection-images, 31–32, 64, 108–118, 120–122, 125–126, 131–135, 146, 220, 277n17, 278n33, 278n35 reflective unity and intensive series in, 109, 114–117, 120–121, 126, 128, 131, 133–134, 220, 278n33, 282n29 See also Cinema 1 (Deleuze) Ahmed, Sara, 27–28, 30, 81, 181, 272n20, 276n5, 288n81 See also orientation AIDS, 5, 9, 22, 29, 33, 101, 154, 210–212, 214, 219, 226, 228, 235, 236, 258n17, 265n12, 281n11, 289–290nn7–8, 291n33, 292n39, 293n56 Akerman, Chantal, 280n45 Alfonso, D. Rita, 97, 104 All About Eve (Mankiewicz), 147, 209, 279n39 All About My Mother (Almodóvar), 140, 155, 282n19 Almodóvar, Pedro, 42, 140, 149–150, 155, 206 See also titles of individual films American Beauty (Mendes), 191 Anderson, Tim, 292n49 Andrew, Dudley, 264n76 Angels in America (Kushner), 214–215, 225, 231, 240, 249, 291n23, 293n51 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari) capitalism, as theorized in, 145, 175–176, 218, 228, 284n4 cinema, as invoked in, 220–221, 269n45, 292n40 connection-disjunction-conjunction cycle in, 17–18, 59 “either . . . or . . . or . . .” models in, 16, 58–59, 67, 225

politics, as theorized in, 12, 22–24, 95–96, 97, 217–218, 262n58, 273n45 schizo and revolutionary artists in, 73, 90, 92–96, 171–172, 200, 216, 222, 273n45 schizos and schizoanalysis in, 12, 13, 20–21, 23, 44, 63, 150, 181, 224, 260n37, 261n54, 282n22 sex, gender, and sexuality in, 14–15, 16, 19–20, 24, 29, 39–40, 41–42, 60–62, 171, 175–176, 178, 202–204, 260n39, 261n48, 263n65 the subject, as theorized in, 51, 60–61, 85, 186, 223–226, 293n54 any-desire-whatever, 19–20, 261n56 Araki, Gregg, 260n38, 262n57, 291n29 Arendt, Hannah, 249 Arroyo, José, 259n17, 290n8, 291n23 Artaud, Antonin, 263n67 attentive recognition, as Deleuzian figure, 34, 108–109, 122, 136, 145, 233 bachelor, as Deleuzian figure. See Kafka (Deleuze and Guattari) Bad Education (Almodóvar), 140, 155, 280n50 Baise-moi (Despentes and Trinh Thi), 98 Baldwin, James, 145, 168–170, 171, 172, 192 Bale, Christian, 237 Barney, Matthew, 17, 18, 274n58 Barthes, Roland, 189 “Bartleby; or, the Formula” (Deleuze), 179, 199–200 “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (Melville), 200, 291n30 Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 167, 169, 172 Bazin, André, 143 Beard, William, 36–37, 41, 71, 92, 269n48 Beau travail (Denis), 21, 23, 32–33, 144–145, 175–205, 206, 208, 216, 218, 248, 287n56, 289n89, 291n30 actual-virtual relations in, 179, 182, 190 Billy Budd and Herman Melville, in relation to, 33, 177–182, 185, 186–193, 196–197, 198, 199–205, 218, 284n12, 284n16, 286nn29–30, 286n48

310 Beau travail (continued) capital and money, in relation to, 176, 184–186, 193, 281n10 Djiboutian society within, 176–178, 183–184, 193, 197–199, 203–205, 285n25, 289n87 internal economies of, 182–183, 193–195, 197–199, 204–205, 232 as minor cinema, 178, 185–186, 199–205 queer marketing of, 176–178, 184–186, 186–187, 189–190, 192–193, 203–205 sex and gender in, 178–180, 186–199, 202–205 Beautiful Thing (Macdonald), 163 Before Night Falls (Schnabel), 155 Being John Malkovich (Jonze), 11–12, 191, 211 belief, as Deleuzian discourse, 8, 168–169, 208, 210, 212, 214–215, 223, 225, 238–240, 244–245, 290n18 Benjamin, Walter, 194, 209, 213–215, 218, 219, 224, 239, 243–245, 247, 249, 287n62, 291n23, 292n35 Benning, Sadie, 29, 131, 260n32, 280n45 Bent (Mathias), 274n60 Bergson, Henri, 75, 147, 262n56 Berlant, Lauren, 102, 154, 201 Bersani, Leo, 154, 187, 192, 194, 196, 197, 272n21, 282n19, 288n73 Beugnet, Martine, 178, 183, 285n25 The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 (Olsson), 283n36 Black Swan (Aronofsky), 112 Blade Runner (Scott), 258n13 the body, figures and theories of, 14, 59–64, 82–86, 98–101, 161, 177, 178–179, 184–189, 192–197, 202–205, 217, 230–231, 285n18, 287nn66–67 See also Cinema 2 (Deleuze) body without organs, 81, 85 Borges, Jorge Luis, 142–143 Borossa, Julia, 288n79 Boys Don’t Cry (Peirce), 11, 12, 154, 191–192, 197, 211, 259n29, 281n16 Braidotti, Rosi, 59–60, 263–264nn73–74, 269n43, 269n45 Braidt, Andrea, 119 Bravmann, Scott, 167, 223, 237, 278n36, 283n34, 288n81 Brokeback Mountain (Lee), 138 Brother to Brother (Evans), 18, 23, 30, 32–33, 144–145, 160–173, 174, 176, 192, 245, 248, 282n30, 283n1 actual-virtual relations in, 162, 164–173, 283n32 Harlem Renaissance cohort in, 145, 160–163, 166–167, 168–169, 171–172, 280n4, 282n25, 283n32, 283n34 as minor cinema, 170–173 Niggeratti Manor scenes in, 161, 165–166, 172–173, 174

Index The Brown Bunny (Gallo), 99 Browning, Mark, 273n38 Buchanan, Ian, 15, 69, 219, 257n7, 258n13, 261n50, 263n68, 284n15 Bullock, Marcus, 290n20, 292n35, 293n55 Buñuel, Luis, 18, 64, 75, 78, 269n48 Burroughs, William S. See Naked Lunch (Cronenberg) Butler, Judith, 87, 153, 196, 232–234, 260nn42–43, 268n38, 291n32, 292n41, 293n54 capital and flows of money. See titles of individual films and theoretical works centers of indetermination, 47, 86, 103, 125–126, 134, 204, 207, 235, Castle, Terry, 279n38 Chahine, Youssef, 132 Chauncey, George, 230, 292n50 Chow, Rey, 268n37 Christian, Shawn Anthony, 167, 282n29 Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Deleuze), 7–10 crisis of the action-image in, 7–8, 33, 62, 67–69, 230, 289n2 demark in, 68 firstness, secondness, thirdness in, 18–19, 60, 65–66, 83, 262n57, 278n33 images, as theorized in, 19, 38, 45–47 movement, as theorized in, 7, 19, 46, 53 national traditions within, 7, 53, 59, 201 perception-affection-action cycle in, 18–19, 59, 64–65, 75, 112–113 relation-image in, 67–69 SASc and ASAc films in, 146, 281n8 publication of, 4, 38 women in , 66–67 Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Deleuze), 7–10 actual-virtual relations in, 31, 46–47, 143, 146–150, 174–178 body, as theorized in, 196, 205, 217, 285n18, 287nn66–67 crises of perspective in, 76–77, 85–86, 180–182, 238 dream-images in, 99–100, 165 lectosign in, 74, 96, 105, 274n50 minor cinemas in, 87, 132, 144, 163, 205, 217 money and capital, as theorized in, 13–14, 174–178, 227–228 and powers of the false, 222, 278n35 publication of, 4, 38 sheets, peaks, and series in, 31, 74–79, 81, 112–113, 122–131, 134, 223–226, 241–242 sound-image relations in, 86–89, 271n17 time, as theorized in, 8, 46, 72, 74–77, 83, 114, 142–144, 146–150, 173, 202 World War II in, 8–9, 32, 74–75, 144, 210

Index Citizen Kane (Welles), 75, 79, 149, 178, 209, 214–215, 218–220, 223, 224, 231, 233–235, 239, 291n33 Cleaver, Eldridge, 145, 169–171, 192 Cohen, Cathy, 154 Colebrook, Claire, 232–234, 260n42, 264n74, 266n14, 293n54 Contreras, Daniel, 258n9, 260n44 Cooper, Sarah, 188, 193, 285n22 Corrigan, Timothy, 186 Crash (Cronenberg), 36, 37, 41, 43, 265n8, 270n1 Creech, James, 191–192, 284n16, 286n48 Creed, Barbara, 57, 64, 267n27 Crimp, Douglas, 258n17 Cronenberg, David, 15, 23, 27, 33, 98, 159, 186, 261n56 critical ascendance of, 36–37, 41 early works by, 35–36, 87, 264n4, 266n20 feminist and queer critiques of, 37, 40–42 key collaborators with, 265n6, 269n1 See also titles of individual films crystal-images, 32–33, 142–160, 168–170, 178–179, 184, 194, 197–199, 205, 219, 222–224, 236, 248–250, 281n10, 284n8, 287n71 first or “closed” form of, 143, 150–152, 168–169, 170, 178, 197, 207, 222, 244 fourth or “decomposing” form of, 143, 156–160, 178, 199, 207, 222, 224, 230 and minor cinema, 143–145 second or “cracked” form of, 143, 152–154, 169, 197–198, 222, 224, 236, 239, 244 third or “evolving” form of, 143, 154–156, 162, 198–199, 206, 222, 224, 244, 286n29 See also Cinema 2 Cvetkovich, Ann, 172, 279n41 Darby, Helen, 273n44 Daughters of the Dust (Dash), 139 David Holzman’s Diary (McBride), 131, 279n42 Davies, Terence, 293n58 Davis, Viola, 139 de Lauretis, Teresa, 28, 257n1, 268n37, 278n37 Dead Ringers (Cronenberg), 3, 16, 21, 30–31, 37–40, 41–44, 45, 49, 51–69, 80, 145, 181, 265n11, 273n46 Birchall in, 56–58 Claire Niveau in, 39, 41, 45, 52–53, 54–62, 66–69, 249, 267n25, 269n45 Mantle brothers’ bond in, 38–39, 45, 52–58, 61–62, 64–69 Marcus twins as inspiration for, 43–44, 52, 267nn29–30 out-of-fields in, 51–67 perception-images in, 51–55 queer innuendoes in, 55–58, 61

311 Dean, James, 167 del Río, Elena, 194, 196, 285n17 Deleuze, Gilles cinephilia of, 27, 249 difficulty of reading, 6, 38, 258n12, 262n60 See also titles of individual works Dellamora, Richard, 71–72, 89–91, 104, 270n6, 273n36, 273n40 demonlover (Assayas), 156 Denis, Claire as established auteur, 27, 32, 186–187, 285n17 and prior links to Deleuze, 178, 183, 284n8 on shaping of Beau travail, 178–180, 190, 204, 206, 248, 249, 286n28, 286n30, 289n89 See also Beau travail (Denis) desire and desiring-production, 4, 14–24, 39, 42, 47–49, 50–51, 59, 60, 77–79, 102–103, 109, 121, 133, 142, 150–160, 162, 167, 170–173, 174–180, 212–213, 218, 227–228, 231–236, 241–246, 248–250, 263n73, 268n35 See also Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari) deterritorialization, 5, 25, 30, 34, 39, 72–74, 79, 86–89, 92–96, 158, 175, 183–186, 201–203, 245–246, 247, 284n2 See also Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari); Kafka (Deleuze and Guattari) dialectics, 7, 31, 53, 77, 115, 144, 146, 158, 168, 217–224, 231 See also Benjamin, Walter Doane, Mary Ann, 291n34 Dunning, Stefanie K., 277n26 Dunye, Cheryl as auteur, 27, 29, 106, 108, 136–137, 139–140, 275n1, 279–280nn42–43 early works by, 275n1, 280n44 as object of own camera, 107, 136–137, 280n44 See also titles of individual films Duras, Marguerite, 87 Dutoit, Ulysse, 154, 282n19 Dyer, Richard, 24, 257n2, 259n25 The Earrings of Madame de . . . (Ophüls), 151, 168 Ebert, Roger, 98 Edelman, Lee, 58, 152, 188–190, 201, 257n3, 269n42, 282n21 Edward II (Jarman), 70, 126, 290n21, 291n23 Eisenstein, Sergei, 115, 158–159, 217 Ellison, Ralph, 134–135 The English Patient (Minghella), 287n56 Espinosa, Julio García, 279n40 Evans, Rodney, 27, 162–163, 171, 280n4, 283n1 See also Brother to Brother (Evans) Exile Shanghai (Ottinger), 278n38 experimental cinema, 11, 13, 26, 87, 91, 112, 139, 263n67–68, 271n9, 281n11 Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick), 152, 281n14

Index

312 Far from Heaven (Haynes), 218 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 163, 208, 279n39, 282n29 Fat Girl (Breillat), 98 Fellini, Federico, 154–155, 156, 157, 162, 163, 199, 206, 244 feminism, 3–4, 28–29, 37, 40–41, 59–60, 70, 187, 261nn47–48, 263–264nn73–74, 278n28, 285n18, 294n60 Fight Club (Fincher), 191 film theory, as discipline, 3–4, 257n2 Flaxman, Gregory, 119, 257n4, 258n8 The Fly (Cronenberg), 36, 38, 41, 44, 59, 265n5, 265n12, 273n34 Foucault, Michel, 171–172, 191, 192 free-indirect, as cinematic mode, 76, 92, 126–127, 132, 207, 220, 238 See also intercessor; Pasolini, Pier Paolo French New Wave, 5, 187, 217, 271n12, 287n66 Freud, Sigmund. See psychoanalysis Fung, Richard, 277n27 Gallop, Jane, 28–29 Geller, Theresa, 261n47, 264n74 Gide, André, 272n21 Go Fish (Troche), 99, 123, 135, 276n7 Godard, Jean-Luc, 35, 187, 233, 286n29 Gods and Monsters (Condon), 12, 211 Goldsby, Jackie, 278n34 Grant, Catherine, 185, 186–187, 189, 192, 203 Greenaway, Peter, 17, 274n60 Griffin, Hollis, 280n3 Griffith, D.W., 114, 133, 217 Grosz, Elizabeth, 261n47–48, 264n74 Halberstam, Judith Jack, 140, 152, 261n49, 275n75 Hall, Stuart, 292n50 Hallas, Roger, 259n17 Happy Together (Wong), 12, 153–154, 286n34 Haynes, Todd, 27, 42, 163, 210–211, 213, 215, 220, 241, 243, 260n38, 290n22 See also titles of individual films Hayward, Susan, 196, 288n80 Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Mitchell), 275n63 Herzog, Amy, 280n50 High Art (Cholodenko), 12, 211, 279n39 Hilderbrand, Lucas, 277n18 Hitchcock, Alfred, 6, 8, 67–69, 146, 189, 233, 258n8 Hocquenghem, Guy, 263n66 Holden, Stephen, 285n28 Holland, Sharon, 278n28 homonormativity, 5, 152, 258n11 How to Survive a Plague (France), 290n9 Hudson, Rock, 148, 281n11

Hurley, Paul, 264n5 Hutcheon, Linda, 43, 70 I Am Love (Guadagnino), 157 impulses and impulse-images, 20, 31, 39, 62, 63–69, 71, 78–79, 121, 137, 156, 199, 227, 247, 269n48 See also Cinema 1 (Deleuze) incompossibility, 75–79, 80, 82, 111, 121, 208, 220–221, 224–225, 272n22, 275n77 inland empire (Lynch), 48 intercessor, as figure in minor art, 12, 103, 109, 127, 131–135, 141, 163–164, 213, 214, 220, 229 See also Kafka (Deleuze and Guattari) Intimacy (Chéreau), 99 Italian neorealism, 5, 8, 97, 155, 271n12, 279n40 I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (Rozema), 258n9 Jagose, Annemarie, 3, 9, 15, 20, 259n18, 271n8, 284n6 Jarman, Derek, 17, 70, 163, 260n32, 265n11, 283n37, 286n39, 290n21, 293n56, 293n58 See also Edward II (Jarman) Jennings, Ros, 163 Jones, Kent, 194 Juett, JoAnne, and David Jones, 163, 260n29, 288n84 Juhasz, Alexandra, 106, 123, 135, 140, 289n7, 292n39, 293n55 Julien, Isaac, 70, 163, 258n9, 260n38, 288n81 See also Looking for Langston (Julien) Kafka (Deleuze and Guattari) bachelor, foundling, and orphan figures in, 185, 193, 200–205, 213–218, 225, 234–236, 243, 289n89 desire and deterritorialization in, 44, 199–200 on minor art and literature, 5–6, 24–27, 34, 39–40, 74, 80–82, 89–96, 135, 150, 163, 170–173, 199–200, 218–219, 271n18, 275n77 politics, as theorized in, 22–23 Keeling, Kara, 23, 120, 124–125, 126, 128, 130, 132, 258n12, 263n63, 264n74, 276n4, 278n28, 278n30, 279n38, 281n7, 292n36 Kelly, Christopher, 215, 260n38, 291n2 kids 9, 292n39 The Kids Are All Right (Cholodenko), 138–139 Lambert, Gregg, 271n18 Landy, Marcia, 209, 213 Laura (Preminger), 269n42 lesbian cinema and theory, 5–6, 9–12, 20, 24, 28, 31, 37, 51, 70, 86, 99, 106, 112–113, 124–125, 126–127, 154, 156, 163, 172, 191, 201–202, 257n2, 276n7, 276n14, 278–279nn37–39, 279nn41–42, 280nn44–45, See also The Watermelon Woman (Dunye)

Index Leung, Helen Hok-Sze, 279n40 Looking for Langston (Julien), 70, 162–163, 258n9 Lorde, Audre, 278n32 Losey, Joseph, 269n48 Love, Heather, 172, 201, 211–212, 276n9, 283nn37–38 Love Is the Devil (Maybury), 12 Luciano, Dana, 290n19 Lynch, David, 48, 156, 206, 273n38 See also titles of individual films M Butterfly (Cronenberg), 37, 41, 42, 44, 95, 268n37, 273n34 MacCormack, Patricia, 261n46, 285n17 Magnificent Obsession (Sirk). See Sirk, Douglas Malick, Terrence, 50 See also The Tree of Life (Malick) Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov), 49 Marrati, Paola, 32, 144, 258n16, 264n78 Marshall, Bill, 201, 203, 275n74 Martin-Jones, David, 262n57 Maurice (Ivory), 90 Mayne, Judith, 187, 266n16, 279n38 Melancholia (von Trier), 149–150 Milk (Van Sant), 138, 151 Miller, D.A., 189 Miller, Henry, 20, 94 minor cinema. See Kafka (Deleuze and Guattari); titles of individual films Mississippi Damned (Mabry), 139, 280n49 Morlock, Forbes, 187 Morrison, James, 290n22, 293n57 Moulin Rouge! (Luhrmann), 17 Mulholland Drive (Lynch), 48, 112, 156 Mulvey, Laura, 188, 195 Muñoz, José Esteban, 277n27 Murphy, Timothy S., 90–91, 273n36, 273n41 musicals, 100, 147, 259n17, 275n63 My Beautiful Laundrette (Frears), 258n9 My Own Private Idaho (Van Sant), 28, 70, 151, 265n11 Naked Lunch (Cronenberg), 23, 28, 37–38, 40–44, 49, 66, 69, 70–74, 76–96, 97, 98, 101–105, 116, 121, 142, 145, 181, 227, 248–249, 265n11, 279n39 actual-virtual relations in, 80–82 Burroughs, William, and, 43–44, 70–73, 83, 86, 88–89, 90–93, 270nn2–5, 270n7, 271n9, 271n15, 271n19, 273n38, 274n51 capital, in relation to, 90–91, 93–96 desiring-production in, 74, 77–89, 96 Fadela in, 79–80, 85–86, 93, 101, 272n28 minor cinema and minor art, in relation to, 72, 80, 89, 95–96, 104–105 Orientalist figures in, 82–83, 94–95, 274n47

313 politics of authorship in, 70–73, 83, 85, 86, 89–96 schizoid figures in, 80–82 sex and gender in, 79–80, 82–86, 272n32 sound-image relations in, 86–89 Namaste, Viviane, 289n90 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 187 Nealon, Christopher, 201 New Queer Cinema critiques and politics of, 11–13, 22, 97, 144–145, 186, 191, 210–211, 229–231, 245, 247 emergence of, 4–5, 10–13, 27–29, 30, 37, 70, 90, 97, 106, 126, 163, 232, 245, 258n9, 260n30, 265n11, 267n23, 279n39 minor cinema, in relation to, 24–25, 27, 163, 247 9 Songs (Winterbottom), 99 Noys, Benjamin, 292n49 O’Neill, Edward, 289n7 Ophüls, Max, 150–152, 157, 163, 281n14 See also The Earrings of Madame de . . . (Ophüls) orientation, 3, 8, 13, 14–17, 20, 24–25, 27–30, 35, 66, 70, 72, 73, 81, 96, 106–107, 121, 126, 134–138, 140, 153, 156, 178, 181–186, 193, 195, 197, 200, 207, 214, 216, 219, 220, 225, 226, 235–239, 272n20, 272n24, 276n5 Orlando (Potter), 92 orphans and foundlings, as Deleuzian figures. See Kafka (Deleuze and Guattari) out-of-field, 30, 39, 49–58, 61, 63–65, 67, 69, 73, 78, 82, 100, 104, 175, 207, 210, 220, 230, 235, 249, 273n46 The Owls (Dunye), 112, 139–141 Paglia, Camille, 108, 115, 135 Pariah (Rees), 138–139 Paris Is Burning (Livingston), 16, 102, 153, 197, 211, 260nn43–44, 265n11 Parker, Andrew, 266n12 Parmar, Pratibha, 11, 288n81 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 159, 274n48 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 18 Pellegrini, Ann, 124 Pendleton, David, 183, 186, 259n21, 260n38 “people who do not yet exist,” 25, 186, 205, 227, 275n72 perception and perception-images, 6, 7, 9, 16–19, 23, 28, 30–32, 39–40, 42, 45–52, 54, 59–60, 64–69, 75, 85, 105, 109, 110–113, 122, 126, 143–145, 217 desiring-production and, 47–52 solid, liquid, and gaseous forms of, 48–49, 51, 59, 271n16 See also Cinema 1 (Deleuze)

314 Persona (Bergman), 75, 79, 112 The Piano (Campion), 18, 274n60 Pick, Anat, 291n30 Pidduck, Julianne, 259n25, 275n74, 277n27 The Pillow Book (Greenaway), 274n60 Pizzello, Chris, 206, 211 Poison (Haynes), 29, 70, 126, 163, 290n58, 293n57 Pola X (Carax), 99, 190–191, 288n79 Polan, Dana, 261n53, 262n61 Portrait of Jason (Clarke), 278n37 Powell, Sandy, 214, 290n21 Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire (Daniels), 139 Prodigal Sons (Reed), 224–225 Psycho (Van Sant), 151–152, 233, 291n34 psychoanalysis, 4, 6, 14–15, 36, 41–42, 57–58, 62, 80, 158, 188, 261n55, 267n21, 267n25, 268n35, 269n38, 271n19, 282n21, 285n22, 288n79 queer theory as discipline, 3, 5, 9, 13, 24, 144, 177, 185–186, 190–193, 199, 204–205, 211, 216, 229–230, 232–234, 236, 244–246, 284n4, 291n32, 293n54 politics, as theorized in, 9, 22–24, 72, 211, 216–217, 229–232, 262n59, 271n8 race and racialization, 3, 26, 32, 114, 118, 120–121, 124–125, 129, 133–135, 138–139, 145, 160–161, 168–173, 198–199, 276n16, 278n30, 278n34, 278n37 See also titles of individual films and theoretical works Raging Sun, Raging Sky (Hernández), 157 Ramsay, Christine, 41, 52, 267n24 recollection-images, 208–209, 238, 276n11 Renoir, Jean, 152, 157, 163, 169 Resnais, Alain, 8, 75, 76, 81, 146, 147, 223 Restivo, Angelo, 258n8, 271n12 Rich, B. Ruby, 10–13, 24, 27, 30, 37, 70, 126, 211, 247, 258n9, 259n25, 259–260nn29–30, 260n32, 275n1, 278n34, 278n37, 279n39 Riefenstahl, Leni, 195, 201 Riggs, Marlon, 145, 163, 169, 258n9, 281n6 Robey, Tim, 42, 269n41 Rocha, Glauber, 132, 163 Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (Rapaport), 281n11 Rodowick, D.N., 85, 105, 165, 173, 257n4, 257nn6–7, 258n14, 271nn13–14, 287n66 Romance (Breillat), 99 Roof, Judith, 151–152, 276n14 A Room with a View (Ivory), 90 Rooney, Caroline, 284n8 Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 273n38, 284n8, 286n29 Rouch, Jean, 279n40 Russell, Jamie, 274n51 Russo, Vito, 257n2

Index Safe (Haynes), 209, 291n30, 291n33 schizoanalysis. See Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari) Schulman, Sarah, 135, 140 Schwab, Martin, 281n7 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 28, 33, 58, 81, 189–192, 196–197, 199, 204, 263n72, 272n20 Sembene, Ousmane, 136, 163–164, 289n87 Shaviro, Steven, 264n76, 266n13 She Must Be Seeing Things (McLaughlin), 258n9 Shortbus (Mitchell), 18, 21, 23, 30, 31, 73–74, 96–105, 122, 135, 142, 197, 241, 249, 274n61, 274n68, 275n63 actual-virtual relations, as theorized in, 73–74, 97–101, 103–105 and counterpublics, 73, 96–97, 103–105, 275n72 and gender, 98–100 as minor cinema, 102–105, 275n77 New York City, in relation to, 73, 97, 101–105, 275n72, 275n77 The Silence of the Lambs (Demme), 28 Silverman, Kaja, 282n29 Sirk, Douglas, 50, 148–149, 218 The Skin I Live In (Almodóvar), 149–150, 155 Smyth, Cherry, 278n37 Sontag, Susan, 210, 215–216, 228, 236, 290n23 “special image” and “special object,” as Deleuzian terms, 119, 147–150, 160, 165, 179, 182, 184–185 Spillers, Hortense, 134–135 spirit, as Deleuzian discourse, 50, 214, 290n18 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 259n20, 281n7 Stroheim, Erich von, 64, 269n48 stutter, as Deleuzian figure, 88–89, 91, 116, 130, 203, 226, 229, 249 Suddenly, Last Summer (Mankiewicz), 48, 147, 209 Sullivan, Laura L., 119–120, 122, 277nn26–27 Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Haynes), 209, 277n18 Swimming Pool (Ozon), 112, 156 Swoon (Kalin), 126, 163, 267n23 The Talented Mr. Ripley (Minghella), 12, 191, 259n29 Taubin, Amy, 40, 71, 84, 272n24 Third Cinema, 263n68, 279n40 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari) and becoming-animal, 264n5 facialization in, 110, 113–114, 117–118, 125–126, 133, 276n16 Herman Melville in, 199 politics, as theorized in, 262n58 “thousand tiny sexes” in, 261n48 To Die Like a Man (Rodrigues), 157 Tongues Untied (Riggs). See Riggs, Marlon

Index transgender cinema, 140–141, 154, 155, 157, 191–192, 224–225, 282n19 transgender theory, 3, 177, 202–203, 216, 288nn83–84, 289n90 The Tree of Life (Malick), 149–150 Treut, Monika, 282n19 Tweedie, James, 283n37 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick), 76 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Demy), 239 usable past (Brooks), 167–168 Van Sant, Gus, 93, 151–152, 258n9, 260n38 See also titles of individual films Velvet Goldmine (Haynes), 23, 30, 32–33, 144–145, 175–178, 181, 206–248, 279n39 actual-virtual relations in, 217, 222, 226, 232, 236, 239, 242 alien figures in, 216, 217, 228, 234, 236, 237–238, 291n29 Arthur in, 206–213, 216, 219–226, 228–229, 230, 236–242, 244, 247, 249, 292n39, 292n41 Brian in, 206–208, 216, 219–226, 236, 243, 292n41 capital and money, in relation to, 177–178, 206–207, 212, 218, 225, 227–228, 292n49 Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, as mediated by, 212–213, 217–218, 222–224, 238 Curt in, 207–208, 214, 216–217, 222, 226–232, 236–242, 244, 247 final sequence of, 236–246, 293n58 green pin in, 214, 216, 226, 235–236, 237–238, 242–243, 248–249, 293n55 Jerry in, 227–229 as minor cinema, 212–213, 217–218, 225–226, 236–246 and New Queer Cinema, 210–211, 213, 244–246 orphans and foundlings in, 217–218, 224–225, 234–236, 243 sex and gender in, 206, 240–242 Villarejo, Amy, 112, 154, 191–192, 279n38 Visconti, Luchino, 156–160, 163, 207, 230

315 Wallenberg, Louise, 258n9 Warner, Michael, 5, 102–103, 105, 154 The Watermelon Woman (Dunye), 21, 23, 29, 31, 64, 99, 106–141, 168–169, 171, 209, 248–249, 264n77, 276n7, 277n27, 278n30, 278n37, 279n39, 279n42 actual-virtual relations in, 119, 126–127 Cheryl’s mother in, 115, 130–131, 136, 137, 276n10 C.L.I.T. Archive scenes in, 115, 120, 123–124, 125, 134, 135, 136, 279n41 collective identities and black lesbian definition in, 106–110, 112–113, 117–131, 132–133, 135–138, 277n21, 280n43 and lesbian historiography, 108–109, 113, 126–131, 136–137 as minor cinema, 108–110, 125–138 Shirley in, 115, 127–131, 135–137 Waugh, Thomas, 267n24 Weerasethakul, Apichatpong, 155–157 The Well of Loneliness (Hall), 202, 288n83 Welles, Orson, 8, 149 See also Citizen Kane (Welles) What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari) face as concept in, 110, 118–119, 125–126, 132 When Night Is Falling (Rozema), 51, 99 White, Patricia, 118–119, 127, 163, 257n3, 264n74, 279n38, 280n45, 282n21 White, Rob, 187–188, 194, 286n39 Williams, Jason, 203 Williams, Linda, 97–99, 101, 102 Winterston, Jeanette, 269n45 Winokur, Mark, 107 Wood, Robin, 36, 40–42, 52, 96, 266n12, 266n18, 272n31 Young, Bradford, 139 YouTube, 29, 131, 170, 264n77, 279n42 Zero Patience (Greyson), 259n17 Zimmer, Catherine, 276n4 Un zoo la nuit (Lepage), 201 Zvenigora (Dovzhenko), 146, 281n9